Let Oppa Breathe…Poorly

T.O.P has recently found himself the subject of…controversy I guess we’ll call it, over a photo he posted on HIS Instagram of himself smoking a cigarette, which surprisingly he has deleted.

Fans, netizens, whoever are mad with T.O.P for smoking and then posting pictures of it for a variety of reasons, which include that it’s unhealthy and he is a role model, and so on. A similar issue erupted on the interwebs in 2014 when someone snapped a picture of SHINee’s Taemin smoking on a balcony, and just as I was then, I am baffled by the internet’s outrage over this.

Listen I get it. I am personally disgusted by the act of smoking and feel personally victimized when someone smokes in my presence. And, I know we all want our favourite idols to be healthy and around for a long time, but unfortunately for the pissed off internet citizens, we don’t have a say. Taemin, T.O.P, and all the other smoking K-Celebs we know and love in spite of their disgusting habit can do whatever the heck they want.

When you comment in their Instagram comments sections ‘oh oppa, please don’t smoke, it’s not good for your health’ you do realize you’re just wasting your time, right? The fact that the tobacco industry is doing as well as it ever has, probably even better, I wouldn’t know since I’m not checking, we can infer that there are millions of people who are very much aware of the health risks that come with smoking and do it anyway and you just have to come to terms with the fact that oppa is one of them. I mean T.O.P and the rest of Big Bang was a part of an anti-smoking campaign for SBS, so we KNOW T.O.P knows it can make him sick and/or kill him, which means he’s smoking because he doesn’t care.

He’s been smoking for years, definitely since I started listening to Big Bang (2007), probably before that, for goodness sakes the man poses in damn near every photo like he got a cigarette in his hand regardless of whether he does or not!

T.O.P doesn’t seem all that pressed to quit, and I’ll even go out on a limb and say he doesn’t care if his fans don’t like that he smokes. Sure, he is my bias, my boyfriend in my head, but seeing that we are not in a relationship, and I don’t have rainy day in hell’s chance of dating him, I (and you should too) approach him, and other idol smokers, the same way I approach a random person smoking, ‘please, just keep that ish far away from me.’