#krystian

Huta announces the next team by trying to describe the song, and I love how they show white people in the audience who have no clue as to what it could be. 

The boys come out waving, and Jihoo is in the leader position, which is interesting, because when we last saw this group, Anthonny was the leader. (Side note: my autocorrect keeps removing his extra N, so forgive me if any “Anthony” spellings creep into my recaps.) 

Huta asks him if they had any difficulties rehearsing, and he says, “It was quite difficult, but I chose it because I wanted to express our sincere feelings to the Star Creators.” Everyone thinks he’s cute. And now it’s time for a flashback.

But first, here is a list of our chauffeurs: 

Trainee name (rank)   Star Level test / Challenge 1 /age final star level

Anthonny  (19) Glitch Mode / Love Me Right - G / 19 ⭐⭐⭐

Krystian (37) Call Me Baby / Back Door - G / 23 ⭐⭐

Park Ji Hoo (44) Freak / Hot Sauce - K / 16 ⭐⭐⭐

The boys are at rehearsal, and the judges find out that 16 year old Jihoo is leading, not 19 year old Anthonny or 23 year old Krystian. They ask why, and it’s time for a flashback-within-a-flashback! Flashbackception! 

We see the boys on the first day, when leader Anthonny felt a little lost and Jihoo stepped up. What we haven’t seen before is that Anthonny was worried he wasn’t doing a good job and bestowed leadership on young Jihoo. 

One of the judges deliberately needles Krystian, saying, “So Jihoo is leader and Anthonny has the killing part, and you’re not upset, Krystian?” That’s rude, judge. Krystian smiles and says he’s fine.

The judge says he’s become an innocent sheep, and Krystian holds it in at that insult. We get a flashback of Krystian begging them not to take the killing part away, just in case you forgot. 

Bobby from IKON is still there giving feedback, and he tells them that the lyrics are kind of all over the place and that they should make them clearer. 

We find out that each member’s lyrics talk about different things, and they show the lyrics on screen. I did my translating them, but I’m very very far from fluent and this was largely google translate.

It’s hard to tell because they don’t translate most of the lyrics and my Korean is nowhere good enough to help with that, but I’ll just trust Bobby when he says it doesn’t make sense, and that their message is getting lost. 

So, the team decides to change their lyrics “again” -- I guess they’ve already changed them a few times. Krystian and Anthonny agree that the lyrics don’t make enough sense. Jihoo says he wants to write about what they experienced at Boys Planet. This is a common thing we’ve seen on this show -- I’m remembering Kamimoto Kotone (who by the way is now in that giant group, TripleS) on GP999 who did the same thing when she did VVS. (“Where did my air time go? No one knows that I exist.”) And every time it happens, it gets attention, so, go for it, Jihoo. Smack ‘em down.

Anthonny has a lot to say but it’s so hard for him as a non-native speaker, so Jihoo helps him tweak his lyrics to make them more accurate and more rhythmic. Jihoo seems to really have a good sense for lyrics, especially considering his age. He stays up late at night trying to make the lyrics even better.

As he explains in an interview, he and his long-time friend Han Seo Bin practiced and prepared for Boys Planet together, but then their audition “Freak” wasn’t aired, and though Seobin was chosen for Love Me Right, he didn’t survive the first elimination. (He finished in 60th -- so close). 

All we ever saw of Jihoo in episode 1 was Hui challenging him to a singing contest for Chair 1 - and there’s a lot more to this kid than that. Anyway, Jihoo wants to write about missing his friend, and just generally be stressed out being on this show, and I say go for it!

I love how MNET has the unmitigated balls to play sad piano music over Jihoo’s commentary about how his audition wasn’t aired in episodes 1-2. You’re the ones who did this, you dumb dumbs! You’re the ones who didn’t air it and now you’re playing sad piano music and I can’t, I just can’t.

As the performance starts, the judges seem excited to see Jihoo perform. (No one cares about Krystian or Anthonny, of course.) 

The performance 

I found this link with English lyrics on top of the performance! It’s good -- check it out. 

My take

Wow. This was so good. While I was writing this section of the recap, I just let it play over and over again because I liked it that much, and now I’m adding it to my playlist. 

I genuinely did not know that Anthonny and Krystian were such good singers. This show, you guys. This SHOW. ARGGGGH.

Krystian has such a nice raspy vocal color -- I’d listen to him sing a whole song, honestly. There’s no way in hell that Korean voters will ever forgive him, so he’s never going to debut on Bepler, but he’s really really good here, and I’m glad we had to chance to see him really shine like this. I knew that he has a long history of being on shows like this and making a big splash, but his Star Level Test wasn’t great, but I suspect he just can’t hit high notes, and I do not care about high notes. He was so much more relaxed here and really, I’m a fan now. I assume he’ll go back to China and I hope he can debut there, if nowhere else. 

Anthonny got noticeably ahead of the beat for the first few lines but then seemed to notice it and get back on the beat. His voice isn’t quite as good as Krystian’s but it’s really good too. He put a lot of emotion into the delivery of his rap lyrics, too. I still don’t feel like I “know” him but I now see what he’s good at. And hey, he’s at Yuehua, so we’ll probably see him again eventually, I hope!

Jihoo obviously put the most emotion into his rapping and wrote the raps for his teammates and just pulled this whole thing together. He also has a nice singing voice. 

The staging worked, their chemistry worked, the whole thing worked for me. I would have pressed A for all three of them, and if forced to vote for only one, I’d have voted for Jihoo if I’d known about him writing all the raps, but I would have voted for Krystian otherwise because I really, really loved his singing voice. 

Look, I don’t need all my idols to be the nicest, most put together people on the planet. It’s ok with me if Krystian still needs to work on his emotional intelligence. Just keep singing like that, ok, buddy? And it wouldn’t hurt if you kept kind of… looking… like you do. 

The editing 

They focus a lot on Anthonny’s small mistake at the beginning. I do like that we see a few trainees noticing how beautiful and emotional Krystian’s voice is. They focus a lot on Jihoo’s “subversive” lyrics, probably more on him than on anyone else, but really all three trainees get a bit of focus, so I’ve seen far worse edits on this godforsaken show.

Also, it seems that the other trainees are seriously touched by the performance. 

The judges say that Jihoo won’t get edited out this time. They also pick up on how Krystian rapped about his anti-fans, who apparently waited for him outside!?!? I cannot get over that kind of behavior. So you don’t like his personality, cool, don’t be his fan. But don’t threaten his well being. I’m sure no one who reads my recaps would do that, so I won’t rant any more on that topic here since I think we’re all already in agreement, and other people have already said it better than I could. 

The voting

They head backstage to sit in the folding chairs of pain. 

Krystian really does seem at peace. It might be an act, who can say, but that’s how it seems, and I am happy with that. I think he really does like his team and I think they can all genuinely connect and sympathize with one another, despite their different life experiences and nationalities. Honestly, it’s shit like this that I watch the show for, as much as anything else. I know some people “ship” the trainees with each other romantically, which, I mean, as long as you keep that shit to yourself it’s ok, but for me I just enjoy seeing friendship in action, because friendship is magic! 

Anyway, it seems pretty obvious that this crowd will vote for Park Jihoo, and they do  -- he wins with a super high 795 votes, which beats the previous high score Kim Gyuvin got in Love Killa.  His team is sincerely happy for him, and it seems that so is everyone else

Someone on a forum I visit sometimes said that she was there at the taping and that they showed a video before each performance with some backstory, which really makes sense with what we know about MNET. So while I can’t be sure that her story is true, it is interesting to wonder if the crowd voted for Jihoo at least in part out of respect for his leadership. But if they did, that’s fair. 

I both think and hope that Jihoo will make it through the next elimination, but I neither think nor hope that he’ll debut in Bepler. I am much more interested to see him regroup with Han Seobin and maybe put together a rap-based group that’s something like Stray Kids or IKON, where they write a lot of their own stuff and control a lot of their own fate. They’re still both so young now and there’s a lot of time for them to get there. 

I wish we could find out how many points everyone got, but I guess not. I hope that Krystian and Anthonny got a lot of votes too, but I bet Krystian got something absurdly low like 200 votes, all from the Chinese visitors. Aww, Krystian. I’m on your team. 

And look how much my niece Kayylee likes the t-shirt I got her!