It always seemed likely that drama would emerge from ‘Produce 48‘, what with Japan and Korea in collaboration and all. Of course, it wouldn’t be the contestants as much as the media and netizens, and neither disappointed.

In particular though, there were an odd amount of disparaging rumors that coincidentally made every relevant Japanese contestant a right-winger/hater of Korea. If it seemed to go against the odds to you that a bunch of teenagers would all adopt that type of political stance and that haters of Korea would go to Korea, you weren’t alone, as campaigns against Shiroma Miru, Shitao Miu, Goto Moe, and AKS as a whole always seemed to be in bad faith, and more importantly they didn’t seem to have much credibility to them once one looked into the issues.

But there was apparently a lot going on than anybody thought, as one netizen came clean about their tactics after the show ended, and it was recently translated and recapped about nine months after the fact.

So basically this person just leveraged the Korea/Japan historical conflict in order to manipulate people into hating certain contestants cause he wanted his faves to get votes instead. Amazing in a way.

The part that makes this even more silly is the possibility that Mnet and/or AKS at least has a certain amount of, say, influence over the final results, so who the hell knows what people like this were even trying to ruin the careers of these idols for.