#lance kim

Everything Lance has done in his life has been out of spite.

He was born in New Jersey, to low-income immigrants of South Korea. They didn’t have much, but they had each other, and Lance is the man he is today thanks to his dad. One piece of advice in particular has always stuck with him– “If someone says you can’t do something, flip them off and do it anyway”. It’s something he lives his life by.

A kid in middle school said that boys can’t have piercings? Lance showed up the next week with his ears pierces. In high school, someone told him he was too young for tattoos? He got a stick and poke one on his hip a few days later. Everyone tells him he’ll never graduate high school? He graduates two years early, through help from online classes and summer school, passing with straight B’s and bringing both his average and work ethic up exponentially to do so. His mom tells him he doesn’t have the language skills or cultural awareness to live in South Korea? He learns Korean from a tutor and reads up on Korean culture, preparing to move there someday just to prove her wrong.

It’s amazing how someone’s life choices– huge choices– can be influenced by other people, and Lance is an unorthodox example of that. Hell, even his career was influenced by someone telling him he couldn’t do it. Told that pro wrestling is stupid and fake and he’s too skinny and scrawny to do it anyway? He spends hours working out and getting in ~peak fitness~, attends a six month intensive at a pro wrestling gym, and works a few indie shows, just to show he can.

It was while on a trip to watch Wrestlemania one year that Lance met Junghoon. He doesn’t even remember how (it was probably in a bar), but they clicked immediately, and started bonding on shared hobbies and interests. And somewhere along the line, they had the idea for a tag team.

And when he told his mom about it, she said it was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. So he did it anyway, moving to Seoul so he and Junghoon could get to work. 

Now in MPWA, they’re known as The Alternates-- a comedy tag team that kinda gets treated like jobbers, but Lance doesn’t mind. He knows they’re entertaining to watch, and he knows that every promotion needs a lower tier team to help get high tier teams over. He’s just vibing.