don't wait for me

ren's dad is an incredibly famous chinese actor, though he's lowk just as famous for going through wives like it's going out of style as he is for his movies. ren is the only kid of wife number three, an up and coming actress that had starred in the same movie as his dad and started their relationship there.

ren had three older half siblings but they were all 13+ years older than him so he never really got to know them well. he also has a baby half brother who is ten years old. all of which to say ren was functionally an only child growing up.

ren's parents were always gone for their respective acting careers but they put ren in pretty much every lesson known to man kind: dancing, singing, acting, wushu, violin, piano you name it and ren's parents were probably paying for those lessons. of course they never showed up to ren's recitals or competitions for those things but ren swears that he was totally fine with that. he had his grandparents after all (maternal grandparents because his dad's parents were long gone).

he would never admit it out loud but the kid was incredibly fucking lonely growing up. he longed for a more normal life or at least someone he could talk to who weren't his grandparents. things got really bad when ren's parents eventually split (dad had to go for wife number four and mom decided she'd gotten enough clout). so ren did the only thing he could think of, he ran away to a foreign country at thirteen to become a trainee at a kpop company.

he spent five years at his first company, working hard to debut but never quite proving to the trainers there that he was "ready" for debut. it really ran him down. ren very nearly gave up and went back to china and then he ran into a scout for dsn who invited him to audition. so ren did and he blew the judges away enough that they very quickly funneled him into the plans for their new boygroup (which would turn out to be riiot).

and then the ren was named the leader of the group. and that activated his perfectionism gene. ren knew that being a foreigner was going to work against him so he became kind of a hardass. he runs riiot like it's the navy, it's ren's way or the highway. but as hard as he can be on his groupmates he's about fifteen times harder on himself. fans have a little bit of a love-hate relationship with ren's strictness or rather the people who like him view it as a virtue and the people who don't like him view it as bullying.

as for the truth: ren adores riiot. that's why he's so hard on them at times, because he genuinely only wants the best for the group and his groupmates. the problem is he really is terribly awkward at expressing himself and his affection. think of him as your emotionally constipated dad who'll slug you on the shoulder and awkwardly tell you "chin up, sport" when you're emotional about something. basically he's trying his damnedest but he's just so awkward at it.

he's working on lightening up now that riiot is a bit older. he'll play around with his groupmates more now and even be a little bit silly. he's unsurprisingly got a lot of control issues and probably will work himself into an early grave at the rate he's going. but he's not unfair or malicious and is the first person to step up and defend his groupmates when he thinks the company officials or the public are being unfair to them. truthfully he's probably even scarier about defending his group than he is about leading them.