On 1st May 2026, ENHYPEN started their Blood Saga World Tour, beginning in Seoul. Overall, it was a success for the members and the turnout of those in attendance. The company they are under, HYBE BELIFT, promoted an article written by Naver on their X account. The article had included the phrase – “the absence was not felt”. The article is originally in Korean and the English translations came to this statement, with other similar phrases. This is referring to Heeseung’s absence for the first time for this world tour because he officially departed the group on March 10th 2026. This received lots of backlash from fans across different social media platforms.
To say his “absence was not felt” is quite dismissive as he was a big topic of discussion regarding this tour without him. The group consisted of 7 members for 6 years, learnt choreography as a 7-member group for years, making it muscle memory, for the company Heeseung (Evan) is still under to promote an article which practically says his absence was irrelevant is strange. The remaining 6 members had to change a large portion of their choreo to make up for his absence, which is time-consuming. It’s almost defamatory for BELIFT to support this statement. Moreover, a petition got 2 million signs in under a week for the company to reconsider their decision and allow Heeseung to pursue solo activities while remaining in the group, protest trucks were sent to park outside HYBE’s building in Seoul, “#bringbackheeseung” reached number 1 for trending hashtags on X, some spam emailed those in authority at HYBE and some even
A large majority of fans were outraged at this repost, and did not hold back with their responses on social media:
As shown, there is a lot of negative opinions towards BELIFT’s promotion of this article by Naver. A Heeseung fanpage on X (@/LHSGlobal) posted an email template for fans to email HYBE regarding this. Even though an incredibly large portion of the fandom came together and agreed that this was not a good move, the fan account’s email template post got backlash. It was minimal, but it still counts.
Although there are only few tweets that were found, the ones provided come across in a harsh tone. @/ikeusim6 has “6hypen” in their bio, meaning that they are an “ot6” stan, which means they do not care for Heeseung’s absence – making their tweet biased. Additionally, @/inlatenovember also has “for enhypen6” in their bio, which makes them biased aswell. The user @/mysa1115 does not have any proof to be an “ot6 stan”, their posts are not defamatory in any way either. Their tweet is quite reasonable and tried to clarify what the article meant, without bashing the opposing side.
Regardless of what happens in the fandom going forward, there is no denying that since Heeseung’s departure, the fandom has split and is at conflict with each other.
Once upon a time, they were just “ENGENE’s“.
-cover image credits–
mominatalks 