Another week, another elimination.
The 65 became 60 as another five girls bid goodbye to their MNL48 journey last Saturday. While the remaining 60 can still continue in their quest to be part of AKB48’s official sister group, they have also formed a bond with each other and every elimination must hard on them emotionally.
There were two interesting developments in the rankings: Sheki has jumped to number 3 (after being out of the Top 10 for so long) and Shaira, one of the Duran twins, dropped from the Top 10 altogether.
Ella, Rain, Sheki, Pie, Cherish, Alyssa, Kate, Daryll, Lorem, Aly got the chance to show their talent in singing and dancing as they performed Janella Salvador’s “Pumapag-ibig” live on stage, together with the Top 10 this week. Out of 65 hopefuls, Pie, Rain, Lorem, Kate, and Cherish got the lowest score from advisers, coaches, and producers leading to their elimination.
There are still four Saturdays in March – three if you remove Holy Saturday from the list – but the numbers game shows that there are only 2 eliminations left before we hit 50 candidates. So either the final elimination will only have 2 unlucky candidates going home, or something big is going to happen in the coming weeks.
I also feel that it’s about time the candidates perform AKB48 songs. While I understand that they wouldn’t be able to sing those, they can dance it. It’s a good warm-up for these girls to see who among them can perform to AKB48 songs well. As of date, they (those not in the Top 10 anyway) are still being evaluated on the basis of fundamental performing technique, but little in the way of idol-ish songs.
Now, this is just a “wish” of mine and I’m going to let them (HHE and ABS-CBN) handle the audition any way they see fit. But I feel that things should start to come full circle as the audition draws to a close. While the audition has been running fine in my opinion, it won’t be able to shake off the opinions and sentiments of local AKB48 fans that the whole process has deviated too much for their liking. And those negative feelings will only continue unless they see that the group has “reconnected” to their roots.
That said, I do appreciate how vastly improved the girls are from the time they started. Obviously, the well-trained candidates like Alice and Eunice are still head and shoulders above everybody else in terms of performance and star factor. But already you can see flashes of potential from the other candidates as well. They still have a long way to go in terms of variety and interaction (the loss of Uriko and Micah – partners in crime – can be really felt on that regard), but they’re getting there as they are starting to warm up to the camera.
I’m getting behind on the Online Updates because of real life. But the girls have been showcasing their talents there since last week. I do enjoy these updates, although it’s really kind of overwhelming to tackle if you miss a week’s worth of updates and had to watch them.
I too am thinking of stuff I can write about. I’ve been planning to address a host of topics for months before real life problems forced me to just focus on the audition itself. Hopefully I can talk about these issues more in future articles.
And now, I leave you with my weekly “Ash for MNL48” campaign.