Here I was thinking that it was just Korean netizens and fans who are this crazy. Jpop idol Hirano Aya spoke out about her love life on Gout Temps Nouveau and now she’s feeling the backlash. Her fans have been outraged that she would reveal such things on television and have even gone so far as to make death threats against her. While it’s obviously not fair to her and she should be able to just date freely and talk about her life, she should have known better. Idols get kicked out of agencies for having boyfriends or girlfriends and they try their hardest to not let such scandals get out. For her to talk about this herself was serious misjudgment on her part.

“Well-known top seiyuu Hirano Aya, known for her roles as Haruhi in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Konata in Lucky Star, etc., made an appearance on the Fuji TV program Gout Temps Nouveau where the young idol’s love life became a topic of discussion. Speaking of her experiences in past relationships, it was a grave subject for an idol to talk about so openly, and unsurprisingly, fans’ reactions weren’t positive.

Fans became enraged in front of their TVs and took to 2ch, where they wrote abusive messages towards Hirano and, allegedly, even began planning her death. As Hirano herself had never said in front of her fans that she’d been in a relationship until now, amongst her core zealous fanbase, the majority seemed certain that she’d never had a boyfriend. Therefore, the appearance on this program was the very first time Hirano had ever spoken of any such romance like those she described, and the fans’ rage in response to having watched the program was uncontrollable.

Even though it was merely the ordinary girl’s talk commonly seen on and expected from Gout Temps Nouveau, Hirano’s fans, who had truly believed in her supposed lack of a boyfriend, were full of tearful, anguished comments. Not stopping at just those, however, their outrage spiraled out of control as some users began planning for the assassination of their former idol, one comment reading, “I’m glad I didn’t record [the program]; I’m going to kill Hirano Aya.” Even on the seiyuu’s Wikipedia page, a string of characters reading “die” was written approximately 67,000 times (as of now, the article has been restored to its original form). Meanwhile, in a slightly less extreme reaction, fans in possession of her CDs and posters have been destroying them and uploading pictures of the ruined merchandise to the Internet. This upset towards Hirano seems like it won’t die down for a very long while.”

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