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Ily 🥺🤲🫶

ILY2 <3

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Hello, welcome to the ramblings of a, well, of me. Some convenient links so you can navigate around!

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Road to Kingdom 2 Posts

Planet B Posts

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Plan(et) B - The Man, The Myth, The Legend [PlanetB #1]

Okay, let's be honest. None of us have any fucking clue what's going on right now. I woke up this morning to the ZeroBaseBraincells server going nuts over this announcement (if you can call a whole website an announcement...) of a brand new audition program from Mnet called 'Planet B'.

Now, based solely on the name, it's clearly supposed to be part of the Planet series (aka, the traumatic experiences known as Girls Planet 999 and Boys Planet, which brought us the lovely Kep1er and Zerobaseone), but other than that, it's a little bit vague. My first interpretation is that it's going to be essentially Road to Boys Planet Season 2, in that whoever competes on this program is going to win not a debut contract, but the chance to appear on Boys Planet 2.0 proper. Which.... sounds like a pretty crappy prize to me, not gonna lie. But the more I think about it, there comes to me a second thought, which I will get into in just a moment.

So, let's look at what little information that's been provided thus far. It's called 'Planet B', it's a new audition program, and they're currently taking applicants. Auditions are open to boys/men over the age of 12 (the lowest age cap is December 31, 2011, which is gross, please stop debuting children) of any nationality who 'love Kpop'. There is currently no maximum age cap, and they're asking for agency trainees, pre-debuted idols, and independent applicants from all over the globe. The only restriction is that, if you're a global applicant, you need to have all your documents in order and have no restrictions in leaving/entering countries. Then, as I was reading back over the... very barebones website, I noticed something else.

My initial assumption about what the show must be came from the line that reads 'Participants selected through Planet B will appear in Mnet's boy group debut program in 2025', which is what implied to me that we were looking at a RTK -> KLW sort of situation. But above that, is a banner that reads 'COMES A MEGA BOY GROUP AUDITION PROJECT'. Now, that could be referring to Planet B, but the order of banners makes me thing it's referring to whatever program Mnet are planning on tormenting us with next year.

With that in mind, my new hypothesis is this: the group that wins Planet B are going to make their debut specifically to appear on Mnet's 2025 show - which is either going to be Kingdom 2 OR a boy group version of Queendom Puzzle. I.e, they're going to essentially recreate TOO going from World Klass straight to RTK back in 2020, but on purpose this time.

This is all speculation of course because we simply don't know what's going on, but I will probably be tuning in anyway, so that'll give me something else to comment on! If you've got any theories of your own, feel free to share them, I'm interested to see what everyone else thinks is going on.

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The Road to 'Road to Kingdom 2: Electric Boogaloo' [RTK2 #1]

The time has come, my friends. 'Road to Kingdom 2' is coming, set to start airing in September (as far as I know, there's no specific date yet). At this point in time, I'm planning on watching the entire series and, after running a poll on my twitter, I will be (attempting) both livetweeting my reactions to the episodes, as well as posting full recaps and thought posts here on tumblr.

Why, you may ask? Well, first of all, I'm an absolute survival show junkie. I don't necessarily watch all of them (because there are so very many of them) but I try to watch as many as I can. Secondly, I am actively part of the performing arts community, from musical theatre to concert band to choir to dance to drama - and I enjoy engaging with things in that area. And thirdly, I'm very opinionated and I enjoy hearing myself talk, lol. So instead of terrorising my various group chats, I'm just going to get all my thoughts out there into the void.

Anyway, with that out of the way, here's what we know so far. Taemin is going to be the MC (so fun), and the official lineup of participating groups is Oneus, Cravity, Tempest, Younite, The New Six, 8TURN, and The CrewOne. Mnet have already announced that, unlike the first season of RTK, this season is no longer for smaller/unknown groups with no music show wins and will not be a precursor to 'Kingdom' proper; the prize for the winning group does not include a spot on that show, apparently. This show is effectively going to be a whole different show from the original RTK, just using the same name, which... why bother? Just give it a new name, then, instead of piggybacking off one of your existing IPs, Mnet. Removing the ticket onto Kingdom element thoroughly defeats the purpose of the show, in my opinion, but hey, since when has Mnet ever cared about doing stuff logically. I could say something about 'Build Up' and how that was handled both during and after the show, but I digress.

Due to it not being the same show as the original season, there's not a lot that can currently be predicted about how it might run, what sort of challenges the groups will face, or how any of the rounds will be conducted. The only thought I currently have is that an uneven number of groups (to me) is implying potential eliminations, which I'm not thrilled about. I'm still traumatised by Golden Child's elimination on the original season, and I'm not likely to be getting over that any time soon.

Now, onto the actual groups. I'm actively a fan of two of the groups (Cravity and Oneus), a casual listener of one other (Tempest), and am only tangentially aware of the other four groups. So, leading up to the start of the show, I'll be making a few intro posts to the groups with my first impressions and thoughts on them as they stand, to see if the competition affects those impressions (I could come out of this with a new stanlist...). If anyone has any MV recommendations for 8TURN, TNX, ATBO/Justb (The CrewOne), or Younite, please feel free to drop them here or reply to me on twitter or whatever.

Pre-voting opened today (July 22) and will run until 12:00pm KST on July 26. As far as we know, the group that wins the most votes during this time will receive some sort of benefit when the show starts. The groups also seem to have started preparing for the first round (most likely will be some sort of introductory performance) if the posts I've seen on SNS are anything to go by. If you want to join in the voting, you just need to download the Mnet Plus app and create an account.

I think that's all I have to say, I'll be back over the next few days as I get to know the rest of the groups on the show. For now, happy voting, and I'll see you all in September for the airing of the first episode!