They say that hell is a teenage girl. It sucks having to deal with burgeoning romantic feelings when most of the boys in your grade are more interested in giving each other wedgies and chasing balls around. That’s where boy bands come in! Obsessing over squeaky-clean, baby-faced guys with angelic voices gives young girls an outlet for their romantic ideals, as each boy band provides a pleasing variety of “safe” alternatives on which to have a crush (real boys, after all, are too unpredictable!) So it’s no wonder that sometimes girls can take things a little bit too far. When one Twitter user set her user icon to a pic of her favorite Japanese boyband member, little did she know that her actions would spark a stream of increasingly unhinged messages from a fellow fan.
As Japan has its AKB48 and legions of female “idols”, so too does it have a massive boyband-making industry. Japan’s singing hearthrob monopoly is held by music mogul Johnny Kitagawa, a veritable Simon Cowell of manufactured pop, who has on his “Johnny’s Entertainment” roster a reel of huge-name groups such as SMAP, Arashi, KAT-TUN, Kanjani 8, Hey! Say! JUMP and V6, to name a few. Obsessive fans of many of these groups are well-known in Japan for getting out of hand and acting immaturely, giving the rest of the sensible, well-behaved fans a bad name. These Johnny’s “otaku” types are known by the nickname “Jyani-ota” and are routinely made the butt of online jokes. Here’s a prime example of a Jyani-ota acting like a jerk by ordering another fan to “delete your account and apologize” for the “crime” of liking the same member of group V6.
The baffling barrage of messages were screencapped and uploaded to Twitter by the victim of the rant, ___Go__, who luckily seems to have found the whole thing hugely amusing:
▲ “Eeeeeeeek! lolololololol watch out for this kid everyone!”
Comments in response the tweet were quick to judge the behavior of the nuttily obsessive fan:
“This kind of thing is why I can’t be a fan of any Johnny’s group.”
“People who can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality scare me!”
“Going to get married, she says… Bahahaha!”
“Watch out, we’ve got a stalker here!”
“Surely nobody is this nuts. This has to be faked.”
“Oh man, do people like this really exist?!”
“Gross, this kind of thing is why otaku creep everyone else out.”
“Fight back! Tell her you’re allowed to like the dude as well, sheesh!”
“Which one was Go Morita again? Anyone?”
While liking boybands is perfectly healthy and actually probably quite beneficial to the health and happiness of young girls (or even older girls, let’s be honest Arashi are just too cute! Ahem) it does seem that the jyani-ota here has taken her obsession to unhealthy limits. Perhaps it might be time for her to give the boy bands a rest for a little while (and maybe take a break from Twitter, too) and give “real” boys another chance? We’re sure Go-kun would understand!
Source: Hamusoku
Image: Onehallyu.com