In history, some acts just show up like meteors, burn up and disappear.
Bi
GFriend is like one of such acts, opening the way for the 3rd Generation, and then disappearing as the paradigm changes forever.
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While EXO's Growl became the largest hit of 2013,
EXO spent 2013, 2014 and 2015 fighting against Cho Yongpil, IU and Bigbang respectly.
With no major 3rd gen acts coming to relieve EXO, it was being pushed back hard.
Melon Yearly Ranking 2015 (excludes pop numbers)
2 Naul Living in the Same Time (R&B)
3 Zion T Eat (Hiphop)
4 Baek Ayeon - Shouldn't have (Ballad)
5 Hyukoh - Wiing Wiing (Indie)
6 Big Bang - Loser
7 Big Bang - BaeBae
8 ZionT, Crush - Just (Hiphop)
9 ZionT - Yanghwa Bridge (Hiphop)
The 3rd Gen completely eliminated, except
10 Spring is Gone by Chance - Loco (rapper) and Yuju of GFriend.
Few people now know that Yuju was more valuable than the rest of GFriend combined, and Source really promoted her incorrectly. If she had decided to strike on her own before GFriend began to go stale she would have made a name for herself- but now she is a shell of herself, not really belonging to anywhere.
Spring is Gone by Chance, plus the falling incident which put Me Gustas Tu in the top 10 of charts, a rarity for a nugu act (GFriend is probably the most successful nugu act of the entire history of KPop) suddenly made GFriend the top act of the 3rd Generation.
GFriend's Rough put it above everyone else, and it fought Twice off and remained at the top until around July of 2016, when Wonder Girls, in its final comeback, crushed GFriend's Navillera, a very unexpected result, while Twice began to use its so-called J-Line (although one of them was not Japanese), extensively, something GFriend could not compete with.
Then earlier in 2017 the cursed Fingertip was released. Basically Iggy Yongbae cleaning up its warehouse, this song led GFriend to fall off from the top echelon of KPop, although for whatever reason the North Koreans liked that song enough to plagiarize it.
GFriend held itself until earlier 2018, when its final hit, TIme for the Moon Night, came out. I don't think its career after Moon Night is worth mentioning.
I personally think that if GFriend . which had nothing to lose, did not challenge the older Generation, the advances of BlackPink and BTS would not have taken place, and Twice would have developed quite differently from what we know now.
GFriend was the last example of an older style girl group, only focusing on Korean domestic market, making smaller profit. Unfortunately Red Velvet and Lovelyz were also set up in the same way, which limited their successes . RV went a bit farther because it was a SM act, but it had no foreign members which appeared to foreign fans (although Wendy could be called as a foreigner), its foreign success was limited.
With the older generation ruling, the 3rd Gen would have been just busy trying to survive, and BlackPink's success would have been limited.
And BTS' big break might not have come if GFriend did not attack the 2nd Gen.
GFriend's legacy is quite mixed - its model was too fixated in Korea and since it had no staff to promote in the overseas (it did launch a half hearted effort to promote in Japan later but I don't think that went anywhere) and its owner was too focused on Eunha, whom for some reason was put as the central member of the group.
However it did become the linchpin to destroy the 2nd Generation once for all, something which is so lacking in the 4th Generation now against the 3rd Gen.
