The Sakura skill gap discourse is so weird and unjustified to me (Saint Satine)
I feel like people are seriously overreacting to Sakura joining Saint Satine/Prelude after the final piece ended.
The main complaints I keep seeing are the age gap, the skill gap, and the fact that she doesn’t speak English fluently. But honestly none of those things are actually that crazy in Kpop.
People are acting like a group can’t function if one member is noticeably weaker than the others, but we’ve literally already seen this before with i-dle. One member clearly stood out in basically everything from the start. Vocals, dance, stage presence, producing, songwriting, all of it. And yes, even Korean language!! And the group still debuted fine and became successful anyway. Groups don’t need every member to be equal skill wise to work.
And the language thing is such a weird argument to me too. “She doesn’t even speak English.” Okay… and? Shuhua barely spoke Korean when she debuted. Even now she struggles speaking confidently in interviews and nobody acts like that makes her a bad idol or a bad fit for the group. Learning languages while promoting has always been normal in Kpop.
Also people judging Sakura off one performance is kind of unfair. So many idols looked awkward or underdeveloped at debut and improved a ton later on. Shuhua next to a Soyeon might be one of the biggest skill gaps we have in Kpop within a group, yet they are successful and thriving as hell. At this point it just feels like people already decided they didn’t want her in the group, so now every little thing gets treated like some huge issue when it really isn’t…