BOYNEXTDOOR [HOME: DELUXE] Special Report: The Animals

What happened

HYBE LABELS posted a BOYNEXTDOOR video titled "[HOME: DELUXE] Special Report: The Animals". The supplied auto-captions open like a news documentary: a research center in Gyeonggi Province, and a story about people who believe they are animals rather than humans.

Why Koreans care

The captions are written in the voice of a TV documentary. They describe cases that were once extremely rare and are now common enough to be called a social phenomenon, and a doctor sets out to investigate. The narration says an overseas survey found that 70% of these people are in their teens and twenties. The captions name no source for that figure and nothing supplied shows it is real data, so it is best read as part of the video's frame. One line is garbled. The auto-caption has 범죄 (beomjoe, "crime") where the sentence most likely means 범주 (beomju, "category"). The narration is therefore saying these people claim the category "human" cannot explain them, not that being human is a crime. The supplied captions stop mid-sentence, as the narration begins to ask whether this is real or an "error phenomenon" with various possible causes.

In the Korean comments

Seven Korean-language comments were stored for this video, listed highest-liked first. The video had 34 comments in total when they were collected. All seven are positive, so what matters is what they single out. The top comment, at 33 likes, reads the video as a preview of what is coming. In translation: "Lol, it feels like they've come back with something huge, so I'm really, really looking forward to 애니멀 (aenimeol, "Animal")." It does not say what 애니멀 (aenimeol, animal) refers to. One comment reads, in translation, "Wait, a promotion could be this fun?" It then calls Leehan eating a snack "so cute" and ends with a note about the group's repackage album (a re-release of an earlier album with new material added) on 9.28. Another reads, in translation, "Leehan is so cute, crazy sloth". It is the only comment here that names a specific animal. A fourth reads, in translation, "Jaehyun's acting is legendary T_T it's insane, seriously." These are the commenters' descriptions. The supplied captions cover only the opening narration and do not confirm those moments.

What the words mean

미쳤어 (michyeosseo, literally "went crazy"): in the comment about Jaehyun's acting it is not a complaint. It is a casual, exaggerated way of saying something is unbelievably good. Another comment uses 미친 (michin, "crazy") right after "so cute", where it works as the same kind of intensifier. The register in both is loose fan-comment praise. "만관부 만사부" (mangwanbu mansabu): read syllable by syllable it looks like nonsense, and its first syllable 만 (man, "ten thousand") also means a number. It is fan shorthand for a stock request, "lots of attention, lots of love". It is spelled with 만 (man, many or lots of; ten thousand) in place of 많 (man, "many"), which sounds the same. Here it follows the mention of the 9.28 repackage album, as a casual plea for people to watch and support it.