#vbee

(for those who don't know, at the chicago show fans were once again cheering over the members talking which made kim lip cry and decide to sit out of the rest of the show.)

all of my opinions on what went down should be taken with a grain of salt since i wasn't at the show, but i'm thinking that this was mostly the result of 1) culture clash + 2) poor planning + 3) tech issues.

1) culture clash.

a friend who went to the la show pointed out how much talking and how little music was performed at the show. when we tallied it up, it worked out to be just over an hour of music vs 1.5 hours of speaking content. for a western audience, this breakdown is pretty unexpected/abnormal, and i could believe that it would cause some restlessness.

also, western artists generally don't encourage quiet at any point in the concert, so constant screaming/cheering is seen as normal. if a western artist wants to speak, they generally wait for the crowd to die down, believing that once the audience realizes that they're not speaking they'll start to quiet. my impression of korean crowds is that they're quieter, + as others have pointed out, loona is just generally less hyped in sk, so they're not used to audiences with this much energy. western fans also tend to implicitly associate screaming = showing love and support and louder screaming = even more love and support. it's not seen as disrespectful, it's seen as showing love, which importantly, is not universal at alllll.

so this is where 1) culture clash and 2) poor planning collide. a restless audience who believes that screaming = love combined with artists who have different cultural expectations clearly do not mesh well. if the concert was tailored to the audience, it would make sense to have more music + less talking but even more importantly, crowd training for the girls. if they had been made aware rather than just being thrown in the deep end this situation, from the restless audience to the end result, might not have happened. so i think bbc is to blame for that.

but importantly!!! given that it seems like the girls were given no crowd training, there was still another group that could have prevented this situation from happening!! while i don't think that fans were being deliberately rude (and i'll expand on why), the only thing that could've stopped the situation from worsening is if the fans shut up when it became clear that lip was getting frustrated. but they didn't.

3) tech issues.

fans were cheering for vivi after she finished speaking, and kim lip began to speak immediately after vivi stopped talking (so while fans were still cheering for vivi). because of a mic delay, it seemed like lip hadn't started speaking so fans continued to cheer for vivi. from the stage, it must've seemed like people were intentionally cheering for vivi instead of lip, and that's what made kim lip cry in the end. if the mic delay hadn't been as severe, the situation would've been clearer for the members onstage - i'd like to believe that the people cheering for vivi would've stopped faster. however, i have seen some accounts say that a group of 20 or so people continued to chant for vivi after the mic issues ended. if that's true, then that particular group was just plain rude. i still don't want to believe that it's intentional, that they were just caught up in the moment, but in this situation impact matters way more than intent.

4) moving forward.

i think this is pretty obvious, but for anyone going to the remaining shows, just dont cheer during the speaking parts!!! i'm sure lip and the rest of the members feel terrible (heejin even admonished orbits on fab) so i'm hoping especially hard that the rest of the shows go smoothly and respectfully.

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tl;dr

1 - different cultural expectations between the audience and the members made things worse. bbbc could've mitigated this, but likely due to inexperience, did not. this was poor planning on their part.

2 - tech issues caused orbits to cheer while unaware that lip was trying to speak. this caused the misunderstanding that vivi akgaes were ignoring her.