Korean presidential election coverage is on another level

Ah, election night. The nail-biting, anxiety-inducing, televised event that will determine whether a country’s future will shine bright or if democracy will be undermined right before our eyes. Fortunately, if you live in South Korea, you can ease your election nerves with high-caliber CGI graphics depicting presidential candidates doing all manner of fundamentally goofy things.

Here’s the presidential candidates as Game of Thrones characters:

Here they are running across various provinces of South Korea, racing in a Rocky-esque montage:

And, of course, here they are as pokémon in Pokémon Go, which has only been officially playable in South Korea since January 2017.

All these animations seem pretty lighthearted, especially when compared to the actual political events in Korea, like the bizarre scandal that recently led to the impeachment of Park-Geun Hye. Netizens’ reactions are mostly perplexed, though:

Translation: “SBS’s election coverage is insane, lol”

This also isn’t a new development for SBS, which is one of the biggest news networks in Korea — they’ve been on the wacky graphics beat for a long time. Here’s my experience watching the election night coverage in 2012, when Park Geun-Hye won a narrow victory over current presidential candidate Moon Jae-In.

The 2017 election coverage is pretty much over, with exit polls calling liberal Moon Jae-In the winner. But if you’d like to rewatch some of the graphics segments, you can head over to SBS’s live election coverage streaming on YouTube, join the comments section, and witness the insanity as it happens. Maybe type in a ㅋㅋㅋ (that’s the Korean version of LOL) to join along.