Fan war takes ugly turn in Kannada cinema as Sudeep and Yash followers start another ‘trending’ online fight

Last evening, multiple Sandalwood hashtags were trending on social media. Unfortunately, though, it wasn’t for a great reason and, instead, was the result of yet another fan war that broke out on social media. In the past several months, there have been several instances of fan wars involving the followers of Yash and Sudeep, but in the last several hours, the hashtags have become uglier and taken a more personal tone. We are not reproducing any here as most of the posts are in bad taste. 

#FanbaselessDogGayYash, #CEOofLotteryYash, #FakeMafiaSideActorSudeep, #CharacterlessBalegaraSudeep were among the trending hashtags, with both sides fighting for supremacy in number of posts to make these trend. The claim that Sudeep’s Vikrant Rona is a Rs 200+ crore success is what has got Yash fans’ goat. Ever since Zee5 Kannada’s promo for the film came out with these box office figures, the buzz on social media has been that it is an inflated numbers with netizens going all out to disprove the claim by the makers.

Over the course of the day, though, the attacks became more personal, with the jibes going beyond posts about the fate of producers who made films with Sudeep, to include nepotism remarks and that the actor is casteist even with his followers, among others.

The counter-attack on Yash was about he would be nothing without the “lottery” called KGF or Prashant Neel and that he leveraged his ‘humble bus driver’s son’ background to good effect. Of course, netizens did not forget that the actor’s mother has been embroiled in an alleged chit-fund cheating scam in the past.

A section of netizens, however, responded to this ‘fan war’ with posts urging them to stop the negative trend, which does not bode well for the Kannada film industry. Having the highest negative trend in KFI was nothing to be proud of, they reckoned.

In several interviews during the promotions of Vikrant Rona, Sudeep has repeatedly said that fan wars were not driven by actors and that more often than not, actors like him would be blissfully unaware about what is happening in the social media sphere. He added that social media fan wars was not something that he takes any interest in.