While fanfics, member shipping, and excessively babying idols have already been strange enough
to people outside of the K-Pop league, which you can all watch here if interested, the
strangeness of all these things combined is still nothing compared to the scariest conspiracy
theories that detective-born netizens have developed over the past years.
What’s even more intriguing is that, while some of them have just figured out several
weeks ago, they are literally the biggest and most mind-blowing theories since there
are no precedents and no one could see them coming.
1.
Kim Garam being used as an attention bait to push Le Sserafim’s reputation
Even when you’re a newbie to K-Pop and probably were just born yesterday, it’s still certain
that you know at least a thing or two about the bullying scandal of Kim Garam because
it’s simply just too big to ignore.
A little recap about what happened in case you still haven’t got the full story is
that, just one day after Source Music released Kim Garam’s individual teaser, several accusations
were posted on famous forums in South Korea, saying that she has always been a terrible
bully since she was still in secondary school.
The victims on her list were said to be as long as an arm and as time passed, more evidence
was also brought up to consolidate the allegations.
However, as entrepreneurial and strategic as HYBE is, their crisis management this time
was said to be confusingly terrible as even when all the evidence were against Garam,
HYBE still stood on her side, saying that she was being defamed by jealous netizens
and the accusers would be taken legal actions against for their malicious intentions.
Not only that, the response was even made just a day after the scandal broke out, which
was very different from the way they handled the negative reactions when G-FRIEND was informed
disbanded, netizens spotted out that HYBE’s staff was faking defending evidence, and most
recently, Kim Garam was said to TEMPORARILY withdrew from the group to mentally heal from
the attack of netizens rather than being kicked out of LE SSERAFIM for good.
To some, HYBE was extremely stubborn, ridiculous and a big example of treating the public as
clowns.
They also believed HYBE was holding onto Garam because she had the potential to make it super
big like Jang Wonyoung.
However, do you know what is the plot twist?
Well, instead of saying HYBE was hypnotized by Garam, there were lots of people believed
she was just a pawn in the big game of capitalists whose ultimate goals were always money.
By that, it means HYBE has already known about the dark past of Kim Garam right at the moment
they took her on board and also forecasted the future where her victims would raise their
voices and cause a huge public uproar.
One solid proof brought by netizens was that her bullying was sorted to degree five and
according to South Korean law, this type of bullying could only be erased three years
afterward and if it’s true, everything was still in Garam’s history and HYBE could
easily see it even if they just overlooked her report.
So basically, the company predicted everything that is happening now but still decided to
debut such a controversial persona because it would keep mouths talking non-stop, maintaining
the heat of LE SSERAFIM without them having to spend a penny.
Plus, as the group also had two super-duper famous ex-members of IZ*ONE, Sakura and Chaewon,
and talented idols like Kazuha and Yunjin, keeping an alleged bully to make people criticize
the group also resulted in a counter-reactions by fans of these members, implicitly raising
the love and empathy for them out of the belief that they were wasted just for a scandalous
member.
This conspiracy theory even predicted that after putting Garam out of the limelight for
a while, HYBE would test the public reactions toward the five-member line-up, gauging how
much love people would shower the girls in and eventually, kicking Garam out of the group
to prove that the company was all ears to netizens’ feedback, willing to fix the mistakes
and always defending the weak for justice.
Basically, this theory said all HYBE’s moves until now didn’t come from the intention
of keeping Garam in LE SSERAFIM but rather to sacrifice her reputation to push the group
quickly to the top.
2.
V and Jennie’s dating scandal was set up by… their own agencies
Related but a little bit different from the first conspiracy theory, this one is built
out of the belief that HYBE was trying desperately to save the reputation of Kim Garam and because
the scandal is so big, they have to use something bigger to sweep the dirt under the rug.
So, what can be bigger than the scandal that not only the whole South Korea but many people
around the world have known?
Well, it’s BTS and particularly, the dating news of a member in BTS.
In fact, when the situation escalated, people had already heard on the grapevine that the
dating life of a BTS’s member would be exposed to distract people from Garam’s case, but
the thing they didn’t expect was that the news would come this early.
That’s why some could immediately point out the fishy points in the alleged photo
capturing V and Jennie hanging out on Jeju Island and conclude that HYBE had photoshopped
this picture themselves to shift the attention, and especially the heated discussion, away
from Garam.
Particularly, netizens pointed out that it was ridiculous for two top stars in K-Pop
to not cover their face while sitting in a car with non-tinted glass.
Second, V in this picture looked very similar to his scene with J-Hope in BTS In The Soop
2 and last, Jennie’s hair in the photo was black rather than ginger, which was extremely
illogic because Jennie had already changed her hair color to ginger around April 10.
Another theory around this case is that the picture wasn’t photoshopped at all and V
and Jennie actually…
went on a date.
However, this date wasn’t because they were in a romantic relationship but rather because
HYBE and YG Entertainment had colluded to do the media play, which actually made a lot
of sense because both BTS and BLACKPINK were preparing for a comeback after a super long
hiatus while the scene has become way more bloodily competitive because of many promising
gen4 idols.
Essentially, this was a win-win strategy devised by big brainers and there is a real, tangible
benefit behind it so some believed this theory made more sense than the first one.
3.
Dating scandals are used as government cover-ups
While there are more and more people trying hard to convince others that idols’ dating
should be normalized because this belongs to the personal rights of a human, the cold
harsh truth is still that the romantic relationships between idols will hardly ever be regarded
as a normal thing.
Why?
Am I being too certain and jumping to conclusions too fast?
Well, not really and as seen many times before, idols’ dating is forever a hot topic because
it not only gets people clicking on titles, which ends up making tons of money for news
outlets, but because it’s frequently used to cover huge political issues in South Korea.
While it seems like coincidences when dating news of big stars in the K-industry and controversies
of big political figures were often reported at the same time, many netizens believed that
it’s always planned by powerful people to make the political and social climate less
intense and make people forget them easily.
One of the most salient pieces of proof was back in 2021 when the big wave of bullying
scandals took over the K-Pop industry and many famous artists were accused of being
bullies back in their schooling days, all of a sudden Dispatch revealed that Jennie
and GD had been dating for more than a year.
Since both Jennie and GD were extremely famous and people had also never seen their dating
coming, discussion was immediately diverted to how and when their love story started.
This also released the pressure that the accused idols and their companies bore because to
a certain extent, not many would focus on the bullying scandals and so, idols and their
companies could have more time to devise sensible crisis management plans.
Plus, this could stop the bullying accusations from spreading like wildfire because one,
the trending keyword “bullying” would be replaced by “dating” and two, when
allegations were made, people wouldn’t care that much because attention was split.
In August 2019, the same trick was also pulled.
When the political climate was super intense because of two big events: North Korea was
testing their missiles and South Korea's economy was in crisis, leading to a demonstration
on August 15th calling for Moon Jae In's resignation, somehow the dating between Jihyo and Daniel
was revealed.
Sensing the fishy smell, people started to track down the whole story and found that
before the dating news, Naver was caught deleting anti-Moon comments but as this didn’t work,
Jihyo and Daniel’s private life was brought into the limelight.
In fact, this scapegoat thing has become so familiar to Knetz that back in 2020 when Momo
and Heechul were revealed to be dating, people immediately raised questions like “What
happened to the country this time that there is another celebrity-related news?,” “Did
the government do something wrong AGAIN?”, and “the government probably needed to cover
something…”
So, do you think any of these conspiracy theories are true or they are all in the head of K-Pop
“delulus” as called by some people?