The MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) just passed and featured many amazing award categories to represent tons of different genres, including an entire category dedicated to K-pop. Although Lisa, a member of the popular K-pop girl group BLACKPINK, won the category with her song “Rockstar” (which was still well deserved), girl group LE SSERAFIM took the K-pop crown for the night after making a major comeback.
During the VMAs pre-show, LE SSERAFIM performed songs “1-800-hot-n-fun” and “CRAZY” from their most recent EP, CRAZY. With their powerful presence alone, they made the pre-show stage feel like the main one. They also won the MTV Push Performance of The Year award, and their fans, known as FEARNOTs, were ecstatic.
The reason a comeback was necessary in the first place was the fact that LE SSERAFIM performed along with the K-pop boy group ATEEZ at this year’s Coachella festival in April. Their performance left them with a significant amount of hate — hundreds of K-pop stans took to the internet to show their disdain, mainly over the members “lacking vocal projection and pitch stability.” This was especially targeted toward the group’s leader and one of its most popular members, Huh Yunjin. With her being a trained opera singer, people wondered where all that training went.
As if the hate toward the group couldn’t be any more magnified, ATEEZ was said to have performed much better than LE SSERAFIM. The fan chants of ATEEZ fans, known as ATINY, could be heard from the Coachella main stage, an amazing feat.
The hate toward LE SSERAFIM and their 2024 Coachella performance reached a point where their management company, HYBE Labels, had to deactivate the comments on all of the members’ personal Instagram accounts, with the whole group’s account only having active comments for their recent comeback. It was devastating to see the members continually losing their confidence on stage.
A domino effect from the hate was triggered for the entirety of HYBE. Another one of their girl groups, ILLIT, debuted as a group with weak vocals, which led K-pop fans to question whether HYBE is even capable of training idols. HYBE didn’t like this response and strove to make as much progress as they could to improve their idols’ images.
ILLIT is receiving a lot more love now, as their stage presence has improved significantly. For LE SSERAFIM, their improvements can be seen and heard in their live performances of the songs from CRAZY. Member Sakura can be seen executing a “duck walk,” a move performed by voguers, while singing “CRAZY;” member Kazuha’s voice is now one of the loudest, despite her reputation as “just a good dancer;” and Yunjin has been showing off her insane vocals more than ever.
Although a few obsessive haters are still talking about LE SSERAFIM, FEARNOTs tried the absolute hardest they could to drown out the noise with love toward CRAZY and the group’s hard-hitting VMAs performance. The group had a hard time in the limelight before, even losing one of their members after their first EP’s promotions concluded. But it’s time for them to truly be “those girls” again. They deserve all the love in the world, so go listen to CRAZY right now! Now, where the heck is Saki?
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