warning: long post ahead involving psychoanalysis of Eyekons.
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I just read an essay connecting object-relations theory (a branch of psychoanalysis) to fandom logic, and I found the framework very applicable to what’s happening in the Katseye fandom right now. I believe the primary force driving the hate (both against Manon and against the other members) is that, in the face of the messy, ambiguous reality surrounding Katseye's future right now, the fandom has fractured into factions based on who they are forcing into the position of "bad object" - a receptacle for everyone's frustrations with Katseye as a whole.
the key idea here is "splitting", where an object in our psyche is split into "good" and "bad" objects in the face of conflict. while these thought processes stay with us our whole lives, they are rooted in infancy. when a baby is hungry and not immediately fed by its caregiver, it can't grasp that its mother may just be busy. its mind can't comprehend the contradiction of a loving figure also withholding comfort at times, so it solves the problem by mentally splitting the mother's breasts into two parts: the "good breast" that feeds, and the "bad breast" that frustrates. all the negative emotions are dumped onto the bad object so that the good object can remain purely loved.
people love and identify with Katseye, yet are confronted with a situation (Manon's absence from the group, and all the drama surrounding it) that challenges their idealized conceptions of the six members as a pure, global sisterhood without significant conflict. to manage the discomfort this causes, different factions of the fandom have resorted to turning different individuals into the Bad Object.
for "OT5 stans", Manon becomes the Bad Object. they frame her as the singular problem and accuse her of being lazy/difficult/ungrateful in order to protect their fantasy that HxG and the remaining members are a harmonious unit, one even improved by Manon's removal. all the disruption and drama becomes blamed on her, leading to ugly, sadistic attacks on Manon (including vicious racist abuse). even innocuous acts of hers (like attending Coachella, or a post thanking new Instagram followers) are interpreted as veiled jabs at the rest of Katseye, fueling further hostility.
meanwhile, for "Manon solo stans", the other members become the Bad Object. in the absence of any clear answers about what happened behind the scenes, the other members are split into either cowardly bystanders or active bullies in order to preserve fans’ idealization of Manon. fragments of inconclusive evidence, like 5-second clips showing a facial expression, are turned into irrefutable proof that this or that member was actually a cartoon villain conspiring against Manon for years. the gaps in information and communication are filled with fans’ projected anxieties.
the Bad Object serves as a fantasy - something to take frustration out on, so whether or not they are truly at fault is besides the point. a perfect example of this is when Twitter stans thought they had doxxed Katseye's manager(?) Missy Paramo, only for it to turn out to have been a random woman with the same name. despite having no idea what Katseye even was, she ended up bearing the burden of being the Bad Object as she was bombarded with threats against her and her son’s life.
besides the sadistic responses described above, another response to a Bad Object is simple denial - we saw this in the (increasingly marginal) section of the fandom who chose to ignore the elephant in the room by simply acting as if the hiatus was a totally unremarkable event and that everyone else was overreacting for no reason, or that it was even a planned marketing stunt.
when we engage in splitting, the complexity of the holistic reality becomes obscured, and we forefit our ability to genuinely understand a situation. our own shortcomings and fears become wrapped up in the Bad Object, and instead of that “releasing” our tension, it actually ends up embodying and reflecting those pains back at ourselves. instead of recognizing and accepting flaws in something we love, we hold them to absurd standards of purity and lash out against what we see as their bad parts. instead, we should strive to look at things as a totality in order to gain a better grasp of them. in the case of Katseye, that might involve interrogating the limits of the concept of a “global girl group” in a capitalist music industry and a racist society, or criticizing stan culture’s general tendency to turn celebrities into objects of identification and comfort.