#* | solos.

by many accounts, selene should have aged out of the idol spotlight by now. there’s something of an expectation that girl groups aren’t meant to be active into their thirties, that they’ll take on a role considered more dignified. but selene isn’t her stepping stone; it’s her foundation.

and that’s why she feels no annoyance entering the studio after a long day of shooting. fatigue lingers at the edges of her consciousness and on the surface of her muscles, but it’s kept at bay by the commitment she’s made and plans to continue making.

when she slides the headphones over her head and flips through the papers of lyrics in front of her, it’s returning to a comfort zone she’s knowingly pushed herself outside of more in the past year or two. and as much as she’ll laud the progress that’s made in trying something new, there’s no denying the calm confidence that comes with familiarity.

“this is really the fourth mini-album in a year. anyone who didn’t know would think you’re rookies,” comes the voice from the other side of the glass fronting the recording booth.

“in forty years when we’re releasing our fiftieth mini-album, this will practically be our rookies days,” mirae counters with a broad grin. forty years is too far off, she knows. the human body isn’t meant for dancing so often for so long, and even if selene’s choreographies aren’t known for being the hardest in the industry, she can’t imagine her seventy year-old knees will take well to them.

selene are seniors within the landscape of active groups, but if their four seasons, four colors project has proved anything, it’s that their seniority has only made them more capable.

she only has one song out, and only one more will come before the end of the year. she doesn’t have enough for a mini-set at a festival, so the fact that they’re considering her at all leaves two options for what the concerts might consist of. either they’re a series of small, festival-like stages with a list of performers to go on for each, or they’ll want her to do something else to film the time. entertain in fanmeeting-fashion or do covers.

whatever it is exactly, she’s though through her different options and come up with her answers and conditions for each. the answer part is easy enough. yes. she wants to get on a stage on her own some place that isn’t a music show and get the experience under her belt some of those younger than her do in spades already because they’d gone all in on the solo music while she’d been building up her resume of acting and modeling gigs.

an email is forward to her with more information a couple of days before the meeting and her suspicions are confirmed. mini-concerts, she’ll have to do a few covers if she’s to perform to pad out the set list to the minimum time they’ve set to justify a ticket price. she crafts a list of possible covers on her phone while she’s at the salon that day. boyfriend is an obvious one, since it’d been well received by her fans when it’d gone up on the base youtube account earlier in the year. copycat comes up early on the list as well. she already has it prepared from her youtube, but her fans haven’t seen it in person yet.

she wants to perform something no one’s seen yet as well and she adds and then removes ideas from the list for a while until she narrows her options down to a few hits from the idol soloists she’d grown up seeing on television. from there, it’s a matter of deciding what side she wants to show. nothing too simperingly sexy, but it has to fit the mood of the rest of the set list as well.

10 minutes becomes the final contender and she saves the list in her notes to write down or print out later. 

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.

she can’t imagine it’s anything negative. squid game is doing leagues better than even she could have predicted with her confidence in the project, and saebyeok has amassed popularity of her own already. mirae’s instagram followers have risen a staggering amount and that may not be everything, but it sure meant a lot when it came to brand offers coming her way and the fee she could charge for them. she can only see the meeting being good news for her, and yet she prepares herself for the worst as well so she won’t be caught off guard.

when she enters the meeting room at gold star, she’s met with a woman she can’t remember having ever crossed paths with before. she must be a new hire, mirae figures, but grows suspicious that she hasn’t been set up with the same a&r reps she worked with on bloom and gashina.

the reason quickly becomes apparent when the woman introduces herself as one of gold star’s global promotion liaisons. from there, it doesn’t take much work to come to the conclusion that gold star has seen the attention she’s getting and wants to hold onto it in more than just the acting field.

the woman explains just that.

“ggashina just came out, but we want to look forward to new opportunities that have opened up for you. gold star has been fielding completely english demos mostly for our younger groups since selene has such strong groundwork laid in korea, but there’s potential and demand for you right now with squid game doing so well abroad and your profile rising.”

she continues to tell mirae they’ve already collected a few demos for her to listen to, and that they want to do something blending what she’s already shown and repackage it for an english-speaking audience. the information comes with a slideshow of formulated concept ideas and plans, and mirae notes mentally that she’d never had this quick of turnaround for her projects before.

instead of letting any resentment fester about that, she agrees as quickly as the idea is presented. investment presented without having to ask for it isn’t something she’ll take for granted.

base academy is good in theory. she can’t fault allowing passionate young people to learn and grow their passion for performance, but it isn’t that simple. an academy requires a pass, and a pass requires getting through pesky gates like money and connections. she’d never trained at an academy, much less one she’s sure has exorbitantly high fees for its direct pathway to three coveted companies. there’s no way she could have paid for it. not with her parents’ meager savings or the even more meager earnings she got from being a fitting model after her agency took more than half in the name of training her up to be a professional on a runway.

moves like this make for an industry even more flooded with bored rich kids than it already is.

her reflections aren’t enough for her to turn down a paid position hosting a workshop at the very academy, but they are enough for her to counter with an offer to film something in the movie theater instead. it will be original for her to dance anywhere other than a dance studio, anyway.

the idea is mostly her own, with some help from her trusted choreographer who also comes up with a piece for her on short notice that works around the space limitation of the chosen location. 

after an evening spent at the salon to get extensions put in and her nails painted red to match her boots, mirae heads to the culture complex with her team after dark. when there aren’t people packed wall-to-wall for a party, it’s more obvious how needlessly big everything is. 

it’s another hour before everything is set up for the shoot, and mirae is ushered away from her position in the hallway outside the theater, chatting to her choreographer, who she’d brought along for any last minute adjustments needed for the cameras to get the right shots. 

filling the space without knocking into anything is harder than she’d anticipated when she’d only had taped lines on the floor in the practice room to simulate how much room she’d have to dance. she bumps her ankle on the bottom of a chair more than once before a break is called and she brings her choreographer in to re-work some of the problem spots.