When I heard they would be adding members to Kara I was extremely apprehensive about the whole idea; Kara is not only an established group but they are extremely experienced and have been around longer than even most popular kpop girl groups so it seems like a huge step backward, or many steps backwards, to add much younger girls, trainees even, to the group.
I watched the teasers and one after one I kept thinking "These girls just aren't going to do it." They seemed talented, and if they were just DSP trainees planning to enter a fresh new girl group I would no doubt support them, but they didn't seem adequate for what they are being advertised for.
While watching the first episode of the Kara Project, I realized I can't imagine honestly any of them being in Kara right now, simply because they seem a lot less mature than the Kara members. I like them, and they seem like really hardworking and talented girls but it's hard to accept them as Kara members. They seemed like little school girls to me, and I couldn't really get past that. I did see them working hard though so I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and see how their performance at the end went, hoping they would pull it off really well.
After watching their performance at the end of the episode, I was impressed honestly, and I was thinking that they did a pretty good job for having only like a week to prepare their performance. However the judges didn't look happy, and I was kind of surprised by this until I heard their comments and realized that for a trainee group, the performance was definitely impressive. But for Kara, it was not at all, which brings me back to the point that these girls lack the experience necessary to join Kara. There's really no way around that. There are things that they need to learn and can only do so through experiencing being a group and performing multiple times.
Basically, their Step performance was a good cover, but it was not good enough to match the original. I can't see them joining Kara on stage with that kind of performance.
As for the individual girls, I haven't had a chance to really get to know any of them but so far, I am impressed by Chaewon's vocals, but she doesn't have the dance skills or the stage presence yet. She's dedicated and loves what she does, I can tell, but she's just so young and she doesn't seem to suit Kara. So Min I think does a good job and I think she has the most potential right now. I think honestly in terms of personality and presence, I can see Sojin as a Kara member as well, but her vocals didn't impress me and she was a little excessive with the performance like she was told.
The results were interesting to me but not very surprising:
I find it interesting that Youngji is #1 right now because she was injured and didn't even perform, but I think she may have had sympathy votes because of that. Her expert votes are extremely low anyway.
I find it strange that Chaekyung has so many expert votes... I was surprised because after the performance her review said that she wasn't very noticeable. But then again, I didn't get to focus on each member individually while watching because the camera doesn't allow you to do that, so how can I even tell..
Honestly all of them are talented and work hard, but aren't at the level of Kara yet. I think it's interesting that DSP is choosing to decide Kara members this way, and it kind of seems like just a scheme to get these trainees more attention, like YG did with that show "Win" or something. I feel like the members that aren't chosen for Kara are going to debut on their own. It's a good strategy but I'm not sure what I think about it yet.
I'll continue to watch the episodes and see what I think later.
