#UG.RITZ

[undergroundrpg]

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Name: Hyun Woorim Pronouns: He/Him Age: 30 Occupation: Staff Writer at RiTZ Magazine Canon: RITZ_01

banghwa-dong, gangseo-gu.

mom is still in school when she marries dad, a hotshot songwriter. they have their first kid together, a son, six months into their marriage. she becomes a pediatrics nurse; it’s smooth sailing for the hyun family, until eight years later, when dad is exposed, or framed, or whatever he feels like calling it, for plagiarism.

another three years, and hyun woorim is born into a broken family. his brother speaks of the good old days, reminiscing their parents’ sappy romance and movie-like love story, but woorim doesn’t know of any. all he’s seen is his dad, always drunk, always bitter, and his mom, working her ass off at the hospital, always tired, always lonely. the concept of family dinners and rosy reunions is unfamiliar to him; he’s only learned to follow woohyun’s trail like a lost puppy, wide-eyed and wary of another fight brewing. avoidance, that’s what woorim knows best.

his dad isn’t the physically aggressive type of alcoholic, but more brooding, sulking, sleepless, trivial. his mom isn’t the workaholic type, and rather makes time, squeezes it out of her hellish schedule, to send woorim to school and be a part of his life. she adores him, her second son who’s a damn eleven years younger than her first. you’re so much like me, she claims, pushing back black locks and pinching pale cheeks. these eyes, these ears, this brain. she puts on a LP, holds him in his arms. and so much like your father. these hands and their eagerness to create.

she tries to filter music into his bright mind, to encourage him to love it as much as she had when she had first met the love of her life, but her efforts are futile. woorim already hates the hint of melody. he hates notes, chords, harmonies. and the little guy hates his own hands.

he hates them more when he loses his mom to breast cancer in high school. it takes his mom’s prolonged death, his brother leaving the house for a life of his own, and a beating by furious fists for his dad to finally separate the rim of a liquor bottle from his lips. but recovery is not as rewarding as support groups promise it to be. in fact, sobriety has never been so bleak.

it takes two years of poverty for his dad to clean up and get a job. woorim’s graduated by then and gets accepted to hongik university, which his brother, newly married and working at a conglomerate tech company, pays for. he’s never been much of a student and is in it for some random major, korean language and history, but makes do with what he has. mostly because he’d promised his mom that he’d, at least, go to college, and he’d rather be out, listening to the drag of professors than clean up after his remaining family.

podcasts had been the only noise streaming through his earphones on his way to his first semester of classes and his many part-time jobs. at age twenty, he still couldn’t stand listening to lyrics sung by unknown faces to a familiar tune. then he comes back from the army at age twenty-two and meets the first person who makes a bitter song taste sweet.

she’s a musician, so she labels herself. he hates music, he tells her. she laughs, as if the idea is so ridiculous, it can never be taken seriously. she’s never heard such a bizarre thing in her life.

woorim-ah, she pushes back black locks, no one ever hates music.

he learns to love to listen, then to translate that into sentences, paragraphs, big titles. he’s a terrible student that skips classes, gets into fights, stays out late and never goes home, but he’s a good writer. the magazine starts small, first selectively featuring her and her band, then later expands as woorim steps foot onto the hongdae scene; free printing on campus is used to manufacture his amateur articles and friends are persuaded (coerced) into handing them out on streets, at shows, in bars. security at clubs are paid off to allow him to slip in and increase his exposure to as many different types of music as he can; spare time is spent burrowing into rehearsing musicality. his grades plummet with the unexpected break-up but he manages, and by the time he’s put his hands on a degree at twenty-six, woorim has more pressing matters to deal with: RiTZ magazine, the hot place to look for news about music, fashion, and young culture. the rising and solidified online star, right at people’s fingertips.

heartbreak burned him, but the magazine rose from its ashes. and woorim couldn’t be happier.

[undergroundrpg]

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Name: Hwang Yena Pronouns: She/her Age: 26 Occupation: Staff Writer at RiTZ Magazine Canon: RITZ_03

Freeform:

Rumour has it she only dates musicians. (It’s not true—she dates anyone that can give her what she wants. Musicians just happen to have it, whatever it is.)

Growing up, Hwang Yena was the type of kid that would restart the game if she lost a round. A perfectionist that settles for nothing less than; an idealist that dreams to covet them all. She has always known what she wants and how to get there, the only challenge being how—or when—to stop. If you saw the way she spoke at the mere age of eight, you’d think a girl like her would end up doing something remarkable. Be a lawyer, politician, president maybe? Well, at least her parents did, and they weren’t very happy when she enrolled herself into a philosophy program in college. After all, what can you do with a degree in philosophy? But they knew better than to try and stop her. Yena never listens; it’s both her vice and virtue.

She spent her first year in college partying, for the most part. Her days either began with a hangover or the walk of shame, sometimes both. At first, it was an attempt at fitting in, acting like every other freshman she knew, because college is all about getting out there and living your best life, right? (Doesn’t help that Hongdae and its bustling nightlife was just a couple streets away from her university.) It made her feel like an adult doing adult things, if liquor and sex is what you call that. Then one day, it stopped being about the booze, or the boys. Something else got her attention.

It started being about the music. She loves the way she forgets everything when her favourite song fills the room, or the way her heartbeat amplifies when loud music blasts from the stereo. She loves the way the same song can hold a million different meanings, unique to every person in the room. It roused the romanticist in her, the dreamer she always tried to keep grounded. She lived life trying to extinguish that side to her, believing it wouldn’t take her far if she only listened to her heart. But none of that mattered when she was amongst the crowd at a music show. She felt alive, and for once, she was glad she is.

It was during one of those nights when she was handed a copy of RiTZ, flipped through it expecting to trash it on her way out (if she doesn’t lose it on the dance floor first). Instead, she ended up hooked to it from the first page to the last, and sat by the bar reading through the whole magazine until the very last song of the night. Cliché (which is why she doesn’t tell people this version of the story), but it was then  she realised what she wanted to do—to write so well she would command the attention of anyone, anywhere, even if they were in a noisy underground club with hiphop pumping from the speakers, just like she was. That night, she restarted her game once more, but this time, she thinks she’ll be in it for life.

[undergroundrpg]

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Name: Yong Jaesun Pronouns: He/Him Age: 27 Occupation: Photographer Canon: RITZ_05

Freeform:

cold metal. smooth plastic. the scent of raw technology– one of his earliest memories. jaesun was only nine years old when he first properly handled a camera, finding its textures seamless and sleek. not to mention that it was simply “so cool” to explore a subject of his uncle’s camera repair store, a place he frequented and observed the older man dissect devices of varying sizes and styles. he couldn’t resist it back then, pressing the button. the whir of the shutter had him blinking in wonder until his uncle had stepped in and stopped his nephew’s clumsy fingers from smudging the lens further, from dropping it against the floor into pieces. he can still remember the man’s patient sigh and low voice offering, “do you like it? i’ll show you how it works, it you want. just not this one. this one’s not for play, alright?” rich. deep tones. punchy beats. it was, as he had put it at the time, “so awesome” to have thirteen-year-old fingers round the edges of fraying vinyl record sleeves. he would watch how his mother would mount the discs that were larger than his torso and describe the process when he had asked: ‘the tone arm is pulled over like this, the stylus with the cartridge here sinks into the grooves like this.’ it was almost as hypnotic as the melodies that would then fill the room. “let me try,” he had asked one day, intrigue followed by confidence curling around the rounded features of his face. he could remember it just as though it happened yesterday– his mother’s “certainly” predestining the title of the song that flowed at his own hand. when he had looked up expectantly, he saw her lean back before placing a cigarette against her lightly curved lips. it was the first time the acrid smoke invigorated him. there were only these two constants in jaesun’s life growing up that kept him grounded throughout his youth: photography and music. what sprouted from helping his uncle at his store was a bolstering interest in understanding all of the intricate parts that came together in a device that would archive a moment in time forever. and being able to use his hands allowed him to stay distracted, allowed him to use his skills to eventually move out of living with the same mother who had introduced him to what ultimately kept him sane. “you’re really leaving, huh?” he could remember her asking as he had loaded his remaining possessions into a duffel bag. “the world is going to eat you up and spit you right out, you know. and i’m not going to be here to save you when it does.” but it was never as bad as she had made it seem. not until jaesun eventually learned that heartbreak could do that to the soul; at the ripe young age of twenty, he would fall in love all too easily with a regular busker that frequented hongdae. when fingers moved from internal parts to external shots, she had been his first subject he shot for a college cultural publication while attending a local university. thoughts of marriage and family were concepts that appeared as real possibilities for the first time in his, albeit short, life, and his naivety nearly caused his mother’s premonition to come to full fruition. but it was the end of this tumultuous relationship that sparked how the rest of his life would go, the hardening of his heart, how he would approach all things from then on. as the man behind the camera, he is one that blends well with the background and prefers it that way. to not get involved with the complicated logistics of socializing and human relationships, jaesun keeps his circle to the bare, functioning minimum. just as the cameras and tools he wields, his goal is to stay on task, to snap some photos, enjoy a cigarette or two, and listen to some good music while he does. with a relatively expansive portfolio under his belt consisting of work he’s done with various print and online publications focused on culture and music, being RiTZ’s photographer is the first consistent and longest job he’s held. and with their allowing him all of his preferred terms listed above, he shows no signs of leaving any time soon.