Luhan, Kris, and two others are now out of the CCTV New Year’s Gala, supposedly as part of regular cuts due to time constraints, according to Sina. However, it’s understandably been heavily rumored that the recent press assault by SM Entertainment led CCTV to decide to not want to deal with anybody associated with controversy.

In retrospect, no matter if SME’s PR doesn’t help them legally, this was a clever maneuver to get the historically conservative show (sort of like the Kohaku of China, I guess) to not want to bother with any of the drama. Furthermore, it allows SME to media play the shit out of this in Korea and say that they’ve won or whatever else. The downside, like has been mentioned before, is if the Chinese companies backing the duo don’t take much of a liking to this and attempt to strike back somehow, so we’ll see on that front.

In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t mean that much since SME still haven’t filed any legal stuff like I really wanted. But for a while there, this was looking a lot less like the SME/TVXQ/JYJ clusterfuck of years ago, and a lot more like a one-sided victory for Kris/Luhan. Now that SME has struck some kind of successful blow, maybe this leads to the fireworks down the road we all want.

Here’s hoping.