What were Janellas insensitive comments? I imagine it was something bout elves...
The first controversy came from an early interview. Janella was asked what happened to her old elven friend who got snubbed in favor of Janella at her first audition. Janella responded,
"Chasiana won't even talk to me anymore! I thought she would be happy for me, but she couldn't even get over herself enough to show up to my last birthday party. Elves are just dramatic like that, you know? It's not her fault, it's just her culture. She can be mad at me if that's how she feels, but I'm not mad at her. In fact, I wish her the best!"
While Janella meant well, elven audiences did not take kindly to her generalizations about their species. Elves have been stereotyped as "fussy" and "difficult" for ages, and they feared Janella's statements would only worsen the problem. Janella quickly made a public apology, assuring them that she spoke out of ignorance and she knows better now. The public reasoned that she was only a teenager, and ignorance is to be expected from such a young person, so this didn't affect her career much.
However, the controversy didn't end there. Several years later, Janella gave a disasterous speech at a charity event to rebuild schools in Yerim-Mor Kingdom. Long story short...not only did she mispronounce Monarch Roz's name as "Monarch Rose", she also congratulated his family on their success "despite their heritage", insinuating that goblins cannot be noble, brave, or wealthy. She then made half of the speech about herself, claiming she "knows what it's like to be underestimated, because as a troll..." and then compared her comfy middle-class upbringing to the suffering of oppressed, war-stricken Morites. Basically she made herself look like a dumb bimbo, and this speech caught her a lot of flak for many years. But she was still quite young and she meant well, so once again the public let it go and her career continued to climb upward.
Several years after that, Janella began dating the divine of sport, Devajaya. She and he attended a celebrity gala in Matuzu Kingdom, hosted by Feztavi, the divine of revels. Janella got pretty drunk and made a scene when she claimed she saw Feztavi flirting with Devajaya. She and Feztavi got into a verbal fight that would have turned physical, if security had not dragged Janella out of the building. Devajaya was so embarrassed by the incident that he broke up with Janella that night, and to this day, Janella and Feztavi occasionally talk trash about eachother in interviews. Janella's fans found this celebrity feud more entertaining than anything, though it left a bad taste in the mouths of Feztavi's most die-hard fans, many of whom boycotted Janella's content after that.
Janella has a long string of other dumb little statements behind her, but nothing truly malicious that would tank her career...at least not yet. Her fans are always there to defend her, claiming she was thrust into stardom at a young age and never even got to finish school, so a little ignorance is to be expected of her.
It seems Janella has the charisma--and perhaps the good looks--to keep shrugging off incidents like these.
