BTS:

Kim Junho

The second son to a happily married couple, and the youngest until they welcome their only girl just four years later. Fulfilling his wife's passion, Junho's father leaves his desk job to open a galbi restaurant, one of the many in Suwon. It doesn't stand out in the least, but at least it's the happiest place for their family.

Their restaurant starts gaining traction by the time he starts high school, and his free time somehow keeps disappearing without him noticing. If he’s not helping out at the restaurant, he comes home to sticky notes stuck to the fridge: There’s leftovers so reheat them before eating; leave some for your sister! Your brother’s busy studying for his college entrance exam, so don’t make a lot of noise. (He can’t complain even if he wanted to.)

Do you want to be a star? is an offer and opportunity that seemingly comes out of nowhere, the casting agent’s business card already in his hands before his brain can start processing the situation. The next thing Junho knows, he’s whisked away to some fancy café while the agent talks his ear off about the famous company. He can barely believe it — him, a celebrity?

How does someone who didn’t have much interest in the entertainment industry become a trainee? How can the company accept someone who doesn’t have half the desperation these other trainees have? Did he have connections or was it just plain luck? Junho understands where they’re coming from, sure, but wasn’t he accepted as a trainee because they saw something in him?

Sore muscles and pain relief patches become the new norm, and so does staying back at the practice room for one last song and being the only one there. When he goes back home after a while, his sister jokes that he stinks of sweat now instead of smoke.

Song Hakjin

The new name is hard to get used to, like wearing newly bought shoes that don’t fit as well as they should; uncomfortable and leaves you with blisters. A staff convinces him otherwise; it’s a high-quality product that’ll last you years. An investment if you will. All you need is to break them in. Lots of actors have stage names, so how is this any different? Or would you rather search your name and have the comedian’s face come up instead?

[+24, −493] 헐~ KN really knows how to choose their idols. Just look at Song Hakjin… He doesn’t know how to sing or dance. It’s not wrong to say he debuted purely because of his pretty face. F*ck… If it’s that easy to become an idol then maybe I should audition too ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ

Days turn into weeks, and weeks turn into months before he realises how deep of a hole he’s already in. MY*MYND already has thousands (maybe millions?) of fans locally and internationally. It takes him a while to accept that there are people out there who support him despite his shortcomings. That they love seeing him improving step by step throughout the years if the comments on their most recent performance video count for anything.

Song Hakjin’s foray into acting comes as a surprise to some, but it’s not completely unexpected. Beating out several other actors at the audition for one of the lead roles, though? That’s when he asks the manager if he’s pulling his leg. (He's just doing his job, Hakjin.)

BTS:

On the lawn: a delegation of house staff furiously scurrying from one side of the estate to another, chatter and blurred bodies framed by a verdant courtyard and the lingering scent of acacia up until the very moment you’re dropped and sent tumbling onto open grass to a wash of silence and thunderous black.

The accident is followed by a prompt dismissal. Unlike most household matters, this, along with the fact you wouldn’t feed for months nor talk for years after, along with several other guilt-trippers out of your control, make up the small sliver of information you are privy to.

Your parents are cultivars, and you a rogue seed. A sprout lives one door down who happens to talk quite a lot and quite well. He understands the importance of the estate and the legacy much better than you do so it’s only natural the cultivars invest in his hearty crop. Luckily, you are self-sufficient in other ways—namely keeping yourself occupied. On most days you photosynthesize by your window with a book and bouncing leg. On days you have the house to yourself you turn the living room television on full blast and skip through sunlit hallways at 120 beats per minute.

They send you up north with your brother when he matriculates. It’s oddly serendipitous. You take well to the city’s stark individualism and existentialist creed. Where you see the limits of your life in greenhouse Gyeongju, you are limitless, sleek, sky-scraping steel-blue potential here. Your appetite spikes.

Eat, digest, excrete, eat, digest, excrete, eat, digest,

“MY*MYND (Korean: 마이마인드) is a South Korean boy band formed by KN Entertainment. The group consists of five members: [Omitted], DJ, [Omitted], [Omitted], and [Omitted]. They debuted on May 15, 2015, with the single ‘Good Bye Bye’.”

You still laugh every time you read it, mostly from disbelief it took them two years to remember what your group was called.

These days you’re swamped. Correction: you’ve been swamped for the past three years since the group took off in earnest, your most recent finally petering into a manageable asymptotic state. Now you have more rest days than you can count and no matter how many profiles you fill out claiming how much you enjoy sleeping or eating or insert-perceived-lazy-activity you are a restless creature and the freedom of unadulterated leisure is paralyzing. So you spend it revisiting frayed memories in writing, only to find yourself disconcerted by your own mind’s creeping bias: the way it dredges up memories of old in rose-tinted hues and those of new in stale grey.