Assistant Manager Kim Hates Idols
SS Chapter 2: 5th Anniversary Live (1)
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TL: FoodieMonster007
The newcomer, Kim Iwol, was summarized succinctly as such.
"A hyung over 180cm tall bowed a full 90 degrees and introduced himself the moment I walked in. When he looked up, his eyes were full of charisma. It was an aura you'd never imagine from someone just two years older."
"He was unapproachable…"
Park Joowoo nodded.
I had given up on college, so how could I have been mild-mannered? I barely held back the dark joke that rose to my tongue.
"Iwol-hyung has a tendency to stand on the sidelines and gauge the atmosphere in new places. He did that with us too, but the problem was, he was so scary that we were the ones who got intimidated."
"Honestly, hyung was just watching from the corner with his hands clasped, but we were the ones sweating bullets."
Kang Kiyeon and Lee Cheonghyeon chimed in, not to be outdone.
I was only observing from a corner, so the insult felt unjust enough to pierce the heavens. Regardless of my indignation, Kang Kiyeon continued with his piece.
"So when I first saw Iwol-hyung, I thought, 'That hyung is going to be the one to enforce discipline among the trainees.'"
"Even though I had the least experience?"
"Jeho-hyung wasn't the type to meddle with the younger members, and Seongbin-hyung was strict with himself but lenient with others. Joowoo-hyung is quiet. That's why you stood out more, hyung. You had the vibe of a social grown-up."
With that, Kang Kiyeon wrote 'mature adult' for his first impression and 'old-timer uncle' for his current one. The common thread connecting these two keywords, despite the vast difference in treatment, infuriated me even more.
Jeong Seongbin said he thought I was a working adult when he first saw me. It seemed everyone had a similar impression, even before a twenty-nine-year-old's soul entered me through regression. I didn't know it at twenty, but I must have been more mature than my peers back then.
"Now, on the contrary, you've become a bit like a wild colt…"
"Seongbin, how could you do this to me?"
"Of course, I respect and trust you, hyung."
"But it's still a wild colt. Doesn't it alarm you that your members' current impressions are 'walkie-talkie great-uncle', 'weird hyung', 'uncle', and 'wild colt'? How am I supposed to recover my ruined image?"
"Wasn't your image already ruined during the reaction live for episode 1 of 'Deserted Rest Island'?"
"Stop driving in the final nail, Lee Cheonghyeon."
I tried to have a nostalgic talk, but all I got were scars. My soul felt completely shaken.
I understand how these guys feel. How bright could Kim Han have been, giving up on college and showing up at UA with a single suitcase?
But if they had seriously said, 'Hyung, you looked that exhausted,' this fun live broadcast would've turned solemn. They had all become broadcast pros, adjusting the tone with amazing skill.
The other guys also retraced their memories and shared first impressions of each other. Jeong Seongbin won the honor of best first impression. Even Choi Jeho praised Jeong Seongbin, calling him a 'decent kid'.
"When I was in school, I even visited Seongbin-hyung's class a few times," Kang Kiyeon started showing off their 'Blueberry Alumni' camaraderie.
This was an episode I'd never heard of when I was proxy-stanning spArk before my regression. Neither Jeong Seongbin nor Kang Kiyeon held back stories, so I assumed that in the past, Kang Kiyeon never visited Jeong Seongbin, who was a grade above him.
Looks like they were closer this time around.
It was a good thing. From Jeong Seongbin's perspective, who was worried about whether he should take on the role of leader, he must have been quite happy that a younger member was coming to rely on him. Although Jeong Seongbin's classmates misunderstood and thought Kang Kiyeon had come to pick a fight, Jeong Seongbin was genuinely happy that a younger member, only a year apart, had come to see him.
"I came here through Kang-geon's introduction, right? When I walked into the practice room, Jeho-hyung, Joowoo-hyung, and Seongbin-hyung were there. The three of them. So I thought I just had to trust Seongbin-hyung and go with it."
"This kid, Lee Cheonghyeon, said that Seongbin-hyung looked very neat and proper."
"Until my friends saw our team profile pictures and asked why all the members looked so scary, I firmly believed Seongbin-hyung was a warm and handsome man."
With that, the younger members vented about their first impression of Park Joowoo, who was as intimidating as Choi Jeho. Park Joowoo struggled to accept the harsh reality.
"That was when I was a trainee, I had just passed 180cm, and it was before I even switched to a heavier mattress…!"
"But you were nearly 10cm taller than Kiyeon. A hyung like that comes out carrying a bed mattress on his own to dust it off, how could you not be scared?"
The story of Park Joowoo and Kang Kiyeon's first meeting, with Joowoo carrying a mattress on his back, was famous among us.
The story went that Kang Kiyeon unknowingly stepped back when he met the murderous glare in Park Joowoo's eyes as Park Joowoo lifted his head to greet him. The part where Park Joowoo was also surprised and left speechless by Kang Kiyeon's fierce expression was particularly heartbreaking.
"I also worried a lot about what to say to Joowoo at first," Jeong Seongbin confessed with a shy expression.
Park Joowoo's face colored with bewilderment.
"You said you thought you wanted to get close to me…"
"I was scared, but I worked up the courage because I wanted to be friends. It's not a lie!"
How could the first impressions of people meeting as idol trainees all be 'scary,' 'fierce,' and 'worked up the courage'?
This is the company's fault. If there had been just one #SunshineCharacter, these guys wouldn't have had to engage in a war of nerves the moment they joined.
Choi Jeho's first impression wasn't much different. Only Kang Kiyeon started his trainee life with a favorable impression of the tall, giant trainee who always kept his mouth shut.
"I first saw Jeho-hyung through the media, so I got a distorted impression."
"Because you only see the dancing in the videos."
As part of the 5th-anniversary celebration, we all watched the video from Choi Jeho's prime (?) that led the youngest members to the path of an idol. Choi Jeho evaluated his past self, saying he 'only had youthful bravado,' but the guy on the screen was truly a promising sprout. Even I understood why Kang Kiyeon had changed his major and decided to come to UA after seeing that video for the first time, so there's nothing more to say.
"My current impression has changed a lot. He's a completely bear-like hyung now."
"He's become almost a different person. A style like Jeho-hyung's is the type you have to watch for a long time."
In reality, Kang Kiyeon and Lee Cheonghyeon got along 'well' with Choi Jeho, beyond just being amicable. They gave him fairy lights for Christmas and used him as a luggage carrier on trips. These were actions you couldn't do if you found the other person difficult or uncomfortable.
I was moved by this friendship, which was unimaginable back when they had nicknamed him 'Sandpaper-dong-ie'.
While organizing the 'First Impression vs. Current Impression' chart, the members shared trivial stories from the past. A flood of fresh tidbits from their early trainee days poured out.
The story of riding swings with Jeong Seongbin at a playground on a winter day also came up. Our naive leader only remembered that day as beautiful and heartwarming. It was a world of difference from my own feelings, as I had been anxiously worrying that my spiritual pillar would say he was quitting.
"I thought Iwol-hyung was the type to say realistic and rational things, so I was surprised. Hyung, you actually got ENFJ on the test, not just from our guesses, right?"
"Yep. I'm full of sensibility, so I'd appreciate it if you'd treat me with a warm heart."
"Was the ENFJ title supposed to feel like that?"
"As far as I know, it was closer to a 'Protagonist'."
The youngest members' side chatter didn't stop. Thanks to them, I was trapped for nearly three minutes, suffering as they explained ENFJ descriptions from both sides.
"When you talk about trainee Iwol-hyung, you can't leave out the story of him lying in bed at three in the morning with his eyes wide open," Lee Cheonghyeon arbitrarily added.
It was something that happened while I struggled to digest the information the SYSTEM poured on me and make plans.
But I was surprised too, you know? A head with two wide-open eyes was bobbing above the top bunk's railing in the dark. I was the one who was scared out of my wits.
"I told you I was enjoying some deep thought."
"Who enjoys deep thought like that at that hour? But then again, looking back now, I guess you might have been tense from adjusting to a new environment~"
For someone who gave others so much grief, Lee Cheonghyeon wrapped up the episode nicely by himself. Still, I guess these incidents piled up to complete the hidden task, 'Be Recognized by the Members for Your Guts'. I'm grateful for that one thing.
"We were only trainees together for a year, but you all were very interested in me."
Even though we'd only known each other for a short time, the material was endless. It meant the guys remembered our shared memories. I said it out of embarrassment, but they counterattacked, "Is it as much as the interest you had in us, hyung?" It wasn't wrong, so I meekly admitted it.
For the next segment, we prepared 'Reading Comments'. To be precise, it was 'Reading Reactions from Our Debut'. We had done content reading wiki pages or music video comments before, but never this.
Despite not having major debut promotions, spArk had good initial publicity. This was thanks to Lee Cheonghyeon's unrivaled visuals and the 'carbonated water' concept, which was poured into an idol scene suffering from a 'refreshing' drought.
≫ He has two older hyungs but the middle-liner is the leader?? You little punk, you must have some nerve, huh?
≫ Jeho? I don't know his voice or his personality, but I'll take him into my arms first.
└His brow bone and T-zone are truly magnificent. Now that's a man.
≫ News that a rookie from a small-time agency saved the handsome-man lineage that was on the verge of dying out.
└ I thought the line was going to be cut off for good, what a relief.
≫ It's already extraordinary that he's the youngest with that face, but he doesn't have a single piercing??? The perfect human embodiment of ≫The end of tuning is stock≪
≫ I guess I like languid, cold handsome men…
Perhaps because of that, the early posts had more classy evaluations from old-timer fossils than Muggle-like sentences. It was like an old-timer, lingering in the idol scene, had discovered a new sprout and was watching it with interest.
While we enjoyed the feast of personality guesses based on physiognomy and relationship sampling, Kang Kiyeon pointed to a spot on a captured community board photo.
"It says, 'What's with this kid's personality?'"
It was an unusual sentence. Above his fingertip, my face was plastered as big as a gate.