Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
When Dal Shabet effectively disbanded recently, netizen comments on the news took me on a trip back to 2011-2012, specifically a largely forgotten mess with B1A4‘s fandom.
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It all started back at the end of December of 2011 at the SBS Gayo Daejun, when Dal Shabet and B1A4 had a collab stage. The problem? There was a lot of touching between the groups. The horror!
B1A4’s fandom reacted about as rationally as one would expect a K-pop fandom to react.
From this criticism and hate spawned speculative rumors. In one such rumor, a Darling was accused of physically assaulting a Bana. While another claimed Dal Shabet’s Serri had blatantly rejected a B1A4 member who extended his hand in a friendly greeting.
But the mess truly got kicked off less than two weeks later at the start of January after the ‘Idol Star Athletics Championships‘ went down. That’s when rumors started to circulate that Dal Shabet stans were assaulting, kidnapping, and raping B1A4 stans. Things were obviously getting out of hand, so police stepped forward to clarify that none of those things happened.
Police officials revealed, “There weren’t any disturbances or crimes committed during the ‘Idol Star Athletic Championships. There was nothing out of the ordinary that occurred, nor were there any reports of such behavior.”
Happyface Entertainment released a statement about the rumors, basically imploring people to stop.
Happy Face Entertainment commented on the matter, “The hateful rumors have caused much pain to the Dal Shabet members. We hope that the spread of these false rumors will end.”
So, uh, naturally that’s when B1A4 fans hacked Dal Shabet’s site. Aside from the timing, we know it was B1A4 fans because they weren’t exactly subtle about it.
On January 10th, fans who visited Dal Shabet’s homepage met with several pop-ups that prevented them from entering the site. The pop-ups had a picture of B1A4 with the message, “Why are you messing with us Banas?” (Bana is the name of B1A4’s fanclub). B1A4 fans have also put up several notices and posts about B1A4 in other sections of Dal Shabet’s homepage, such as their schedule.
Serri was the member most affected by the rumors due to the finger being directly pointed at her in many of them, and she took to Twitter begging people to stop harassing her.
Serri even used Twitter to respond to the rumors, “I am writing to say how deeply upset I am at the horrible rumors being spread about me. Please stop spreading these lies, they are not true. Please stop haunting celebrities with these harmful rumors.”
This had pissed off B1A4’s fandom even more, and eventually she basically had to release an apology for being threatened and told to kill herself.
“Hi everyone, this is Serri from Dal Shabet. I just wanted to write and apologize to everyone who was hurt because of the things that happened towards the end of last year. We Dal Shabet are still rookies who debuted in 2011, and therefore we made a lot of mistakes until now. For a moment, we had forgotten that we are public figures who communicate with the masses, and I was so worried about people misunderstanding things that I had previously written to you, asking you not to misconstrue anything. But I think my words have hurt many, and for this I truly apologize. We are still new to this and there is plenty left to learn. We are unfamiliar with how to put our fans first and I feel like we acted before really thinking about how the public would feel. My heart has been extremely heavy thinking about this, and in my efforts to convey my genuine heart, I cautiously write this letter to all of you. I am truly sorry. I will work to become more prudent, learn to be more thankful for the fans’ love and support, and work harder to show you my best efforts.”
Thankfully we didn’t hear much about this mess after that, which at least meant the worst of it had subsided.
Nowadays, B1A4 fans come off relatively chill and you rarely hear about them making a mess at home or abroad. I would like to think at least part of that stems from the fact that many of them learned their lesson from this immature clusterfuck that all started with male and female idols touching each other for a performance.
