Having a member leave a group can be devastating for a group's popularity and image; momentum grinds to a halt, promotions stop and the group plummets. Sure, Apink and Girl's Day survived Yookyung and Jihye leaving their respective groups, but at the time both were pretty much middle of the pack in terms of popularity at the time. KARA, one the other hand, have plummeted from their lofty status and are likely to never get back up and Super Junior will never be able to go back their "Sorry Sorry"/"It's You" days, despite multiple attempts. EXO will most likely not be an exception to this and I have already seen many posts/comments online saying people would leave EXO-L if Luhan left.
Make no mistake, Kris was a pretty popular member of the group, but Luhan was by far the most popular member in EXO and always had been (except maybe Kai when he was pushed at debut era). We've seen what happens when the star of the group leaves with After School, who have never really recovered from Kahi graduating and Pledis now just shove Nana's face in a desperate attempt to get the public to notice the group again. Expect Tao to be the main face in M now, since the other 3 are renowned for being ignored even amongst the fandom despite Chen singing 70% of each song (it'll now be 80).
Already drama has started to unfold and comparisons to Kris' situations have been made and at this rate EXO-L is going to tear itself apart. Tears have been shed and accusations of hypocrisy are being flung left, right and centre as people try to backtrack what they said about Kris or fruitlessly try to justify why they support Luhan and not Kris. Frankly I do think it's unfair people demonised Kris yet are happy to side with their angelic Luhan but the important thing is this can easily snowball into a monster a la T-ara. The Soshi bond may or may not be real but in the end neither Jessica nor OT8 have been portrayed as bag guys yet. The amount of jokes I've seen about "We are One!" already suggests EXO will not be so fortunate.
Lastly, even if this all blew over fairly easily with minimal causalities, EXO still could lose their position due to competition. For the duration of EXO's time at the very top, Big Bang as a group have been absent, instead sticking purely to solo activites. Of course the former have had 3 hits in the past year, but the latter's lack of new releases also played a big part in EXO's rise to number 1. If Big Bang return it was unclear if they could regain their title or not, but this may make things easier. Another contender for EXO's crown is Infinite, the group who just doesn't stop rising and isn't letting up any time soon after "Back" peaked at number 2 on the digital singles chart and Season 2 being the 4th best selling boy group album this year after EXO-K & M and TVXQ!. They may be a while off yet but VIXX are now a trending group recently and SHINee could climb higher if they stop with the weird promotion cycles.
Overall it doesn't seem likely that EXO will stay at the top for too long, even if their image isn't ruined by this. Perhaps they'll serve as an example of what happens when a group rises (and peaks) too quickly: it just leads to one big mess.
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