Physical 100 fans slam “unfair” quest against female contestants

Physical 100 fans have criticized a quest in Season 2, believing it wasn’t “fair” to the female contestants compared to the show’s male competitors.

In Season 1 of the competition series, many fans felt male contestants took advantage of winning by choosing female athletes during the Death Match quest. It led to some controversy over Physical 100’s goal of finding the best regardless of age or gender.

Going into Season 2, Netflix kept its contestant pool of males and females, but the series has once again landed in hot water.

Season 2 has a bigger emphasis on strength and endurance; for example, the minecraft relay quest. Even The Maze Quest had fans seeing male contestants like Gibson tackle another team’s female contestants and use shady tactics. Another one was the pull-up pre-quest challenge for Quest 3.

There’s no denying the female contestants are the best in their fields from bodybuilders to national athletes. But many see them as a weak link. At one point, a mostly female team was regarded by Kim Dong-hyun as being the easiest to beat.

Netflix

A fan on Reddit even commented the female contestant on Lee Jae-yoon’s team was “dead weight” and even infuriated that she did the duo hanging challenge despite having done six pull-ups in the pre-quest challenge.

Another fan felt female and male contestants are better off not competing against each other as “the series is making an impact by ‘portraying them as a burden to a team’.”

One fan agreed, saying: “I agree. They should either a) separate the males and females b) make the challenges less strength-centric or c) insist each team must include one female, that way they each have more or less the same limitation in terms of resources to allocate to challenges.”

“The male-female issue aside, I felt the challenges are far too heavily focused on strength or a combination of strength and endurance, when there are other aspect of fitness. They could do flexibility, balance, isometric exercise.”

Some agree that the first season did a better job at including challenges that weren’t all about brawn, like the tile flip challenge. But some feel Season 2’s quests were inadvertently designed to see the women as “dead weight” and eliminate them by default.

A good example was Jung Ji-hyun picking an all-male team, physically muscular team during Quest 2.5 because it was to his advantage while the female contestants were left to be eliminated.

Let’s see how many women make it to the final as Physical 100 Season 2 airs new episodes every week. If looking for more about the series:

All Season 1 winners and eliminations | Is it scripted? | Season 1 full list of contestants | What time does Season 2 air | Who is the narrator| Season 2 contestants and cast