AND IT WAS WEN ZHE'S BIRTHDAY..................

so obvi as you all well know, a good 60% of what i post about on dreamwidth is idol survival show feelings. well let me tell yall, i am continuing with girls planet 999 and the fifth episode was a bit wild.

a little bit of context for you all, who do not have the produce 101 franchise constantly living rent free inside your brain: these shows are typically around 12 episodes long and begin with around 100 contestants (99 in this specific case). the group is eliminated down to ~55, ~35, ~20, and a final group of ~10, with elimination episodes being typically the 5th, 8th, penultimate, and final. the korean idol training system is a bit fucked up in that kids will start training often from pretty young ages (early teens, usually?) in both singing/dancing and also media training in order to try and make it as a pop idol group member. shit's difficult. idol survivals (where the selection process is televised and the audience gets a say in the results--as opposed to these decisions being made by execs behind closed doors) have ballooned in popularity over the past ten years. this is great for me because it means i have lots and lots of television to watch. it is, simultaneously, in my opinion a bad thing because these children do not need to be televised they do NOT need to have the world's eyes on an incredibly stressful time in their lives. these things can coexist

now with that disclaimer out of the way let's talk about the format of girls planet because i do need to give you a specific piece of background before i can explain one of the things that's giving me brainworms. this show in particular does something really interesting--it intentionally has an even number of contestants of korean, japanese, and chinese heritage. (a 2018 survival where korean girls competed alongside akb48 members sort of tried to do an even kr/jp split but then four japanese girls dropped out and the voting was skewed towards the korean girls the whole show.) how does gp99 do this? it's called cells. a "cell" is a voting unit of one girl from each group (k/c/j) and the girls are ranked by their cells, not individually. then the mentors on the show got to save one girl from each group from a cell that had been eliminated, basically. this was a really interesting idea and it kind of sucks that they totally abandoned it in the back half of the show and the sequel season.

sidenote rich text editor is still broken and this is such excellent html practice i haven't used this in ages

anyway so the first thing that's driving me wild is this chinese girl (the titular wen zhe) whose cell was almost the lowest-ranked allowed to survive, was eliminated, and was promptly brought back by the mentors. hope, disappointment, and survival alone. ON HER BIRTHDAY. this poor girl. and one of the higher-ranking chinese girls ended her thank-you speech with "happy birthday wen zhe" and i really did start to cry, ok? i really did cry.

the second thing is like. okay. so the cells are ranked and then the top 9 girls with individual votes get announced, right? and this one girl, youngeun. her cellmates, yurina and xiaoting, are both in contention for first place individually. these two 20something women on either side of her are so super nervous and this teenager, who's the one who put the cell together initially, is just sitting there vibing and feeling proud of herself, and i just think she's neat for that, ok?

ok hope you enjoyed my gp999 loredump hopefully i will post some more relatable content to my dreamwidth soon but don't expect too much of me. and also please pray that dw brings back rich text editor i miss her