Xingdae Fight of 2015
N.B. This is a repost from my old Tellonym.
Jongdae and Yixing both belonged to Exo-M.
They have a one year age gap and Yixing is the elder. Jongdae joined very late and had a very short training period which was especially tough given that he now needed to sing in Mandarin which he didn't know before his audition. Although he had tutors and lessons and such, Yixing, who is a native Chinese speaker, took him under his wing and did a lot of coaching and teaching, both of phrases for interviews but also pronunciation for songs. My understanding is that Yixing also tutored Jongdae in dance, another area of initial weakness. Jongdae was an eager pupil who always credited his teacher and as they got older, started looking after Yixing in small and large ways, the most prominent example is attending Yixing's solo Pathcode shoot and worrying about him staying warm (27:33 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3rmasa).
Yixing had been making his own music since his trainee days and had the goal of releasing an album and/or contributing music to an Exo album. However, SM is very strict about how tracks and lyrics are accepted so artists typically have to compete with other tracks and win. Nevertheless, you can hear some of Yixing's early work in his Lost Planet solo 'I'm Lay' as well as in this SM Rookies practice clip of Seulgi and Irene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuxQa9_eSLQ).
After the first two Chinese members left Exo, Yixing wrote the music and Chinese lyrics+rap to Promise in reaction and this was his first song to be properly featured on an Exo album. However, because Korean is not his first language, he asked the Exo group chat for help and Jongdae was the only member to come down. Jongdae would adapt/write the Korean lyrics to Promise with Chanyeol ultimately writing the rap. This initial collaboration would spark a whole series of demos that they made together with Yixing generally contributing the music and Jongdae generally the lyrics. Jongdae would normally perform the majority of the vocals on the demos. The goal for Yixing was to prepare 100 demos to present to SM to show that he/they were ready for their own album for more of their music to be featured on Exo albums. This collaboration brought them even closer together and they were very affectionate with each other during this period. Ultimately though in late 2014 the USB with the masters of the demos was lost and never recovered. They were able to reconstruct Promise and there were a few non-master files of some of the songs but they had lost a huge amount of work.
Shortly thereafter, the remaining Chinese member outside of Yixing, Huang Zitao, who had had many injuries during his time with Exo and at the time had one severe enough he couldn't perform, started to make moves that suggested he too might leave. This period is very complicated and was very uncertain for fans and for the band because Tao's father got publicly involved in his quest to have Tao sue SM for mistreatment (largely bc of the injuries and how they'd handled them) while Tao had previously maintained he had no plans to leave ever. It's also clear that with the departure of the first two members, SM had been scrambling to sort out how promotions in China and Exo-M would work regarding both the two Chinese members as well as the two Korean members but Tao, as a Chinese member was clearly a key part of whatever plans they had.
At the same time, Yixing was in negotiations with SM that ultimately led to him opening his own Chinese studio which initially was supposed to be focused on managing his Chinese acting. His bargaining power was presumably strengthened by the loss of two going on three of the four original Chinese members given that Exo's original vision was fundamentally based in part on serving the Chinese market and expanding SM's reach in it.
Ultimately, Yixing opened his studio at the beginning of April while Tao's father's letter was published at the end of April.
In the middle of these two events is the Japanese fan meeting (https://youtu.be/lOHEypLdako?t=390) which contains one of the most iconic Xingdae moments: Jongdae picking Yixing as who he would be a fan of if he was an Exo-L and indicating it by backlogging Yixing whose face is hidden. The grin that spreads across Yixing's face as he gets picked is everything and Yixing ultimately breaks the chain they'd had going to pick Jongdae back.
The next time we see them together is for the May 30/31 concerts of Exo'luxion. In between the fan meeting and those concerts, Yixing begins filming for Go Fighting! (where he gets very close to the other Chinese celebrities on the show, all older than him), Tao's father's letter is published, Yixing has an injury on the set of GF and SM officially announces that they are in negotiations with Tao in the hopes of convincing him to stay.
NOW my personal read of the May 30th and May 31st concerts, both of which were performed in Shanghai, is that I think the May 30th concert is more or less normal between them. In the Chinese versions of the concert, Yixing performs 'My Answer' with Jongdae and Kyungsoo with Yixing largely providing piano accompaniment as well as some vocals. The vast majority of these performances are very tense and weird because Jongdae completely refuses to make eye contact with Yixing, even when he's initiating it or when neither of them is singing and Jongdae is also seemingly very adverse to being close to Yixing. For example, watch the May 31st performance and this one from August. l tend to use the My Answer performances as a marker for their relationship since it was clearly designed to take advantage of their chemistry and instead showed the breakup. HOWEVER I personally think that the May 30th performance, has basically normal interactions between the two of them.
I'll also note that unlike other fights in the band like Chanyeol and Baekhyun's Obsession era fight, I don't really think the other members took sides.
Take for instance, the two members outside of Jongdae who were closest to Yixing: Minseok and Baekhyun. On stage throughout the tour, they have fun together and in the Second Box we get the three of them at ease in their couple talks and roller coaster adventure. But we also don't see a rift between either of these two and Jongdae. This tells me that neither of them did anything either in terms of what sparked the fight or during the fight that the other members had a serious problem with.
Another factor is how long this fight last, it took until Jongdae's birthday in September for Yixing to publicly apologize and from October to March, we start seeing some signs of the rift healing though this is only fully confirmed by the November 2016 (a little under two years after the fight) when they do their double Lose Control/Hey Mama! promotions that it's clear that everything is forgiven between the two of them. So it was a serious fight between two people who are not prone to fights and which lasted a long time, which is less surprising given that they are both stubborn people.
SO this is what informs my XingDae breakup take.
