Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
About a week ago, a post about TREASURE member Haruto being homophobic blew up on Twitter, garnering tens of thousands of retweets.
As usual fans of his and his group have responded back with stuff like demanding people see the whole context, as it apparently came from an old Weverse Live. The thing is, though, one could argue that seeing it just reinforces the homophobic sentiment.
It’s difficult to defend that as not homophobic, and he didn’t exactly back off from the sentiment on WeVerse either, in what seemed like a response to the backlash.
None of the excuses I’ve read about this make all that much sense to me. He said what he said, and if he regretted the wording or something of that nature, then he could’ve corrected it instead of doubling down.
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Amazingly, I found a lot of people responding to criticism of him to be saying things worse than Haruto’s comments. Such as places like the replies to this tweet, which is about Koreans not even denying the homophobia, and in some cases even sympathizing with Haruto.
Gonna be honest, it’s baseball season and I just kinda … whiffed on this whole mess going down until I saw the Pann Choa post just now. My bad*.
*None of you fuckers tipped me off either, lol.
But man, after catching up on it, it’s been striking just how much support he has from TREASURE fans and how much homophobia is out there in the K-pop sphere (especially surprising internationally). Just a ton of either right-wingers and/or religious people either supporting Haruto’s sentiments, taking them even further, or couching their homophobia in excuses galore (even some moderate types are doing that).
Should be interesting to see if there’s any further consequences for this incident, but the craziest thing is it doesn’t seem there will be other than to make it harder to expand the fandoms of Haruto and TREASURE in the West.
