Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
For those who understandably haven’t been following along, South Korea is holding elections for a new President soon after the previous one was impeached and removed over his attempted coup. Both sides are thus campaigning, and recently aespa’s Karina has gotten involved through an Instagram post.
So basically, she wore the outfit above, which has red and the number two on it, both of which are associated with the right-wing People Power Party. The post also had a rose in it, and this election is being called the Rose Election, thus netizens immediately accused her of taking a political stance.
After the backlash, Karina deleted the post, but things flared up again when PPP spokespereson Baek Ji Won posted aespa to her Instagram Story with the song “Supernova” playing,
On one hand, the color, the number, and the rose make for either an unfortunate amount of coincidences and a lack of awareness or is an insane public political declaration on her part consider their fandom demo. On the other hand, an increasingly desperate PPP that has been trailing and fractured of late would gladly take any positive buzz, and this wouldn’t be even close to the first time a misunderstanding like this happened over vague things. For me it mostly comes off like people just looking for a chance to shit on a celeb, but who knows. Guessing this might require a clarification soon, though it’ll likely be default stance of being apolitical so people will believe what they want. And that could end up being a problem for aespa.
Also, sorry for not being active of late but everybody needs a break from time to time and this spell in K-pop seems like an ideal one, honestly, lol.
Update
SM Entertainment has released an apology.
We apologize for causing concern due to our artist Karina’s recent post.
Karina simply shared something from her daily life on social media, with absolutely no other intention or purpose. Once she realized that the post could be misunderstood, she immediately deleted it. We sincerely apologize for any distress this may have caused unintentionally.
Our agency will also be more careful and make greater efforts to prevent such incidents from happening in the future. We hope that our artist’s intentions will no longer be misrepresented or consumed with a particular agenda, and we will do our utmost to protect Karina and all of our artists.
So has Karina to fans.
"I’m really sorry for making MY worry.
— Karina♡ (@ujiminphoria) May 28, 2025
That was never my intention,
but since the misunderstanding kept growing and MY was getting very worried, i thought I needed to speak up directly. From now on, I’ll try to be more attentive and act with more care. Once again, I’m sorry for… pic.twitter.com/c48l3rSsnw
I dunno, nothing would surprise me.
Wouldn't surprise me if a lot more idols were conservative (at least compared to what stans think) given some of their regional, family, and financial backgrounds. I do also think a lot of stuff can be explained by them being incredibly stupid and/or out of touch. https://t.co/IdGjc17NZS
— Asian Junkie (@asianjunkiecom) May 28, 2025
