Lee Jieun has been KPop's greatest adversary , and the singer who doomed BTS' world domination by wresting K-O-R-E-A from it on late 2021.
I thought we were seeing the last of her when NewJeans obliterated the digitalis and made her irrelevant, but the Kakao takeover of SM suddenly empowers her significantly.
She now has all of SM as her allies, something unthinkable since she spent almost all of her career fighting against it (although she did engage to something interesting with a member of a certain SM act who will probably jump out of Kakao as soon as possible).
Lee Jieun's hostility against kpop is virtually infinite, and she would not stop at anything to undermine it whenever she could, and now she has obtained real power since she has a lot of influence in Kakao Entertainment which she did not use much but now her chance has arrived, it is likely that she will lead SM to become a domestic company with little appeal to foreign fans.
How kpop almost exorcise its long residing, 1,344 years old strange creature but got beaten (pun intended) by her is something to ponder for a long time, and the world, with the absence of BTS, willl notice how SM will lose most of its international ground and turn into a boring domestic company.
