I think people mistook the loss of general public listeners for the loss of fans—it wasn’t a cb that either kfans nor intl fans HATED or anything, it just didn’t appeal to casual/non-fans the way Temptation did.

This being the last txt release before hanteo/circle changed how they do album counts combined with a Monday u.s. release also gave the false impression of a drop in sales, when it was really just a change in system. Albums had previously been counted SOLEY by outgoing units to retailers, and now they are counted by albums being physically in hand of a consumer. (Ex: if a store buys 10 albums for their shelf and sells one, it no longer counts as 10 sales, but as one) TXT did FAR better than their peers in keeping stability that year (some dropped by MILLIONS), but since it followed a period where fans had felt a bit of regret about performance, it created the idea that there was a fall off.

By numbers—Deja Vu is still one of their best performing tracks ever, Mini3 did incredible sales for a mini-album (especially post system change) And txt has continued to have steady growth since. We truly were just too young as a fandom to know better then—since 2023 we’ve kinda learned that TXT has the capacity for big success when general listeners bite, but fans on their own can only go so far—that’s not failure or loss, that’s just the regular fluctuation to be expected from a popular group :)