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#han taein
psincorrectquotes · 9 months
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Taein: hello, officer, what seems to be the problem?
cop: uh i'm sorry, sir, but i have to arrest you for driving a motorcycle with three people on it
Taein: three?
Kang-hyun and Jootaek:
Taein: WHY DIDN'T YOU GUYS TELL ME THAT PHILLIP FELL OFF
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fcble · 7 months
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ZENITH ENTERTAINMENT is a fictional South Korean entertainment company. It was founded in 2016 by former SM Entertainment executive LEE TAEIN, shortly after his supposedly amicable departure from the company. 
They are best known for their first and flagship group FABLE, who continues to be the only artist formed solely by the company. Zenith is also notable for the way CEO Taein notoriously inserts himself into the smallest of business decisions, and their refusal to take trainees since Fable’s debut.
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BASICS
NAME: Zenith Entertainment
TYPE: Private
INDUSTRY: Music, entertainment
FOUNDED: 2016
FOUNDER: Lee Taein
HEADQUARTERS: Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea
AREA SERVED: Worldwide
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 20+
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ARTISTS
FABLE (2018 — present): eight seven member boy group
NEON NIGHTS (2021 — present): five member girl band
JAESUN (2023 — present): idol soloist
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NOTABLE PEOPLE
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LEE TAEIN (1969) … Founder, CEO, and Fable's creative director. Former SM Entertainment talent acquisition director. Played by Lee Byung-hun.
PARK SANGHYUN (1972) … COO and CFO. Has been trying to get a private office for the past seven years. Played by Lee Seo-jin.
CHEN YUXUAN (2002) … Taein and Sanghyun's executive assistant. Underpaid and overworked intern. Played by Liu Yu.
WOO HYEKYUNG (1997) … Social media & marketing manager. Has held the position since 2017. Rules the open office with an iron fist. Played by Park Soobin.
SHIN JUBIN (1985) … Neon Nights and Jaesun's creative director. Classics fan. Can conjugate ancient Greek. Played by Hwang Jung-eum.
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KIM GAEUN (1981) … Fable's lead stylist. Co-founder of modern hanbok brand Shinbok. Played by Son Ye-jin.
HONG SHINUI (1975) … Historical consultant for Fable. Korea University adjunct professor. Historian specializing in the middle period of the Joseon dynasty. Played by Lee Tae-ran.
JEON DAEWOONG (1995) … Fable's manager. Former SM Entertainment trainee, 2014-2017. Always thinking about who he could have been. Played by Ahn Hyo-seop.
LEE AERIN (1990) … Neon Nights' manager. Not their first fan, but still their biggest one. Played by Tiffany Young.
NAM CHOHYUN (1998) … Jaesun's manager. Also his cousin. Otherwise unqualified for his job. Played by Han Gichan.
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MAJOR SHAREHOLDERS
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LEE TAEIN (1969) … 60%. Founder and CEO.
AHN █████ (197█) … 15%. ███████ Group ███. Played by ████ ███.
JUNG SEOBUM (1990) … 10%. Venture capitalist, representing Daehan Ventures. Played by Lee Junho.
████ █████████ (19██) … 7%. Lawyer, the eponymous ████ of law firm ████ & ███. Played by ███ ████████.
███ █████████ (1969) … 6%. Senior Superintendent in the █████ ████████████ ██████ ██████. Played by ███ ████████.
LEE JAESEOP (1995) … 2%. Idol, member of Fable. Played by Kim Doyoung.
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kanginki · 2 years
Video
LE SSERAFIM 2022 "FEARLESS" SHOW
Creative Director: NU KIM 
Visual Creative : Yujoo Kim, Gabriel Cho, Yoon Cho, Sungwoong Moon 
Director : Inki Kang  Assistant Director : Gyuhee Kim, Nari Kim 
Producer : Downy Jung, Solip Park Line Producer : Seola Ji, JIhwan Shin, Seona Jeong  Production Assistant : Jongseok Kim, Jonghoon Lee, Minju Kim, Yongbae Kim
Director of Photography : Hyunwoo Nam  B Cam : Eunki Kim 1ST AC : Minwoo Lee, Sungyun Jo 2ND AC : Hyunji Kim 3RD AC : Jinsoo Ha DIT : Yeongseo Park 
GRIP TEAM : DOLLY GRIP(HeeJun Choi)
TECHNO CRANE : Haksong Lee(SERVICE  VISION KOREA), Sangjo Lee, Yonggeun Hwang, Doyoun Kim, Hakseo Kim 
GAFFER : Seungnam Yoon 1ST : Inkuk Hong 2ND / Junmin Yang, Taeyoung Kim 3RD : Minjun Kim, 4TH : Hyunwoo Shin, Donghoon Kim 
Art Director : Heeju Park, Insol Yun (MOLE) Assistant : Hyeong-eun Kim, DR Han, Jongmin Kang, Sang chul Park, Woo young Huh, Taein Jung, Chan Park 
Color Grading : Jiyun Yeom 2D : Jongwon Ko, Arang Kwon 
SOURCE MUSIC. Rights are reserved selectively in the video. Unauthorized reproduction is a violation of applicable laws. Manufactured by SOURCE MUSIC, Seoul, Korea
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solplparty · 2 years
Video
youtube
LE SSERAFIM 2022 "FEARLESS" SHOW https://youtu.be/grp6kOx5too Creative Director: NU KIM Visual Creative : Yujoo Kim, Gabriel Cho, Yoon Cho, Sungwoong Moon Director : Inki Kang Assistant Director : Gyuhee Kim, Nari Kim Producer : Downy Jung, Solip Park Line Producer : Seola Ji, JIhwan Shin, Seona Jeong Production Assistant : Jongseok Kim, Jonghoon Lee, Minju Kim, Yongbae Kim Director of Photography : Hyunwoo Nam B Cam : Eunki Kim 1ST AC : Minwoo Lee, Sungyun Jo 2ND AC : Hyunji Kim 3RD AC : Jinsoo Ha DIT : Yeongseo Park GRIP TEAM : DOLLY GRIP(HeeJun Choi) TECHNO CRANE : Haksong Lee(SERVICE VISION KOREA), Sangjo Lee, Yonggeun Hwang, Doyoun Kim, Hakseo Kim GAFFER : Seungnam Yoon 1ST : Inkuk Hong 2ND / Junmin Yang, Taeyoung Kim 3RD : Minjun Kim, 4TH : Hyunwoo Shin, Donghoon Kim Art Director : Heeju Park, Insol Yun (MOLE) Assistant : Hyeong-eun Kim, DR Han, Jongmin Kang, Sang chul Park, Woo young Huh, Taein Jung, Chan Park Color Granding : Jiyun Yeom 2D : Jongwon Ko, Arang Kwon SOURCE MUSIC. Rights are reserved selectively in the video. Unauthorized reproduction is a violation of applicable laws. Manufactured by SOURCE MUSIC, Seoul, Korea Connect with LE SSERAFIM OFFICIAL YOUTUBE https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs-QBT4qkj_YiQw1ZntDO3g OFFICIAL INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/le_sserafim/ OFFICIAL TWITTER https://twitter.com/le_sserafim OFFICIAL JAPAN TWITTER https://twitter.com/le_sserafim_jp OFFICIAL FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/official.lesserafim OFFICIAL WEVERSE https://weverse.onelink.me/qt3S/t2ra8uwj OFFICIAL V LIVE https://www.vlive.tv/channel/818FB5 OFFICIAL WEIBO https://weibo.com/LESSERAFIM HYBE LABELS
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lesterplatt · 3 years
Video
vimeo
[Commercial] NIKE X ABC HO21 DANCE FILM 2 from 서기웅 Line of sight on Vimeo.
Director: 88 Gymnastic Heroes Assistant Director: Eunkyung Han, Minje Jeong [88 GH] - Production: KEEPUSWEIRD Executive Producer: Seunghwan Lee [KUW] Producer: Sohee Heo, Gawon Kim [KUW] - Director of Photography: Giung Seo [Line of Sight] 1st AC: Minhyuk Hong, Jaehong Kim 2nd AC: Jaeho Kim, Youngdae Park 3rd AC: Seongmin Oh - Gaffer: Minsoo Kang [VIT Lighting] 1st: Jeonghui Son, Hyeonjeong Go 2nd: Hwayong Jeong 3rd: Jihyun Choi 4th: Junha Ye, Dongyun Sin - Art Team: Se-eun Park, Hyeryeong Kwon - Sound Recordist: Seungjin Kim (Jin Sound) - Photographer: Baechu - Stylist: Ipsae Lee Hair: Jae mi lee Make up: Hyemin Park - Edit / DI: 88 Gymnastic Heroes 2D Graffic Design: Hail - PA: Yuchang Lee, Woosung Lee, Taein Jung
- Cast Film1,2: DANCE POZZ [CAU Dance Club] Film3: Selina [Coreo]
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lordsicheng · 7 years
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Masterlist v.1
Edited: 181102
This masterlist consists of all my writings for Produce 101 Season 2 contestants. For other groups, click here
If you were to request a writing, please check my request guide!
Posts with ** contain mature and/or suggestive content
Reactions/MTL
Wanna One
Where they would bring their girlfriend on first date
Cursing for the first time (maknae line)
Serious vs. Chill types in relationships (ft. JBJ)
Pros/cons dating them (Seongwoo, Jaehwan, Daniel, Guanlin)
Pride vs. apologizing first in arguments
You bending down to get something + you’re wearing a low v-neck shirt (Seongwoo, Minhyun, Jaehwan, Daniel) **
MTL to like someone with a sassy/fiery personality
Reaction to you going crazy and doing aegyo after getting drunk (hyung line)
Being in a K-Drama with their favorite actress (maknae line)
Meeting their favorite idol (maknae line)
Having a s/o that’s sexy/provocative (Jihoon, Jinyoung, Daehwi)
JBJ
Cute vs Sexy girl preference
As boyfriends
MTL to date older/younger than them
Reaction to them walking in on you wearing nothing but their shirt + dancing to their song
First date 
Music video scenario (Kenta, Yongguk, Hyunbin)
Serious vs. Chill types in relationships (ft. Wanna One)
Reaction to you wearing a sexy dress for the first time on date night  **
Pros/cons dating them
Kim Yongguk confessing to his crush
Reaction to you fangirling to another member
Arguments (special post)
Reaction to going into the haunted house with them
Reaction to finally going down on them (nsfw)  **
MTL to date an introvert vs extrovert (ft. MXM)
Seasons fit for the members
Reaction to best friend wanting to cuddle
When their gf tells them they’re horny **
When you surprise them with a kitten/puppy
Ideal Types (special post)
Reaction to when you say another member looked hot in Fantasy MV
When they find out they’re dating a sibling of another 101 trainee
MXM
MTL to date an introvert vs extrovert (ft. JBJ)
Yuehua 
MTL to date a younger girl
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Scenarios/Drabbles
Wanna One
Yoon Jisung
Chocolate  (Yoon Jisung x OC) 
-
Ha Sungwoon
Not Yours to Keep (Ha Sungwoon x OC) 
Little Did He Know (Ha Sungwoon x OC) 
-
Hwang Minhyun
She’s Mine (Minhyun x OC ft. Yoo Seonho) 
A Different Tomorrow (Minhyun x OC) [1 , 2 , 3, 4, 5, 6]  **
“Kilig” (Minhyun x OC) 
Clumsy (mini drabble; Minhyun x OC)
Athlete (mini drabble; Minhyun x OC)
Treasure  (mini drabble; Minhyun x OC)
Radio Romance (Minhyun x OC)
-
Ong Seongwoo
Emptiness (Seongwoo x OC)
A Letter to My Wife (Seongwoo x OC) 
Crush du Jour (Seongwoo x OC) [ 1, 2. 3, 4 ] 
Can I? (Seongwoo x Kim Jaehwan x OC)  **
Best Mistake (Seongwoo x OC) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]  **
Coffee (mini drabble ; Seongwoo x OC)
“Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia“ (mini drabble ; Seongwoo x OC)
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Kim Jaehwan
Can I? (Ong Seongwoo x Kim Jaehwan x OC)  **
Winter (mini drabble; Kim Jaehwan x OC)
-
Kang Daniel
Beautiful in White (Kang Daniel x OC) 
Time to Love (Kang Daniel x OC) 
Bloom (Kang Daniel x OC)
Change Your Mind (Kang Daniel x OC)
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Park Jihoon
Sea of Lost Love (Park Jihoon x OC) [1, 2, 3] 
“Maybe? Perhaps, Possibly.” (Park Jihoon x OC)
Iridescent (mini drabble; Jihoon x OC)
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Park Woojin
Noona scenario (Woojin x OC) [1, 2] 
Summertime Madness (Woojin x OC) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
For The First Time (Woojin x OC) [1, 2, 3]
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Bae Jinyoung
Polaroid (Bae Jinyoung x OC)
Gust (Bae Jinyoung x OC) 
Delicat | [1, 2]
Flowers  (mini drabble; Jinyoung x OC)
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Lee Daehwi
Princess (mini drabble; Daehwi x OC)
Swoon (mini drabble ; Daehwi x OC)
-
Lai Guanlin
Kismet (Guanlin x OC) 
-
JBJ
Noh Taehyun
none yet
-
Takada Kenta
none yet
-
Kim Sanggyun
Midnight Stroll (Sanggyun x OC) 
Stand By (Sanggyun x OC) **
-
Kim Yongguk/Jin Longguo
Western Sky (Yongguk x OC) 
Hot and Bothered (Kim Yongguk x OC) **
Contrast (Kim Yongguk x OC) 
-
Kwon Hyunbin
When I Was In Love (Hyunbin x OC) 
Free Spirit (One Last Bite character epilogue) 
Red (Hyunbin x OC)
-
Kim Taedong
Something Special (One Last Bite character epilogue) 
-
Kim Donghan
One Last Bite (Donghan x OC) [1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5] [epilogue: 1 / 2]  **
Into You (Donghan x Idol!OC) 
Raindrops (Donghan x OC)
-
MXM
Im Youngmin
Don’t Let Me Be Yours (Youngmin x OC) [1 / 2]   **
Forbidden (Youngmin x OC)  (nsfw/smut) **
-
Kim Donghyun
Autumn Breeze (Donghyun x OC) [1 / 2 / 3 / 4] 
-
Yuehua 
Zhu Zhengting / Jung Jung
Purple Skies and Brown Eyes (Jung Jung x OC) 
-
Justin Huang
3 is a Charm (Justin Huang x Yoo Seonho x OC) [1 / 2 / 3 / 4] 
Cupid’s Target (Justin Huang x OC)  
-
Rainz
Kim Seongri
Foolish Heart (Kim Seongri x Ju Wontak x OC) 
Ju Wontak
Foolish Heart (Kim Seongri x Ju Wontak x OC) 
Lee Kiwon
Nothing into Something (Lee Kiwon x OC; fluff)  [1 / 2]  
My Little Angel (Lee Kiwon x OC)
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Other Trainees:
Yoo Seonho
3 is a Charm (Justin Huang x Yoo Seonho x OC) [1 / 2 / 3 / 4] 
She’s Mine (Minhyun x OC ft. Yoo Seonho) 
From a Distance (Yoo Seonho x OC) 
-
Other Writings: 
Wanna One Music Video Scenarios
Yoon Jisung - Scandal - Ailee
Kim Jaehwan - 11:11 - Taeyeon
Park Jihoon - Ex Girl - Monsta X ft. Wheein of Mamamoo
Ong Seongwoo - Goodbye Love - Taein ft. Namolla Family
Ha Sungwoon - Rose - ELO
Kang Daniel - Big Girls Cry - Sia
Bae Jinyoung - La Da Dee - Cody Simpson
Hwang Minhyun - A Bitter Day - Hyuna ft. Yong Junhyung, G.NA
Lai Guanlin - Don’t You Worry - Brown Eyes
Lee Daehwi - Don’t Be Mad Anymore - G.NA
Park Woojin - I Know What You Did Last Summer - Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello
JBJ Enemies to Lovers Series:
Kim Donghan - Never My Type
Kim Yongguk - “Perhaps, Love?”
Kwon Hyunbin - Accidentally, Purposely
Takada Kenta - Exchanged Student
Noh Taehyun - The Boy Next Door
Kim Sanggyun - Notes on a Journal
Kim Taedong - Not In Your Lane
JBJ Soulmates series 
Kwon Hyunbin
Kim Sanggyun 
Kim Yongguk
Kim Donghan
Holidays with JBJ
Noh Taehyun
Kwon Hyunbin
Takada Kenta
Kim Yongguk
Kim Donghan
100 Ways to Say I Love You Series
*note: please refer to this post; all are requests
# 65 - Noh Taehyun
# 94 - Bae Jinyoung
# 29 - Lai Guanlin
# 24 - Kang Daniel
# 82 - Park Jihoon
# 19 - Lee Woojin
# 19 - Bae Jinyoung
# 83 - Park Jihoon
# 32 - Hwang Minhyun
# 17 - Lee Kiwon
# 12 - Jang Daehyeon
# 40 - Kim Donghan
# 71 - Kim Yongguk 
# 86 - Yoon Jisung
# 25 - Kwon Hyunbin 
# 49 - Hwang Minhyun 
# 29 - Kang Daniel 
# 74 - Kim Donghan
# 47 - Justin Huang
# 84 - Kim Shihyun 
# 18 - Ong Seongwoo
# 12 - Kim Yongguk
# 20 - Woo Jinyoung
# 23 - Lai Guanlin
# 66 - Im Youngmin
# 39 - Park Woojin
# 15 - Kim Shihyun
# 64 - Kim Donghyun
# 83 - Hwang Minhyun
#39, #50 - Lee Daehwi
#70 - Hwang Minhyun
#83 - Hwang Minhyun
Writing Prompt: Prompts for Days
* note: please refer to this post; all are requests 
# 49 - Park Woojin 
# 30 - Han Minho
# 18 - Bae Jinyoung
# 15 - Takada Kenta
# 71 - Kim Donghan
# 23 - Kwon Hyunbin
# 81 - Takada Kenta
# 84 - Kim Donghan
# 42 - Jung Jung / Zhu Zhengting
# 43 - Lee Daehwi
# 68 - Han Minho
# 100 - Kim Taedong
# 92 - Im Youngmin
# 88 + # 31 - Kim Donghan
# 93 + # 97 - Takada Kenta 
Song Drabble Challenge
Ong Seongwoo
Justin Huang
Kim Sanggyun
Park Jihoon
Park Woojin
Kang Daniel
Lai Guanlin
Jung Sewoon
Kim Jaehwan
Kim Samuel
Kang Dongho
Kim Jonghyun
Yoon Jisung
Zhu Zhengting
Kim Taedong
Kim Jonghyun
Kang Daniel
Kim Yongguk
Hwang Minhyun
Lee Daehwi
Takada Kenta
Noh Taehyun
Ha Sungwoon
Kim Donghan
Im Youngmin
Seo Sunghyuk
Kwon Hyunbin
Takada Kenta
Bae Jinyoung
Ong Seongwoo
Zhu Zhengting
Lee Yoojin
Jung Sewoon
Kim Donghan
Kim Yongguk
Yoon Jisung
Kim Donghan
Lai Guanlin
Hwang Minhyun
Noh Taehyun
Kang Daniel
Ong Seongwoo
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vm4vm0 · 4 years
Video
[Campaign M/V / PRODUCING] Burberry X GQ with DEAN, Miso - Imagination from AMBIENCE on Vimeo.
Production House | ambience Director | Alohaman, DEANTRBL Executive Producer | Downy Jung(ambience) Assistant Director | Yongseok Jo Line Producer | Kiyeon Hong(ambience) Production Assistant | Jinju Park, Taein Jung, Yuchang Lee, Byeonghoon Park - Director of Photography | Jee K(The Move) 1st AC | Sungju Min 2nd AC | Sion Kim 3rd AC | Juhwan Jeon - Gaffer | Hyunjun Lee(JMT) Lighting Assistant | Seungyeol Ma, Seunggeun Lee, Seongjin Heo - Art Director | Boyyd Art Team | Hyojin Sim, Dawon Kang, Jisu Choi - Edit | Alohaman Color Grading | Alohaman VFX | Kyungmi Shon(GREI.T/SOHOCLUB) - Hair&Make-up | Giihee(HOLY), Jooyoung Han(Black_lip), Yuyeon Lee Stylist | Dohee Kim, Minsie Lee - GQ Korea | Jyn Yi, Hyonjin Lee, Jinsu Lee - you.will.know | Harrison Hong, Donghoon Ha, Junhoo Cha, Gaeun Chu, Sungho Jin
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aninidesu · 6 years
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Title: An Ideal Relationship Author: Ong Kaeng Status: Completed Han Hojun decided to take modelling career because he admired Lee Taein who is a famous model. Lee Taein, a skilled model and an unparalelled beauty but rumored to have a nasty personality. But one day, Hojun accidentaly met Taein's eyes during a rehearsal and they kept on running into each other after that. Were thoe meetings just some coincidences? #AnIdealRelationship #Webtoon #yaoi #OngKaeng
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psincorrectquotes · 1 year
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Taein: Do you cook, hyung?
Jootaek: …I made a cake once?
Phillip: Yeah, it was good.
Kang-hyun, surprised: Really?
Phillip: Don’t make me lie twice.
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psincorrectquotes · 1 year
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Taein: *staring deadpan into the camera with a spoon as a microphone, Phillip holding the camera* And here we can see endangered Jootaek in his natural habit.
Jootaek: *falls down the stairs, spilling his cereal everywhere*
Kang-hyun: Natural selection is coming for this man.
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psincorrectquotes · 1 year
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Phillip: Hey, can we stay over tonight?
Hyungho: Why?
Kang-hyun: Taein fiddled with an ouija board and cursed our flat.
Taein: Jootaek-hyung doesn't know how to banish spirits, so he just throws salt at them and yells "DOES THIS LOOK LIKE A HOTEL TO YOU?!"
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fcble · 3 months
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Inwang jesaekdo, Jeong Seon (1751)
OUTTAKES — A collection of bits and pieces of ideas I had and posts I was going to make that never made it to completion
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TRIVIA
I wanted to do posts of miscellaneous trivia and headcanons around certain themes. The only one of these I completed was one on their names. I forced the explanations of Mingeun and Andrew(‘s stage) names into “Double A-Side,” but I do have the rest of them HERE.  
I also have some other trivia facts that I think more people should know.
Mingeun keeps a diary in French. He was very strongly encouraged to start one when he was a trainee, and he’s stuck with it ever since. Except he doesn’t want anyone else reading it, which is why he writes in French. It’s also made him a lot better at the language.
The worst-kept Fable secret is that Jaeseop has been in a relationship with his girlfriend since 2016. The best-kept Fable secret is that Jaeseop moved out at the end of 2022 to live with said girlfriend. I am hoping this will have bearing on the story soon other than mentions that Jaeseop doesn’t live with them anymore.
Solidifying the degrees for once because I feel like I’ve said Jaeseop has three different degrees. He does not. His degree is in marketing. Kiyoung’s is in political science, and Andrew’s is in music. Haksu dropped out halfway through but he was studying business administration. His heart was not in it at all.
On the topic of education, Intak went to a technical high school and is a decently qualified fake civil engineer. Eunsu attended SOPA in the Department of Practical Music. Mingeun is the only member without a high school diploma.
The lore-relevant reason for the education is that Taein believes in back-up plans. It’s part of the reason he doesn’t like Mingeun very much. On a tangential note, Neon Nights was the backup if Fable’s debut fell through.
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FANSERVICE MOMENTS THAT CAUSE SECOND-HAND EMBARRASSMENT / 2024 WHITE DAY SPECIAL
Exactly what it sounds like. Also the failed post that inspired this one. It was so cringe I couldn’t go through with it. I wanted to write this like a script. Thinking of the dialogue did me in completely. HERE are the only two scenes I finished.
Other things I had planned on were Haksu’s constant enabling of the boyfriend stans (signing fake marriage certificates at in-person fansigns, barking/meowing/whatever in fan calls), Jaeseop chivalry moment (didn’t think farther than that), and an extra terrible group Imagine Your Korea ad.
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OOPS ALL HAKSU CONFESSIONS
This is the title of “Great Things” in my docs. When I made the doc, I was going to write it as moments in a confessional booth. The problem with that is that he’s rationalizing all his actions in his head and he would not have confessed at the level of honesty I needed for the piece. So the other half of the piece was going to be entries in Mingeun’s diary because he’s the only one that works like that, and it would have been two perspectives on the same events. There were two problems with that. One, I wanted to die writing first person. Two, he didn’t know the extent of Haksu’s actions. 
The last scene of this piece is also a couple of days before the Haksu segment of “Form is Emptiness.” One of the first iterations of this was actually from Andrew’s perspective. It was part of a different Haksu piece which was perspectives on Haksu.
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OTHER DOC TITLES (PUBLISHED)
the eunsu departure novella (but mingeun is also everywhere???) — “Form is Emptiness.” Mingeun is everywhere. I can’t explain it. I guess in this context it makes sense because they’re besties.
mingeun wooseok era (probably not he’s not even flopping) — The Shooting Stars drafts doc. You can find it HERE.
andrew han moment — The write-up of In Full Bloom, the YouTube documentary accompanying their second full album. This helped me realize he’s a main character more than I would like to admit.
andrew mingeun parallels (emotionally constipated man discovers talking about your feelings helps) — The working title of “Not Enough.” In hindsight this is funny because they don’t even work through anything here. They were supposed to. Also I spelled impostor correctly once and incorrectly once in the same sentence 👍.
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byeonghwi time!!! (how he became a trainee) — “First Love.” Exactly what it sounds like. 
mingeun hwajung bi4bi — “Live Wire.” They don’t talk about it in the piece but they are both bisexual. 
intak anniversary piece that is actually andrew's identity crisis in disguise — “Double A-Side” was originally going to be from Intak’s perspective because he thinks about a lot of things but doesn’t say a lot of things. I realized pretty early on that this had to be an Andrew piece and so that changed.
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OTHER DOC TITLES (UNPUBLISHED)
walk the line — The perspectives on Haksu piece. This was also going to do the same event from multiple perspectives thing. I got as far as three paragraphs into Mingeun’s 2019 Mass experience, which is canon and did happen.
jaeseop at the shareholders meeting! what will happen to him? — Jaeseop attending his first meeting as a Zenith Entertainment stakeholder <3. Since the Fable concept scandal happened, I have to mess with the timeline. This is a thousand words long but I’m going to revisit parts of it in another piece I think so I’m not posting any of those words.
fable! but i don't know where i'm going — A rewrite of one of the very early Fable pieces where Taein told Mingeun to lie about his identity but I never finished it. Actually kind of important now that I think about it. It’s how he ended up the way he was in “Not Enough.” He should know that it’s Taein’s fault. But he was young and angry and desperate and just moved across the world and it was a lot easier for him to take his anger out on Andrew rather than his boss. This was also going to be accompanied by the interlude in which Jaeseop fights for Mingeun’s life, which is what changes Taein’s mind. This is very much missing from just Mingeun’s perspective. Maybe I’ll finish this one. It’s got some great bits like
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and also
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:(.
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BONUS:
What was the main conflict for every Fable member in November 2021?
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fcble · 8 months
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DOUBLE A-SIDE: a single where both sides are designated the A-side, with no designated B-side; that is, both sides are prospective hit songs and neither side will be promoted over the other.
In which Andrew has some difficult conversations. FEATURING: Andrew Han, Yoon Mingeun, Park Intak, Kang Haksu WORD COUNT: 4.1k NOTES: Two shorter pieces with similar themes that are not exactly completely related to/reliant on one another. Can be read together or independently! Also not proofread please lmk if you find typos or something doesn't make sense.
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[ A-SIDE — MAY 10, 2023 ]
Andrew steps into Intak's studio, announcing himself not with a knock or a greeting, but merely his presence. He sees a flash of movement as Intak minimizes one of his windows. 
Haksu and Mingeun trail behind him reluctantly. Andrew pulls Mingeun the rest of the way into the room and shuts the door behind all three of them.
"No one is leaving this room until we write our anniversary song," he announces.
"What if I have to piss?" Mingeun asks.
"Intak?" Andrew asks. It's almost telepathic to see Intak reach into the bowels of his desk and retrieve a plastic soda bottle. He spins in his chair and tosses it to Mingeun, who catches it, looking stunned. Andrew knows he has an almost addiction to Mountain Dew, and the bottles pile up until they spill over onto the floor.
"What if I have to shit?" Mingeun asks next.
"I don't think Andrew-hyung will keep you from using the bathroom," Haksu says. He steps around Andrew to take a seat in the worn loveseat, the only other chair in the room. He leans forward to look at Intak's screen. "Are you working?"
"Yes," Intak answers shortly.
"I asked Jaeseop to get us food if he doesn't hear from us in a few hours," Andrew says. He sits next to Haksu, dropping the bag containing his laptop on the ground, in front of Intak's electric keyboard. Its identical counterpart sits right next door in his own studio. He can't help the way his hands move automatically, picking out the beginning of Fur Elise.
“What kind of food?” Haksu asks, clearly skeptical of Andrew’s quite literal taste. “Pizza Hut, again?”
“Olive Garden,” Andrew answers cheerfully as he plays. He doesn't rise to Haksu's obvious bait—he's used to it. And he might have a point. They do eat a lot of Pizza Hut.
He turns his attention to Intak. “What are we starting with?”
“Nothing.” Intak says.
Andrew stops playing. “I was really hoping you were going to say something other than that.” He thought he could rely on Intak to have something, anything. Taein asked them months ago, in January, to start working on what would be their fifth anniversary song later in the year. Andrew had agreed, and then gone back to putting the finishing touches on his album. It was always Intak’s responsibility to produce concept-fitting songs that Taein actually liked. Andrew has no idea how to work in the gayageum and the taepyeongso and the piri and whatever else Intak uses.
Intak shrugs. “You could do it.”
“I couldn’t.” It’s a deep-seated conviction. Andrew can’t do whatever Intak does, because he doesn’t have that same knowledge of history and culture and Korea itself that seems to be inherently built into his group members. He’s reminded, embarrassingly enough, of when he heard their debut song for the first time, and asked after the vaguely string sounds in the instrumental. In Andrew’s head, string instruments were cellos and violas and violins and double basses, and maybe, and a more radical day, harps and lyres. Not Asian zithers.
“Don’t you think it’s time you tried?” Mingeun, this time. He leans against the wall, arms crossed, the room having run out of seats.
The room feels stuffy all of a sudden. Andrew has tried. Every sample Intak’s given him sounds shitty and stereotypical in his hands, like a soundtrack straight from a film scene where the characters step into a Chinatown somewhere and the lighting dims and the screen clouds with smoke. When Intak writes music with the same sample, it becomes uplifting, a celebration of a heritage and a culture yearning to burst forth in an increasingly anglicized world. Andrew envies him.
Haksu nudges Andrew with his foot. “You should.”
Andrew is frozen, unable to respond. Haksu is right. He should. But now, he feels like there’s too much at stake. His album did well—it’s their best-selling one yet—and that means he has a reputation to uphold. They have expectations for him now. They think he’s smart and talented and worthy. Andrew knows the limits of his own abilities. They don’t include writing a usual Fable title track. There’s a reason his album sounds the way it does—that’s what he knows, what he’s confident in. It’s a breath of fresh air next to the sameness of the rest of their discography. That’s his job. Not the traditional sound that defines almost all of their songs.
He pretends everything is fine. "Are you sure you don't have anything?" he asks Intak. "We don't have a lot of time."
Intak begins to scan through the files on his computer. "Because we spent so much time on your album," he grumbles. "I have demos Taein-nim rejected."
"Let's fix one of those," Andrew says decisively. Mingeun looks like he wants to argue. Or maybe that's how he always looks, because he always wants to argue.
They start with the longest ones first. Intak turns on his speakers and presses play on a three and a half minute audio file—Andrew can see the exact time if he squints.
“I remember this,” Haksu says, ten seconds into the song. As far as Andrew can tell, it’s Intak’s usual conglomeration of sounds. An unknown, echoing instrument skips in and out of the main melody. The bass is minimal, but consistent. It sounds almost interchangeable with the majority of their discography. “It’s from a long time ago. Our second mini album?”
Intak nods. “I tried again for our third. Taein-nim said no again.”
Andrew takes extensive mental notes on each subsequent song. The glacial pace of the second one, probably meant to be a ballad. The bass-driven third one, traditional instrumental lost in the 808s. The one with the beat drop that sounds like it switches to a completely different song. One with Haksu singing nonsensical demo lyrics that he doesn’t remember. Another slower-paced one, driven by a string instrumental. A rock song.
“Taein-nim said I should give that one to Neon Nights,” Intak says. 
Andrew shoots Mingeun a quizzical glance. Mingeun shakes his head. “She likes doing everything by herself,” he says in English, referring to Hwajung, the band’s main producer. The change in language surprises Andrew. They’ve all worked together before, on Andrew’s album, and then on a Neon Nights one. 
Andrew sighs. “Who doesn’t know?” he asks, also in English, because Hwajung is also Mingeun's girlfriend.
“Who do you think?” Mingeun says. “He’d get mad at me.”
It’s Haksu. Andrew knows that even if Haksu won’t say anything out loud, he’s thinking certain thoughts. Celibacy and pre-marital sex and they’re idols and all of that. 
He can't be mad at that. Mingeun and Hwajung are pretty good at keeping it on the down low, pretending they barely know one another at work. If Andrew hadn't seen them sit so close to one another they were basically sitting in the same seat while they worked on his album, he'd be no wiser than Haksu.
Haksu folds his arms over his chest. “You’re doing it again. Stop talking about me.”
"Learn English," Mingeun says, speaking Korean again. Haksu learning English would be of no detriment to them, Andrew knows. They'd fall back on broken, rusty, grammatically incorrect French, in which they can barely understand each other, because Mingeun speaks Canada's archaic French with an unintelligible accent.
Haksu grimaces. "That's Westernized," he says, as if he doesn't partake in a predominantly Western religion while dressed in Western clothes, about to eat Olive Garden in a few hours.
“The music,” Intak interrupts, and they go back to listening to shorter and shorter segments. Some of them are pieces. A chorus. A verse. Half of each. One is Intak humming a few bars. He clicks out of that one quickly.
“I wanna hear it,” Haksu says. His request is ignored.
A few minutes later, Intak finally runs out of demos.
“Taein-nim rejected all of those?” Mingeun asks. 
“I doubt he listened to all of them completely,” Intak says, “but yes.”
In Andrew’s ears, most of them have blended together. He’s grateful to hear Haksu say, “I like the orchestral one that goes like”—he hums a bit of the song—because it gives Andrew a chance to step in and say, “I thought that one was the best too.”
He does think it was one of the better ones, but mostly because it was nearly complete. His best guess for its rejection is because it's not nearly as upbeat as some of Intak's other compositions. Andrew figures it should be fine for an anniversary piece. It's better that way—something slower and steadier that demonstrates their growth as people and artists.
He starts thinking of lyrics. Something provocative and dramatic. Intak’s demo lyrics are all about a nostalgic, wintry longing that brings to mind comparisons to Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Andrew is thinking about something in the opposite direction, something bigger, something brighter. Love is like a volcano?
“I want to keep the idea of the lyrics,” Haksu says, breaking Andrew’s reverie.
“It’s our anniversary,” Andrew says, nearly rendered speechless from Haksu’s words. “If the melody is melancholy, the lyrics should be happier.”
“No one says shit like ‘melancholy,’” Mingeun says. “Let’s keep going with Intak-hyung’s idea.” At some point during their listening party when Andrew wasn’t paying attention, he migrated from the wall to the floor next to Intak’s desk.
Sometimes Andrew despises democracy. They weren’t always democratic. Not in the days when it was just him and Intak, because then it was Intak making most of the decisions. Andrew never wanted to intrude or overstep. He has the confidence to do so now, but he knows this is an argument he won’t win.
So he relents easily, says “Fine,” and pulls out his laptop. Mingeun looks surprised at his lack of disagreement. He really enjoys arguments, Andrew thinks.
He plays audio engineer, because he still disagrees with the idea and theme of the song. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches the three of them gather around Haksu’s notebook to develop Intak’s fledgling ideas. He sits back in his seat, losing himself the layers of the song. He listens to the song forward and back. He turns on and off each one individually, and then two or three at a time. He pictures the way the vocals will layer on top and underneath. He thinks about asking Haksu to sing one of his new lines, just so he can experiment with it. He tries not to imbue it with his own style—an extra synth here and there, a secondary melody in a minor key, one too many layers of vocals.
His flow state is interrupted by the chime of a new text message. It’s Jaeseop, texting exactly three hours after Andrew told him he was heading to work.
bringing ur food (๑>◡&lt;;๑), he reads. Below is a selfie of Jaeseop holding a plastic bag, the sky bright blue behind him. 
“Andrew,” Intak says loudly, and Andrew looks up, surprised that his name came from Intak and not Mingeun.
Andrew tugs his headphones off and watches Intak rip a page out of Haksu’s notebook. “Do the demo with this.”
“Me? Why can’t Haksu do it?”
Mingeun snatches the page from Intak’s hand. “I’ll do it if he doesn’t want to.”
“Andrew’s doing it because he’s going to arrange it,” Intak says. Mingeun reluctantly hands the paper over to Andrew. “He’s the one who wants to stay in this room until the song is done.”
“I said that for all of us,” Andrew says.
They’re interrupted by Jaeseop’s arrival. He seems cheerful as he sets down the bags on the little space remaining on Intak’s desk. Tucking his hands into his pockets, he asks, “Is it going well?”
For some reason, the onus is on Andrew to answer. He feels the weight of their gazes: Jaeseop is expectant, Haksu is skeptical, Intak is steady and bored, and Mingeun’s is his usual scowl.
“It’s going very well,” he says.
Haksu gives him a reproachful glance and says, “He’s underselling us. We could finish the song today, as long as Taein-nim approves of it.”
Jaeseop brightens. “Sounds good! I can’t wait to hear it.” He sounds like he genuinely can’t wait to hear their song. 
He leaves just as quickly as he arrived. The door is barely shut behind him when Haksu stands up and announces, “I’m going to church. Mingeun is coming with me.”
“I didn’t agree to that,” Mingeun complains.
“It’s Wednesday,” Andrew says at the same time.
Haksu looks at both of them like they’re stupid. “So? I worked on the song. I did my part. There’s nothing else for me to do.”
“He’s right,” Intak says. He crosses his arms and gives Andrew a look that very obviously says he shouldn’t argue. So Andrew folds without saying anything. 
To his surprise, Mingeun picks himself off the floor. “Thanks for the food, hyung,” he says, grabbing one of the bags on Intak’s desk.
The speed at which people work when they want to leave will never cease to surprise Andrew. He doesn’t think this is hard work as much as Haksu does. He could stay here for days or weeks, immersed in the music, so long as Jaeseop keeps providing him with food.
As Mingeun and Haksu leave, he hears Haksu grumble under his breath about Americans and fast food and forks.
“Chopsticks are from China,” Andrew overhears Mingeun say before the door swings shut.
In the quiet, Intak says, "I'll start working on the b-sides."
This comes as a surprise. "I thought we were releasing an anniversary song, not an anniversary album."
Intak looks like he was caught off guard as well. "I could have sworn Taein-nim said that to both of us."
Andrew is slighted. Why wouldn't he be, when he wasn't given these same guidelines? He's the one who's shaped and guided their sound outside of all the traditional title tracks. Fable can pull off other concepts, because Andrew pushed them in those directions, even if it was only one song per album.
“Do you think Taein thinks of your music differently than mine?" he asks.
Intak takes a minute to think about it. Andrew can practically see the gears turning in his head.
"No," he says, and Andrew wonders why it took him so long to come to that conclusion.
“He must,” Andrew insists. He refuses to let the topic drop. “I didn’t get to write our debut song.”
“I didn’t ‘get to’ write it either. I wrote it because I could write a good song."
“I can write good songs.”
“Yeah. I don’t disagree.”
Talking to him is like talking to a brick wall. Intak is smart, but there's always a disconnect between what he thinks and what he says. Andrew has to pry every response out of him, like he's pulling teeth.
Intak methodically unpacks the remaining takeout bag and takes a bite of his carbonara. “This sounds like it's really important to you,” he says with his mouth full. “Can we talk about it later?”
“No. I thought I passed the audition and debuted in Fable to be a songwriter."
"I thought you passed your audition because you speak four languages."
Andrew shrugs, because he did say that, even though it's not quite true. Everyone lies on their resumes. He said that because he thought it would impress Taein, and it did. “Something should have changed by now.”
"You. You’re the one that should change," Intak says as he stabs his pasta with vitriol. 
He has changed. He’s older now, and wiser, as generic and contrived as that sounds, with a better understanding of his place in the world. He isn’t that same person who auditioned so many years ago with an unplaced confidence that he could survive and thrive in the cutthroat music industry. He’s accepted Fable’s middle class, second tier status, and he finds he doesn’t mind as much as he thought he would.
"I have."
Intak takes a long look at him and says, "Not enough."
Then, as if to signal that conversation is over, he puts his head down on his desk. "Record the fucking song, Andrew," he says, voice muffled.
They never write any b-sides.
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[ B-SIDE — JUNE 3, 2023 ]
Andrew isn’t one to lose his temper. So he surprises even himself when he stands up and walks out of the room. Jaeseop is still talking. He pauses in the middle of his sentence.
“Where are you going?” His voice is muffled by the door and walls.
“Out,” Andrew answers from the other side of the door. “I’ve heard enough.”
He has heard enough. All Jaeseop had to say was that their album was delayed again. It could have been a text message.
He hikes up all three flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator. At the top, he leans his body weight into opening the door to the rooftop. It creaks open reluctantly, hinges squealing in discordant protest. Then he has to do the same thing to close it.
He takes a seat on one of the two stone benches, overlooking the city around him. There isn’t much to see. The sun is setting, and the glow of the copywriting sign becomes more visible with each passing minute. The other, taller, buildings cast long dark shadows and block out any possibility of Andrew seeing farther than across the street.
He sits there for a minute, thinking and trying to cool down. He’s unfamiliar with anger when it comes from within. Frustration and futility, sure, but anger is a different beast. That’s Mingeun’s forte.
The door protests again, inching open. Andrew stares. Another thirty seconds pass before Mingeun steps outside. Speak of the devil—or think of him—and he shall appear.
Mingeun leaves the door ajar. He takes a silent seat next to Andrew.
“Do you need something?” Andrew asks. He can feel his anger creep into his words.
Mingeun crosses his arms. “I need a reason to talk to you?” he asks. “You seemed upset when you left. Is that enough?”
“I was,” Andrew concedes. Mingeun could still have an ulterior motive. Jaeseop always sends the youngest members to do his bidding, like some villain with his henchmen.
“I didn’t think you’d notice,” he continues.
Mingeun rolls his eyes. “I can fucking see.”
He sounds upset. It shouldn’t be a surprise. He’s always upset about one thing or another. And why wouldn’t he be upset about this?
“I thought we were more important to Taein,” Andrew says, dropping the honorifics on purpose. “More important than a survival show trainee.”
Mingeun shrugs. “He could have something on Taein, like Haksu did.”
He matches Andrew’s use of honorifics. They both know the easiest way to get through to their CEO is to wear him down with astronomical persistence. A bit of bribery and blackmail never hurts either. Andrew can’t imagine what other secrets Taein might be protecting, especially after Haksu’s extravaganza. He thinks they’ve all learned their lessons since then: Taein should break fewer laws, Haksu shouldn’t stake his career on a few secrets, and the rest of them should sleep with one eye open around him regardless.
“Didn’t you watch the show?” Andrew asks. Mingeun watches every kpop survival show he can get his hands on. Where he finds all the time to do that remains a mystery.
“I did,” Mingeun says. “I didn’t care for him. What kid thinks he can cover Taemin in his audition? He only got as far as he did because his parents are famous. There’s nothing he could have done on his own for Taein to take notice of him.”
Andrew lets him go on his tirade. He’s feeling better. Even though he’s now left to face the reality of his delayed album. It should be their album, but he has a hard time thinking of it that way. He puts a part of himself into each and every one of his songs and albums. Granted, he has one album to his name, but he thinks his point stands. And even if his music is never as good as he wants it to be, as he thinks it should be, that shouldn’t stop them from releasing and promoting it. Intak releases, for lack of a better word, shit, on every EP since their debut. Andrew has never been offered that same opportunity.
“You’re not listening to me,” Mingeun says.
Andrew snaps out of it. “I am.” He’s not. “I don’t want to talk about him.”
“Fine.” Mingeun drums the fingers of his right hand against his thigh. “What do you want to talk about?”
This Mingeun makes Andrew uncomfortable. If it weren’t for his restless motions, he’d think it was a different person sitting next to him. He’s never this receptive or attentive or willing to talk.
“I don’t know.” Now Andrew is the one who doesn’t want to talk. The role reversal freaks him out a little. At the same time, he can’t pass up this chance to have a decent conversation with Mingeun.
Then it comes to him. “My stage name. I’m sick of it. I don’t think I ever liked it.”
“Okay,” Mingeun says simply.
Andrew expects more from him. He thought they were going to talk.
“Does it bother you that much? Am I supposed to feel bad for you?”
He should have known not to bring this up with Mingeun. It’s a touchy subject. Mingeun sounds more like himself now.
“It does.” Andrew wants to say more, but Mingeun isn’t done yet.
“I never liked your name either. It’s so presumptuous. Out of all the characters, you picked those two?” He looks disgusted. “That’s the reasoning parents use when they choose names for their children. You did it for yourself.”
Andrew fires back. “My parents never gave me a Korean name and they were never going to give me one. I didn’t have another choice. You should know that.”
They’ve known each other for years. That’s supposed to be common knowledge. How can Mingeun not know?
The smallest remaining rational part of Andrew’s brain knows it’s because Mingeun fills his head with so many other things. He’s got his near-encyclopedic archive of kpop groups and songs and dances. It should be easy to see why personal information would hemorrhage from his brain. Does Mingeun know their birthdays? He doubts it.
Mingeun rolls his eyes. “Yeah, but it didn’t have to be that one.”
What else could it have been? Andrew was never given any examples or suggestions. Just the thinly veiled threat that if he wanted to make it in Korea, he needed a Korean name. Mingeun should understand that.
“You always make everything about yourself. You never ask about me. Mingeun, how was your day? Mingeun, are you having fun on Shooting Stars? Mingeun, why does Taein hate you more than everyone else?”
“Taein doesn’t—” Andrew starts.
“Yes, he does.”
They lapse into silence, because Andrew knows, somewhere deep down, that as much as he thinks Taein dislikes him, Mingeun’s situation is worse. It isn’t a competition, but Mingeun’s always had it worse. He just chose not to see it.
When Andrew thinks Mingeun has cooled down, he says, “Tell me about your name.”
“Oh.” The surprise in his voice is evident from a single syllable. He gets over it quickly. “'Min' is the generational character. You know, the dollimja."
Andrew does not know, but he nods along and pretends like he does. Mingeun looks him in the eye and says, "You don't know."
He doesn't have it in him to argue.
"It means quick and clever," Mingeun continues, tracing the Hanja character on his thigh. Andrew recognizes it in pieces: the character for mother, radical 66. “The ‘geun’ character is the one for diligence.”
He writes this one with his finger too: 勤, speeding through the horizontal lines and finishing with a sloppy rendition of the strength radical. 
“It’s nice,” Andrew says, because it really is a nice name.
“Better than yours,” Mingeun says in a way that’s clearly meant to provoke. Andrew doesn’t rise to the bait. 
“Doesn’t seem like a high bar,” he says, and when Mingeun laughs at that, he feels like he’s crossed some impassable reach and brought the two of them a small step closer.
In the days that follow, Andrew drops his stage name informally. Most of the group calls him Andrew anyway. There's no special announcement. Daewoong calls him Yejun three times and Andrew doesn't respond three times, and after that, he gets the point too. Taein asks him about it, and Andrew spins a tale of authenticity and identity his boss clearly doesn’t give a shit about. But Taein doesn’t push further, and he’s left feeling more like himself than he has in years.
11 notes · View notes
fcble · 9 months
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You can vote for MINGEUN three times a day by CLICKING HERE.
As the Shooting Stars finale approaches, Mingeun can be found in any one of his usual haunts: his company’s dance practice room, the French bakery down the street, any of the many live music venues dotting Hongdae. For this interview, he invites me to the building of his label, Zenith Entertainment.
He greets me in the building’s lobby, charmingly polite. He has a magnetic presence, making me feel less like a seasoned writer and more like a Fabulist—one of his group’s dedicated fans. It isn’t hard to see why he’s so successful as an idol. Mingeun leads me through the building, giving me a glimpse of his daily life. Zenith Entertainment starts on the third floor. He points out the practice rooms of the company’s three artists—his own group Fable, girl band Neon Nights, and idol soloist Jaesun.
Then we hike up the stairs to the fourth floor, the corporate level. He shows me the open-concept office of the staff in one large room. We briefly greet Zenith Entertainment CEO, Lee Taein, hard at work in his own office.
Eventually, Mingeun unlocks a door at the end of the hallway. We step into a small, dimly lit room. In the corner is a small glass cubicle, containing a single recording microphone and music stand. The main centerpiece is a neatly organized desk with all the workings of a musician: a widescreen monitor, two speakers, a pair of headphones, a computer keyboard and a music one. A shelf on the wall displays each of Fable’s albums. Two high-backed ergonomic chairs occupy the rest of the remaining space. Mingeun gestures for me to take the seat closest to the desk as he sits in the chair opposite. He explains that this is the studio of fellow Fable member Andrew Han, one of the group’s main producers.
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The following is an unedited transcript of our interview.
Q: Tell me a little about yourself, and how you came to compete on Shooting Stars. A: Hello, I’m Fable’s Yoon Mingeun. Officially, I’m the group’s main dancer. We’re becoming a bit less strict with positions. I trained as a vocalist for some time at SM Entertainment before I joined Zenith. I chose to join Shooting Stars because I wanted to prove myself to myself.
Q: Can you elaborate any more on that last point? A: I guess. There are so many skilled and talented idols these days. Even in my own group, I feel overshadowed sometimes. I want the acknowledgment or the physical proof that I’m just as good, or better. And I’m competitive. I want to win. Is that so bad?
Q: The first voting put you at rank 22, before you rose into the single digits. Do you have anything to say about how you managed to pull that off? A: No.
Q: What would you bring to the winning group? What makes you indispensable? A: I can do anything. That’s kind of already my role in Fable. I do whatever’s asked of me, because I can. If someone’s sick or someone leaves, it doesn’t matter, because I’m there. I’m insurance.
Q: Anything else you want to tell readers? A: Not really. Vote for me. That’s all I have to ask.
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fcble · 1 year
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TURN BACK TIME   ━━━━   PROFILES !
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OH KIYOUNG / 오기영 / 吳基榮, b. April 18, 1994, played by Lee Minhyuk
KIYOUNG is the eldest member and lead dancer of Fable. Prior to being asked to join the group by Jaeseop, he lived a rather aimless life. As a teenager, he had spent a few years as an idol trainee at another small company that went under before he could debut. After that, he all but gave up at being an idol, until Jaeseop offered him a second chance.
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ANDREW HAN, b. September 23, 1995, played by Yoon Jeonghan
Despite being born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, YEJUN is better known by his self-christened Korean stage name. After multiple years spent trying to break into the American music industry as a teen and young adult, he moved to South Korea alone in 2016. A few missteps somehow led to a jackpot, and Andrew found himself the main vocalist of an upcoming idol group.
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LEE JAESEOP / 이재섭 / 李材攝, b. October 2, 1995, played by Kim Dongyoung
JAESEOP was given his position as Fable’s leader and lead dancer by Zenith Entertainment CEO Lee Taein, who also happens to be Jaeseop’s uncle. When he first agreed to work with his uncle, he thought the job would require use of his brand new marketing degree, not immediately disregard his entire university experience. Whatever. Jaeseop likes his group members more than he likes his uncle.
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PARK INTAK / 박인탁 / 朴仁托, b. December 3, 1995, main rapper, played by Kim Taehyung
For INTAK, music was much more of a hobby than a possible profession. There was absolutely no way he could share his music with anyone other than his few friends. Also, he hated the idea of being an idol. Until Kiyoung convinced him to just try it out for a little bit, and Intak was roped into becoming Fable’s main rapper.
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KANG HAKSU / 강학수 / 康授學, b. August 8, 1997, played by Lee Jaehyun  
HAKSU’s life changed on November 23, 2017, when he realized he had to become an idol. Less than a month later, he dropped out of university and joined Zenith Entertainment, becoming the latest and last addition to Fable. His sudden addition confused and surprised the other members, particularly Mingeun, who had held the main vocalist position until Haksu usurped it.
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BAEK EUNSU / 백은수 / 伯銀帥, b. July 10, 1999, played by Yoo Yongha
As the second son of a Buddhist priest, EUNSU had always had the freedom to do almost anything he wanted. Even if the something was being possessed with the pop punk need to get out of his small home town. So he did. He spent some time as an SM Entertainment trainee where he met Mingeun, and then went with him to Zenith Entertainment, until he eventually became Fable’s main rapper.
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YOON MINGEUN / 윤민근 / 尹敏勤, b. November 13, 1999, played by Lee Jangjun
MINGEUN was born in Yongin, South Korea, before immigrating to Canada at the age of two. Fast forward almost ten years, and Mingeun was accosted at Incheon International Airport by an SM Entertainment scout on a routine vacation. He accepted, and quickly became consumed with the overwhelming urge to debut. He persevered to eventually become Fable’s main dancer, and is occasionally referred to as one of the only members of the group who can actually dance.
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LIM BYEONGHWI / 임병휘 / 任昞輝, b. May 18, 2001, played by Bae Jinyoung 
BYEONGHWI is a near perfect example of someone else's kid. As a child, he was mostly obedient, excelling in school and sports and skipping class to accompany a friend to a Zenith Entertainment audition. He was wracked with guilt over the last part for weeks, especially when he, not his friend, ended up passing the audition and debuting as Fable’s lead vocalist.
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fcble · 1 year
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In which Andrew and Mingeun put the dia in diaspora. FEATURING : Andrew Han, Yoon Mingeun, Fable ensemble WORD COUNT : 6k
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APRIL 2017
For Mingeun, meeting Andrew is a moment of certainty in his uncertain life. They’re much too similar to each other, and that means there can only be one of them. They hold the same position. They have very similar backgrounds (to Taein, at least, and it’s his opinion that counts). Mingeun knows it needs to be him. It’s sickening, he thinks, how nice Andrew seems to be. He’s not possessed by the same manic urgency for success as Mingeun.
Mingeun sees him with Byeonghwi all the time, in the lobby, in the singular conference room, heads bent over Byeonghwi’s homework. And that’s the other thing. Andrew is smart, and it hasn’t gone to his head. It’s Eunsu who pries Andrew’s credentials out of him, eyes almost popping out of his head when he tells Mingeun, “Did you know he went to an Ivy League university?”
All that does is make Mingeun feel even more inferior, with his lack of education and his lack of refinement. Andrew is conversationally fluent or better in four languages. He speaks French better than Mingeun, and Mingeun did French immersion.
Mingeun grits his teeth and tells himself he could be a better idol. Except everyone else seems enamored by him. There’s Byeonghwi of course, always in their little tutoring sessions. Eunsu finds him fascinating, waxing poetic of Andrew’s shining qualities. Andrew cracked Intak’s shell in a record two weeks. Mingeun was unaware that Intak was capable of saying so many words. Even Jaeseop defers to him sometimes. Mingeun wants to shake him and tell him to get his shit back together, because Andrew is only a few months older, and Jaeseop is smart and worldly too.
About a month after Andrew's arrival at Zenith, he insists on taking Mingeun out for coffee. They go to an overpriced coffee shop/bakery, where Andrew insists on paying.
Mingeun is halfway through fucking up a croissant when Andrew says, "Let's get along. No more pretending the other person doesn't exist."
He speaks in English, as if that will make Mingeun more susceptible to his words. It seems he doesn't understand they're competing against each other.
Mingeun puts his croissant down. "Why? There's no guarantee one or both of us will debut."
“Stop thinking like that,” Andrew says. The hard gaze in his eyes contrasts with the rest of his pretty face and his words. It doesn't scare Mingeun, but it does intimidate him slightly, making him think that maybe he underestimated Andrew. Maybe he does have that same pressing desire to survive. Mingeun's stomach rolls. They're too much alike. He hates it. He wants to crawl out of his skin and become a different person.
But Mingeun knows how this will end. Being a trainee puts you at the whim of too many other people. It leaves you vulnerable, and no amount of willpower will let you survive unscathed.
“You haven’t been around here for very long,” Mingeun says. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“I’ll survive,” Andrew says, as if he didn’t hear Mingeun’s concerns.
“You don’t understand!” The sound of his fist cracking against the lacquered table draws the attention of the people around them.
Mingeun tries to collect himself. He really does. But the little food he ate is churning in his stomach, and his vision is clouded, like he can’t see anything other than Andrew. Stupidly confident, infuriatingly self-assured Andrew Han.
Andrew is saying something back, because Mingeun can see his lips moving. He can't hear a single word over the blood roaring in his ears.
He cuts him off. "Thank you for the food, hyung," Mingeun says, rising stiffly from his seat.
Annoyance flashes through Andrew's eyes, before he returns to his usual relaxed self.
"You can't keep walking out of conversations when they don't go your way," he says. "You won't get anywhere like that."
Andrew speaks in absolutes. Will, will not, can, cannot.
Mingeun raises his chin in defiance and says, "Fuck off."
He makes the most dramatic and dignified exit he can, refusing to look back in Andrew's direction.
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"Are you going to be a hater for your entire life?" Eunsu asks.
The good thing about being part of an entertainment company so small it can't house its own trainees is the freedom it gives them. The bad thing is that both Mingeun and Eunsu live with family and friends, and that means all their private conversations happen in the anonymity that comes with living in a big city.
"I'm not a hater," Mingeun says on their third lap of the same Hongdae block. They pause to watch a busking group cover EXO’s “Monster,” and Mingeun's entire body thrums with the need to join in, even when he's tired and upset from his own day.
Eunsu takes a moment to respond. "Okay," he says, and Mingeun reasons to himself that he's distracted and he's tired and that's why he's not having a full conversation. “You act like one. You barely get along with anyone.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Mingeun asks without taking his gaze off the performance.
“If you’re going to be in a group, you have to work with other people,” Eunsu says, stating the obvious.
“I know that.” He can work with other people, but he doesn’t have to enjoy it. As long as he can stand on stage, he’ll do whatever it takes.
“You don’t act like it. I don’t want to tell you to lower yourself to everyone else’s level, but you can’t force them meet the same high standard you hold yourself too,” Eunsu says slowly, as if carefully choosing every word.
“I don’t,” Mingeun says, and he means it. He has to push himself, because this is all he knows, and he can’t fail.
“It’s good to be grateful for what you have, even if it’s settling for something less.”
Mingeun doesn’t want to talk to him anymore either. He’s not settling. Eunsu–rational, practical Eunsu–has told him multiple times before that Taein had nothing to do with his unfortunate departure from SM Entertainment. Mingeun knows it has to be true, because Taein left before he did, but he still feels like he has something to prove to him. It’s almost like revenge, or maybe spite, that made Mingeun actively seek him out.
He fakes a yawn. “I’m ready to go home. Good night, Eunsu. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
“You can say you don’t want to talk to me,” Eunsu says. “Good night, I guess.”
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AUGUST 2019
Andrew wouldn't say he hates Fable's concept. He wouldn't say he dislikes it either. He doesn't have close to the same level of virulent hatred as Mingeun does. It's more of a passive feeling, of whether or not he belongs.
It comes in small moments. Like when Taein puts him on the spot and asks him to come up with a Korean stage name in half a second. Andrew panics, stringing together the most auspicious Chinese characters he can remember from his courses. He ends up with 藝: art, and 俊: talented, handsome. Yejun. Every day he's grateful it makes sense as a name.
Or when he meets Mingeun, who asks him when he and/or his parents immigrated. Andrew has to explain that it was his great-grandparents who moved to the US, and it was so long ago he has no idea what year that was. All Mingeun says is, "Oh." They don't talk again for another three weeks.
It's when Fable is in the final stages of preparation for their debut, and Andrew admits he's never worn a hanbok before. Seven people stare at him like he's grown a second head. Jaeseop has to give him a step by step tutorial on how to get dressed.
Or all the times he’s out in the city, and so consciously aware of how he stands out. The way he dresses, the way he walks, the way he has to lean against every inanimate object. It prompts greetings in English or extremely slow, enunciated Korean. Sometimes he plays along, responding in English. Sometimes he shuts them down in Korean. Most of the time, he lies awake in bed on those nights, and wonders why he got on the plane in the first place.
By Fable’s second comeback, he’s had enough.
“Again?” Haksu asks distastefully when they learn of the concept for their third mini album. He voices Andrew’s thoughts exactly. The difference is that Andrew wasn’t going to say that out loud.
The eight of them sit in the only formal meeting room in the Zenith building. Taein, Andrew has realized, likes to micromanage. He sits at the head of the table, album concept art still projected onto the wall.
Taein ignores Haksu. “If there are no other questions, then I'll see you at the concept photoshoot.”
The difference between him and the other members, Andrew muses after Taein’s dismissal, is fundamental. They can all be dissatisfied with the stagnancy of Fable’s concept, but Andrew is the only one who feels so out of place. What claim does he have to the stories and traditions his group members were raised with?
The person with the closest experience to Andrew has to be Mingeun. But something happened along the way. A few months before their debut, Mingeun went from temperamental and judgemental, to a quiet, sullen shell of himself. He's still quick to anger, but Andrew knows that's an indubitable part of Mingeun that can never be changed. The difference is that it comes out in his actions instead of his words.
The worst part of it all is that Mingeun stopped speaking to Andrew in English whenever the two of them were alone. Andrew's grasp on a new language has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few months, but it was Mingeun's idea to talk to each other in a different language, both for privacy and to retain their fluency. Now he refuses to speak anything other than Korean. Andrew can't understand what's gotten into him, or why he refuses to talk about it.
Their trainee era pseudo rivalry is over, and it was all in Mingeun's head anyway. It wouldn't be an issue if Mingeun could hold a proper conversation about his problems like a normal, functioning adult. The issue is that he spent so long as an asocial trainee that he probably has no understanding of what it’s like to be a normal, functioning adult.
Andrew tries to recruit Jaeseop for this attempt at a conversation. He's lost track of how many times he's tried.
“No,” Jaeseop says. “You can do this yourself.”
“It’s part of your job as leader,” Andrew says, “to mediate conflicts.”
“I don’t get paid enough for that.”
“We barely get paid at all.”
That isn’t a strong enough argument for Jaeseop, so Andrew knocks on Mingeun’s door alone.
“What do you want?” Mingeun opens the door to reveal himself in a Fortnite t-shirt.
Andrew momentarily forgets what he wanted to talk about.
“Hey, Mingeun. Can we talk?” He leans against the doorframe.
“Did I fuck up something?” Mingeun asks, crossing his arms.
“No. Can I come in?”
Mingeun lives in squalor. Andrew picks his way over clothes, various fan gifts, and no less than three SHINee posters that have fallen off the walls.
“I know you hate our concept,” Andrew says when he’s seated on Mingeun’s bed. “I want to know if you hate it for the same reason I do.”
“Which is? Don’t leave me hanging like that.”
Andrew takes a deep breath and takes the plunge. He really shouldn’t be so nervous about having a conversation, but he can’t help it. “I don’t feel like I belong. I’m not the right person to represent whatever we’re supposed to represent.”
Words fail him. He doesn’t know how to convey to Mingeun that he feels like a fraud, like every day he lives a lie, and some day, someone will call him out on it, and Andrew’s house of cards will come crashing down.
To his surprise, Mingeun starts to laugh. “I was stressed there, for a minute. I thought something was wrong. You mean impostor syndrome? Yeah, I do. Every fucking day of my life.”
Andrew knows what impostor syndrome is, and he knows that what he’s feeling is distinctly not imposter syndrome.
“It’s not that,” he says. “I mean the concept itself. The clothes. The music. The overall aesthetic. What am I doing here? I don’t have the same cultural connection everyone else does.”
“Oh. I didn't think Taein-nim gave you the talk too.”
“The talk?” Andrew repeats, but Mingeun moves on.
“Never mind. You’re Korean. You have the same right to the culture as any of us.”
Mingeun doesn’t understand. Andrew has always thought of it as a wall between separating himself and Mingeun from the rest of the group. Now he’s realizing that there’s another wall between himself and Mingeun. Maybe a thinner one, or a slightly porous one, but a wall nonetheless.
“It’s not the same,” he says. “I’m a foreigner, and I’ll always be one. I don’t have the same experiences and memories of growing up ingrained in my culture.”
“Okay. So you didn’t watch Pororo when you were a kid. So what? It’s not too late. You’re in Korea now. Go outside and get your fucking experience.”
He’s all worked up now, gesticulating wildly through the air.
Andrew changes tactics. “When you moved, didn’t you know you were never going to fit in the same as everyone else around you?”
“I was three,” Mingeun says. “That’s different. Immigrating overseas is assimilating into another culture, not returning to your homeland.”
“This isn’t my homeland. I could spend the rest of my life learning the history and the traditions, and I still wouldn’t know as much as someone who grew up here.”
“And that’s fine! No one gives a fuck. We’re in a fucking kpop group. Don’t delude yourself into thinking we’re paragons of cultural influence.”
Andrew didn’t know Mingeun had words like that in his vocabulary.
“I never said that,” he says, even though he thought that influencing was part of being an idol.
“It sounds like it,” Mingeun retorts. “It sounds like you have a problem, and you’re trying to take it out on me.”
How can he misconstrue the point so badly? It’s indicative of Mingeun’s lack of listening comprehension.
“I used to think we were alike,” he continues. “Now I’m glad we’re not. Get out of my room.”
“We can talk about this,” Andrew says.
“That’s all you ever want to do. Talk and talk and talk. I'm fucking tired of talking!"
There's a knock at the door. Mingeun glares at Andrew until he stands up to get it.
“Hi, hyung,” Byeonghwi says. “I don't want to bother you, but it’s really loud.”
“Of course,” Mingeun says, from somewhere behind Andrew. He sounds completely different from the way he did three minutes ago. “Andrew-hyung was just leaving, right?”
He places one hand firmly between Andrew’s shoulder blades, all but pushing him out the door.
In front of Byeonghwi, Andrew has no choice but to go along.
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JUNE 2020
Everything is going well for Fable. They’ve finally released a studio album, an event that was an extremely long time coming by Andrew’s standards. Two years and he’s still not used to making idol music. Maybe it’s something he’ll never get used to.
Haksu finds the article first. He sends a screenshot, and then a link, to their group chat, and Andrew zooms in on the image to read the headline, “Exclusive Reveal of Fable’s Mingeun’s True Past.”
He skims the article: an explanation of their group and concept, Mingeun’s profile picture, a Tweet in English that says, “was anyone gonna tell me this kid from my elementary school became a kpop idol or was i supposed to find that out myself from mcountdown?” accompanied by a yearbook picture of eight-year-old Mingeun Yoon, and a fantaken airport photo of Mingeun with his Canadian passport in one hand.
Andrew doesn’t think much of it. It’s a weird thing to be in the news for. He scrolls down to the comments and reads through variation upon variation of “who?” He closes the article and mutes the group chat when he sees that there are fifty new messages.
Three days later, Mingeun goes on hiatus. The day after that, he gets on a plane to Canada. It all seems very dramatic and blown out of proportion to Andrew, but he keeps quiet. Tensions run high among the rest of them. Haksu takes Mingeun’s center position in the chorus, making him center for over half the song. Jaeseop fumes quietly in the background. Eunsu loses his temper three times in three days, and for a few moments, it’s like Mingeun never left at all.
Two weeks after Mingeun’s initial departure, it seems as if everyone has calmed down. Haksu reports that it’s become harder and harder to find the first article, and most searches of their group bring up only their recent activities. Andrew does a bit of discreet searching through Twitter on his own, only to find out that the initial Tweet was also deleted, and no one outside of Korea gave a shit at all, probably.
"I don't see why Mingeun's… issue was an issue in the first place," he says, lying on the ground of Intak's bedroom. Andrew would like to be working on music, but his writing process these days takes place only in his head while he stares at the ceiling.
It isn't like the floor is comfortable either, when all he has to work with is a spare pillow and Intak’s tiny rug. But Intak is in his bed, and Jaeseop is in his chair (holding a pile of clothes in his lap) and that leaves Andrew on the floor.
“It escalated so fast. You didn’t keep up with Mingeun’s transgressions?” Jaeseop asks. “Betrayed his country, deceived his fans, sympathized with North Korea–”
Andrew stops him. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Angry people on the Internet seldom make sense,” Intak says.
“It was something about the way he doesn’t have to enlist,” Jaeseop says.
"Extrapolation," Intak suggests. "To be honest, I could see where the deception accusations came from."
"It wasn't deceptive," Jaeseop says. "It was an omission that lets people believe what they want to believe. You should really ask Mingeun about this yourself." He levels an accusatory glare at Andrew.
"About what?" Andrew asks, a bit slow on the uptake.
"The way he lied about his upbringing." The response comes so easily, as if Jaeseop is talking about something as benign as the weather.
"I knew it," Intak says, sounding incredibly self-satisfied.
Andrew sits with the revelation a minute longer, recalling a year-old conversation. "Am I the only one who didn't know about this?"
"Only Eunsu and I knew for sure," Jaeseop says.
"But it isn't difficult to notice. Maybe if you could see past your own nose for once–"
"Hey–" Andrew tries to interrupt him but Intak keeps talking.
"-because then you'd notice there's an obvious difference between your image and his image. Why do you get to be yourself, and speak so openly about not knowing anything about your heritage, like you're proud of it?"
The problem with Intak's argument is that it isn't pride. It's ignorance, embarrassment, a sort of disclaimer Andrew feels like he has to give for his very existence. His career is based on his own culture, and he knows next to nothing about it.
Andrew sneaks a glance at Jaeseop, but something like silent agreement in his expression tells him he's on his own.
"It isn't an image," Andrew says, sitting up on the floor. He wants to defend himself, but every possible defense he has could be misconstrued as an excuse. He knows Intak would take advantage of that.
Intak meets his gaze. "Then that's worse."
"I think he gets it, Intak," Jaeseop says as he folds one of Intak's shirts. The pile of clothes is beginning to turn into a neat stack of clothes.
“We were talking about Mingeun. Can we go back to talking about Mingeun?” Andrew asks.
“When he’s not here to have a say in anything? No,” Intak says. “We’re talking about you now.”
“Fine,” Andrew bites out. “Any other complaints?”
“You’re Korean and you have no spice tolerance.”
Andrew stares at him. “What does that have to do with anything?”
Intak shrugs. “It’s a complaint. It comes to mind every time we go out to eat.”
“You use every pot and pan when you cook,” Jaeseop says.
“We own two pots and two pans.”
“One pot meals,” Intak says in full seriousness, when Andrew knows full well the one of the only things he can cook is instant ramen. Why are they talking about this anyway?
It occurs to Andrew, as they lapse back into comfortable silence, that Mingeun played his role extremely well. If it had been Andrew in his place, the charade would have been up after a day. It must have been a stroke of luck that all he had to change was his name.
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AUGUST 2020
By the second month of his Lee Taein-imposed exile, Mingeun can feel his sanity slipping away. There's nothing to do at home. He goes for walks around the neighborhood while he listens to the latest kpop releases. He teaches himself the dances in the bathroom mirror. He runs errands with his parents, where his greatest contribution is carrying all the groceries into the house in one trip. He tries to spend more time with his sisters, except Minah has a normal full-time job, and Eunice spends all of her free time out with her friends or studying for the SAT. His path has diverged much too far from theirs: he's never had a job with regular hours, or given a thought to college admissions.
"One of my group members went to Columbia," he says once, in an attempt to have a conversation.
Eunice laughs. "Then he became a kpop idol?"
"He studied music," Mingeun says.
"If he was really good at music, he would have gone to Berklee or Julliard, and maybe you'd both be more famous."
"You sound like Mom," he says, because she does. They’ve all heard that. If Minah was better, she’d work on Wall Street. If Mingeun was better, he’d be in NCT.
His sister looks disgusted, like it's the greatest insult to be compared to their parents. Mingeun would agree.
By the end of the third month, Mingeun hasn't left his house in three weeks. The last time he ventured outside, he was recognized at the mall by a teenage girl who stopped him and said very loudly, "Oh my God, you're Mingeun from Fable right?"
Mingeun is on hiatus, he's taking a break, and he doesn't have to be an idol, so he frowns, says, "What?" and walks away.
He overhears one of the girl's friends say, "You can't just assume an Asian guy is a kpop idol" and the original girl defend herself ("I swear he looked just like him").
The last time he went out before that, he decided it might be nice to be able to drive. His mother does her best to teach him. Mingeun gets as far as cruising down the street, making three point turns, and even parallel parking once. It all ends when he accidentally presses the gas instead of the brake and floors it through a–thankfully empty–intersection.
His mother berates him for at least fifteen minutes, as the car idles on the side of the road. Mingeun can’t stop his hands from shaking on the steering wheel, curling inward on himself mentally, telling himself he’s impervious to the criticism, even when he knows he’s not.
Other than that, he spends as much time as possible calling his group members, whenever time zones and their schedules allow. They're some of the only friends he has. He's barely talked to his school friends since the last time he was in school four years ago.
By the fourth month, Mingeun resorts to the tried and true strategy of bothering Taein until he gives in. It's worked before with him and Haksu, and he surprises himself by waiting so long before he tries it out. He texts Taein every day, multiple times a day: screenshots of his six hour Discord calls with Intak and Jaeseop (proof that he’s a team player), feedback on Fable's newest album (proof that he’s staying up to date), photos from his daily life (proof that he’s taking the break he was told to do). Taein rarely responds. He also rarely reads the messages. It's a lot harder to do this with an ocean between them.
So he starts calling. Taein picks up the first few times, and Mingeun finally feels like he's getting somewhere.
"Good morning, sajang-nim," Mingeun will say brightly, knowing full well that it's ten in the morning for him and 2 AM for Taein. "How was your day? Can I go back yet?"
And Taein will give a vague answer like, "It isn’t the right time" or "There are factors outside of my control that must be considered" or "Please don't call me unless it's an emergency."
At some point, his calls stop going through, and he's pretty sure Taein has him blocked. Mingeun starts sending his messages to the Fable group chat instead, asking them to tell Taein to please unblock him. Haksu finds the situation amusing. Andrew leaves the group chat three times. Mingeun adds him back three times. It isn't like he has anything better to do.
“Stop leaving the group chat,” Mingeun says as soon as Andrew picks up his call.
“I should hang up right now.”
“You’re no better than Taein. He blocked me.”
“I know, I’ve read your texts.”
Why did Mingeun call Andrew anyway? Just to complain?
“Then tell him to unblock me,” Mingeun says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
"He has a lot going on right now. There have been fans outside the company building for three days now. They want you to leave the group."
Mingeun's heart drops. Clearly, this is why Taein doesn't want him to come back. Would he fold to fans just as easily as he folds to them?
“It’s been all over social media too,” Andrew continues.
“I haven’t looked,” Mingeun lies. Every time he types his name into the Twitter search bar, one of the first results is #MINGEUN_OUT.
“That’s good. It’s worse online.”
“Do you think Taein would agree? That I should leave?” Mingeun sees no future for himself if he’s kicked out of another company, this time after a debut.
Andrew is silent for a moment. “It depends on how weak-willed he is. It’s his fault that you’re in this situation in the first place. Jaeseop told me a little about what you were forced to do.”
“I wasn’t forced,” Mingeun says, though he isn’t sure why he’s defending Taein. “I chose to do it.”
“From what Jaeseop said, it didn’t sound like you had a choice. He’s your biggest fan. He’s defended you for the past few months.”
He makes it sound like Jaeseop is a defense attorney and Mingeun is his poor, hapless, falsely accused client. Maybe he should have been a lawyer instead of a kpop idol.
“What did Jaeseop tell you?” Mingeun asks, trying to get a grasp on how much Andrew knows.
“You’re purposely vague about your childhood. You let everyone assume you’re Korean by nationality. You made some sort of agreement with Taein to lie. Jaeseop wasn’t clear on that part.”
“Did Jaeseop tell you that was the only way Taein would let me debut? That he was so focused on the group's image he would mold me to fit it?”
“No,” Andrew says. “You didn’t have to keep this to yourself. You could have told us.”
Mingeun shakes his head, even though he knows Andrew can’t see him. “And make all of us liars, instead of just me? This is my problem. I can deal with it myself.”
“It’s not only your problem when it affects the entire group. Your identity isn’t a problem.” The frustration is evident in his voice.
“It is when you’re an idol,” Mingeun says, even though he knows Andrew is going to disagree, with the bullheaded stubbornness that makes him unable to see from any perspectives other than his own. "Wouldn't you have done the same?"
"No." Andrew's response is firm and immediate, and that comes as a surprise. “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”
There’s an implicit question in there: how does Mingeun live with it? He’s not sure of that. “Where are you from?” and sometimes even “What’s your name?” have always been difficult questions for him to answer. Being told what to say and how to behave made it easier, in some ways. Now his answer is a convoluted, “I was born in Korea, but I moved to Canada when I was young, and even though I grew up there, I visited Korea every year, until I moved back when I was a teenager.” What could be a one word answer for many people becomes an autobiography for him, like he has to give his entire life story to answer an icebreaker question.
“Yeah. I guess it’s difficult,” he admits eventually, and all of this, he realizes, is a weight lifted off his shoulders. He won’t have Taein feed him lines anymore, but he also won’t have to micromanage every word he says.
“I have to go,” Andrew says suddenly and vaguely. Mingeun gets the feeling that he doesn’t want to talk anymore. Just when they might have been getting somewhere.
Mingeun shuts back down. “Oh. Alright. I’ll call you again later.”
“Sure. Bye, Mingeun.”
He never calls Andrew back.
By the fifth month, Mingeun borrows his dad’s credit card, books a flight to Korea, and doesn’t tell anyone until his plane is taxiing for take off.
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SEPTEMBER 2022
It takes Andrew four years to write an album. In all fairness, it’s not a full four years. Two years pass before he starts. He has to gain an understanding of Fable and kpop and the way comeback means any new music release first. It would be so terribly American of him (and terrible in general) to travel abroad and immediately impose his ideas and his standards on everyone around him.
So he waits.
It isn’t until Intak has a very large hand in the title track of their first studio album that Andrew thinks he could do that too. He even goes as far as to think he could do more than that.
Add another two years onto that, and now Andrew has a passable skeleton of an album. Now, he thinks he’s ready to show it to some of his group–not the whole group, because if Andrew showed Jaeseop a melody and three pages describing the vibe, he would look at Andrew blankly and say, “That’s not a song.”
Instead, Andrew invites the other most musically-inclined members. Over the years, their production group has shifted to become what it is today: Andrew, Intak, Haksu, and their latest addition, Mingeun. For the most part, they already know what he’s been working on. Andrew has asked Intak for his input multiple times. Haksu has edited a few of his early lyric drafts. The difference is this time, Andrew wants a review of all twenty-seven songs he’s considering for the album.
His studio is cramped with all four of them in there, and both Intak and Mingeun like to pace, so they meet in what’s become mostly Andrew and Intak’s apartment, because Kiyoung is rarely there and Jaeseop has moved out.
For the most part, everything goes as Andrew expected. He orders pizza, Haksu makes a snide comment about Americans, they drag Intak’s speaker system into the living room, and they listen to his music.
It’s a little intimidating, even though these are his friends he’s known for years now, to gauge the reactions on their faces as the songs play. It feels as if Andrew has bared his soul to them, his very existence hinging on how many times Intak creases his brow in each three minute period.
The first few tracks are no surprise to anyone. There’s the title track he worked on with Intak for the explicit purpose of being a title track, the second promotional track that Mingeun had assured him over and over again sounds completely fine, and Eunsu’s song that he persuaded Intak to take a second look at.
They progress further and further into the uncharted territory of songs that no one other than Andrew has heard, and he does his best to describe what he envisioned for each one. Mingeun demolishes four slices of pizza as Andrew stumbles over his words, as if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
It seems everyone has only nice things to say, which is a bit disappointing to Andrew. Of course he wants recognition for his work, but he also wants his work to deserve it.
That changes with the ninth track.
“The next one is a band track,” Andrew says. “I had help from Neon Nights with this one too.”
“You did?” Mingeun asks with his mouth full. He sounds surprised. He looks like he’s going to say something else, but he goes back to chewing quietly.
“I was also thinking it could be our first English song.”
“What?” Mingeun and Haksu say at the same time.
“Jinx,” Mingeun says, and then continues with his complaints. “Why? We don’t need to make music in English.”
Andrew had never expected Mingeun to be so against the idea. Mingeun is someone who always wants more, and Andrew never thought being in a mildly successful kpop group would be enough for him.
“Other groups do it,” Andrew says.
“With title tracks,” Mingeun says.
“Because they want to break into the Western market,” Haksu adds. “We’ve never wanted that. It’s not our goal.”
“Why not?” Andrew asks, frustrated. It’s time they tried something new. If he has to film one more cringeworthy Korean tourism commercial, or smile and nod at the “kpop’s cultural representative” nickname one more time, he’s going to lose his fucking mind.
“There’s no place for us,” Mingeun says like it’s obvious. “Aren’t you here because you couldn’t survive there? Haven’t you been excluded, or looked down upon, and you want to go back to that?”
And the answer to that is no, because Andrew has never thought of himself as anything other than American. He doesn’t know how to explain to Mingeun that he feels more out of place in Korea, surrounded by people who are supposedly like him, than at home in the US.
“Things are changing now,” Andrew says.
“Not enough,” Mingeun snaps back.
“We should do it,” Intak says, finally breaking his silence. “Think of it as a challenge.” He stares at Mingeun while he says it, because Mingeun isn’t one to back down from a challenge.
Mingeun scoffs at that. “I speak English. It wouldn’t be difficult for me.”
“Obviously it’s difficult for you to accept it,” comes Intak’s response.
Mingeun begins a silent, angry circuit around the room. It’s a definite upgrade over punching a hole in the drywall.
“It still doesn’t make sense,” Haksu says. “It wouldn’t fit our image at all.”
That’s another thing Andrew will never understand, even after a few years in Korea. The emphasis on appearances, the way how you look is more important than what you do. He’s guilty of propagating that too: the stage outfits, the makeup, the filters, his stage name, finding out what his best selfie angle is.
“Enough about our goddamn image,” Andrew says, exasperated. Haksu winces, and Andrew thinks he should have said fuck instead. “Maybe it’s time it reflected who we are.”
He’s met with silence.
“What does the song sound like?” Intak asks.
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