#longfei

[Jun’s reply to JA’s comment on his Weibo post]

[No ep.6 spoilers]

I didn’t feel like having my heart ripped out for the second time in one day, so I gave up on episode 6 last night right before the Jun/Yanan conversation happened. Well, I just finished it, and now I’m sitting on my front steps at midnight-thirty, in 80%+ humidity with a coffee mug of whiskey (it had ice when I poured it - I’m not that ballsy anymore. Drink responsibly, folks) and blasting Gong Ge’s album on Spotify (fight me, his music is badass). And I am mulling. Hard. I saw that CYZJ Subs uploaded episode 5, but I haven’t watched it yet so I don’t know if my answers are in there. Doubt it though.

Can someone explain why they had an elimination in /this/ episode? To my knowledge, we haven’t had a clear timeline on how eliminations are gonna go up to this point. Hell, when this started, everyone I saw that understood Chinese was responding to fan panic about voting that it wasn’t clear how or even if eliminations would happen.

My first thought was that eliminations were planned for episode 5, but when staff got wind of Jony J and Gong Ge’s plans to leave, they switched things up. The voting page has had Ma Boqian and the other guy (I’ll figure it out) on it since the second episode, so all of this has been filmed well enough in advance that they could’ve changed things up in the edit. That doesn’t hold water, though, when you watch the beginning of ep.6. I think they found out at least during the live for ep.5 that Jony J was leaving, but Gong Ge seemed genuinely surprised that’s how things played out even if he was ready to follow JJ. It wasn’t a guarantee that they’d both leave. So that rules out a planned elimination in ep.5 for me.

If ep.6 was always going to be the first, why bother? Why bring in two new people and risk immediately kicking one off? Why not pair Minghao and Longfei up after their partners left? Why not, since Hao had the right to choose in the first place, re-do the partnering? (I wonder if he wouldn’t have just picked Longfei at that point so he wouldn’t mess anybody up.) I’ve watched plenty of competition shows where someone’s gotten injured or otherwise had to bow out, and production just said, “hey, we’re gonna skip it this week,” even when they’d already started eliminations. Granted those were American shows and there were differences in the shows’ formulas anyway. They just as easily could have focused more on how everyone was dealing with the loss both in the context of the show and as people who’d become friends. (And if you’re gonna @ me saying JJ and GG thought they were better than everyone else and separated themselves, watch the fucking plethora of extras out there. They all got along as people, even if they didn’t see eye-to-eye professionally. They’re not the holier-than-thou villains so many people paint them as. I’m just super bummed we’ll never see Samuel and Gong Ge’s English interactions. They happened.) They could’ve fleshed things out without it being pure fluff or cutting the episode down.

I guess I just don’t see why it was necessary? The only reason I can see them bringing people on was to add drama. But they hinted at JJ leaving at the end of ep.4 and dragged it out this long. Between that and Yanan sitting out this performance, there was already more than enough to keep people watching. I don’t get it. I don’t. Get. It. (Can you tell I don’t really like it either?)