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vcstasy · 6 months ago

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and…⠀♫⠀WHO do you work for, again?

The core four of JAGUAR’s main creative team (presently headed, of course, mainly by creative director Choi Eunhee)—that being their two main producers, their head stylist, and main choreographer—consists of Seol Daejin, Kwak Joosun, Son Sebin, and finally Yoon ‘Vicki’ Miryung. Both Joosun and Sebin have been with the company since 2012, the year of YOON’s debut, despite their ages (19 and 18, respectively). Miryung came on four years later, in 2016, shortly before JUST4U’s disbandment and after then-soloist Daejin’s debut date under SM Entertainment. He only lasted three years before going back to his producer roots and leaving for JAGUAR in 2019—the same year former ALGORYHTHM members Jalen and Haeil did the same—and completing the team most know today.

Seeing as it took them a good seven years to be brought together, and there’s a smaller gap of three years between JUST4U’s debut and Joosun and Sebin’s arrivals, a few people have asked the question of this: Who was doing it all before them? And, the answer is simply that no one knows, except from maybe a few of the main executives and the people themselves. The first few years of JUST4U’s discography are largely uncredited production, composition, and arrangement wise, and the only names that get mentioned are Yeseul’s and Insu’s themselves—they took on the lyrics themselves most of the time, and on a few occasions contributed to the production process also. These ghost producers are likely due to the fact that JAGUAR, in 2009, was still very new in the idol scene (only two years into it after jumping ship from the PR business in 2007). Quick payments for releases most likely seemed easier than spending the time building a dedicated team from the ground up—which is also likely why Joosun and Sebin were hired so young and so early into their careers.

They’ve all grown alongside the artists, and have all grown particularly close to CHERRYADE over the months they’ve spent working with them. Below is an overview on each.

Dead-eyed, perpetually bored, and at times too dry for his own good, people usually avoid making conversation with Joosun at all opportunities possible. And sure, he’s only really there to do his job, but making nice while doing so has never been something he’d be opposed to. He actually thinks he can be pretty funny when you get to know him. Not that many ever make it to that stage.

Joosun never wanted to be in the spotlight. All Joosun ever wanted in the music world was to be used as what he believed he was: an asset. A cog in the machine, sure—but an essential one. Something that things just wouldn’t feel right running without. He grew up the primary caretaker for his three younger siblings while his mother racked up credit card debt and his father lay in ashes, sealed in a columbarium that he never bothered to visit on any separate occasions other than the day they went to put him there, and if you asked him he’d tell you that was where the need to be needed came from.

Others may say they were drawn to music as a child and that was why they chose to pursue it, but Joosun never really found the time for that. The most he interacted with music as a child was through the radio and when he was making up tunes on his youngest sister’s toy piano for her entertainment. He wasn’t an experienced musician—much less an experienced producer—in the slightest by the time he was desperately searching for jobs of all kinds, and the only reason JAGUAR took him on in the first place is because they’d come to the realisation that they couldn’t keep hiring no-names to make music for them and then keep their mouths shut about it. Joosun called it mutual desperation, Seungdae called him a ‘baby bird they could nurture.’ The man had been weird since the day they met.

He learned on the job, and his first few mixes were nothing short of abysmal. It took a lot of overtime and a lot of begging for lessons from his newfound contacts in an industry he knew next to nothing about to get him on track to becoming the artist he is now, and he’s thankful he’s managed to dig out a space for himself in the music world. If he could give his sound a colour, it would be red—a deep, dark, wine shade. Mature, promiscuous, dark, at times. But it’s less of a case of that being all he knows (he experimented with just about everything on his journey to find what really fit him) and more a case of that being what’s his. He’s best at it, he flourishes within it, and he knows his way around it even with his eyes closed. It’s glaringly obvious whenever you’re listening to anything Joosun, and that’s just the way he likes it.

NAME⠀ㅇ⠀KWAK JOOSUN ( 곽주선. )

BORN⠀ㅇ⠀FEBRUARY 17, 1993

POSITION⠀ㅇ⠀PRODUCER

PLAYED BY⠀ㅇ⠀CHOI WONBIN

Accommodating but no-nonsense, Daejin is always considered the kinder of the two producers. He always has a few words of encouragement even if on the inside he thinks you’re awful, always delivers any criticism he does deem nice enough to say out loud with a sweet smile and little motivational fist-pump, and never fails to get at least one smile out of whoever’s he’s worked with that day. His own dreams of being an idol might not have worked out, but as long as he can help others in their own careers he’s happy.

A child of divorce, Daejin turned to music (and basketball) as a semi-coping mechanism to block out all the arguing before the split became official. The last he saw of his father was the month before his seventh birthday, sitting beside him on the balcony of their cramped flat with his legs dangling through the gaps in the railing while the man smoked through a pack and gave him some half-hearted life advice. Take care of your mother. Try and get along with your older brothers. Do something with your life. He did his best to follow along with it all, although the second was the hardest. Him and his oldest brother had next to nothing in common, constantly coming to blows, so for the most part he stuck to his older brother or kept to himself. They only became closer during the messy divorce period, while his parents were duking it out over custody and money. That was also where he really got into music, picking up both the guitar and the keyboard as things he could teach himself to keep himself busy when his mind was driving him crazier than usual.

He was never all that academically inclined, bunking off to shoot hoops or waste away the day’s hours in arcades for the majority of his school years—but his mother didn’t really care. She would’ve been more surprised if he was a perfect student, seeing as her two children before him were just as unwilling to show up to school. SM came about when he was thinking about what to do to make good on the ‘do something with your life’ part of his father’s advice. It was quite a rash decision, but it involved music, and if it went well he could safely say he had done something worthwhile (and, he would admit, he was looking forward to lording it over his brothers if it went well also). He didn’t tell any of his family until he got the confirmation that he’d passed his audition, and then off into trainee life he went. Daejin kept his head down and himself to himself during his two years of training, and was perfectly happy with his solo career as it went on—not just for the success it brought him and fun he was having with it, but also because along the way he got the chance to contribute to it more and more, until by 2018 he was fully self-written and self-produced.

The end of his idol career came about of his own volition. He felt he was content with what he’d produced, grateful for the people he’d met and things he’d accomplished, and simply wanted to step back and focus fully on the aspect he loved most: the production. JAGUAR was only his first choice because he’d been a fan of JUST4U growing up (he still has all their albums to this day), and when they accepted him he was packing his SM bags as quick as he could and happily leaving the idol life behind. It took a while to get through Joosun’s shell, but they’re thick as thieves now. He lives his life making music and having fun doing it, trying out all sorts of genres and sounds but always leaving them that little something that makes them truly his. Daejin’s sound doesn’t have one specific colour, as he likes to think it’s an explosion of every single one of them.

NAME⠀ㅇ⠀SEOL DAEJIN ( 설대진. )

BORN⠀ㅇ⠀MAY 27, 1998

POSITION⠀ㅇ⠀PRODUCER

PLAYED BY⠀ㅇ⠀MOON SANGMIN

DISCOGRAPHY (2016–18)

JUL 2016⠀CALL YOU TONIGHT⠀(FROM MINI ALBUM: “DIAL TONE”)

DEC 2016⠀TRIGGER⠀(FROM SINGLE: “TRIGGER”)

SEPT 2017⠀WANT FROM ME⠀(FROM MINI ALBUM: “COMPONENT”)

MAY 2018⠀2FACE⠀(FROM FULL ALBUM: “PUZZLE PIECE”)

OCT 2018⠀SOBER THOUGHTS⠀(FROM SINGLE: “SOBER THOUGHTS”)

Stretched so thin you’d think she was a rubber band on the verge of snapping, Sebin treats life like she’s on the run. Constantly moving, always talking, never taking a moment to breathe in fear an idea dissipates or her concentration dissolves. She’s a force of nature when she’s in the zone, but her everyday sunny disposition is one that makes her all too easily likeable. All-around lovely—as long as you don’t get in her way.

Sebin thinks she got all her neuroticism and need for over-perfection from her mother. She hadn’t known much about their state of living as a child, but apparently it meant lots of too-long dinners with other adults she couldn’t remember the name of even if her parents reminded her three times over, wearing clothes that always felt too new to break in, and keeping up appearances at all times. Once she’d grown up, she realised they were just wealthy. Clothing was her father’s business of choice, and she thinks she shares his love for beauty, for seeing visions come to life by their own hands—although for her it channeled in different ways. While he loved intricate stitching and the feel of expensive fabric against his fingers, Sebin was always more enamoured with make-up (although fashion never truly left her heart). The heaps of tubes filled with lipsticks and glosses and mascaras her mother owned (which she helped herself to more than a few times over the years), how one shade could compliment one person and insult another—she felt there was a way to learn it, and she very badly wanted to.

Beauty school felt like her calling, and it only took a little bit of begging for her parents to agree to let her go—with the catch that she’d have to take night classes to get a more standard education alongside it, which she agreed to easily. She enjoyed her time there to the fullest, finally beginning to learn all the ways around the thing she’d been so fascinated with as a child. Of course, she became aware that the standards in Korea weren’t the same everywhere, and so on their yearly summer vacations to whatever foreign country her mother was dying to visit she’d find a way to steal a few afternoons to herself to try and get a few more tips and tricks from people who’d had a completely different perspective on beauty than she had over their years. Broken English and hastily scribbled drawings on the notepad she’d dedicated to carrying around with her was all she could communicate via for the first few years of these trips, but over time she brushed up on a couple languages to have at her disposal also. Sebin was determined to ‘master beauty,’ as she called it, in every way possible. Hairstyles for all types of hair, looks for all types of faces, clothes for every type of body, beauty for every type of person.

Her job at JAGUAR came about due to her want to get out into the real working world, and the idol industry was the best fit for her dream. Her looks on people’s faces? On their bodies as they performed for all their fans to see? She would do anything for it, and when she walked into the interview room she said just that, eagerness spilling out of mouth as she spoke a mile a minute. She jumped for joy (literally) when she was accepted, and threw her all into the job from the first day. Her and Yeseul got along like a house on fire from the first time they met, which was another thing she was over the moon about. Sure, getting to know Insu and Yoonhae was a little hard at first, and she felt a tad intimidated by Joosun, but she soon warmed up to all of them, and they did the same with her in kind. Her and Joosun got particularly close, seeing as they were the only official creative team members at the time—everything else being mostly outsourced—and he’s still one of her closest friends today. While she’d ditched the rather childish dream of ‘mastering beauty’ a while ago, what she gets to do today is everything she’d hoped for and more.

NAME⠀ㅇ⠀SON SEBIN ( 손세빈. )

BORN⠀ㅇ⠀JULY 8, 1994

POSITION⠀ㅇ⠀STYLIST

PLAYED BY⠀ㅇ⠀HEO YOUNGJI

Often referred to as Joosun’s female counterpart (if he ever went down the dance route), Miryung—or Vicki, as she uses at work—has quickly become known for her gruelling sessions and little sympathy for stragglers. She’s perfectly pleasant after work hours are over (if a tad standoffish at first), but if the only place you’ve been face-to-face is the studio, then chances are you don’t like her much.

Miryung doesn’t quite know where she got her tough-loving nature from. Her mother and father were as doting as they could afford to be when mostly living paycheck to paycheck in order to support both her and her younger brother, and it wasn’t as if she was put through any particular torment at school. But her brother was bullied quite relentlessly, and so she got used to pulling her hair back and getting sharper acrylics in order for it to hurt more when she went to scratch and kick and belittle the perpetrators right back, so she supposed it may have rooted around that time. Her skin got thicker and her eyes got colder, and in some ways she became a bully right back—but she didn’t let herself think about that too hard. She was just doing the right thing as a sister, even if her acts of violence were sometimes a little too far over the top.

As she grew older, she realised that maybe putting all the pent up anger she seemed to be housing into something else would be better, and that was how she found dance. She found a class, picked it up quick and got better quicker, and by fourteen she was standing in as an assistant instructor for the younger kid’s classes on weekends. That was where the desire to teach came from, too. She saw more and more people like herself over the years, people just looking for an escape or to channel everything negative brewing inside them into something more productive, something better for their peace of mind. Her mean streak calmed down the more and more she threw herself into both performing and teaching every style of dance she could think of, although her no-nonsense way of teaching remained—she found it was just.. Easier to keep it that way. Praise and comfort never fell easy from her mouth, always sounded too stilted to be genuine.

JAGUAR came about when Miryung was looking to expand her teaching abilities at places other than the multiple classes she was now handling as a nineteen year old. She wasn’t about to bite off more than she could chew, so a relatively small scale company was what she was looking for—and found, in JAGUAR. Wrangling trainees into shape was easy after all the practice she’d had, however rude they were to start with. What was first simple instructing soon began to morph into choreographing, and after years of making up routines for her classes to follow along with that didn’t come as any particular hurdle either. She felt like she’d finally found her true calling, something she was born to do. That’s where Vicki came from—victory. She’d won.

NAME⠀ㅇ⠀YOON ‘VICKI’ MIRYUNG ( 윤미령. )

BORN⠀ㅇ⠀APRIL 30, 1997

POSITION⠀ㅇ⠀CHOREOGRAPHER

PLAYED BY⠀ㅇ⠀CHOI ‘YUJU’ YUNA

#⠀✦ ₊ ᶻ⠀⠀CANDY KISSES⠀⠀⸻⠀⠀misc.⠀#ten points if u can name all the manga in the headers. i will forgive 8 out of 9 because one is a bl. Shut up its funny #I MISS SOLOIST DAEJINNNN i hv sm Lauv 4 Him #kpop oc #fictional kpop group #fictional idol community #idol oc #fictional idol group

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