#* | character development.

now she knows her purpose had been to earn a few extra tips (or a few tips at all) out of the mere appeal of the cuteness of a five year-old girl, but at the time, she’d made herself a star in her own mind.

at the end of the night, whatever measly offerings they’d gotten would be split between her dad and his bandmates. they had a deal to rotate who got the largest portion when the total couldn’t be split evenly, something that happened more often than not, but in retrospect, she thinks her dad got the benefit more often than the others. her cuteness must have worked on them, too.

back then, she hadn’t understood that when she begged him to use his tips on the way home to buy odeng or tteokbokki on the way home, her greed had been getting the best of her.

she looks back on it now and wishes she could scold the little girl who hadn’t fully grasped the reason her parents sometimes didn’t join their children to eat a meal or why they visited the seven thousand won buffet that let them sneak home leftovers so often even after she got bored of their dull food.

when she talks to her dad now, he never brings up her young greed. instead, he congratulates her on her mini-concert when she calls him to check in that morning. she can’t talk for long; she’s on the way to the salon when they talk, but she knows she won’t hear from her mom and she doubts her brother or sister remember, so she savors what she can get.

it’s not a full-blown concert. there are no fancy stage effects since so many concerts are crammed into such a short time, and she only has two songs of her own out anyway, but it’s her first solo concert after twelve years and it feels like a crown in its own way, even if many who have been around a much shorter time are also holding their own mini-concert for the series.

though the set is less than twenty minutes, she’s been in the studio practicing like it’s a two hour show. 

success isn’t foreign to mirae, even if she’s been told she works like it is. from some perspectives, success had been handed to her on a silver platter and, as such, unaffected aloofness is expected from her. some still perceive her to have such a quality on mere expectation alone.

for all she’s painted in strokes of effortlessly confident, enviable ‘cool girl’, un-wanting to try is one thing she isn’t.

she’s starkly aware of how critical the current moment in her life is. she’s watched squid game’s achievements almost religiously. there’s alerts set on her phone for any big news that comes out under squid game’s topic and she’s been playing the social media game so as not to waste the influx of millions of new followers to her instagram. if the spotlight from squid game alone weren’t enough, gashina has only made it that much brighter domestically.

it’s a new type of pressure she’s never really felt before from any of her individual acting endeavors or modeling, that it’s on her whether she flies or falls from here. there’s been meeting after meeting with management and a&r about what the next steps are and they’ve only grown in number since the mid-september drop of squid game. with her next drama postponed, it’s been script after script sent her way — more than ever before now that the chance of casting her means the hope of some of squid game’s attention rubbing off on her next project — and auditions that for the most part haven’t felt like the next right step. a&r makes a point of how global music can go. it’s easier to capitalize on the global music market and build her profile from there, they claim. gashina’s well-loved by global k-pop fans, so if they aim for a more general public with an english-language single, she has a lot of potential. in the meetings, she nods in silent agreement, but calculates in her head how to be seen as a multi-hyphenate instead of a one-hit wonder.

she’d once worried about being cornered into the label of only being an actor, but now there are forces in all directions saying which next step is the best, and none of the opinions seem to overlap well enough to blend them together into some masterful chess move of her own.

there’s a unique mix of annoyance and bubbling anxiety she walks out of the room with when the meeting comes to an uncomfortable close. they may not have said anything, but mirae has little doubt the talk they’ve been warned of will be true, at least in part. if someone had it out for gold star, faked tax evasion would be too easily cleared to be a good method of dirtying their name.

it’s not news to her that the rich are greedy to keep ahold of their money. she’s known it since childhood and, in her adulthood, she’s brushed shoulders with more than a few people she’s sure loved what their financial power could let them get away with to retain that power. she’s even dated one or two, so there’s no claim she can make of doe-eyed naivety, but that doesn’t make it any better a look when people find out.

her company is supposed to be the last thing she’s worried about throwing a wrench into a good publicity run, and with squid game growing more popular by the day, she’s supposed to be in the spotlight for her work, not for the dirty dealings of a company she’s stood by every day for over a decade.