The Heeseung situation was already complicated. Then a producer got involved, and it got louder.
Two days after ENHYPEN announced that Heeseung was leaving the group, fans started looking for answers — and some of them landed on El Capitxn. The producer, whose real name is Jang Yi-jeong, had previously worked with Heeseung directly. Both are credited on "Highway 1009," a track from ENHYPEN's 2024 full-length album. The friendship was known. The speculation was quick. Some fans accused El Capitxn of influencing Heeseung's decision to leave, and others went further — claiming he had encouraged what they described as "artist syndrome" in the singer.
El Capitxn did not stay quiet about it.
On Thursday, he posted on his personal social media telling fans to stop sending him messages. The post included explicit language. "Stop sending me stuff about Lee Heeseung. The kid can mess up sometimes. If you're real fans, you should hug him before throwing stones," he wrote. "Why do you keep blaming me?"
That post spread immediately. Fans flooded his account with responses. One commenter pushed back hard: "If there were no fans, Lee Heeseung would never have debuted. Why can't you understand that? Fans always come first."
El Capitxn replied without hesitation: "Without Lee Heeseung, there would be no fans."
The back-and-forth kept going until the producer told critics to "go play on Twitter," then closed the comment section entirely.
There's something genuinely uncomfortable about this whole exchange — not because fans shouldn't be upset, and not because El Capitxn was necessarily wrong to defend himself. It's that the real story, the one about why Heeseung had to leave the group to pursue solo work when other HYBE artists haven't had to make that choice, still hasn't been told. So fans are filling the silence with speculation, and anyone connected to Heeseung becomes a target for it.
Meanwhile, Heeseung posted a handwritten letter on Weverse the day the news broke. "Because of the members who shared countless emotions with me, and because of ENGENE who always filled every empty space, I was able to move step by step toward a dream that once felt unreachable," he wrote. He added that he's working on an album and hopes to meet fans again soon.
ENHYPEN continues as six — Jungwon, Jay, Jake, Sunghoon, Sunoo, and Ni-ki. El Capitxn's comment section is closed. The questions are still open.