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wee fcking woo
Thursday, March 9th, 2023 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hyojungssa history lesson on why pristin's disbandment is remembered with such resentment
disclaimer:
fan from 2016-infinity ♡
this will be biased and editorialized, but also acknowledge some of the objective reasons they may not have been successful* in the market.
some primary sources are gone now (vlive, the official twitter) so there is a risk of inaccuracy as i write this from memory.
*the idea of success is subjective, but for the purposes of this we'll assume that if pristin (a 3rd gen, post-ioi girl group) had been as successful as seventeen (a top 4 3rd gen boy group in 2017, amongst exo, bts and wanna one), they wouldn't have disbanded. that may or may not be the case.
pristin?
PRISTIN (프리스틴) was a 10-member girl group that debuted on march 21, 2017.
(left to right: roa (minkyung/minkyeung), kyla, nayoung, eunwoo, kyulkyung (jieqiong), xiyeon (siyeon), rena (yebin/yaebin), sungyeon (shannon), yehana (yewon), yuha (kyungwon/gyeongwon)
note: during their time on produce 101 certain members' names were translated/romanized a certain way and later the members themselves would correct the romanization to what was used on their passport...
prior to their group debut
like the trainees of most companies, "ladyteen" (fan nickname for pledis female trainees) were known and had made appearances in various mvs, 17tv streams and special stages. 7 pledis trainees appeared on the first season of produce 101: im nayoung, kim minkyung (minkyeung), kang kyungwon (gyeongwon), jung eunwoo, kang yebin (yaebin), zhou jieqiong (joo kyulkyung), and park siyeon. minkyung's ranking was affected by a scandal. jieqiong (#6) and nayoung (#10) ranked into the final group (I.O.I) and promoted with them from may 2016 to january 2017. ioi was extremely popular, with big name cfs, variety appearances, and sales; they ranked 4th for girl group digital sales and 2nd for girl group physical sales in 2016 with 3 promotions (dream girls, whatta man, very very very). it is fair to call them one of the top girl groups of their time, though their career was short-lived (as their contract was written this way). nayoung and jieqiong did not miss ioi promotions to debut with their 'home' group as yeonjung (wjsn), chaeyeon (dia), and sejeong + mina (gugudan) did.
in the meantime, the remaining female pledis trainees put on weekly theater concerts under the group name 'pledis girlz'. their first one was on may 14, 2016, and this reddit user has a nice compilation of fancams listed for each week. the fact that the date says '7 years ago' is k wording me... anyway i believe this concert would have been the first official reveal of the additional three trainees who hadn't been on the show: kim yewon, bae sungyeon (shannon bae) and kyla massie. in addition to full group cover stages, unit stages, and talk segments, each concert featured a specific girl, who got to perform a solo stage. pledis uploaded videos of the solo performances on youtube: see example here! pledis girlz was also given their own song: rollercoaster, composed by seventeen's woozi, and self-composed/wrote their own song: we. they even started having guests from produce 101, which was amazing because those girls were often from even smaller companies and had less opportunities to be on stage. ioi subunit even guested!
these weekly concerts were plagued with absences: obviously, nayoung and jieqiong were promoting in a different group, but siyeon had a recurring ankle injury which kept her out, and yebin had some kind of mystery illness, so you never quite knew how many members would be performing that day! i need you guys to watch 160528 the way (yes i made a playlist that's how obsessed i was with it that summer. it was really hard to find full fancams of those first performances when people were still afraid of being kicked out for filming LOL also the non p101 girls didn't have fanbases so people did not film them.)
nayoung and jieqiong's first concert appearance was june 25 and the concert was livestreamed on vlive. this was about when the pledis girlz song 'we' was released as a digital single with an mv featuring the 8 members who weren't in ioi.
also during this time sungyeon was sent on the jtbc show girl spirit, which was a vocal competition show. yes, pledis sent a predebut group main vocal trainee on a competition show to show off her vocals. YES, pledis knew how to promote their girl group trainees better than their girl groups.
the final theater concert was on september 10th - i think they held a total of 15 or 16 weeks of concerts. nayoung and jieqiong were a part of this one and they also performed the song 'stop it' which eventually became 'running' on their debut mini album. pledis girls started a cover project with adore u (note: 9 members because of siyeon's ankle injury), and held a concert on january 6th with nayoung and jieqiong to announce their group name: pristin. at this concert they performed 'another promise', a song that was never officially released but was given a video later.
debut should not be the end of the road
pristin debuted on march 21st, 2017 with a mini album that contained self-composed/written songs, a very similar concept to their sibling group seventeen. sungyeon participated in the title song WEE WOO and honestly? people hated this song and thought pristin could have done better. but in the polarizing way many debuts like this are, they got a lot of attention for it. roughly 43k in physical sales. not bad at the time but not great either, and not near what ioi sold on their debut.
as a group, these were truly some of the most entertaining idols you could have imagined.... they had two active subbing groups (teamlightbeam and pristin LTI) and team light beam literally was so fast. pristin fans almost never had to wait for subtitles, we always had options, and their content was so fun to watch. you know how groups like svt and wjsn have a reputation for how funny they are? it truly felt like they were the sister group to seventeen in all ways. (i say this as someone who was a pledis girlz fan before a carat LOL.)
in august 2017, 5 months later, pristin came back with another mini album and their sales decreased to ~27k. in october, pledis announced kyla was going on hiatus due to an injury sustained during the we like mv filming. after this all the kyla updates we got were from her older brother (LOTS OF DRAMA THERE...) and her little sister (crying emoji). there were so many conspiracy theories about how kyla was leaving pristin because she didn't have fans or because of her weight and the fires were stoked by her brother. kyla was basically living a normal life back in la - no social media but we saw her through her sister's vlogs... but there was no indication she had truly left the group or the company. there just was also no sign that she was coming back to seoul, either.
pristin finished off 2017 with three ROTY awards (rookie of the year), which some might say are rigged considering chungha as a soloist recorded much better numbers than them that year. whether actually rigged or not... it didn't quite feel deserved... but they were still the biggest girl group debut that year. anyway watch the we are pristin performance!
in january 2018 on their 300 day anniversary, the summer night video was released. this is the same song they performed at their bye & hi concert (another promise). the video has a polaroid of kyla...
in may 2018, the subunit pristin v debuted, with the members nayoung, roa (minkyung), kyulkyung (jieqiong), eunwoo, rena (yaebin). it wasn't self-produced and used foreign composers. GET IT truly is an iconic classic and one of my favorite vm project mvs... this debut in itself was (...) because pledis' reputation for giving up on their girl groups (after school, orange caramel, hello venus) was not forgotten, and with that lineup it kinda reeked of handpicking the group's most popular members minus chronically injured siyeon, plus eunwoo who could sing and trialing them for a permanent lineup. i think kyungwon even came to the debut showcase like???? jobless girl who i felt so bad for because she clearly kills that concept (see hinapia). [EDIT: yewon was there too. also they both attended a pristin v fanmeeting lol] this made 18k sales... which the uninformed would say is a downward trend but again in what world does a mid-tier group who has been on hiatus for 9 months with half their members sell more than their previous comeback. and i'm not talking hiatus with lots of individual activities.
it ended up being unrelated, but kaeun and yunjin going on produce 48 (june-august 2018) as pledis "trainees" worried me a lot, and frankly i fantasized about yunjin redebuting with pristin and saving them as a coping mechanism. knowing what i do now i'm glad she didn't, but what if she did??? what if she did???????
related, han sung soo (ceo of pledis) was the general producer for iz*one until he got found out for illegally taking extra royalties on the music he'd worked on... pristin fans were always mad at hss because pledis helped train fromis_9 and in particular iz*one (due to the timing being right when pristin started to get absolutely nothing) in the pledis building instead of giving those resources to pristin...
late 2018 to early 2019 was awful because pristin had no schedules and they were literally softbanned from posting on official social media so they had to make secret updates in private kakaotalk groupchats meant for fans to share photos. kyungwon had this thing called monthly yuyu where she'd post a picture on fancafe. i'm pretty sure that because she had been doing it every month already they kept letting her do it even when no one else could post on fc anymore and in january it had to be moved to the kkt chat... sungyeon would leak singing clips and song demos. pristin fans tried so hard, you guys. online requests on fancafe for comeback: ignored. in person sticky note protests on the pledis building: ignored. i can't say it any better than this spreadsheet i made back then to track their latest activity. as soon as pristin v promotions ended, activity dropped off a cliff, and appearances were only made for birthday vlives to the point where that was all we had to look forward to. you had to wait for someone's BIRTHDAY. to see them!
at this point we knew the writing was on the wall and honestly i just wanted pledis to end my suffering and announce disbandment so i could get some closure. pristin members started making individual instagram accounts which was a terrible sign considering ^^^^^ but at least we could hear from them.
on may 24, 2019 pledis announced that pristin had disbanded. seven members had terminated their contracts with the company (nayoung, minkyeung, gyeongwon, eunwoo, yaebin, siyeon, kyla) and the other three were staying with pledis.
this blatant display of giving up on a talented, unexplored group in the face of other mid-tier groups, including mid-tier post-ioi groups, being continually given chances created such a huge resentment towards pledis that someone hacked the pledis website just to tell the entire world WEEE FUCKING WOOOO. you have to laugh.
tl;dr
some possible reasons for the disbandment, though we'll never know why:
for context: siyeon was born in 2000 and joined pledis in 2008. she debuted in 2017, 9 YEARS LATER. she was only an idol for 2 years before leaving the company.
post-pristin
my grievances mostly lie with pledis, so i don't want to pass judgment on their post-group careers. i want to say it's worth noting minkyeung, gyeongwon, eunwoo and yaebin redebuted in hinapia (late 2019) with a digital single written by the songwriters of get it, but the effects of covid just a few months later truly shattered any chance the group had at sustaining itself. i promise pristin fans did all they could at the time to support this group.
nayoung joined sublime artist agency and works as an actress. jieqiong works solely in china and filed to terminate her contract with pledis. sungyeon works as a songwriter/producer and has done a lot of songs with bumzu/prismfilter. yewon... ?? minkyeung and gyeongwon model. i think eunwoo and yaebin are influencers but they're not that active... siyeon is acting... kyla went back to the us, released some music and is living her life.
a lot of them hang out still and by that i mean combinations of sungyeon/minkyeung/gyeongwon/eunwoo/yaebin/siyeon. sungyeon and yewon have done lives together (they're still in pledis after all), nayoung and yewon have met up before but jieqiong's last interaction with one of them seems to have been the ioi "reunion" video call in may 2021. yewon is really the only member of pristin nayoung interacts with, on instagram or in real life. yes i judge relationships based on instagram follows and likes so take it with a grain of salt but i think it really is quite indicative.
instagrams:
archival links:
ladyteenintl (wordpress / twitter)
teamlightbeam (twitter)
#Comeback_PRISTIN
prstaq (twitter)
hinapia subs (twitter)
disclaimer:
fan from 2016-infinity ♡
this will be biased and editorialized, but also acknowledge some of the objective reasons they may not have been successful* in the market.
some primary sources are gone now (vlive, the official twitter) so there is a risk of inaccuracy as i write this from memory.
*the idea of success is subjective, but for the purposes of this we'll assume that if pristin (a 3rd gen, post-ioi girl group) had been as successful as seventeen (a top 4 3rd gen boy group in 2017, amongst exo, bts and wanna one), they wouldn't have disbanded. that may or may not be the case.
pristin?
PRISTIN (프리스틴) was a 10-member girl group that debuted on march 21, 2017.
(left to right: roa (minkyung/minkyeung), kyla, nayoung, eunwoo, kyulkyung (jieqiong), xiyeon (siyeon), rena (yebin/yaebin), sungyeon (shannon), yehana (yewon), yuha (kyungwon/gyeongwon)
note: during their time on produce 101 certain members' names were translated/romanized a certain way and later the members themselves would correct the romanization to what was used on their passport...
prior to their group debut
like the trainees of most companies, "ladyteen" (fan nickname for pledis female trainees) were known and had made appearances in various mvs, 17tv streams and special stages. 7 pledis trainees appeared on the first season of produce 101: im nayoung, kim minkyung (minkyeung), kang kyungwon (gyeongwon), jung eunwoo, kang yebin (yaebin), zhou jieqiong (joo kyulkyung), and park siyeon. minkyung's ranking was affected by a scandal. jieqiong (#6) and nayoung (#10) ranked into the final group (I.O.I) and promoted with them from may 2016 to january 2017. ioi was extremely popular, with big name cfs, variety appearances, and sales; they ranked 4th for girl group digital sales and 2nd for girl group physical sales in 2016 with 3 promotions (dream girls, whatta man, very very very). it is fair to call them one of the top girl groups of their time, though their career was short-lived (as their contract was written this way). nayoung and jieqiong did not miss ioi promotions to debut with their 'home' group as yeonjung (wjsn), chaeyeon (dia), and sejeong + mina (gugudan) did.
in the meantime, the remaining female pledis trainees put on weekly theater concerts under the group name 'pledis girlz'. their first one was on may 14, 2016, and this reddit user has a nice compilation of fancams listed for each week. the fact that the date says '7 years ago' is k wording me... anyway i believe this concert would have been the first official reveal of the additional three trainees who hadn't been on the show: kim yewon, bae sungyeon (shannon bae) and kyla massie. in addition to full group cover stages, unit stages, and talk segments, each concert featured a specific girl, who got to perform a solo stage. pledis uploaded videos of the solo performances on youtube: see example here! pledis girlz was also given their own song: rollercoaster, composed by seventeen's woozi, and self-composed/wrote their own song: we. they even started having guests from produce 101, which was amazing because those girls were often from even smaller companies and had less opportunities to be on stage. ioi subunit even guested!
these weekly concerts were plagued with absences: obviously, nayoung and jieqiong were promoting in a different group, but siyeon had a recurring ankle injury which kept her out, and yebin had some kind of mystery illness, so you never quite knew how many members would be performing that day! i need you guys to watch 160528 the way (yes i made a playlist that's how obsessed i was with it that summer. it was really hard to find full fancams of those first performances when people were still afraid of being kicked out for filming LOL also the non p101 girls didn't have fanbases so people did not film them.)
nayoung and jieqiong's first concert appearance was june 25 and the concert was livestreamed on vlive. this was about when the pledis girlz song 'we' was released as a digital single with an mv featuring the 8 members who weren't in ioi.
also during this time sungyeon was sent on the jtbc show girl spirit, which was a vocal competition show. yes, pledis sent a predebut group main vocal trainee on a competition show to show off her vocals. YES, pledis knew how to promote their girl group trainees better than their girl groups.
the final theater concert was on september 10th - i think they held a total of 15 or 16 weeks of concerts. nayoung and jieqiong were a part of this one and they also performed the song 'stop it' which eventually became 'running' on their debut mini album. pledis girls started a cover project with adore u (note: 9 members because of siyeon's ankle injury), and held a concert on january 6th with nayoung and jieqiong to announce their group name: pristin. at this concert they performed 'another promise', a song that was never officially released but was given a video later.
debut should not be the end of the road
pristin debuted on march 21st, 2017 with a mini album that contained self-composed/written songs, a very similar concept to their sibling group seventeen. sungyeon participated in the title song WEE WOO and honestly? people hated this song and thought pristin could have done better. but in the polarizing way many debuts like this are, they got a lot of attention for it. roughly 43k in physical sales. not bad at the time but not great either, and not near what ioi sold on their debut.
as a group, these were truly some of the most entertaining idols you could have imagined.... they had two active subbing groups (teamlightbeam and pristin LTI) and team light beam literally was so fast. pristin fans almost never had to wait for subtitles, we always had options, and their content was so fun to watch. you know how groups like svt and wjsn have a reputation for how funny they are? it truly felt like they were the sister group to seventeen in all ways. (i say this as someone who was a pledis girlz fan before a carat LOL.)
in august 2017, 5 months later, pristin came back with another mini album and their sales decreased to ~27k. in october, pledis announced kyla was going on hiatus due to an injury sustained during the we like mv filming. after this all the kyla updates we got were from her older brother (LOTS OF DRAMA THERE...) and her little sister (crying emoji). there were so many conspiracy theories about how kyla was leaving pristin because she didn't have fans or because of her weight and the fires were stoked by her brother. kyla was basically living a normal life back in la - no social media but we saw her through her sister's vlogs... but there was no indication she had truly left the group or the company. there just was also no sign that she was coming back to seoul, either.
pristin finished off 2017 with three ROTY awards (rookie of the year), which some might say are rigged considering chungha as a soloist recorded much better numbers than them that year. whether actually rigged or not... it didn't quite feel deserved... but they were still the biggest girl group debut that year. anyway watch the we are pristin performance!
in january 2018 on their 300 day anniversary, the summer night video was released. this is the same song they performed at their bye & hi concert (another promise). the video has a polaroid of kyla...
in may 2018, the subunit pristin v debuted, with the members nayoung, roa (minkyung), kyulkyung (jieqiong), eunwoo, rena (yaebin). it wasn't self-produced and used foreign composers. GET IT truly is an iconic classic and one of my favorite vm project mvs... this debut in itself was (...) because pledis' reputation for giving up on their girl groups (after school, orange caramel, hello venus) was not forgotten, and with that lineup it kinda reeked of handpicking the group's most popular members minus chronically injured siyeon, plus eunwoo who could sing and trialing them for a permanent lineup. i think kyungwon even came to the debut showcase like???? jobless girl who i felt so bad for because she clearly kills that concept (see hinapia). [EDIT: yewon was there too. also they both attended a pristin v fanmeeting lol] this made 18k sales... which the uninformed would say is a downward trend but again in what world does a mid-tier group who has been on hiatus for 9 months with half their members sell more than their previous comeback. and i'm not talking hiatus with lots of individual activities.
it ended up being unrelated, but kaeun and yunjin going on produce 48 (june-august 2018) as pledis "trainees" worried me a lot, and frankly i fantasized about yunjin redebuting with pristin and saving them as a coping mechanism. knowing what i do now i'm glad she didn't, but what if she did??? what if she did???????
related, han sung soo (ceo of pledis) was the general producer for iz*one until he got found out for illegally taking extra royalties on the music he'd worked on... pristin fans were always mad at hss because pledis helped train fromis_9 and in particular iz*one (due to the timing being right when pristin started to get absolutely nothing) in the pledis building instead of giving those resources to pristin...
late 2018 to early 2019 was awful because pristin had no schedules and they were literally softbanned from posting on official social media so they had to make secret updates in private kakaotalk groupchats meant for fans to share photos. kyungwon had this thing called monthly yuyu where she'd post a picture on fancafe. i'm pretty sure that because she had been doing it every month already they kept letting her do it even when no one else could post on fc anymore and in january it had to be moved to the kkt chat... sungyeon would leak singing clips and song demos. pristin fans tried so hard, you guys. online requests on fancafe for comeback: ignored. in person sticky note protests on the pledis building: ignored. i can't say it any better than this spreadsheet i made back then to track their latest activity. as soon as pristin v promotions ended, activity dropped off a cliff, and appearances were only made for birthday vlives to the point where that was all we had to look forward to. you had to wait for someone's BIRTHDAY. to see them!
at this point we knew the writing was on the wall and honestly i just wanted pledis to end my suffering and announce disbandment so i could get some closure. pristin members started making individual instagram accounts which was a terrible sign considering ^^^^^ but at least we could hear from them.
on may 24, 2019 pledis announced that pristin had disbanded. seven members had terminated their contracts with the company (nayoung, minkyeung, gyeongwon, eunwoo, yaebin, siyeon, kyla) and the other three were staying with pledis.
this blatant display of giving up on a talented, unexplored group in the face of other mid-tier groups, including mid-tier post-ioi groups, being continually given chances created such a huge resentment towards pledis that someone hacked the pledis website just to tell the entire world WEEE FUCKING WOOOO. you have to laugh.
tl;dr
some possible reasons for the disbandment, though we'll never know why:
- lack of profitability (evidence: sales dropping. counter-evidence: groups with worse sales continue on all the time)
- sub-point: the group being wildly imbalanced in popularity between members who had debuted in one of the most popular girl groups of 2016, members who had been on the show that created that group, and members who had no prior public exposure (and didn't match korean beauty standards) (counter-evidence: groups like this don't have to disband!!! they have popular members to carry the group!!!!!!!)
- internal conflict between the members (evidence: post-group interactions, or lack of interactions. counter-evidence: what popular groups haven't had members fight before and make it through)
- opportunity cost, aka pledis could have made more money investing in other groups (evidence: pledis/hss was getting paid to train other groups, pledis had seventeen and post-p101s2 nuest)
for context: siyeon was born in 2000 and joined pledis in 2008. she debuted in 2017, 9 YEARS LATER. she was only an idol for 2 years before leaving the company.
post-pristin
my grievances mostly lie with pledis, so i don't want to pass judgment on their post-group careers. i want to say it's worth noting minkyeung, gyeongwon, eunwoo and yaebin redebuted in hinapia (late 2019) with a digital single written by the songwriters of get it, but the effects of covid just a few months later truly shattered any chance the group had at sustaining itself. i promise pristin fans did all they could at the time to support this group.
nayoung joined sublime artist agency and works as an actress. jieqiong works solely in china and filed to terminate her contract with pledis. sungyeon works as a songwriter/producer and has done a lot of songs with bumzu/prismfilter. yewon... ?? minkyeung and gyeongwon model. i think eunwoo and yaebin are influencers but they're not that active... siyeon is acting... kyla went back to the us, released some music and is living her life.
a lot of them hang out still and by that i mean combinations of sungyeon/minkyeung/gyeongwon/eunwoo/yaebin/siyeon. sungyeon and yewon have done lives together (they're still in pledis after all), nayoung and yewon have met up before but jieqiong's last interaction with one of them seems to have been the ioi "reunion" video call in may 2021. yewon is really the only member of pristin nayoung interacts with, on instagram or in real life. yes i judge relationships based on instagram follows and likes so take it with a grain of salt but i think it really is quite indicative.
instagrams:
archival links:
ladyteenintl (wordpress / twitter)
teamlightbeam (twitter)
#Comeback_PRISTIN
prstaq (twitter)
hinapia subs (twitter)
oof
Date: Sat, Mar. 11th, 2023 06:22 pm (UTC)Re: oof
Date: Sat, Mar. 11th, 2023 10:57 pm (UTC)thanks for reading!! it's crazy how much history gets forgotten and esp in this age many fans of pledis/hybe groups don't know what metaphorical crimes they committed against their ggs when the industry is already stacked against them... nothing makes me angrier than people defending pledis particularly when they're svt fans >_>
no subject
Date: Mon, Mar. 13th, 2023 09:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Tue, Mar. 14th, 2023 06:02 pm (UTC)