sugar n' spice

posted on : 8/26/2025

Picture it: The year is 2018. Mydol rookies, officially named ANGELGIRLS18, were in full swing, and rumors were flying around left and right that Mydol was finally debuting a new girl group after the Emphasis disaster.

Eighteen girls. Five spots. Two already secured by the fan favorites, Baebi and Chloe Lee, another most likely promised to nearly I.O.I member, Klara Blix, every girl in that practice room was fighting for their life.

ANGELGIRLS18 LINE UP. TOP ROW: JUNG YOONAH, CHLOE LEE, YOO "BLISS" MIRAE, KLARA BLIX, KIM SENA, REYNA CRUZ. SECOND ROW: PIPER JEON, LONDYN DILLION, SANOUK "HEAVEN" RITTHIRONG, LIU WEI, OAKDA IORI, MA TAERI. BOTTOM ROW: YOO EUNBYEOL, CINDY "JANIE" JONES, MELISSA LOPEZ, BYUN EUNHAE, MESA "EVE" NATHA.

This was a stacked trainee lineup. Every member had an updated account, and the public was obsessed, even begging for Angelico to debut all eighteen of the girls together because they just couldn't picture a lineup with only five members. But Angelico was headstrong on debuting only the top five.

While ANGELGIRLS18 didn't have an official ranking system, fans would often stream their favorite members' vlogs, which, yes, every girl posted a vlog once a week; the content for this group was insane, in hopes of proving their popularity and getting them into the final lineup.

However, there was a fan-favorite duo that stood out the most.

Sena Kim and Renya Cruz.

These two were inseparable. The duo people were on their knees begging Angelico to debut together because of how close they were. During one of their monthly evaluation documentaries, Sena would express how much Reyna meant to her.

"With both of us being from America and not having any family to go back to, we became each other's family. I love every girl here, but Reyna is different. I feel like she was meant to be my sister." And Reyna would return the sentiment, expressing to the camera with tears in her eyes, "In all my time as a trainee, I've never bonded with someone like I have with Sena. I just...can't picture this life without her, like, she's so special to me. I want to dance with her until we're old and wrinkly."

Then, the last evaluation documentary video was posted. Typically, the videos would be around 30 minutes long, featuring a performance from each trainee and a mini interview. With this being the last one, fans were anxious to see what the girls were going to give as their final act before their possible debut.

Reyna wasn't featured in the video. Instead, a black screen with text that read:

"After careful consideration, we have decided to release Reyna from ANGELGIRLS18 due to repeated attendance issues.

We thank her for her efforts and wish her success in her future endeavors."

Fans were stunned, angry, and confused, but there was no one to listen to the frustrations because, well, ANGELGIRLS18 was over. The final lineup had been chosen, and Reyna wasn't in it.

A month later, the Venus lineup would be announced. To long-time ANGELGIRLS18 followers, the lineup was no shock. Baebi, Chloe Lee, Bliss, and Klara were the most highly speculated members, with it always being a tie between either Sena or Reyna to secure the fifth spot. While many were happy to see Sena debut, they noticed something that made them feel...off.

Reyna, her alleged found sister, was silent. Nowhere to be seen. Even when the girls posed with former ANGELGIRLS18 members at their debut showcase, Reyna was absent; she wasn't even in the crowd, according to fan sites.

Speculation ran rampant in the small trainee sphere, with theories circulating about a disagreement between Sena and Reyna that would ultimately end their friendship. But most of these theories stayed in a niche part of the internet. After all, Sena was growing to be a top-tier idol, and Reyna was, presumably, still an Angelico trainee.

That was until September 22nd, 2021, when Reyna would create a YouTube account with the user "reynavision" and would post a video titled "my nda is up. here's the truth." the same day.

The 36-minute-long, now-deleted video would recount Reyna's tough time as an Angelico trainee.

"People always joke about idol diets, but it wasn’t a joke. We were weighed twice a week, sometimes more if Jinhwa was in a mood. If we gained even half a kilo, we’d get shamed in front of the other girls. My meals were basically chicken breast, boiled vegetables, and sometimes a sweet potato if I was lucky. If they caught me sneaking food, I’d get docked practice hours, which just put me behind everyone else. [...] There were cameras literally everywhere. And I don’t mean just for the documentaries. There were cameras in the hallways, cameras in the practice rooms, cameras in the cafeteria. Everything we did was recorded, and if you said the wrong thing or complained, it would get back to the higher-ups. We were told straight up, ‘You don’t get privacy until you’re worth money.’ [...] Angelico made sure we never felt safe with each other. They’d post rankings on the wall every week, and if your name wasn’t in the top three, you were basically invisible. They’d compare our weight, our vocals, our skin, our everything. So yeah, a lot of us fought. A lot of us hated each other at one point or another. And then they’d film us pretending to be best friends. [...] They’d feed us lines, tell us who to sit next to, what to say, when to cry. If you didn’t give them drama, they’d cut your screen time."

But everyone already knew this about Angelico. It was basically their marketing tactic to have the most intense trainee program in Kpop to turn out the best of the best idols, but the real bomb drop moment was when Reyna would go into the details of why she was kicked out.

"Okay, so let me just tell you the truth because I’m so sick of people saying, ‘Oh, Reyna was lazy, Reyna was late, Reyna didn’t work hard enough.’ Like, no. I worked my ass off every single day. I bled for that company. I starved for that company. I lost myself for that company. And I was told the very last evaluation? It was between me and Sena for that final spot in Venus. Just me and her. So what happens? Sena looks me dead in the eye and tells me the evaluation is at 3PM. I trusted her. She was my sister, right? I show up early, 2:45, hair slicked back, makeup done, ready to go, and the whole fucking room is empty. Empty. Because the evaluation was at 10:00 a.m. Ten. She had already gone, they had already marked me absent, and they didn’t even let me speak. That was it. Done. Cut. And yeah, I had been late a couple of times before, okay? A couple. Not proud of it, but when you’re surviving off half a sweet potato and four hours of sleep, sometimes you’re gonna miss the bus. [...] At first, I thought it was a mistake. I was like, maybe I heard her wrong, maybe I wrote it down wrong. But no. No. I found out later she knew the time. She knew the whole damn time. She lied to me. She set me up because she wanted that spot, and guess what? She got it. Congratulations, Sena. You got your dream. Hope you sleep well at night."

The video exploded. Within hours of being posted, clips of her rant about Sena were shared on TikTok, Discord servers, and stan forums. Long-time ANGELGIRLS18 followers said it confirmed everything they suspected but were too afraid to voice. For newer fans, it was the first time they’d ever heard Reyna’s name, and they were stunned that such a central figure in Venus’s predebut story had been erased so thoroughly.

Angelico moved fast. By the end of the second week, Reyna’s video was scrubbed from YouTube, with copyright strikes reportedly issued by Angelico Entertainment. Re-uploads of the video disappeared almost as quickly as they went up, with Constellations accused of working overtime alongside Angelico staff to bury the story. Threads were mass-reported, fancams and edits drowned out critical hashtags, and anyone questioning Sena’s integrity on Twitter often found themselves brigaded by stans spamming fancams of Sena or ratioed into going private.

But not everything could be erased. Even non-fans were captivated by the drama of a best-friendship turned sabotage, with some dubbing it “the darkest pre-debut betrayal since the Produce48 rigging scandal.”

Sena, meanwhile, was not untouched. Though Angelico never issued an official statement addressing Reyna’s claims, the comments under Sena’s Instagram posts from late 2021 to mid-2022 were flooded with snakes, clown emojis, and demands for her to apologize. During livestreams, fans would sneak in questions like “Do you miss Reyna?” or “Why did you lie about the evaluation?” only to see them ignored or deleted in real time.

To this day, Sena has never publicly acknowledged Reyna, much less apologized to her.

So what does this say about Sena’s character?

On the surface, it paints her as cold, manipulative, and willing to betray the one person who called her a sister just to secure her own debut. And for many people, that’s exactly how the story landed. The betrayal was too sharp, too personal, for people not to assign her the role of villain.

But the longer the video circulated, the more the conversation shifted. At the time of the final evaluation, Sena was only sixteen, possibly seventeen, depending on how you counted her birthday. A teenage girl, stuck in Angelico’s notoriously brutal training system, with everything she’d ever worked for on the line.

Fans and even casual viewers began pointing out that Sena wasn’t acting in a vacuum; she was acting under the weight of a company that deliberately pitted girls against each other, withheld food, sleep, and support, and told them daily that their dreams were just one mistake away from vanishing.

In that light, Sena’s actions, while obviously fucked up, became less about inherent malice and more about survival. Angelico fostered an environment where sabotage wasn’t an exception; it was almost expected. If she hadn’t secured her spot, maybe it would have been her on the outside, posting a rant video years later instead of standing on stage with Venus.

Even Reyna, in parts of her rant, hinted at understanding the pressure Sena was under, saying at one point: “I don’t think she was born evil. I know she wasn't. I think Angelico made her that way.”

The nuance didn’t erase the sting of the betrayal, but it complicated the narrative to some.

So maybe the real villain wasn’t Sena at all. Maybe it was the system that led her to make the choice. Angelico built a machine where kindness was a weakness, where friendship was a lever, and where survival sometimes meant sacrificing the very people you loved most. Sena and Reyna were two teenage girls practically thrown into the K-pop Hunger Games, and no amount of love between them was going to save them from this fate.

While Sena will likely carry the stain of that choice forever, the truth is that Angelico created the storm. The girls were just trying not to drown in it.

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POSTED ... DECEMBER 12TH 2021

It’s  been  almost  six  years  since  EMPHASIS  faded  from  the  K-pop  scene,  but  a  new  trademark  application  by  Mydol  Entertainment  has  Sweetpeas  and  curious  netizens buzzing.

On  December  12,  industry  insiders  noticed  that  Mydol  Entertainment  officially  reapplied  for  the  “EMPHASIS”  trademark,  covering  usage  for  musical  recordings,  entertainment  services,  and  merchandising.  The  news  comes  nearly  a  decade  after  the  group’s  2014  debut  and  over  six  years  after  their  quiet  disbandment  in  March  2016.

While  neither  Mydol  nor  any  former  members  have  commented,  fans  are  already  speculating  about  the  purpose  behind  the  filing.  Could  this  be  the  start  of  a  long-awaited  reunion  comeback?  Or  is  Mydol  preparing  to  relaunch  the  brand  with  an  entirely  new  lineup,  perhaps  as  a  rebranded  girl  group  paying  homage  to  the  once-beloved  name?

For  those  unfamiliar,  EMPHASIS  was  a  short-lived  but  impactful  girl  group  under  Angelico  Entertainment,  initially  intended  to  be  a  “sister  group”  to  powerhouse  boy  group  PRIORITY.  Debuting  with  a  unique  dual-concept  format,  they  quickly  stood  out  in  the  crowded  2014  girl  group  landscape.

Their  debut  mini  album  EMPRINTSIS  gave  fans  the  infectious  “Feel  Special”  and  the  bubbly  “Du  Du  Du!”  while  their  sophomore  release  EMFACT  delivered  two  of  their  biggest  hits,  “FANCY”  and  “LOVE  BOMB!”  The  latter  comeback  was  a  breakout  success,  making  their  sudden  year-long  hiatus  and  eventual  disbandment  all  the  more  puzzling.

Following  their  official  goodbye  single,  “Pinky  Swear”,  EMPHASIS  seemingly  vanished  from  K-pop  history.  Angelico  quietly  removed  most  of  their  content,  leaving  only  official  MVs  online.  Over  time,  the  group  developed  a  “nugu  but  not  nugu”  legacy:  not  unknown,  but  never  fully  given  the  chance  to  become  the  household  name  they  could  have  been.

The  members  have  since  gone  in  wildly  different  directions, some  thriving  as  soloists  or  in  new  groups  (like  BAEBI,  Piper  of  Sugar  n’  Spice,  and  Chaewon  of  PRIMADONNA),  others  leaving  the  idol  industry  entirely  for  acting,  streaming,  or  behind-the-scenes  work.

What  do  you  think,  Sweetpeas?  Is  this  a  reunion,  a  reboot,  or  just  a  business  move?

[+1,234,  -56]  If  it’s  not  OT10,  then  what’s  the  point?  😭

[+987,  -42]  if  this  means  the  girls  have  to  work  with  jinhwa  again  count  me  out  keep  them  far  away  from  that  man

[+984,  -65]  let’s  not  forget  angelico  literally  lied  about  mijoo’s  age  so  she  could  debut  at  13…  disgusting

[+854,  -38]  sweetpeas  do  not  let  nostalgia  make  you  forget  how  badly  they  were  treated

[+812,  -65]  Watch  it  just  be  a  rookie  girl  group  using  the  name  for  clout  🙄

[+609,  -21]  Sweetpeas,  we  might  be  EATING  after  6  years  omg

[+588,  -30]  The  fact  Angelico  erased  them  from  history  still  pisses  me  off.

[+551,  -44]  yall  are  crazy  if  you  think  jinhwa  is  letting  akiko  step  foot  in  the  mydol  building  😭

[+477,  -25]  If  they’re  relaunching  Emphasis  I  hope  it’s  to  give  the  girls  the  send-off  they  deserved.

[+420,  -18]  ot10  or  nothing  but  even  then  they  deserve  better  than  a  nostalgia  cash  grab

[+399,  -15]  priority  getting  to  live  while  emphasis  had  to  die...my  first  kpop  heartbreak

[+375,  -12]  if  this  turns  out  to  be  a  rebrand  with  rookies  rip  to  the  real  emphasis

[+355,  -12]  I  will  boycott  if  Akiko  isn’t  included  tbh.

[+299,  -19]  priority  stans  need  to  sit  this  one  out  yall  were  weird  back  then  and  you’re  still  weird  now

[+268,  -14]  If  it’s  just  a  trademark  renewal  for  business  purposes…I’ll  cry

[+241,  -11]  if  this  is  a  reunion  i  hope  priority  isn’t  anywhere  near  them  those  “collab  stages”  were  creepy  af

a    set    of    headcanon    questions    based    around    platonic    development    ,    such    as    best    friends    or    a    group    of    friends    .    send    a    pink    emoji    to    explore    more    about    your    platonic    dynamics    .

a small edit featuring fic girls in the tag 💞

girls featured . . . @snspice + @asphodolls + @rannie-moon + @venusvity + @faairycore + @mazeofyeni + @veloursangel + @gnarlyyy + @inter-stellar-jyp + @pinkshaus + @alwaysvivid + @seonsdiary

PARTY4U  is  the  second  pre-debut  single  of  the  up-and-coming  MYDOL  girl  group,  G-GIRLZ.  They  would  promote  the  digital  single  for  three  weeks  as  well  as  their  previously  released  track,  GNARLY.

Yes,  finally,  after  two  months  of  heavy  speculation  and  leaks  online,  G-GIRLZ  finally  revealed  their  official  group  name  and  debut  date  at  the  end  of  their  PARTY4U  music  video...

As  you  can  imagine,  stan  twitter  had  a  lot  to  say  about  it!

TAKE A SCREENSHOT TO GET YOUR PARTY4U PC!

“We  didn’t  storyboard  it.  We  built  a  house  and  let  the  night  unfold.”  —  Son  Roan,  MV  Director,  on  filming  “party4u”

The  "party4u"  MV  isn’t  structured  like  a  traditional  music  video.  It’s  a  voyeuristic,  damn  near  clusterfuck,  drift  through  a  house  that  feels  like  the  center  of  the  universe  for  exactly  one  night.  The  camera  is  your  only  guide,  tipsy  and  uninvited,  always  a  few  seconds  late  to  the  drama.  There’s  no  plot,  but  there  are  stories.

Shot  mostly  handheld,  with  a  grain  filter  and  blown-out  lighting,  the  video  follows  a  single  continuous  motion  through  the  rooms  of  a  party  you’ve  seen  on  TV  before:  sweaty,  messy,  and  a  little  bit  sad.

“Each  member  of  TACK13  has  their  own  arc,  but  none  of  them  get  a  resolution.  That’s  the  point.”

ੈ✩‧₊˚༺☆༻ੈ✩‧₊˚ ꒰ ❛ G-GIRLZ via TIKTOK ! ❜ ꒱

.ﾟ۪ ♡ ۫  ...      CAPTION READS: @snspice back at it with my i.o.i twinnie <33 #MIKA #SNS #GGIRLZ #NAVI

.ﾟ۪ ♡ ۫  ...      comment section !

[ @IO1HEARTCORE ] : no bc seeing mika and navi on my fyp in 2025 like this??? tears ❥ 4.0k

[ @PICKMEPICKME ] : the power these two still hold after all these years… unreal ❥ 3.6k

[ @LUNARIXREUNION ] : I.O.I forever means i lose it every time they link up ❥ 3.3k

[ @NAVI48TRAUMA ] : they still have that same chemistry like it’s 2016 again ❥ 3.1k

[ @SWEETTANAVI ] : navi’s smile when mika turns to her i’m gonna cry ❥ 2.9k

[ @M1KALINES ] : this made me pull up the “very very very” mv so fast ❥ 2.7k

[ @NOKIACALLS ] : never got my i.o.i comeback but this healed something in me ❥ 2.5k

[ @SECONDGENSTAN97 ] : it's sooo weird they're not 13 anymore 😭 ❥ 2.4k

⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ NA MINJUNG

　　　　ೃ⁀➷ NAMI is a member of south-korean fictional girl group SUGAR N' SPICE. she made her debut in the group on april 30th, 2024 under MYDOL ENTERTAINMENT after a previous member left the group to live a regular life. she has been in the public eye twice before, with her original experience coming from participating in the survival show IDOL SCHOOL, where she finished the show in 16th place. after the show she joined WM ENTERTAINMENT and then was sent on another survival show, PRODUCE 48. she finished this show ranked 11th and made her debut in the final temporary girl group, IZ*ONE, in 2018. after the group disbanded, she went back to training before the opportunity to redebut was given to her.

・❥・⠀ exploring the story of being a known but unknown face, never feeling like she fits in, found family, rough family life, constantly feeling inadequate, extreme jealousy, trying to overcome trauma, and wanting to show who she really is to the world.

𝓣ik-tok on the clock, but the party ͟don't stop !