Chapter 69
Chapter 69
The internet blazed up instantly, just like the marshmallow fireball Seo Cha-gyeom had created.......
[Neuti's elimination is such a shame...ㅜㅜ]
My pick was Jeong Byeong-jon so I never voted for him, but personally I thought Neuti was the kind of position you absolutely need on a team.
If you have a main dancer on the level of Han Neuti, they really deliver when you send them out for variety or competitions, such a bummer *sigh* ㅠㅡㅜ
Comments
―You should've done your voting then, that's why.
―Are you trolling?
―Sorry, fans are a bit on edge right now ㅜㅜㅜ Thanks for rooting for him
└Yeah yeah, I get it ㅠ No worries
[What are the chances the Han Neuti sighting is bait from the production team?]
The production team definitely told Han Neuti to go outside and be spotted on purpose to trick the KESses... Right now, every community is buzzing over the fact that Han Neuti=Rei, there's no way they'd just throw away that kind of buzz. If I were the production team, I'd use it somehow.
↓↓ The best-case scenario the Hyeon production team could pull off
(After the tearful slideshow during Music Camp...)
Sim Do-yoon: There's a special rule we haven't told you about, exclusive to Season 7. It's called '0%'... giving one eliminated trainee the chance to start again from the very beginning.
Trainees: (buzzing murmurs)
Sim Do-yoon: With the mentors' unanimous decision, the 0% trainee is...!
3
2
1
(The curtains open and Han Neuti appears)
An Jiwon: Hyung!!!! (runs over and smothers him)
Seo Cha-gyeom: (sobs loudly)
Kim Han-ul: (wipes his nose)
Comments
―F*ck, are you doing stand-up comedy
―Stop it, Neuti fans have passed out and can't see this anyway
―Hmm. Kinda surprising. ㅋㅋ. I can't say anything specific... but I wanna tell Neuti fans there's no need to be so heartbroken. Might be a good idea to screenshot this post.
└Stop showing off
[Stop denying reality, Han Neuti is definitely eliminated]
(Photo)
Another sighting post today
It's just a hundred percent
And Neuti barely had any sightings even outside training camp before, but now they're flooding in all at once, so ㅋㅋ it's definitely a signal to the fans, telling them to stop wasting energy because he's dropped.
Comments
―But then what do we do about the final fundraising money for this kid
―I heard the production team begged the eliminated trainees not to go out too much to prevent spoilers, but as expected of Rei-nim, unbelievable
└Squeak squeak into the storage room, then get beaten down with devil's editing at the end and finally dropped, and now they're telling him not to go outside either ㅁㅊ do they have any conscience...
―But why do the sightings of him keep popping up around △△-dong? Does he live nearby?
└What are you gonna do, speculating about his house?
└No, I was just curious....;; Sorry, I wasn't thinking about his privacy, I'll delete it
└That's in front of the Sorasum building
There had been many cases before where eliminations were uncovered through sighting photos taken during the training camp period.
Each time, many people denied reality, writing hopeful daydreams about how it must be a trick by the production team, but the result was always the same.
If a sighting post appears, it means elimination.
And so, Han Neuti's elimination became an established fact.
But.......
[Is Rei's elimination for real?]
I wasn't watching Mebaek but then I saw all the Rei news and even voted...
Even if it was just one vote on the very last day...
It's such a shame, if only I'd known a little sooner...
The KESses really have no eye for talent ㅜㅜ
Comments
―That last line suddenly taking a dig at us
―No, it's not our fault, the production team hid him, f*cking hell
―I voted for the first time this time too... I think there were probably a lot of people like me, so I seriously can't believe his ranking didn't go up but actually dropped
[If Han Neuti is 15th, a serious investigation needs to happen]
They say the ranking shifts are huge because it changed to 1-pick... so then who exactly overtook Han Neuti and got in?
And if it's 1-pick, Han Neuti, who's consistently been at the top of the core fan index, should actually have gone up in ranking.
[Neuti was on the support team]
Well, this might look like another case of denying reality
But I don't think he's eliminated...
I have my reasons
Han Neuti's elimination had many points that didn't add up, no matter how you looked at it.
It went beyond a simple fan's denial of reality, it was a truly objective suspicion.
Because of the countless opinions insisting that Han Neuti couldn't possibly have been eliminated, and the backlash against them, the community atmosphere grew more and more chaotic.
Then Friday came.
The ranking announcement ceremony was revealed.
[Summary of the 3rd ranking announcement ceremony]
Top 12 survive
Seo Cha-gyeom 5th
Kim Han-ul 6th
Rei eliminated
Comments
―Disband them
└They haven't even debuted yet
―After kicking out Rei, the best you put in is Kim Strong Boy ㅋㅋ Stop blaming the public, it's all the result of the KESses' moldy eyes ㅇㅇ I'm unstanning, bye
―Seo Cha-gyeom 5th... If even he gets eliminated, I'm gonna drop my ultimate bias and just go back to my original group
―Gyeon-woo fans, please don't relax ㅠ Since it's 1-pick the total sample size shrank, so even if he was roughly 8th, getting the 100,000 vote benefit would put him up into the 4th place range. Basically, this survival announcement ceremony just didn't tell us Baek Gyeonwoo's ranking, f*ck....ㅋㅋ
―So Han Neuti really is eliminated, huh.
Seo Cha-gyeom's drop, Kim Han-ul's rise, Han Neuti's elimination—topics ebbed and flowed like the tide through the community.
And the dropping of a massive bomb in the midst of all this happened in just one hour.
[We demand the production team]
We are Han Neuti's support team.
MAKE100% is currently only revealing the vote counts for trainees ranked 5th to 12th.
Trainee Han Neuti was eliminated at 13th place, and his vote count has not been disclosed.
However, we held a '3rd voting verification rewards event', and through it, we know the exact number of votes from the event participants who supported trainee Han Neuti.
And based on this information, we have concluded that trainee Han Neuti's current ranking is difficult to accept.
We support not only trainee Han Neuti but all the trainees, and we support MAKE100% as the space for their dreams.
Production team, please reveal the exact vote count for trainee Han Neuti.
+++
We are currently collecting votes from voters who did not participate in our event. If you voted for trainee Han Neuti in the 3rd vote but did not participate in our event, please verify through the link below.
We will hold a raffle for prizes among those who verify.
Thank you for your participation.
It was a post that Han Neuti's fans had prepared from the very moment the sighting appeared.
The community users who first saw this post laughed it off.
―See, it's just denying reality.
―Stop it, you're getting uglier.
―I was thinking of using the final fundraising money, but they're using it on crap like this...? Wow, what a damn waste of money ㅋㅋ
However, regardless of whether the suspicion was valid or not, it wasn't only the fans who wanted to deny Han Neuti's elimination.
There were those who just found it entertaining and hoped it was rigged, and the fans of trainees who had been neglected and eliminated from <MAKE100%>.
Fans of other trainees who had been rooting for Han Neuti.
The many people who had come to know Rei.
These various clusters gathered, grew larger, and began to fiercely push public opinion.
[I don't think they can just ignore this]
The support team isn't stupid, and tens of millions of won isn't small money, so seeing them pour that much into it, the vote gap with 12th place can't be that big.
Before it was revealed that Han Neuti was Rei, he couldn't even get the general public's votes, but this time the prize event was promoted massively with the biggest scale ever.
It's 1-pick, so the number of votes is small and easy to tally, right? 12th place is currently under 100,000 votes ㅋㅋ I think it's better to wait for the results from Han Neuti's support team.
Comments
―So just how many votes did he get for them to be doing this? ㅋㅋ If they just said 'we got this many votes', people could judge it objectively, so what's the reason for keeping it a secret? Isn't it because it's too ambiguous for them too?
└Why would they say that.. Are you from the production team?
└The exact vote number is the card the Neuti fans are holding right now, why would they be asked to reveal it... If they reveal it, of course the production team would rig the numbers beyond that, are you dumb?
Even amidst this commotion, Han Neuti's fans were diligently collecting votes.
The statement that a few individuals would manually tally tens of thousands of votes seemed, in fact, like a very far-fetched claim.
But surprisingly, the process went smoothly.
That was because, after seeing the subway ads get banned and the voting events catch fire, the production team had kindly introduced a 'Vote Verification System'.
The reason was that while subway ads had minimal promotional effect, voting events were directly linked to the broadcaster's revenue.
The 'Vote Verification System' they created was a system where a new QR code was issued each time you voted, which made it easy to filter out duplicates and fake votes.
Thanks to that, as they watched the vote counting process become so very clean and smooth, the people who had simply been laughing gradually... became serious.
―Knock it off, would you feel at ease only after all the trainees go back to working at some dumpy small company?
―Seriously, ㅎㄴㅌ fans are making this a massive deal ㅠ ugh...
―Wow, so this is how ugly it gets when you really can't accept reality ㅋㅋㅋ This is going down in idol fandom history as a dark legacy, congrats.
The fans of high-ranking trainees, sensing the seriousness, began to chime in to try and quell the situation.
But this reaction backfired.
―"Those" profile pictures are so damn shameless for real
―Right, they're just saying that rigged or not, Neuti just needs to shut his mouth, isn't that their logic? They're just running wild thinking their picks are definitely debuting.
―Those guys are saying to just bring Han Neuti back and continue the finale as is, like they're being generous...
└For real, if Neuti really was rigged out, don't you think there would have naturally been rigging in other spots too? How can you be so sure it was only Neuti? ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
They had aggrieved not only Han Neuti's fandom, but also the fans of other eliminated trainees, and even the fandoms of lower-rank trainees who hadn't yet been eliminated but had a slim chance of debuting.
Even so, it was a situation where they were still outnumbered by the large fandoms of the top rankings.
But at this moment.
[I understand the fans of eliminated trainees making a fuss about rigging]
But what about the Seo Cha-gyeom fans?
You guys are basically guaranteed to debut, why are you hanging out with those guys ㅎㅎ;;
Possessing firepower equal to that of the top-ranking debut candidates, yet not on good terms with them,
the Seo Cha-gyeom fandom joined in.
―Seo Cha-gyeom fans, think carefully. You're blocking your own kid's path by pushing the angle that the program is rigged just to save Han Neuti.
└Gaslighting failed, we'll handle our own business.
└It's not about pushing a rigging narrative, it's about demanding a clear answer on whether it's rigged or not... Does something that wasn't rigged suddenly become rigged just because we say so?
―Debut with the backing of a broadcasting station and a confirmed rookie award vs. toiling away as a child breadwinner at some dumpy company. Right now, the Seo Cha-gyeom fans are pushing for the latter.
└Better the latter than debuting by turning a blind eye to rigging ㅋㅋ;
└Yeah, Cha-gyeom will succeed wherever he goes so it's fine.
―I hope the program doesn't fail, and I want to see Cha-gyeom and Jiwon debut together... But if there really was a mistake in the counting process... it should be corrected, that's only right.
└Do you think it'll end with a correction? The moment they admit a mistake, the program is ruined.
└Then it should be ruined, what can you do...? Is that my fault?
Despite the dissuasion from other netizens, the Seo Cha-gyeom fandom's stance was firm.
Here, let me point out one thing.
The Seo Cha-gyeom fandom joining hands with the Han Neuti fandom was not simply because the two were close.
They had just witnessed the result of 'Seo Cha-gyeom 5th' at the previous survival announcement ceremony.
At that moment, the edits—the chilling, downright shitty ones—flashed through their minds like a panorama.
And they instinctively sensed something ominous.
'Could it happen to Cha-gyeom too?'
They thought that if Han Neuti really was rigged out, Seo Cha-gyeom could also be eliminated through rigging.
And one more person.
A trainee who was just as certain not to be a PD Pick as Seo Cha-gyeom.
[I'm a Baek Gyeonwoo fan]
The production team is trash so I just hope they fail.
It'd probably be better to just go back to Youth and wait for the next group ㅇㅇ
The fandom of Baek Gyeonwoo, who due to whole-group-edit existence had no relationships whatsoever outside of Seo Cha-gyeom and Han Neuti and was left a lonely straggler, also joined in.
Moreover, Baek Gyeonwoo was from a large agency.
Even if he got kicked off the program, the home he'd return to was a palace, so they leaned closer to a mentality of 'whether the program fails or not.'
[I just hope it really is rigged]
They need to stop making these damn survival programs already, you bastards are the main culprits who've made the idol scene so f*cking terrible ㅋㅋ
Let's end it here, it's not too late even now.
Mary and Indeowol's new groups are coming soon anyway, let's greet the next generation with a normalized fandom scene.
Once the type who simply wished for the program's failure joined in, the tide quickly turned favorably toward Han Neuti's side.
And finally, journalists picked up on this public discussion of rigging.
<'MAKE100%' Fairness Crisis? Rigging Scandal Uproar>
<The Shaking Trust in K-Specialists: How Are 'MAKE100%' Votes Being Counted?>
<The Reason the Production Team Says 'They Cannot Reveal the Vote Count'>
Of course, the production team didn't stay idle.
They vigorously put out rebuttal articles and swayed public opinion by treating the Han Neuti fans' suspicions as mere 'fault-finding.'
But even in that gap, Han Neuti's fans concentrated solely on tallying votes like ants.
And the people who saw that sight... were impressed.
―They're working that hard, just reveal it and end it.
―What's so hard about revealing the vote count? Do they shatter it with a hammer the moment the counting is done or something?
―If they're really innocent and it's unjust, just revealing the vote count ends it, but the more stubborn they are, the more suspicion grows, so why are they doing this?
―Rei-hyung, it's Minsoo, I submitted an inquiry for a disclosure request to repay the favor.
Like that, the pressure to reveal the vote count grew heavier and heavier.
Once the situation grew too big to use 'the producer's circumstances' as an excuse any longer,
the production team finally... raised the white flag.
<Vote Counting Error Acknowledged, 'MAKE100%' Temporarily Suspended...>