The savvy fast food geniuses at McDonald’s have apparently taken a look at the fanbase that destroyed Brad Parscale’s reign as Trump’s 2020 campaign manager for the Tulsa disaster and very nearly got TikTok banned from operating in the United States in retaliation and decided “well shit, we might as well figure out a way to sell to them”. The resulting “BTS Meal” is described as a “10 Piece Chicken McNuggets. New limited-time sauces picked by BTS. Fries and a Coke. Plus, get behind-the-scenes content only in the app” on McDonald’s website, which is kind of lame when you overthink it, which I am. Of course they’re probably not going to make little BTS action figures and pack them in an adult-sized Happy Meal box with the food, but how about a t-shirt? A QR code for a new exclusive single? Or a collector’s cup (which in our opinion is a tragedy. The fast food collector’s cup is a treasured American tradition now in an irrevocable decline if not forever gone).
For all we know this “Behind-the-scenes content” is simply a McDonald’s employee training video on how to properly clean the McNuggets fryer. Or footage of live chickens being tossed into the grinder to make the nuggets. There’s no guarantee in the value proposition that this content is indeed BTS-centric. As such National Zero is going to take the editorial position that the whole idea is stupid and it would still be stupid if we knew anything about K-Pop besides where it intersected with American politics. We heart their fanbase for that epic trolling of Trump last year, but cannot and will not endorse this marketing collaboration between their premier act and McDonald’s.