Not fic related, but what can you say about the issue surrounding hc? Some say its lost in translation but idk what to believe. I'm not fluent in Korean after all. I'm quite on the heavy side, so seeing haechan say such words, as his fan, is uncomfortable...
i tried to find an ask i was sent about a similar issue but it was jeno talking to haechan a few months ago, because my answer will be the same i gave that day. unfortunately it was on cc and cc doesn't allow to look for old tweets, nor is twitter helpful in any way so i'll try to answer again.
under the cut bc very long sry
first of all, it's completely normal to feel uncomfortable. those are your feelings and they're valid. your feelings are separate from the intentions of the person who said those words, so no matter what you're entitled to feeling hurt if you feel like your bias might be fatphobic and no one should be telling you otherwise. in any case, feeling disappointed is not wrong because as many people are saying he is a public figure and his words can reach (and hurt) many people.
this said, as someone who lives in korea, i do understand why some people who are korean are saying his words are being greatly exaggerated by ifans. korean people constantly comment on other people's weight. it's to the point that i think it's a way for them to make small talk. just like they ask people if they have eaten when they want to ask how they're doing, food is often used in connection to health. when people haven't seen you for a long time they usually tell you that you've gained or lost weight as well (happened many times with me) and people do tell others to eat well as a good health wish. that's why i think that telling people to get in shape and take care of your body does not necessarily mean that he thinks they are fat, it's just a way to say take care of your health. imo it would be wrong to read a deeper meaning in it.
back to my previous point. does that make your hurt unnecessary? no, because you can get hurt even he didn't mean to say something hurtful. if you get run over by a car it doesn't matter whether the driver meant to do it or not.
but i don't accept the narrative that hc is a terrible person who judges the members' bodies because he is fatphobic, and anyone believing this has clearly never lived in korea, where the kind of sentences he said are as common between friends (especially male friends) as using the weather to make small talk. if you want a real example, i dare you to look at the other nct dream members. all of them have, in other instances, made comments that according to our standards would be judged "fatphobic" while they were talking among each other. do we stan a group of assholes or are we going to acknowledge that there might be a certain degree of cultural difference at play between the way we consider acceptable to talk about other people's bodies and the way they do it?
i'd like to add something i said when this issue happened with jeno and haechan was called fat instead. i'm not haechan's babysitter. he doesn't need me to defend him when he's talking with his friends. if what is said among them is problematic, i'm sure they are all old enough to talk among themselves and solve the problems. what they don't need is some fans (often solo stans or akgae) inventing a narrative in their head, analyzing reactions to support their theories and then proudly saying "member x is an asshole" and deciding that they, as strangers, know their friendship better than dream, the actual group of friends. and this is just to get rt and likes, for the drama. it's meaningless to always praise dream for having a genuine relationship but then distort every single instance of genuine reaction we get from them just to make a hit tweet. if jn and jm were annoyed by that comment, i trust them to say something among each other without everyone butting in blindly.
finally, i'm sorry that as a haechan fan he disappointed you. i do think what he said is wrong. i think he should've minded his words better. i don't like when he says stuff like that. i don't believe he wants to be hurtful, but at the same time i don't think he saw a problem with what he was saying because most people around him don't. not only the other members, but also the staff, his family, other celebrities. it's alright being disappointed, but i hope we can all be realistic and stop pinning the weight of a behavior that is widely normalized on a single idol every time something like this happens.
I hope I explained myself properly. It's a delicate issue, and as a fan I have to juggle between dealing with my own feelings of disappointment and seeing many comments of people who are inventing things or being hurtful just because they finally have a good pretext to do it.
