Ron Does Stuff

Now, during my long hiatus from blogging, I managed to fully get myself into K-pop. I say fully get myself into it because I’ve been listening to it since forever, but only really wanted to get to know the names of the members after I encountered BTS.

Since then I’ve gotten to know the names of the members of many other K-pop groups, and now I’m even watching an audition show for a J-pop group! Times have changed!

The Howling is an audition show to complete the Japanese boy group that Hybe Labels Japan is forming. It already has four members — K, Nicholas, EJ, and Taki — who all competed in the Korean audition show, I-Land. They didn’t make it to the final group, unfortunately, but we did get Enhypen out of that show!

Honestly, what excites me about this audition show is the story connection with Enhypen. Any Engene that’s followed Enhypen’s career knows that they’ve got this whole vampire storyline going on, and as the name suggests, whoever ends up a member of the group in this one will be the werewolves. A connected universe!

And the first thing we get is Enhypen meeting their former I-Land castmates! And the boys rightfully point out how tough it is to have to go through another audition show. I haven’t really watched a lot of these Korean-style audition shows other than I-Land, and even that was intense for me.

Enhypen really isn’t that old of a group, compared to everyone else in HYBE, but they have done a lot over the short time they’ve been active, so them giving some real-life anecdotes from their own lives as an idol doesn’t come off as forced. Cute stuff so far!

The debut group meeting the trainees is equally as cute as well, and definitely less tense than it was during I-Land. Is it because the Japanese prefer good vibes? Feel free to totally demolish me in the comments but I renember reading somewhere that the reason why Japanese ads are the way they are is because they prefer a good feeling after watching something? Someone educate me!

There’s a whole segment on ~showing their charms~ that’s a staple on these shows now that while cute in the beginning I kinda have to admit runs a little long? But having sat through one of these shows before this is probably one of the few times they’re going to be this carefree so I won’t begrudge them this.

And I was right because the next day they already get the mission stage that they have to rehearse on their own. On the day of the performance, they get shuttled to the venue where they are immediately told to prepare for the rehearsal and at this point, I would have shat myself.

It doesn’t get any better when they show the lead-up to the performance because the Japanese performance director is an exacting mentor, which she has to be, I can’t blame her. And to be quite honest while this is tense it’s still not as harsh as I-Land was? Or the Trainee A logs. And even those, if you think about it, aren’t as harsh as the way some of these K-pop companies were/are to their trainees. Those lawsuits were filed for a reason after all.

AND THEN we get introduced to the &Ball and the &Ring. The &Balls are their individual scores, and if all their balls combined fill-up the &Ring, all of them will be moving to the final If they don’t, their debut will be canceled altogether. Even the set debut members. Goddamn. No wonder one other member left before the show even started! But at least there’s also a chance that all of them will debut. That’s more than the other audition shows do, to be honest. Unless I misunderstood but I guess we’ll find out in future episodes.

I also like that during the judging, it looks like the Korean judges are the Paula Abduls of the panel while the Japanese ones deliver the harsh blows. Given the current political climate between those two countries? You really do not want to have a Korean person speak harshly to a Japanese one on national TV and vice versa.

After their first performance, it looks like the guys did…okay. Will they be able to do better next time? Will they even get to debut, as it looks like this is just going to be four episodes? At least that’s what I understood? We’ll see!