Jaehwan of WANNA ONE is being accused of dropping the n-word in some kind of skit thing on ‘Show Champion‘, and it definitely sounds like it.

Somebody slowed it down so people can get a better listen.

so this is kim jaehwan of wanna one saying "nigga," that show champion tried to hide. i even slowed it down so y'all could see. pic.twitter.com/y7GsJrXsnO — nia | janae day! (@nctelitist) August 24, 2017

One of the defenses being thrown around is that he was just saying ‘naega’ like the caption, but…

so jaehwan just gon use the word naega in the completely wrong context… he wanna say nigga that bad…. jaehwan why… pic.twitter.com/Wn6DIy9RFk — #just_u (@solowoohyuns) August 24, 2017

…yeah. In that context, it wouldn’t make sense to just use that and what he was trying to imitate there would be clear.

The other thing I’ve seen thrown around is that he was actually saying ‘naega wasseo’ or ‘naega wasseop’ as slang (it’s a pun).

Learn Korean. He said "내가 왔어" "naega wasseo" aka"I'm here" but "whats up" and "wasseo" are similar in korean so they put whats up. Its a pun — ⛅️hannah⛅️ (@cloudymorning_) August 24, 2017

There are multiple problems with this, IMO.

For starters, you can hear him say the ‘P’, so he’s not saying ‘naega wasseo’, it’s ‘naega wasseop’ at best. Or if you can’t hear it, then you can certainly see his lips coming together and popping for the ‘P’ sound and not the ‘O’ sound. Finally, even if what they are claiming was true, the slang comes from the similarity to the n-word anyway in one way or another.

I asked my Korean friend. All the k-wannables and others defending Jaehwan can stick it up their ass pic.twitter.com/6jvcLuPyMN — ⋆.* (@winlongguo) August 24, 2017

Like the caption even says “Show Me The Rap Jaehwan”, so you can’t claim everybody doesn’t know where that came from.

So yeah … less than ideal.

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Note: Article has been updated to match the changing arguments of Jaehwan stans.