The Manon Situation: KATSEYE's Hiatus, Fan Theories, and the "Curse" of the Six-Member Girl Group

It should have been the best week of KATSEYE's young career.

Fresh off two Grammy nominations (Best New Artist and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for "Gabriela") and with a Coachella slot locked in for April, the six-member pop group was riding higher than ever. Then, on the evening of February 20, 2026, HYBE and Geffen quietly dropped a statement on Weverse that stopped the fan community cold.

Manon Bannerman, the Swiss-born rapper and one of the group's most recognizable faces, would be taking a temporary hiatus "to focus on her health and wellbeing."

The statement was brief, measured, and carefully worded: "After open and thoughtful conversations together, we are sharing that Manon will be taking a temporary hiatus from group activities to focus on her health and wellbeing. We fully support this decision. KATSEYE remains committed to showing up for one another and for the fans who mean everything to us."

EYEKONS (as the fandom is called) immediately flooded social media with support, worry, and, inevitably, questions.

What Fans Are Saying

The initial wave of fan reaction was warm and supportive. Many praised the group and the label for prioritizing a member's mental and physical health over a packed schedule, calling it a mature and responsible decision. Others drew on Manon's own words from a BBC interview in late 2025, where she had spoken openly about the emotional toll of online commentary, noting that the scrutiny of sudden fame could be "very terrorising on the mind."

But within hours, a more complicated conversation began to emerge.

Fans noticed that Manon had liked an Instagram post with a caption reading "Another Black girl subjected to racism and label mistreatment yet again" a video that directly referenced her situation and suggested her hiatus may not have been entirely her own choice. Screenshots spread rapidly across Twitter and TikTok, and the comment sections lit up with concern.

"They made her the face of the group, used her for engagement, and now this," read one widely shared tweet. "HYBE x Geffen, count your days."

Others pointed to what they described as a pattern: Manon being sidelined in certain promotional materials, left out of activities, and depicted unfavorably in a documentary about the group's formation. Some fans connected the dots between these moments and argued the hiatus represents something more systemic, a Black member in a predominantly non-Black group bearing the weight of racism from both outside the fandom and, allegedly, from within the industry itself.

Adding more fuel to the fire, KATSEYE member Daniela's father publicly made comments about Manon during the hiatus period, drawing widespread backlash and further fracturing the fandom.

Neither Manon nor the label has addressed the post she liked or the subsequent controversy. The group's five remaining members (Yoonchae, Lara Raj, Daniela Avanzini, Sophia Laforteza, and Megan Skiendiel) have confirmed they will continue activities, including Coachella.

The Curse of the Six-Member Group

While fans debate the specifics of Manon's situation, pop culture observers have been quick to point out a pattern that has come to be known, half-jokingly and half-seriously, as the "curse of six."

Six-member girl groups have a long, complicated history of instability. Time and again, a group assembled with six members finds itself navigating departures, hiatuses, or internal fractures right at the moment of their biggest breakthrough. It's almost a rite of passage.

Look at the history of K-pop alone: EXID, I-DLE,LILIT or VCHA, and countless others cycled through lineup changes when the pressure of sustained success began to show cracks. Western pop has its own version of this story, groups cobbled together by labels or reality competitions often discover that six personalities, six ambitions, and six sets of personal circumstances are simply harder to hold together than four or five.

The theory isn't science, of course. Groups of every size break up or lose members. But there's something about six that feels precarious, large enough that individual members can get lost in the shuffle, small enough that losing even one changes the group's entire identity and dynamic. Six is the number where every member both matters enormously and is also, paradoxically, more replaceable than in a trio or quartet.

KATSEYE was assembled through The Debut: Dream Academy, a reality competition that whittled 20 candidates down to six. The process was grueling, public, and emotionally loaded for everyone involved. The six who made it came from different countries, different backgrounds, and different cultural experiences. That diversity has been one of the group's greatest strengths and, if the current controversy is to be believed, may also be the source of its deepest fault lines.

Where Things Stand

KATSEYE is continuing forward.

Their Coachella performance in April will mark their biggest stage yet, and the momentum from Beautiful Chaos with "Gnarly" and "Gabriela" both charting on the Billboard Hot 100, isn't going anywhere overnight. But the group is doing so as five, and the absence of one of their most prominent members hangs over everything.

Fans are holding two things simultaneously: genuine love and support for Manon, and growing unease about what her hiatus actually means. The vague language of "health and wellbeing" increasingly the industry's catch-all phrase for situations that are too complicated or too sensitive to explain publicly leaves room for every interpretation.

What's clear is that Manon matters deeply to the people who follow this group. Her candor, her charisma, and her visibility as a Black woman in a global pop group made her significant not just to KATSEYE's sound, but to what the group represents. And the conversation her hiatus has sparked about racism in the music industry, about how labels treat members who speak up or stand out, about who gets protected and who gets sidelined is one the industry has been having in fits and starts for years.

For now, EYEKONS are doing what fandoms do in moments of uncertainty: holding space, sending love, and watching closely.

We hope Manon comes back when she's truly ready and that when she does, it's on her own terms.