Southeast Asian fans of BLACKPINK were mocked, many Korean netizens are criticized for being racist
The story of BLACKPINK’s Southeast Asian fans receiving hate and racism has become a trending topic among Korean netizens.
At 6 pm on June 26 (Korean time), BLACKPINK made a comeback with the pre-release track ‘How You Like That’. Currently, this song has recorded a lot of impressive achievements. In terms of views, the group’s MV set the highest record ever with 1.66 million people watching YouTube Premiere. YouTube also confirmed that ‘How You Like That’ recorded the highest number of views in the first 24 hours in history when it got 86.3 million views.
Besides the comments praising BLACKPINK, there are still many malicious comments on the views of the girls. Most notably, Kpop fans can easily see the comments on Youtube, Twitter, and Korean forum Nate, looking down on the group and fans because their high views are mostly thanks to the strong fan base from Southeast Asia: ‘Isn’t it just thanks to SEA fans streaming?’, ‘They got that high views just cause it was watched by many SEA people!’, ‘BLACKPINK’s SEA fans are so many!’, ‘They’re only popular because of SEA fans’…
These offensive comments not only show up during ‘How You Like That’ era, but have come from many Korean netizens for a long time. Right from when BLACKPINK just debuted and started to get huge achievements on YouTube, out of every 10 Knet comments, there will be 2 to 3 ones mentioning SEA fans with a mocking attitude.
This has annoyed many BLINKs because they have to read the comments saying the same thing to bash on the group’s performance and being racist to Southeast Asian countries. In fact, Kpop is very popular in this region and every group has views contributed by Southeast Asian fans. However, it seems that BLACKPINK has to receive these mocking comments the most, the reason is probably because member Lisa is from Thailand.
On July 1st, the Korean forum Theqoo posted a topic about this issue. The OP quoted a tweet by a Korean fan expressing their feelings about BLACKPINK’s SEA fans receiving racist treatment by many Knetz.
Here’s the tweet:
“Every time there talks about BlackPink’s MV views, there have to be people mentioning SEA raising the views and it’s hilarious to me… Do you guys think that just because SEA are watching those MVs it should be considered fake and a scam..? So only white people’s acknowledgment should be accepted to be considered “worldwide”? Koreans are getting racist treatment from white people, meanwhile they act like they’re white when being racist to others”
This topic has become a hot topic on Theqoo because of the ‘Knet exposing Knet’ content. However, perhaps because such rude comments are more often seen on Pann Nate, there is almost no objection to Theqoo. Korean netizens under the post are also frustrated why there exists a discrimination between Southeast Asian views and other countries’ views. Besides, many BLINKs have left evidence in the comment section to prove that BLACKPINK’s success is thanks to the support of fans from all over the world, not only Southeast Asian countries.
