Was TWICE debut that bad?

[YooJeong]

No. I have stanned Twice since pre-debut and here is how it went pretty much, as someone who lived through it: 

LOA debuted at #22, not bad but not good. People compared them to Miss A, so they said it flopped. The song began to drop super quickly - at one point LOA was mopping the floors of Melon, and hit #99 within a few days of debut. LOA was almost kicked out of the top 100. 

But THEN, Twice started promoting. They promoted everywhere, , and it paid off. People started falling in love with the song and with Twice. The public loved their charisma, personalities, visuals, stages, etc. And the song went from the bottom of Melon and slowly rose up to enter top ten. It peaked at #7 at some point, which didn't last but it did stay in top 10 (#9-ish) for a good while. By the end of promotions it was one of the most hearted (hearts on chart) debut songs on Melon and even hit #1 on some random charts (Monkey 3). 

So was it that bad? At first, yes. But when they started promoting and attending music shows, it did well. Overall, LOA definitely hyped them up and took their popularity to such a good level that when Cheer Up came out, they became superstars. Cheer Up made them super popular, but they were incredibly popular after/during LOA promotions too.  

[YooJeong]

13 hours ago, abra said:

It should be said that Tzuyu's flag incident brought a LOT of attention to the group and the song, which made it soar up the charts

That helped, but I remember LOA was already rising a lot before that happened too - it rose in its first two weeks of promotion, and the incident just pushed it to rise a lot faster. Her flag incident brought Tzuyu herself more individual attention than to Twice and LOA as a whole, and mostly got attention from China that SK, but yeah that definitely did play a role. I wouldn't say it was the primary factor for LOA and Twice popularity rising though. Definitely a big factor, but not the central one