티아라 파이팅!!! (T-ara Fighting!!!)

This isn't my analysis of what I think happened. I'm never going to know what happened. But I'm fantasizing what I'd have expected on July 25th if I'd logged on and seen the T-ara tweets, and a soothsaying friend had told me, "This is about to erupt into a scandal; can you predict what it'll be?" I'd have guessed, "The scandal will be idol singers pushing each other or being pushed beyond their endurance." This is partly because it fits the tweets, but also because the story of being pushed too hard was already abroad on the Net, in relation to all of K-pop but particularly to T-ara. When I first heard their rendition of "Like An Indian Doll," it was embedded in a Seoulbeats piece that said, "The T-ara members are particularly notorious for taking falls and fainting from exhaustion as their killer schedules catch up with them," and that attributed Jiyeon's lifeless demeanor in that performance to her exhausting schedule. When I first read* about Eunjung slipping and breaking her kneecap last January, the author speculated that this wouldn't have happened had Eunjung not been overworked. And I'd already done a horrified post myself when I'd run across a video interview with Qri (captioned "Tiara cutie and pretty") where she'd said, "On average, I sleep for 2 hours," and then laughed. I'm not necessarily endorsing the Seoulbeat interpretation (as a matter of fact, I fooled around with differing analyses for why Jiyeon might present herself like that), much less saying it's the only way to interpret the tweets: I don't know if T-ara are overworked or not, actually, or if Hwayoung was trying to fend off excessive work. But I think you have to notice the way the tweets incorporate the language of the Korean work ethic. Here are the tweets. I'm using the allkpop translation for Hyomin, Jiyeon, Eunjung, and Hwayoung, with an alternate translation by oniontaker** in brackets; I only had the oniontaker translation for Boram and Soyeon. Obviously, oniontaker is translating as "dedication" what allkpop translated as "determination"; I've also seen it as "will":

Hyomin: "The differences in levels of determination^^, Let us all have more determination. Fighting!!!" ["It's a difference between levels of dedication ^^ Let's all be dedicated and hwaiting!!!!!!"] [Me: According to Wikip, "fighting" (파이팅) and "hwaiting" (화이팅) are basically the same word, based on the English word "fighting"; I've gathered over the last couple of weeks that it's used to cheer people on, T-ara fans posting the meme "T-ara fighting/Hwayoung hwaiting" all over the Net.]***

( More tweets )

I'm slowly working my way through God Of Study on Hulu. I watched episode four a couple of nights ago, which included teachers forbidding a student to go to the bathroom until he'd finished a particularly difficult math problem, and forcing another student to sit out in the cold in the wee hours of the morning doing one set of math problems after another until he'd scored 100. This was presented as the acts of extraordinarily caring and dedicated teachers doing everything they could to help students who would be flushed down the toilet without them.

( Scraggly, swarming mob in disaffected dress )

( Hwayoung hwaiting )

( Footnotes )