#id.kang seulgi

[idolizerp]

LOADING INFORMATION ON PRISM’S LEAD DANCE, LEAD VOCAL AHN JOWI...

IDOL DETAILS

STAGENAME: AJ CURRENT AGE: 24 DEBUT AGE: 18 TRAINEE SINCE AGE: 13 COMPANY: MSG ETC: This performance soloist is known as the nation’s it girl for her variety work

IDOL IMAGE

she’s thirteen years old and she’s here on accident. thirteen years old and she’s followed her sister to this audition like she’s followed her everywhere, living in the shadow of her splendor. she’s awkward and gangly - her ears stick out too far and she’s all limbs, even if she’s not that tall.  her dancing is solid enough, her singing sweet, but is she a standout, really? she looks at her sister - shining hair, shining eyes, a light that seems to pour out of her. maybe she’s not. maybe jowi is destined for second best, middle of the road, just okay.

and maybe she’s young. maybe she’s moldable. that’s probably what they see in her that day. the casting director seems to look right into her soul. they see something in her, that they can use.

they see her fire.

she’s full to the brim with it, from poorly suppressed energy to a wild passion that rages like a wildfire beneath her skin. there’s greed there too, desire, and they can use it. they can shape that. and they do. they take this gangly child and craft her into something shining, a gem cut from rough hewn stone. it takes years to polish her, an opal that flares fiery until the end, a brutal gleam to softened edges, a hardness that belies the sheen of delicacy.

when AJ is put out into the market she’s the girl everyone feels like they could be someday. that’s the gimmick. girls want to be her and she’s not so intimidating, so ethereal, that they feel like it’s impossible. there’s a relatability to her. she’s too loud, for starters, and her tongue too sharp. she’s half sweet and half sour, half dorky and half devilish. her looks are unique but not stereotypical, they don’t alienate. she’s the kind of girl you could admire but you’re not intimidated by her. you could imagine her as your friend, your girlfriend.

she’s a lead dancer and lead vocal and she’s not really the best at anything. there’s a better dancer, a better vocalist, and she can’t personally rap to save her life, but she demands  attention. she’s good enough to carry it off, breezes through part switches relying on humor. she’s got the brain for choreography, reduces it to pattern memorization and becomes the “secret weapon” of the group on stage and off, the key, the pin to hold them together. the others are all mains, the best at something, but they need jowi, too, the glue to stick them together, to propel them from one main’s part to the next, to move through the song and ease the transitions.

it’s not until her first variety guesting solo that anyone really knows the msg plan for her. it becomes clear right away. she’s the sort of sweet and sour and relatable that can get away with a lot, that pushes the boundaries where she can, that sacrifices image for humor, that turns in a quick pivot from hilarious self denigration to wicked and savage comebacks and one liners. she can’t do impressions and she’s not good at chosen talents, but give her a chance to lose herself in an ensemble cast and she can shine. so that’s what she becomes.

the queen of duality, bridging a gap between concepts in her ability to play sexy and fatal on stage and sarcastic and relatable off, a duality that smooths between well polished members and sets them up to shine, propping them up for their big showy notes or solid dance breaks and fading back again. she’s passionate, she’s charming, she’s genuine (or at least, presents the image that she is). relatable but she reverses on stage.

a jack of all trades, a master of none - at least for now.

IDOL HISTORY

“for god’s sake somi, just take her with you. someone has to watch her.”

jowi is thirteen and lanky, long limbed and gangly. she’s not tall, no, but her proportions are odd - like she’s more leg than she is anything else. the bruises that dot her shins speak to a recent growth spurt she hasn’t been able to adjust too just yet. her hair is in two hastily coiled buns, done up at either side of her head, set towards the top, with strands escaping around her face and forehead, wispy and already frizzing in the debilitating summer heat.

somi is another story. only two years older than jowi, she’s already stunning. tall and slender, in a graceful way that speaks to the ballet training both of them have been in since they were toddlers in tutus that extended farther than their arm spans, a testament to the preferences of their mother. somi is all long straight hair, shiny and silky, and big doe eyes. she’s beautiful, honestly speaking, in the way that makes people stop and look at her. jowi is proud of this, too young still to care that she herself looks more like a child of the forest than a properly groomed human being.

somi is expressive too, her eyes rolling in a spectacular display of disregard for their mother, slim arms crossing artfully over her chest as she heaves a sigh so theatrically woe-laden that jowi almost apologizes for the fact that she’s too young to be left properly on her own - at least according to their mother. she feels old enough to sit around the house alone. perhaps the problem is all three of them know jowi won’t just stay in the house, unable to resist the temptation of the wide world outside, liable to run off into trouble at a moment’s notice. jowi is always like that, stumbling into the unexpected, throwing herself headlong into whatever comes her way, unrelentingly charging forward.

maybe that’s why it works out like this.

maybe that’s why they tell her to stay in line she’s going to have to audition, so she does.

maybe that’s why they bring them both back in, offer them spots training at the company.

“you better not slow me down.”  somi says, with a hardness in her voice jowi is used to, by now.

so jowi works twice as hard as anyone else even dreams of.

of course she likes this, this acknowledgement. years spent in somi’s shadow mean she’s thirsty for recognition, for validity, and she’s on the edge of the precipice that is adolescence, desperate to solidify who she is and who she will become. jowi is driven to a fault, always has been, and she burns with the need to live up to the ghost of her father, the present icon that is her sister.

she’s been in a race against this girl since she can remember. she’s been condemned by her mother twice as long, the child born a month after an unfortunate accident. a burden for a newly single mother, trying to juggle a toddler and the aftermath of a funeral.

despite born into mourning, jowi is strangely bright eyed, a larger than life personality that beams out of her like sunlight, to the point of overbearing. like the energizer bunny she exists in perpetual movement - until sudden and abrupt crashes drag her down. months of three hours of sleep a night and endless energy erupt in one drunken night gone an hour or two too long leaving her slumped over a friend’s shoulder, carried home to sleep for the next forty hours, only waking to shower, gulp down liters of water.

trainee life isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, and for jowi its nearly unsustainable. for most of them it isn’t, it’s a system built to break you down. but jowi is fierce, jowi is nothing if not determined,  pushing herself to her limits and past them, until she’s taking intravenous fluids in the hospital, suffering dehydration, exhaustion, anemia, you name it. she pushes herself to heights she would never have thought possible, reaches lows she thinks might ruin her.

and yet, somehow, she isn’t the one who breaks.

instead, its somi. somi, the perfect daughter. somi, perpetually first place, effortlessly lovely, stunningly intelligent, immensely skilled. but somi hasn’t faced adversity. somi doesn’t know criticism like jowi does, hasn’t thrived under duress and neglect. somi can’t take it - it’s too harsh, too cruel, too exhausting.

for jowi, it’s something like second nature.

you might think to yourself now, “surely this only exacerbated the rift in the ahn family?” and you would be right. beyond that even. the rift became a gulf, a trench - mariana’s even, the deepest chasm of the ocean.

at seventeen jowi was all but alone, excluding the trainees she was working and living (at that point) alongside. of course her mother outwardly supported her, to keep up experiences, but the understanding was that any sustained contact would not pass the bare minimum societally required of her, and would mostly consist of a few thousand won here and there and phone calls that heavily suggested she was simply waiting for jowi to get kicked out and come back home with her tail between her legs.

only that’s not quite how that worked out.

instead, she was put into vocal lessons, and then more and more personal training, and then finally told she’d been chosen for the potential lineup for the upcoming girl group. that her monthly evaluations will be weekly now, that she needs to keep on top of her diet, that this could mean big things for her.

they put her in music videos next, dress her up and stand her in the middle of luridly bright sets, have her smile soft and serene and sweet as boys she’s mostly seen on screen up until now, or on twitter or naver. it felt unreal at first. but as hours of forced smiles and constant cameras and continuous takes slogged by, she found herself buried under the reality of what it was to be an idol, to lipsync through a chorus forty five times to get it from each angle, to perform the same song, the same segment of the same song, fifty different times in five different outfits all for ten seconds of a jump cut you pray doesn’t expose how sweaty and exhausted you were in the moment. in those moments she discovers what will be required of her, and it’s a little frightening. but then the first articles drop, just little ones on pann, who’s that girl in the video, and later, did you see her again? and eventually look, it’s solstice’s girl, her name is jowi, she’s a trainee. and then she has fans  - not many, but a few, and the numbers grow, and she gets a letter from the desk downstairs from a fan telling her to be strong, that they’re waiting for her debut, and she cries. happy tears, but bittersweet, because how can strangers see what her own mother can’t, or won’t?

and then she is chosen, and she’s debuting, and she’s so fucking excited she’s overflowing with it. she’s lived in somi’s shadow for so long that to be debuting now and in a central position in the group no less, has her head spinning. surely now, now her mother will care about her. now her sister will acknowledge her. they’ll smile at her, they’ll tell her they’re proud. she’s sure of it, so sure she’s full to bursting.

it’s only silence though, that she gets. they don’t even bother to decline the invitation to the showcase for her debut. the other girls are finding their families in the audience, tears spilling down pretty cheeks, and jowi is crying too. how cute, their slow growing number of fans say, little jowi is so touched to have debuted.

and she is, god, is she ever. it was an accident of fate that brought her here but she finds herself born for it, made for it, thriving on it. this goal of so many years, finally in front of her. the rush and the thrill and the ache of it, heart pounding like it might explode out of her chest.

but they aren’t there.

for years, they aren’t there, and jowi learns to find the validation she craves so desperately in other ways.

but that’s hard too. if trainee years were a marathon, debut is climbing mount everest. msg is an established company, sure, but they’re not at the top of the heap just yet. they don’t have the cache to rely on that. they’re clawing up to the top come hell or high water, and jowi’s jack of all trades status is useful, but it’s not the kind of thing that lands you cf deals or acting parts, gets you hosting. that goes to visuals and the like, and jowi’s always been a little too atypical for that, more unique and charming than broadly adored and acknowledged.

maybe she can pretend, at first, it isn’t terrible. things are in the works. a guest spot here, a commercial there, an influx of articles on every little movement she makes. the comments are nice too - the media play isn’t oversaturated yet. t the attention is there, and the intrigue. they’re being noticed. she’s being noticed. her mother even calls her, one night, and jowi thinks maybe it can be okay.

of course, when she lets herself stop, think, listen in the dead of the night she’s sick to her stomach. the anxiety heightens day by day, and she’s ferocious in her efforts to combat it. she trains herself into the ground and her dietary habits consist more of liquor to put her to bed and handfuls of hastily swallowed nutrient supplements than anything else, and her hours in the gym become absurd. but if they’re going to media play about her abs, she better have them, and if they’re going to talk about her figure in crop tops, she better suit them. she’s always been obsessive, when it comes to coping with her own emotions, when it come sto avoiding her life.

it’s her personality that finally takes off. she’s been groomed to facilitate transitions in their songs, to work the bridge or the chorus and help the song get to the point the main vocal will take over and soar, or push the transition to the rap verse, or slide through the moves that will precede the main dancer’s showcase. she’s glue to the girls, fitting the distracting and diverse songs together into something that makes at least a little bit of sense, with a charisma and performance capability trained into being diverse and multifaceted, to help carry off each vastly different concept in a way that seems convincing to the audience. if she can take that first chorus or hit that opening strong, the skepticism starts to fade and “what the fuck concept is this” drifts more towards “what a weird and fun concept, as expected of prism!��� she’s there to sell the image of the group, so maybe that’s why she works so well in an ensemble atmosphere. ironic, for a girl trying to go solo.

she lands a spot on invincible youth and plays off the other girls well, develops a reputation as a social butterfly, as half sour and half sweet, a startlingly savage sweetheart with a competitive fire that surprises, given her soft demeanor and boyish offstage mannerisms. from there come the cf deals, and slowly the attention builds up in bits and pieces. she gets into the normal scandals - too close to this idol, too friendly with that one, a rude face here, rumors of deviant behavior behind the scenes. the irony of a rough and tumble variety image is that it acts as a shield -  she’s so goddamn normal seeming that no one can fault her for it too much, like they might were she one of the stunningly ethereal beautiful goddess types. they don’t have high expectations for her, maybe, so they don’t hold her to a wildly high standard either. it gives her room to work with.

but it doesn’t give her a solo, doesn’t help her stand on her own two feet, doesn’t let her shine in the way she wants - the way she feels she deserves. instead she remains prism’s secret weapon, prism’s key, the glue to hold them together, but she’s tired of being the border pieces of the puzzle, tired of being the wiring that turns the lights on to let them shine.

she wants that spotlight, and she’ll get it one way or another, whatever it takes. all she wants,  all she’s ever wanted, is to be seen.

the grand plan for jowi escalates in bits and pieces. moments on variety pick up steam, her public recognition grows, and as the group becomes more successful in its own right, the doors open. opportunity knocks. it comes in commercials, in brand deals that plaster her features across bus stops and sign boards, playing out oft-cringey attempts at comedic acting across the screens of televisions throughout seoul.

she earns a name for herself, and with it she begs, on her knees, for the one thing she’s wanted this whole time. she thinks if she can get that, if she can reach that goal, release that solo, something could change. that gaping hole in her chest that demands satiation might be quieted.

but debut comes and it doesn’t work. the solo does fine. not well, not poorly, just fine. it’s a sexier image than she’d really wanted and a brooding video she hadn’t anticipated, a sort of vampire-chic concept that suits prism, she supposes, but she’s always liked the brighter parts of their discography, the ones that lent more towards the occultly cute than thoroughly occult, the peek-a-boos over the red lights.

so she moves the goal posts again.

that’s all its ever been for her. moving the goalposts, chasing something that will quantify happiness that doesn’t come, satisfaction that isn’t gained. she’s running towards a distant and receding shore, an oasis that drifts ever farther like a mirage. first she’d just wanted to outlast her sister. then she’d wanted to outlast the girl who told her she danced like she had two left feet, then the one who’d said she’d need to get her eyes done if she even wanted to dream of debuting. then the trainer who’d told her she’d only be second rate, then she’d wanted to debut, then she’d wanted that first win. she’d wanted a year end award. she’d moved the goal after that to her solo debut. once and again. running, a hamster on a wheel, an endless race.

[idolizerp]

LOADING INFORMATION ON CHERRY BOMB!’S LEAD DANCE, LEAD VOCAL AHN JOWI...

IDOL DETAILS

STAGENAME: AJ CURRENT AGE: 24 DEBUT AGE: 18 TRAINEE SINCE AGE: 13 COMPANY: MSG SECONDARY SKILL: Variety

IDOL PROFILE

NICKNAME(S): jojo, AJ-oppa, teddy bear, solstice’s girl, CB!’s secret weapon/key INSPIRATION: Her inspiration was and has always been her older sister. She followed her first to ballet lessons, then to vocal lessons. Initially it was just easier for their mother to sign Jowi up to tag along and get both children out from underfoot, but eventually they were even scouted for the same company. She was and remains, also, a vehement CAREmel fan. SPECIAL TALENTS:

excellent at math / quantitative problem solving (puzzles, pattern games, mental computation, memorization)

“dancing robot” that seems to be a data bank for choreography and can perform choruses/point dances from dozens of hits, classic and current.

NOTABLE FACTS:

She had her variety debut on Invincible Youth, where it was discovered her variety talents shine in an ensemble cast when she’s given the chance to play off of others.

She has been central to a lot of fan criticism and rumors regarding her relationships (friendly or not, speculated or actual) to various other artists, from company seniors like Solstice to others.

She’s known for her extensive “network” amongst idols and often surprises by turning up on instagrams from various other idols. 

IDOL GOALS

SHORT-TERM GOALS:

In the short term all AJ really wants is to finally get the chance to release her solo single. MSG has been busy capitalizing off her variety attention and has, for the time being, seemingly put her solo plans on indefinite hold, something that has left her furious and frustrated for far too long. It’s not that she dislikes her variety career (obviously) but she’s getting tired of being more known for things that she hasn’t spent years training and cultivating (i.e. vocals and dance).

LONG-TERM GOALS:

In the long term she would like to follow in the steps of female soloists like Hyori or BoA, with a long running career, consistent and respected output as a soloist, and a well rounded image as performer, dancer, and vocalist alike. Clearly she’s reaching for the stars here, but despite the unlikeliness of making it to such a height as a female soloist starting from an idol group, she’s eager to give it a try. When it comes to her variety career, she’d like to find a single long running show to become her variety home in a fixed cast capacity, toning back her current break-neck schedule and trimming it into something much more manageable, supplementable with guest roles when promoting her music so that she can avoid overextending herself and her image.

IDOL IMAGE

she’s thirteen years old and she’s here on accident. thirteen years old and she’s followed her sister to this audition like she’s followed her everywhere, living in the shadow of her splendor. she’s awkward and gangly - her ears stick out too far and she’s all limbs, even if she’s not that tall.  her dancing is solid enough, her singing sweet, but is she a standout, really? she looks at her sister - shining hair, shining eyes, a light that seems to pour out of her. maybe she’s not. maybe jowi is destined for second best, middle of the road, just okay.

and maybe she’s young. maybe she’s moldable. that’s probably what they see in her that day. the casting director seems to look right into her soul. they see something in her, that they can use.

they see her fire.

she’s full to the brim with it, from poorly suppressed energy to a wild passion that rages like a wildfire beneath her skin. there’s greed there too, desire, and they can use it. they can shape that. and they do. they take this gangly child and craft her into something shining, a gem cut from rough hewn stone. it takes years to polish her, an opal that flares fiery until the end, a brutal gleam to softened edges, a hardness that belies the sheen of delicacy.

when AJ is put out into the market she’s the girl everyone feels like they could be someday. that’s the gimmick. girls want to be her and she’s not so intimidating, so ethereal, that they feel like it’s impossible. there’s a relatability to her. she’s too loud, for starters, and her tongue too sharp. she’s half sweet and half sour, half dorky and half devilish. her looks are unique but not stereotypical, they don’t alienate. she’s the kind of girl you could admire.

she’s a lead dancer and lead vocal and she’s not really the best at anything. there’s a better dancer, a better vocalist, and she can’t personally rap to save her life, but she demands  attention. she’s good enough to carry it off, breezes through part switches relying on humor. she’s got the brain for choreography, reduces it to pattern memorization and becomes the “secret weapon” of the group on stage and off, the key, the pin to hold them together. the others are all mains, the best at something, but they need jowi, too, the glue to stick them together, to propel them from one main’s part to the next, to move through the song and ease the transitions.

it’s not until her first variety guesting solo that anyone really knows the msg plan for her. it becomes clear right away. she’s the sort of sweet and sour and relatable that can get away with a lot, that pushes the boundaries where she can, that sacrifices image for humor, that turns in a quick pivot from hilarious self denigration to wicked and savage comebacks and one liners. she can’t do impressions and she’s not good at chosen talents, but give her a chance to lose herself in an ensemble cast and she can shine. so that’s what she becomes.

the queen of duality, bridging a gap between concepts in her ability to play sexy and fatal on stage and sarcastic and relatable off, a duality that smooths between well polished members and sets them up to shine, propping them up for their big showy notes or solid dance breaks and fading back again.

a jack of all trades, a master of none - at least, for now.

IDOL HISTORY

“for god’s sake somi, just take her with you. someone has to watch her.” 

jowi is thirteen and lanky, long limbed and gangly. she’s not tall, no, but her proportions are odd - like she’s more leg than she is anything else. the bruises that dot her shins speak to a recent growth spurt she hasn’t been able to adjust too just yet. her hair is in two hastily coiled buns, done up at either side of her head, set towards the top, with strands escaping around her face and forehead, wispy and already frizzing in the debilitating summer heat. somi is another story. only two years older than jowi, she’s already stunning. tall and slender, in a graceful way that speaks to the ballet training both of them have been in since they were toddlers in tutus that extended farther than their arm spans, a testament to the preferences of their mother. somi is all long straight hair, shiny and silky, and big doe eyes. she’s beautiful, honestly speaking, in the way that makes people stop and look at her. jowi is proud of this, too young still to care that she herself looks more like a child of the forest than a properly groomed human being. somi is expressive too, her eyes rolling in a spectacular display of disregard for their mother, slim arms crossing artfully over her chest as she heaves a sigh so theatrically woe-laden that jowi almost apologizes for the fact that she’s too young to be left properly on her own - at least according to their mother. she feels old enough to sit around the house alone. perhaps the problem is all three of them know jowi won’t just stay in the house, unable to resist the temptation of the wide world outside, liable to run off into trouble at a moment’s notice. jowi is always like that, stumbling into the unexpected, throwing herself headlong into whatever comes her way, unrelentingly charging forward. maybe that’s why it works out like this. maybe that’s why they tell her to stay in line she’s going to have to audition, so she does. maybe that’s why they bring them both back in, offer them spots training at the company. “you better not slow me down.”  somi says, with a hardness in her voice jowi is used to, by now. so jowi works twice as hard as anyone else even dreams of. of course she likes this, this acknowledgement. years spent in somi’s shadow mean she’s thirsty for recognition, for validity, and she’s on the edge of the precipice that is adolescence, desperate to solidify who she is and who she will become. jowi is driven to a fault, always has been, and she burns with the need to live up to the ghost of her father, the present icon that is her sister. she’s been in a race against this girl since she can remember. she’s been condemned by her mother twice as long, the child born a month after an unfortunate accident. a burden for a newly single mother, trying to juggle a toddler and the aftermath of a funeral. despite born into mourning, jowi is strangely bright eyed, a larger than life personality that beams out of her like sunlight, to the point of overbearing. like the energizer bunny she exists in perpetual movement - until sudden and abrupt crashes drag her down. months of three hours of sleep a night and endless energy erupt in one drunken night gone an hour or two too long leaving her slumped over a friend’s shoulder, carried home to sleep for the next forty hours, only waking to shower, gulp down liters of water. trainee life isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, and for jowi its nearly unsustainable. for most of them it isn’t, it’s a system built to break you down. but jowi is fierce, jowi is nothing if not determined,  pushing herself to her limits and past them, until she’s taking intravenous fluids in the hospital, suffering dehydration, exhaustion, anemia, you name it. she pushes herself to heights she would never have thought possible, reaches lows she thinks might ruin her. and yet, somehow, she isn’t the one who breaks. instead, its somi. somi, the perfect daughter. somi, perpetually first place, effortlessly lovely, stunningly intelligent, immensely skilled. but somi hasn’t faced adversity. somi doesn’t know criticism like jowi does, hasn’t thrived under duress and neglect. somi can’t take it - it’s too harsh, too cruel, too exhausting. for jowi, it’s something like second nature. you might think to yourself now, “surely this only exacerbated the rift in the ahn family?” and you would be right. beyond that even. the rift became a gulf, a trench - mariana’s even, the deepest chasm of the ocean. at seventeen jowi was all but alone, excluding the trainees she was working and living (at that point) alongside. of course her mother outwardly supported her, to keep up experiences, but the understanding was that any sustained contact would not pass the bare minimum societally required of her, and would mostly consist of a few thousand won here and there and phone calls that heavily suggested she was simply waiting for jowi to get kicked out and come back home with her tail between her legs. only that’s not quite how that worked out. instead, she was put into vocal lessons, and then more and more personal training, and then finally told she’d been chosen for the potential lineup for the upcoming girl group. that her monthly evaluations will be weekly now, that she needs to keep on top of her diet, that this could mean big things for her.

they put her in music videos next, dress her up and stand her in the middle of luridly bright sets, have her smile soft and serene and sweet as boys she’s mostly seen on screen up until now, or on twitter or naver. it felt unreal at first. but as hours of forced smiles and constant cameras and continuous takes slogged by, she found herself buried under the reality of what it was to be an idol, to lipsync through a chorus forty five times to get it from each angle, to perform the same song, the same segment of the same song, fifty different times in five different outfits all for ten seconds of a jump cut you pray doesn’t expose how sweaty and exhausted you were in the moment. in those moments she discovers what will be required of her, and it’s a little frightening. but then the first articles drop, just little ones on pann, who’s that girl in the video, and later, did you see her again? and eventually look, it’s solstice’s girl, her name is jowi, she’s a trainee. and then she has fans  - not many, but a few, and the numbers grow, and she gets a letter from the desk downstairs from a fan telling her to be strong, that they’re waiting for her debut, and she cries. happy tears, but bittersweet, because how can strangers see what her own mother can’t, or won’t?

and then she is chosen, and she’s debuting, and she’s so fucking excited she’s overflowing with it. she’s lived in somi’s shadow for so long that to be debuting now and in a central position in the group no less, has her head spinning. surely now, now her mother will care about her. now her sister will acknowledge her. they’ll smile at her, they’ll tell her they’re proud. she’s sure of it, so sure she’s full to bursting. it’s only silence though, that she gets. they don’t even bother to decline the invitation to the showcase for her debut. the other girls are finding their families in the audience, tears spilling down pretty cheeks, and jowi is crying too. how cute, their slow growing number of fans say, little jowi is so touched to have debuted. and she is, god, is she ever. it was an accident of fate that brought her here but she finds herself born for it, made for it, thriving on it. this goal of so many years, finally in front of her. the rush and the thrill and the ache of it, heart pounding like it might explode out of her chest. but they aren’t there. for years, they aren’t there, and jowi learns to find the validation she craves so desperately in other ways. but that’s hard too. if trainee years were a marathon, debut is climbing mount everest. msg is an established company, sure, but they’re not at the top of the heap just yet. they don’t have the cache to rely on that. they’re clawing up to the top come hell or high water, and jowi’s jack of all trades status is useful, but it’s not the kind of thing that lands you cf deals or acting parts, gets you hosting. that goes to visuals and the like, and jowi’s always been a little too atypical for that, more unique and charming than broadly adored and acknowledged. 

maybe she can pretend, at first, it isn’t terrible. things are in the works. a guest spot here, a commercial there, an influx of articles on every little movement she makes. the comments are nice too - the media play isn’t oversaturated yet. t the attention is there, and the intrigue. they’re being noticed. she’s being noticed. her mother even calls her, one night, and jowi thinks maybe it can be okay. 

of course, when she lets herself stop, think, listen in the dead of the night she’s sick to her stomach. the anxiety heightens day by day, and she’s ferocious in her efforts to combat it. she trains herself into the ground and her dietary habits consist more of liquor to put her to bed and handfuls of hastily swallowed nutrient supplements than anything else, and her hours in the gym become absurd. but if they’re going to media play about her abs, she better have them, and if they’re going to talk about her figure in crop tops, she better suit them. she’s always been obsessive, when it comes to coping with her own emotions, when it come sto avoiding her life. 

it’s her personality that finally takes off. she’s been groomed to facilitate transitions in their songs, to work the bridge or the chorus and help the song get to the point the main vocal will take over and soar, or push the transition to the rap verse, or slide through the moves that will precede the main dancer’s showcase. she’s glue to the girls, fitting the distracting and diverse songs together into something that makes at least a little bit of sense, with a charisma and performance capability trained into being diverse and multifaceted, to help carry off each vastly different concept in a way that seems convincing to the audience. if she can take that first chorus or hit that opening strong, the skepticism starts to fade and “what the fuck concept is this” drifts more towards “what a weird and fun concept, as expected of cherry bomb!” she’s there to sell the image of the group, so maybe that’s why she works so well in an ensemble atmosphere. ironic, for a girl trying to go solo.

she lands a spot on invincible youth and plays off the other girls well, develops a reputation as a social butterfly, as half sour and half sweet, a startlingly savage sweetheart with a competitive fire that surprises, given her soft demeanor and boyish offstage mannerisms. from there come the cf deals, and slowly the attention builds up in bits and pieces. she gets into the normal scandals - too close to this idol, too friendly with that one, a rude face here, rumors of deviant behavior behind the scenes. the irony of a rough and tumble variety image is that it acts as a shield -  she’s so goddamn normal seeming that no one can fault her for it too much, like they might were she one of the stunningly ethereal beautiful goddess types. they don’t have high expectations for her, maybe, so they don’t hold her to a wildly high standard either. it gives her room to work with.

but it doesn’t give her a solo, doesn’t help her stand on her own two feet, doesn’t let her shine in the way she wants - the way she feels she deserves. instead she remains cherry bomb’s secret weapon, cherry bomb’s key, the glue to hold them together, but she’s tired of being the border pieces of the puzzle, tired of being the wiring that turns the lights on to let them shy.

she wants that spotlight, and she’ll get it one way or another, whatever it takes. all she wants,  all she’s ever wanted, is to be seen.