Welcome

Hasun’s childhood was quick and uneventful as far as he is concerned. Parents hardly around, more focused on money than family, grades that never soared but didn’t fall. The only thing that ever stands out to him when he looks back is the slight bullying for a blue eye caused by heterochromia but that had been solved after a few harsh words and sharp hits. A boring life for a seemingly boring person. It wasn’t until he left home, at sixteen, that Hasun found any passion in life. Moving from a small town to the streets of Seoul maybe should have come as a bigger shock to the system but it never fully settled in for Hasun. Not until he got his first glimpse of street dancers.

He’d danced before, it had been fun as a child, one of his aunts paying for the odd lesson here and there but it was mostly him on his own in a cramped bedroom. There had always been the knowledge in the back of his head that he could have a career in it, that there were dancers on the television, at events, he could be one of them, but other things had seemed important. More possible.

It took four months for him to finally start indulging his interest in the hobby. He can’t help but look back and see those four months as a complete waste of life.

A year later he’d found a small street crew to join and dancing had slowly begun to eclipse thoughts of doing anything else with his life. Many liked to say that he had a natural affinity for it but Hasun never agreed, still doesn’t, he worked too hard at it all for people to just write it off as ‘coming natural’. The confidence others had in his talents though did lead to him getting scouted at the age of eighteen. Signing with a small but trustworthy company and instantly beginning to train in hopes of debut. As time went on though and Hasun saw more and more of the industry, of how idols suffered and fell he couldn’t help but pull himself out of it.

After that he was lost. He had the drive, the talent, the notoriety in the dancing scene but no where to go and no solid dream of what he wanted to do. Dancing as a whole was too broad and not dancing too heart wrenching. Eventually Hasun managed to use the limited industry connections he had to get a gig being a backup dancer for a rookie group’s showcase. Which then led him to a larger company and then a larger one after that and a larger one after that. It wasn’t until he got to Alpha Records that Hasun actually found somewhere he liked. He couldn’t really describe what it was about the place that made him so comfortable, but it worked for him and it wasn’t long until he was signing on to be a permanent choreographer and dancer for the company.

That was five years ago now and Hasun has continued to make a name for himself, even if this one is smaller than it would if he was an idol. It suits him. He mainly goes under the stage name ‘Bleu’ when he’s performing, a cheesy nickname from an ex-boyfriend that had ended up sticking over the years until everyone was calling him it.

She was an accident-- and oops child, if you will. Her parents were in their mid thirties when she was born, and their only other child was already sixteen; he wasn’t even living with them anymore. They said it was because he was pursuing being a performer, though now it’s very clear to Minseo that he wanted nothing to do with their parents, and she can tell why.

The kept her and raised her, but she was very much treated like a mistake. She was given just enough to survive and not be taken away by government agencies, while her parents went on trips and out to fancy dinners, wasting any money that their son sent back to pay his dues. The brother that, conveniently, had never been told that Minseo existed. Minseo never thought she was neglected or mistreated. She just assumed that this was how things were. Kids had to earn their keep. Adults worked hard to get where they were, and therefore got more luxuries. She was too young for it to not make sense. 

As she grew older and matured, she started to see that things were wrong. That she wasn’t being treated right, and that things weren’t okay. And it became very clear how weird it was that she’d never spoken to her brother, and that he didn’t know who she was. She’d always assumed he was just too busy to ever visit, but that didn’t make sense anymore. So when she was eleven, she used her friends’ phone (on which she’d created all her own social media accounts) to spam all of Shinwoo’s social media. She DM’d him on Twitter and Instagram. She messaged him on Facebook. She did the same to all the Alpha and TNT Official accounts too. She found his business inquiry email and spammed that, until finally he took notice, and she could explain herself.

Daewon learned to skate before he learned to walk. There was just something about being out on the ice-- moving, having the wind run through your hair. Inhaling and getting crisp, cold arena air fill up your lungs. It was his life. 

His parents supported him, so at a very young age, he started figure skating, and he was good. He had passion. He had the technique. And Daewon had the conviction and dedication to make performances entertaining. He wasn’t just doing the moves and getting points. He was performing and telling a story on the ice. It was a dance. He was an artist. 

He went on to do a lot of tournaments in his early teens, going to world grand prix’s and olympic qualifiers and placing well (or well for his age). He was the name on everyone’s lips, but that was before the injury.

Daewon still doesn’t even know what happened. He was fifteen. He was just practicing-- doing normal routines and programs that he knew inside out-- when he wiped out hard. Daewon was rushed to the hospital with a head injury, a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, and severe pain all up and down his right side. 

He eventually recovered, but he couldn’t skate. He’d done something to his ankle and putting pressure on it in the ways that figure skating required was too much. Not to mention that another wipe out like the one he’d had before would result in much worse results.

He was kind of lost before Eliza Kim found him. She saw his potential, and offered to teach him how to dance. He had the flexibility and the theatricality. All the basic skills and technique was there. He had the potential. So, under her wing, he learned to dance.

he’d be silver star’s pet project-- the son of a gifted singer, signed when he was eight years old and groomed as he grew up to be just as powerful a vocalist. silver star was nothing special (definitely couldn’t keep up with the big three), but with woohyuk under their arm, they could surely compete someday.

slowly, the pieces fell into place. more and more trainees were picked up. more and more potential members and talented performers. woohyuk was in a tricky situation-- after being homeschooled and pushed into training his whole life, he didn’t really know how to interact with most other people. what would eventually become tnt was his first real friends, and it took a long time to get there. he was awkward and strange, and got so much extra attention and care from the company, but he wanted nothing more than to connect with them and to be a unit. 

in 2012, woohyuk finally got his debut. after ten solid years of training, he was doing what he was made to do-- albeit, not quite in the way he expected. with the addition of sam, tnt had turned into more of a hip hop group, and that wasn’t how woohyuk was trained, but he adapted quickly. the group were his brothers-- his family. silver star was the mastermind behind it all. they didn’t hit success initially, but they were on their way.

woohyuk was probably hit the hardest by silver star’s betrayal of tnt. it was like finding out your uncle who was always nice to you was going to jail for money laundering-- you never really expected it, you were a bit in denial, and you had no idea how to move forward. if it wasn’t for the rest of his group, woohyuk probably would have self destructed. he didn’t know anything but performing, and had been conditioned into thinking that this was his one shot, and if it failed? he was fucked. he didn’t know what he could possibly do moving forward.

deokjun didn’t fall into being an idol through the usual routes. 

when he was growing up, he’d wanted to be a financial planner or something of the sort-- he was good with numbers and logic and wanted to help people. he was a stellar student, class president, and well liked by everyone. preppy. one of those guys. 

his first contact with the entertainment industry was an internship with alpha records as soon as he graduated when he was eighteen-- shadowing their business side and working for them. alpha hadn’t been happy with their latest round of auditions and were short a few new trainees, and upon seeing him, asked him if he could sing. and when it turned out he wasn’t half bad, they asked him to sign, and after some thought, deokjun figured why not? if he didn’t like it, he could always drop out, and his cost of living would be paid for this way. plus, plenty of idols and trainees still went to school while training.

he never expected to love it as much as he did. he found a passion for dancing, and really bonded with the other trainees, and with the environment at alpha. perhaps if he’d been anywhere but alpha, he’d’ve felt differently, but there was something about the familial bond the company had that hooked him, and before he knew it, the future he’d had all planned out slipped away. and when he was twenty, he debuted as helix’s leader.

Jisuk has always been incredibly shy. He never thought of his family as large; to him it was always just his grandmother, parents, sisters, and older brothers, all eight of them crowded under one small roof. Their house in Seoul was small, but when he was a child it seemed to Jisuk that this was just because that was how they were meant to live, not because they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.

As he got older, his family’s financial struggles became more obvious to him. They barely had enough food to put on the table, his parents were always off somewhere working as much as they could, as were some of his sibling as soon as they were old enough to find work. Jisuk had always thought of this as normal, but his classmates at school were always quick to remind him that he was the only one on the first day of every school year wearing one of his brother’s old uniform and not one that was spotless and new like theirs.

Though this was not the only reason Jisuk was so unpopular at school, it was certainly one of them. To his peers, Jisuk was always too shy, too quiet, too weird for preferring hip hop artists like Andrew Woo, Snake, and Hyuk over the newest idol group whose debut song they seemed to be able to dance to perfectly as soon as it came out.

To his classmates, Jisuk seemed to live in silence. He walked to school in silence, he went to class in silence, he sat alone in silence, and returned home each day in silence just to repeat everything again the next morning. But Jisuk loved music, and if he wasn’t composing his own he would listen to it to hours throughout the day as he wrote lyrics and poetry and just about anything that would cross his mind.

As difficult as it was for Jisuk to explain to other people later in his life, he didn’t have to write lyrics because he wanted to rap, he had to rap because of everything he wrote. He would fill notebooks and composition books with lyrics and notes without even thinking about it, it just came naturally to him. But he knew that standing onstage in front of an audience rapping, however, would not come as easily to him.

Jisuk started underground in Seoul in front of groups of people so small he would rarely call them an audience. He would find himself in a group of other rappers starting out or having been working underground for years by then, and as they just rapped for each other a group of people would often form around them.

It was from there that he started playing shows that slowly grew in size, and though over the years his name started to be more recognizable in underground hip hop, he had no plans to ever join a label–or even to take off the hat pulled as low over his forehead as he could that he seemed to always wear wherever he was, including when he was onstage.

He had been rapping underground for around five years when he was approached by the producer Poet to join the label that he was forming with Eliza Kim. Just like with every other offer to join a label that he had received before, Jisuk was hesitant at first to agree. He had never needed someone else to produce for him, and he rarely ever had the desire to play shows that were bigger than the ones he was playing with no company supporting him.

Choi Bokyung’s life before becoming a trainee was pretty plain; boring, even. She lived as part of a close family in Seoul, attended school and got decent grades and doted on her pet dogs. The only thing that stood out about her was her beauty; she was an abnormality for her otherwise plain looking family and that’s what got her casted when she was ten by Spotlight Productions.

She trained hard for five years; she discovered that she excelled in singing and dancing but it was obvious to anyone that just glimpsed into her trainee life that she was set up to be the face of the group - it didn’t matter if she was particularly good at anything since all she had to do was be an idol and look pretty.

Missing out on debuting with both Iris and Sparkle were the first blips in her career. In both groups she was in the most final lineups but lost her place to those who could do all she could do, just better. She persevered for a few months after Sparkle’s debut but ended up cutting ties with Spotlight.

It wasn’t long before Radioactive scouted her. They were least like the sound she envisioned doing but she was desperate not to let the misfortunes of Spotlight get her down. She joined and picked up her training right where she left off. She’d only been at the company for a short while before she was pulled aside and told she’d represent Radioactive in the first season of Idol Project. She was honoured, really, but part of her couldn’t help but feel saddened knowing that a chance to debut with the rumoured girl group, later known as Heirs, wouldn’t be an option for her.

So she competed. She held her own, but didn’t make the cut. She was eliminated around the middle of the season and was happy to see that netizens considered her the standout amongst those she was eliminated with. Unlike Spotlight, Bokyung left Radioactive soon after being eliminated and made her third home at Alpha.