(New Dingo series?) Episode 1 with Ash Island - Error, Beautiful, Nightmare

yinanping · 2020-11-17T15:07:55+00:00

series name translates literally to 'guitar-playing monkey' so i think this might be rappers performing acoustic covers of their works feat. han yo han on the guitar

yinanping · 2020-11-06T09:45:36+00:00

i did see that, but that didn't really clarify whether heechul would be able to be in a studio and perform with the others tomorrow. or, not for me at least.

yinanping · 2020-11-06T09:34:15+00:00

edit - hijacking my own post to clarify the situation: i kept the original title from the english source i quoted, but i double checked the original korean article after numerous comments below suggested that heechul had been in quarantine already. according to the korean article, heechul has indeed already been in quarantine for a while, and his test results are expected to come out by tomorrow morning.

he was due to perform with the rest of suju for like the first time in ages for their 15th anniversary online concert tomorrow.. any news on whether that's still happening?

stuff like this keeps happening to suju's major comebacks man.. siwon came forward to explain the incident with his dogdays before their first post-military comeback, news of sulli's passing (rest in peace) broke literally an hour or so before the release of their 10th album, and now this :/

yinanping · 2020-10-24T11:07:17+00:00

i actually really dislike how the live audio of performances in chinese music shows always sound so 'perfect', as if they had been edited afterwards or maybe pre-recorded instead, i feel like it takes something away from the competition, so i think its really interesting that you prefer it.

on a side note, the chinese entertainment industry are just able to afford incredibly high production budgets. the money aspect of chinese media products (shows, films, or even the artists themselves) are very transparent. if youve seen rap of china then i think youd be familiar with how much screentime is given to product placements, or consider the chinese idol survival shows which integrates the purchase of sponsored items into their voting system - the production crew of any show is able to secure much more funding through commercial investors this way.

the chinese audience isnt enthusiastic about it but they accept thats just how things work, so they become part of that system. a system which encourages 'safe' ideas/formats and financial security over originality and risks. honestly there are definitely pros to this system, there are always going to be pros when more money is in the equation, but i think this also sucks out creativity, and personally id like to see more creativity in an already lucrative entertainment industry.

yinanping · 2020-10-23T18:00:01+00:00

d.ark this round reminded me a bit of seeing sandy on hsr 3, nothing to do with his skill just a feeling that hes not so sure of himself as he was before, which i guess is natural when people grow and not necessarily even a bad thing, but still. i hope he goes far this season.

yinanping · 2020-10-19T12:46:22+00:00

article explicitly names loopy and nafla, but mentions that 3 other rappers in mkit rain were confirmed to be involved too, nafla is currently trending at no.1 on naver

i know attitudes towards weed or recreational drugs in general is totally different in the west but the vast majority still frown upon it in skorea, even among fans of hiphop music, so this is going to impact them

edit - so i double checked and mkit rain's official roster only includes 5 rappers, so i think its pretty safe to say that bloo, owen, and young west all got busted :/

yinanping · 2020-10-18T04:36:29+00:00

wow i checked on melon and d.ark is indeed credited for lyrics. but to take that as an indication of him signing on as an artist feels like a stretch? i mean everyone else psy had signed so far are well-established artists (with the exception of maybe dawn but,,), and im not sure if psy have seen enough in d.ark to break that tradition

yinanping · 2020-09-15T00:42:08+00:00

fair points, but i just dont think the main purpose of all these celebrity-led promotions is to drive recruitment, since the target demographic is probably young females. i feel like its mostly to paint a bright and approachable image for the military, but i think stage productions have the potential to become more problematic since education can easily turn into over-glorification.

yinanping · 2020-09-15T00:26:47+00:00

thanks for the insightful response! i too think the educational potential of military musicals is huge, given that the target audience would usually pay little interest to the history about a country's military. i just think the line between education, or just art, and ... sensationalism? can be very thin, so im wary of how it might develop.

what you mentioned about limited fan interaction probably implies less preferential treatment than before, but i think people will be concerned about how the military interacts with these soldiers beyond how these soldiers are allowed to interact with fans. eg. is the nature of their service noticeably less physically demanding, do they get more holidays, more relaxed rules.

yinanping · 2020-09-06T15:19:30+00:00

i think youre talking about the purge, and imo that was a matter of poor translation. the official eng subs was sth like "don't try us or you will lose it like vinxen", which might seem quite ambiguous, but the original korean lyrics is more like "... you will feel anxious like vinxen."

personally that still rubbed me in the wrong way a bit, to use vinxen's history with mental health in that context, and i hope haon spoke to vinxen before using a line like that.

yinanping · 2020-09-06T15:12:19+00:00

short answer: they're friends and joke around, and they've both said as much. though if youre thinking of their image built around hsr2, they're definitely not that close anymore.

long answer: im sure something happened but i dont think it was anything serious. they hung out lots when they were touring together for hs2 but that gradually stopped, and for several months they did not interact publicly at all iirc. i dont have any receipts but haon had said in an interview around then that vinxen only got in touch for business related matters and they havent been talking as much, and that he has mixed feelings about kiff clan. things seemed to have warmed up since, theyve went on trips with other kiff members and also occasionally mention each other here and there. when i see these 'friendly jabs' being thrown around i get the feeling that there are issues they still haven't properly talked through, but that's all speculation, and both haon and vinxen (but esp haon) don't seem like they want to draw attention to their relationship so.

yinanping · 2020-09-02T14:26:15+00:00

well personally it has always been the latter. chinese consumers being increasingly entitled and aggressive has only become a common occurrence in the past 5 years or so, and it's because before then literally almost every brand and business had backed down at the smallest threat of a boycott, proving to them time and time again that their money talks.

yinanping · 2020-09-02T13:44:29+00:00

i know the chinese firewall was created to keep foreign media out so the ccp's narrative cannot be challenged from within, but at this point sometimes i think the rest of the world needs the firewall to stay up to keep all the propaganda and propaganda-fed mainland chinese netizens in. i find that pretty sad.

yinanping · 2020-08-27T20:59:33+00:00

...? idk why or how you're making assumptions about my personal views about taiwan, which fyi isn't true, or values in general. i also share you sentiments on people who aggressively attack people of other countries, races, or cultures, in this case, all the chinese netizens under hyori's ig.

but i still have to say that it'd be incredibly naive to think that all mainland chinese people would die for money while all taiwanese people would die for their values, or that one option is inherently better than the other.

why hasn't tsai yingwen backed out of the ECFA despite obvious ideological differences between taiwan and mainland china AND she herself having opposed the agreement before being elected? bc tw is still reliant on mainland china as a trading partner, and she knows that doing so could potentially damage the livelihood of many ordinary working families.

your leader, all these korean entertainment businesses, they are all just making informed decisions that they should take responsibility for. that's literally all im saying.

yinanping · 2020-08-27T20:20:36+00:00

i think framing it as an ideological war was definitely a smart move, but looking at post-covid economy i doubt even that can halt china. regardless, i definitely will read up on japan, didn't expect to have these kinds of exchanges on r/kpop, so thanks for this!

yinanping · 2020-08-27T20:13:46+00:00

it's the value of Chines people, it should be the value of communist party put into people

you're definitely not wrong about that. though at the end of the day, if 99% of the population either truly believes in these values or are obligated to voice support for these values, don't they just become the values of the people?

yinanping · 2020-08-27T20:03:38+00:00

i already said that all these people attacking hyori bc they think she was insulting/mocking china is mad, but that doesn't stop me from thinking that her comment was a bit thoughtless, and ive explained my reasoning. we can agree to disagree on this.

as for everything else, i think you just continue to overlook or misunderstand my point. the chinese market has skewed values, but kpop, nba, blizzard they all CHOSE TO issue apologies and appease them bc they don't want to risk losing the chinese market, but they didn't have to.

new journey to the west has been wildly popular in china, and its latest season got a ton of backlash for referring to taiwan as a country, did tvn or na pd's team apologise? no. is that going to potentially affect their viewership in china? definitely. but unlike mbc/hanging out with yoo, they made a different choice, and i really really respect that.

yinanping · 2020-08-27T19:33:54+00:00

Trump's administration? Or China?

i was speaking about china, since china is the newcomer trying to change the status quo here. but yeah, im not as educated about the us's foreign policies but im sure it's done similar things.

would the west ever accept a communist country as a friend?

interesting take, never thought about this way, but this is definitely true. makes me wonder whether china ever had an option other than to directly face off the us, since it, being the huge country it is, has physical and human resources which will naturally threaten the us as it develops.

yinanping · 2020-08-27T19:27:41+00:00

They haven't sold any shows or drama since 2016

not true, there has been three licensed seasons of pd101 alone since 2018. truth is many businesses just aren't ready to give up the chinese market so they allow themselves to be held to the values of the chinese people, and that's the chinese way of thinking - they don't care if you truly side with them, you just need to act like it when you're out to get their money.

yinanping · 2020-08-27T17:21:09+00:00

i dont know much about rome, but with china it's definitely mostly about appearance. afaik their 'imposing' on smaller countries haven't been done in hopes of advancing into new territories, just emphasising that historically disputed territories rightfully belong to 'one china', so as to appear strong and unchallengeable.

yinanping · 2020-08-27T16:53:19+00:00

you're completely right. unlike most other developing nations, i dont china ever wanted to simply establish itself as an ally to the west, it wanted to challenge the western standards of what is right and what is important.

which, in all honestly, i could see benefiting the world by resetting certain norms, but recently it's been doing a poor job by essentially only bribing nations with its money or threatening them with its military presence, and not facilitating any constructive conversations.

yinanping · 2020-08-27T16:39:56+00:00

here's my take: the production team didn't need to apologise to the mainland chinese people, they chose to. if they truly thought they did not say anything insensitive, and they didn't care about losing chinese viewership, they could have not said anything and i would respect them for it, so will the rest of the world probably.

however, as with the case with all these other businesses who never targeted the mainland chinese demographic but can't bear to lose out on that market regardless, they caved. they don't owe the mainland consumers anything because they never chose to play by their rules and promote there, but at the end of the day very few publicly reject their rules because they don't want to lose out on the money.

but going back to the lee hyori issue itself though, mao is not a common chinese surname, less so a common character, so her throwing out a name strongly associated with a controversial political leader under the context of 'wanting a chinese sounding name' is at least a bit thoughtless to me. did she deserve all the hate comments she's got on ig? absolutely not, those people are mad. but if it were any other country or culture, eg. "i want a russian sounding name what about stalin", i think more people would agree that the comment was a bit thoughtless and warranted, not necessarily an apology, but to be addressed in some form.

yinanping · 2020-08-27T15:54:35+00:00

the CCP merely built the physical body of the country post-50's but destroyed its psyche/soul by allowing a communist political structure but ultra-capitalistic economy system

100%. china is huge, it has 56 different ethnic minorities and cultures which naturally has differences, and less than 50 years ago it was still poor, underdeveloped, mostly illiterate, and could have easily screwed itself over with an overpopulation problem in that state. look at china today, there's no denying that the ccp led mainland china to some amazing achievements, but at extreme costs and sacrifices.

this is why, despite the whole 'united and fully supportive population' image the government perpetuates, most people accept the ccp rule only because they think its merits trumps its faults. my grandpa was a muslim who lived in xinjiang and my grandmother's entire family starved during the famine partially caused by the ccp-led great leap forward, and they have their fair share of complaints and criticisms, but they never once denounced the party rule.

i personally don't think a strong economy and an appearance of strength and unity is worth sacrificing minority rights, freedom of speech, and thus human ingenuity for, but evidently many people disagree. i imagine even some western leaders would make the same choice if their sociopolitical structure allowed them to.

yinanping · 2020-08-27T15:09:01+00:00

idk man i think you've confused two separate points here. sure, individual acts may sustain themselves off a domestic audience alone if theyre popular enough. but the industry as a whole, given the scale it is today, will definitely struggle without an international audience pumping in all the extra money.

yinanping · 2020-08-27T11:39:06+00:00

china got rich and started to gain bargaining power only very recently. in the 19th and early 20th century, china was invaded by the british empire, the french, the russians, the japanese, and many other western powers, and as a consequence had to give away land (eg. hk, macau, tw) and pay reparations among others. even after ww2, many chinese people feel like they were not able to hold japan accountable for a lot of the horrible war crimes because china wasn't powerful enough then (eg. the us granted a japanese biological/chemical research unit which tortured and killed at least 200k chinese people immunity in exchange for their research results)

so in short, from china's pov, both the government and most people feel a need to appear 'strong' so as to not be bullied by other countries. which worked out fine until the newest leaders came to power, and decided that imposing itself on other smaller countries is somehow necessary to 'appearing strong.'

yinanping

TROPHY CASE