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idolizerp · 5 years

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LOADING INFORMATION ON CHERRY BOMB!’S MAIN VOCAL LIM SEOLHEE ...

IDOL DETAILS

STAGENAME: Sophia CURRENT AGE: 23 DEBUT AGE: 17 TRAINEE SINCE: 14 COMPANY: MSG SECONDARY SKILL: Acting

IDOL PROFILE

NICKNAME(S): sunshine for her image as the energy pill, saseumi for her doe-eyed beauty, bookworm because she’s been captured in airport and fansign photos holding well-read books on multiple occasions, seolcasso–seolhee + picasso for her artistic talents, heethoven– seolhee + beethoven as derived from her initial vlives where she would ask fans to send in requests for piano covers to do. INSPIRATION: her love for music is hereditary–what with her mother being a piano teacher and her grandmother’s blessed voice. she thinks she was born to embrace and to fall in love with the sound of music and, thus, desires to inspire others with her voice. SPECIAL TALENTS:

drawing & painting–her mediums being charcoal and watercolor, respectively.

a walking jukebox, which came from a few variety show appearances during group promotions where she was able to sing acapella to every single song requested by the mcs.

plays the piano, guitar, and guzheng & has been known to fulfill fan requests for her to cover other idol groups’ songs.

NOTABLE FACTS:

speaks korean, english, italian fluently.

graduated from seoul’s school of performing arts & attending seoul institute of the arts.

a huge fan of harry potter and has been quoted in an interview saying luna lovegood is the character she relates most to.

loves cooking & baking as a way to de-stress.

a known lover of dogs and children–has been captured in fancams with her signature dimpled smile playing with a dog or taking pictures with older fans who bring small children to fansigns.

IDOL GOALS

SHORT-TERM GOALS:

she wants cherry bomb! to gain more notoriety as a whole–perhaps, a first music show win to show that they’ve reached a level of public reception that would propel her and her girls further on their individual paths. maybe then, she can utilize her group branding to help give her budding acting career a much needed boost.

LONG-TERM GOALS:

she wants to shatter expectations for idol actors. because despite her dramas not achieving much success/critical reception in terms of rating, she’s really fallen in love with acting and wants so desperately to be taken seriously as an actress, to be recognized for her craft. eventually when she’s broken the mold–hopefully via a breakout role in a successful drama–she wants to then ask msg if she can pursue a solo career in music–venture into singing osts or actually debut with a song she’s composed or written herself. somewhere further down the line, when the novelty of being in a girl group has well and truly faded, she hopes to be established as a well-rounded artist in music and in film/television.

IDOL IMAGE

BEFORE.

they call her chameleon–the judges.

it’s not an insult, they reassure with a flash of teeth and blood red lips. you’ve got a pretty face and a nice voice. (pause.) but no personality.

she learns later–much, much later–what it means to be a blank slate.

it takes three years to break the bones of a girl who constantly feels out of place in a room full of her peers.

three years to perfect the art of makeup, to dress to impress, to walk in sky-high heels like she was born for it.

all it takes is three years behind closed doors in an industry where survival of the fittest means fighting with everyone and anyone for a chance at becoming the next big thing for her to learn that the world of fame is paved with sacrifice.

three years to realize that to stand on that brightly lit stage, she must murder herself; set her innocent self on fire and reborn from the ashes someone stronger, brighter, warmer.

TABULA RASA.

trainee days spent isolating herself as the quiet, hardworking girl is buried under rigid lessons and rules of thumb on how to construct a new layer of skin to stitch around herself. years of crying behind closed doors and missing home is replaced by a fresh-faced girl who laughs at everything, smiles at everyone, and bounces back with enthusiasm after a fall—sunshine in ecstatic motion.

from practice room to the bright stage, msg sinks their claws into a lost girl with stars in her eyes and molds her into something whimsical and ethereal. they take all the broken parts of her that seep through the cracks and tell her to bury it behind a radiant smile. creates a mask for her to wear by exploiting all the mismatched parts of her that make her who she is: the dazed look of a dreamer, the seaside accent that still roils under seoul’s modern cadence, her restless hands, the purity of her lilting voice.

they take all that and slip onto her the delicate skin of a walking ray of sunshine with a heart of gold and a thousand watts smile.

on stage and on camera, she’s cherry bomb!’s little energy pill. she’s warm, a little absentminded, not quite there, but innocent all the same. it’s that charm–that little dimple in her cheek–that captivates. sets her apart. if only for a little bit.

she doesn’t mind it–not really.

it’s just another mask she wears. another role she plays.

she’s young. she has time. to change, to mature, to grow out of the novelty of it all.

(she doesn’t.)

AFTER.

four years in the eyes of the public and she’s muffled peals of laughter hidden behind small hands and eyes creasing into half moon crescents. sometimes, she’s softly uttered words of praise, advice, encouragements to her faithful fans on instagram live or a whole chorus of a newly uploaded acoustic cover sung in the voice almost too soft to hear above the strum of guitars, gratitude embedded in three minutes of heartfelt lyrics and shining eyes. to the world, seolhee is someone fragile and in need of protection. almost too good for the world. almost too untainted and pristine. (almost too good to be true.)

from her endearing attempts to interact with and befriend fans and fellow idols alike to her occasional variety show appearances where she’s the perpetually 4d absentminded girl with the dimpled smile hosts have to subtly prompt and prod for answers to their questions about her trending airport fashion, her faithful fansites and fancams in 4k depicting her pristine and perfect on stage (not a hair out of place, her smile perpetually stitched on her face. never faltering. never wavering), growing up pains, childhood in busan, her lingering accent.

there’s always a bit of lasting unconventionality hidden in those moments when they ask about home, about family, about transitioning from the carefree, quiet life on busan’s sandy shores to the pulsating thrum of the big city with its too fast pace and perpetual anonymity.

how did you survive, they ask. i didn’t. she wants to confess. i adapted. i changed, is what she says instead.

and it’s the truth. msg takes her hand-me-downs and thrift-shopped dresses and replaces them with sponsored one pieces with the tags still on them, shiny mary janes in place of worn converses, her sea salt-scented braid of hair is combed and styled in soft waves tumbling down her back and smells of peaches, her unruly tongue fixed under an iron fist to master the straight-laced way of seoul-speak.

she’s made to rid herself of all the things that make her her.

every night, she goes to sleep; her face scrubbed clean, the skin of her good girl persona somewhere on the floor. every morning, she wakes when the sun rises and pulls her skin back on, pats her face dry of tears, and presses two fingers to the corners of her mouth, pushing up until a small dimple forms on her cheek. there, transformation complete.operation sophia is a go.

every day is a vicious cycle. it’s walking on eggshells and pretending someone else isn’t living beneath this suffocating skin, wallowing in years of self-deprecation and the perpetual ache of longing (for something, for someone, for the taste of home—wherever that may be).

six years later and she’s still warm. still smiling. just a little dimmer. a little softer.

she’s got this look about her now–almost fragile; whimsical in a way that garners second glances when people first meet her or see her sitting in a corner of the room lingering on the outskirts of conversations, staring into space. a waifish doll; an effortless kind of beauty. ethereal; almost surreal.

she talks softly with a touch of poetic elusiveness and practiced eccentricity, designed to fluster or to purposely dazzle. she stares like she’s trying to see through you. into you. she’s a soft kind of pretty when she’s caught in between camera flashes or in the midst of whispered conversations with one of her members. and yet, on stage and on television wearing the skin of someone else–someone polished and manufactured, she’s danger in high heels.

catch her off-guard and all alone in the dead of the night with her face scrubbed clean and swathed in a too big hoodie and you’ll notice there’s a strange kind of dichotomy when you realize the girl you watched on tv belting high notes or crying her heart out in her latest drama is vastly different from the lonely girl who looks the spitting image of her, sitting for hours in front of a painting in an art gallery or by the han gazing into the waters.

softer, sadder, dreamier.

still as lost as ever.

IDOL HISTORY

PRELUDE.

appa falls in love with eomma in italy, five years after their fateful first encounter in the circus that is high school. a whirlwind romance between a budding photographer and a piano teacher. must be fate, the wedding guests whisper when they vow eternity to one another in a church filled with friends and family who wish them well with warm smiles and teary eyes.

so they love and love and love and somewhere in between, a baby girl is born.

eomma cries; she’s so happy. relieved, she admits years later with a kiss to her forehead. they’ve been trying and trying, after all.

appa cries too. because here she is; another girl for him to love, to protect. a gift from heaven.

they name her sophia, after the saint.

ONE.

they return home after the honeymoon phase fizzles and fades, settling in busan with halmeoni amidst student loans and living on budgets. there, she grows up a free-spirited daydreamer, often associating the world and the people around her in streaks of color and a symphony of sounds. her childhood consists of sand between her toes, sea salt in her hair, ocean-soaked dresses, and the sound of tinkling laughter.

her four seasons of growing up on the sandy shores of busan goes a little like this:

spring: an almost brand new knee-length dress made of white lace her mother buys from a thrift shop at a discounted rate, sunflowers and daisies dancing in the wind, chasing butterflies, and flower bookmarks pressed into the pages of a journal.

summer: ripe with music, her spread eagle on a blanket and sunset golds streaked across her face, the drone of cicadas, cherry popsicles, the whir of electric fans, knee-deep in the sea, her mother calling her name off in the distance.

autumn: a waterfall of warm colors, halmeoni’s cozy handmade sweaters with the sleeves hanging past her fingertips, gingham skirts and leggings, pumpkin pies, spiced lattes, a night sky filled with paper lanterns and the glimmer of stars, father’s phone ringing off the hook in the middle of the night; every night.

winter: soft pink mittens and oversized pea coats over chunky sweaters and chunkier scarves made with love, homemade hot chocolate, footprints in fresh snow, one hand clasped in mother’s hand; the other grasping air, perpetual cold; lingering emptiness.

she’s seven, wide-eyed and curious, watching a master chef work her magic. it’s halmeoni in a soft yellow dress and a spongebob apron around her waist singing deulgukhwa hits and humming to joo hyunmi and patti kim. it’s little seolhee perched on the counter by the fridge singing right along in a game of monkey see, monkey do.

early evening always starts with the swell of a sobangcha song, halmeoni wielding a carrot under her chin and seolhee’s little face crinkling up in peals of laughter. in the living room, her parents smile indulgently, hands busy tucking unpaid bills under week-old newspapers and balls of colorful yarn. and ends with seolhee curled in halmeoni’s lap, both hands clutching her parents’ sleeve in her sleep.

days and nights like these are normal—until they’re not.

one cold night in december, dinner prep is a somber affair. the radio is turned off and secondhand vinyls gather dust—buried under boxes full of knick-knacks and memories. there’s no halmeoni twirling in the kitchen, no tongue-in-cheek adlib to the latest hit trot song, no laughter.

home is quiet. empty. and little seolhee aches with the feeling of missing someone no amount of singing or wishing could ever bring back.

TWO.

she’s ten when she learns to make friends with an old guitar she buys off a neighbor moving to the big city, learns to strum awkwardly, clumsily; a cacophony of sound. it takes a full four seasons for her to learn to love the vibrations of nylon strings beneath the pads of her fingers. learns to put herself back together singing acoustic covers and soft little ballads with her face turned up to the stars. puberty comes and goes with her seated on the rickety steps of her porch, strumming nostalgic chords to the ghost of her youth.

her parents say nothing as they watch her from inside the house, smiles wilted, wistful, watery.

(there’s so many things their daughter could be, should be, and hurting, cradling sadness and turning grief into old-timey blues shouldn’t be one of them.)

they leave her be when she starts going to the market in the sticky heat of summer, guitar strapped to her back, playing for small crowds and neighborly regulars. from dusk to dawn, seolhee fixes a soft smile on her face as she strums and strums and strums, voice light and whimsical as she sings requests as a thank you for listening.

she comes home with a straw hat full of notes and red fingers, knowing full well it’s not enough to make up for this month’s expenses. so seolhee ventures back out again, haunts local farmer’s markets and side streets, the sandy beaches during tourist season, trying to make the most of a life that seems to pass her by too quickly, too quietly.

sometimes, she tells herself that when she sings something inside of her heals. as if the soft blue notes become a makeshift stopgap measure filling up the gaping hole in her chest, easing the perpetual emptiness, soothing the ache—the want—for a different life.

sometimes, when she closes her eyes, seolhee pretends she doesn’t hear the sound of her parents fighting, the front door slamming, and her mother’s muffled crying.

sometimes, when she lets herself sink in between lyrics about a dreamer wandering away in search for herself—for an adventure—seolhee swears that some day it could all be possible.

THREE.

family is four. then, three. then, two.

home is no longer sand in between her toes and the ocean clinging to her skin, but the veins of seoul—harsher and all concrete jungle. it’s sleek office buildings and cold cityscapes and soon, the roads she used to bike down back home is replaced by honking taxis and the congestion of too many strangers.

home is now a shoebox; a cramped one bedroom apartment on the outskirts of seoul.

FOUR.

school is but a circus and, sometimes, she finds herself center stage. an unwilling spectacle. her accent is the only thing she has left of home and her peers mock her for it. turn her into the punchline of inside jokes and over-the-shoulder remarks about a bumbling seaside girl who doesn’t belong. she’s not ashamed, but it hurts just the same.

so, she keeps to herself, minds her own business, and makes herself at home on the rooftop and the empty bleachers in an emptier field. she has her guitar and her ocean of sounds. starts spending more time with her head down, hair in a loose braid, writing the world and the people she watches and meets down in the pages of secondhand leather-bound notebooks.

“you have a pretty voice.”

it’s rooftop prince. only this time, they meet in the middle of the soccer field. it’s seolhee with her guitar in her lap and a curious tilt of her head, one hand shielding her eyes and feeling like she’s looking at the sun. blinded, she looks away. a little embarrassed, a little flattered. it’s been a long time since someone has complimented her, after all.

“why do you sing?”

so i can heal. one day, some day.

seolhee smiles and turns her face up to the sky. “because it feels like i’m home.”

FIVE.

she’s two days shy of her fourteenth birthday when she wraps herself in a chunky sweater and a soft scarf stitched with halmeoni’s love and makes her way to a quiet corner in hongdae with her guitar strapped to her back. braves the bite of an impending winter with numbed fingers and a voice that carries.

she starts with sobangcha and joo hyunmi, hesitant and almost stuttering as she tunes her guitar with nimble fingers and her heart in her throat. somewhere, somehow, she hears halmeoni telling her to be brave as she plucks strings and closes her eyes, petite body swaying to the ebb and flow of a bygone song. with halmeoni in her ear, she lets the world fade away, pays no mind to the small gathering of an audience finding their way to the nostalgic croon of an old soul.

she comes awake to the sound of applause and a case full of clinking coins and a tiny pile of notes. she thanks everyone for their time and sets off to trudge home with her earnings.

she’s pulled from her afterglow by a tap on her shoulder and whirls around to a man in a suit, all coiffed and perfect, voice velvety smooth. her early birthday gift is an invitation that sounds too good to be true.

her mother is apprehensive. she’s heard stories about the life of an idol. doesn’t want her daughter to live life under perpetual scrutiny, robbed of her youth, and always struggling to catch up to changing times and new trends.

“you’ll have to give up everything.”

“not everything.“ not you, she means to say. never you.

impending goodbyes has her losing her grip on the impression of a budding city girl society has pressed upon her, slipping back into the soft drawl of dialect and settling right at home in the wake of her desire to chase after a flimsy dream. like this, she’s doe-eyed and wears the heart of a dreamer, curls around her mother like she’s five years old and afraid of the dark.

“i guess this means my baby’s all grown up now.”

am i? doesn’t feel like it. seolhee swallows back a sob and presses her face to her mother’s neck.

goodbye shouldn’t have sounded so definitive. so painful.

SIX.

three years into training and she realizes her voice has stopped being her own, shaped by the company and molded into the image of an innocent girl with the unpolished voice of a would-be angel.

three years and she realizes she’s signed her youth away as dreams of singing on stage with just a microphone and her guitar are replaced by backhanded compliments, veiled sabotage behind closed doors, and a sense of something sacred being stolen from her.

she’s forbidden from ever bringing up a possible solo debut in the future where she can sing about a girl who’s just trying to find her place in the world. the answer is no almost every time. sometimes, if she’s good—when she ranks on top during evaluations, when she ends up being amongst the shortlist of girls for an upcoming girl group—she gets a backhanded maybe. always baited, always rebuffed. lulled into a sense of security with empty promises of what-if’s and what-could’ve-been’s.

three years in and she learns to bite her tongue and does as she’s told. sings what she’s given. dances as she’s practiced. smiles as she’s commanded.

all the while, hours spent in the dead of the night writing lyrics that read like poems, like stories of a thousand lives not yet lived in her notebooks are laid to waste, buried under rejection after rejection in the bottom of a box full of remnants of her childhood and reminders of a home away from home.

like this, she muffles the cries of a girl homesick for a place she’s never been, sings and dances like it’s the only thing that matters and tells herself she’s happy.

tells herself it’s all she wants.

tells herself it’s enough.

(it never is. never will be.)

SEVEN.

lim seolhee is buried—erased—the day she debuts as cherry bomb’s main vocal.

(because lim seolhee is the sunshine girl who looked at people like they hung the moon and the stars. because lim seolhee is tousled hair and tinkling laughter in the middle of the sea. because lim seolhee is made of old songs and picture books, flower crowns, and grass stains.

because lim seolhee is the kind of girl easily broken and taken advantage of.

because lim seolhee, naive and kind, has no place in a world full of backstabbing and desperate survivors trying to make it to the top.

so, she creates herself a persona—someone soft-spoken and unassuming, who seemed unlikely to stab you in the back than she is to hold you while you cried. someone who always seemed a little dazed and absentminded; her gaze faraway, her voice a whisper.

someone like halmeoni—all soft around the edges, always so poised and graceful in her mannerisms (from her mysterious little smile, to the tilt of her head, to the way she walked and talked), her voice a balm to her soul.

she takes all the things she loves most about her and creates a persona in her grandmother’s shadow.

like this, sophia is born to weather all the storms seolhee doesn’t have the strength to handle on her own—just like halmeoni had been there, once upon a time, to hold her hand while she dusted the dirt off her knees and got right back up to face the world.

her father calls three days later. when she picks up, all she hears is his rumbling laughter, sounding much fuller than it had in their rickety old house filled with the scent of spices and long-time struggles.

“are you happy? how’s it feel to be on stage?”

like i’m flying. like i’m dying. “how are you, daddy? are you happier now?”

“…yeah, i guess i am, seol-ah. i think i am.”

“that’s good. that’s all i ever wanted—for you to be happy.”

(what she means is—i miss you so much, it hurts. will you come home? will you come back? do you miss me too?)

“i’m proud of you. be good. keep shining, dad will always be by your side.”

don’t lie. don’t lie. don’t lie, she thinks as she cries silent tears and thanks him for everything. for the moments of happiness when she was but a child too curious, too naive, too loving for her own good. for the lifetime of loneliness and always getting left behind when things get too hard—too tough—for people to stay.

“i’m always good.“ always. then and now.

EIGHT.

msg thrives on how easy it is to break her and fit her into a mold of their design, how quickly she can give away her free will for a promise of an adventure (of life never being dull, of living a dream). it’s easy to take a lost little thing in need of guidance and shape her into something otherworldly, push her onto a gnarly road and tell her to simply go straight to find her way back home, to where she needs to be.

but if one were to ask where she’s needed, she thinks of her old childhood home in busan, the pale yellow paint peeling on patches on her ceiling, the glow-in-the-dark wallpaper brittle and gathering dust. thinks of being waist-deep in the sea, thinks of halmeoni in her spongebob apron and a carrot as her makeshift microphone, thinks of her father somewhere (surviving, thriving, happy—she hopes), thinks of her mother and her work-roughened hands and the small shoebox apartment tucked in the tiniest corner of a heartless city.

if one were to ask what it is lim seolhee wants in private, watch her freeze, her smile slipping just slightly off her face—like a deer caught in headlights. watch her eyes, those sad lonely eyes, well up in tears she won’t let spill. watch her closely and carefully as her body seems to curl in on herself—as if the weight of the world is suddenly looming on her shoulders. watch for the tremor when she speaks, fingers twisting at her sides, voice impossibly soft and fragile: i don’t know…no one’s ever asked me before.

and no one has. no one cares either. msg simply takes and so do her fans. everyone breaks off little pieces of her; pieces she willingly gives because she can’t say no—until there’s nothing left for her to give. nothing left for anyone to take.

all that remains is the hollowed out shell of a girl drifting aimlessly, her heart never here or in one place, her mind lingering on faraway places not yet traveled and the sound of ocean waves crashing on sandy shores like a neverending siren’s call.

NINE.

she enters a mid-life crisis at the ripe age of twenty.

the zeroes in her bank account don’t mean anything when all she sees staring back at her in the bathroom mirror is a tired, lonely girl (a skinny, pretty little thing. all hollowed out by time, youth chipping away at the edges), who doesn’t know what she wants. doesn’t know where she belongs or who she is.

so when the stage starts to feel like a burden, she finds a niche on the small screen. makes peace with esoteric scripts and starts creating a name for herself. slowly, she learns to find temporary homes in between lines and in fictional universes. slowly, she finds becoming someone else exhilarating, being on set like stepping into another world. acting becomes second nature—another job; one she actually likes.

but like the stage, the set too becomes another battlefield. people say you won’t get to where you are without ruffling a few feathers or stepping on someone’s toes.

after all, survivors don’t make it to the top without playing a little dirty.

(she learns this the hard way.)

mother once told her names were dangerous things—that a girl should remember the names of men who tried to steal her heart, who loved her like she was the only thing that mattered, and who left her all broken, bruised, and ugly. mother tells her it’s the name of men she should be afraid of. the sons of women who lured her in with their heated gazes, their lilting voices, their body full of power. mother warned her that men were dangerous; their names a warning sign—a temptation.

her fall from grace comes as a surprise and at the hands of an up-and-coming actor.

when she meets him, he is boy blue with a heart of gold. all gentle hands and a dirty mouth. their first kiss is a shy affair—all bumping noses and awkward lip grazing—and done in the quiet of his penthouse suite.

they’re on their third date when they’re caught on camera; their rendezvous splashed front page on gossip rags and dispersed on the internet. a tentative relationship captured for all of posterity.

the world explodes. her heart does too.

msg does damage control. spins the fairytale narrative of a love borne between friends. of close encounters, bad timing, and years of pining. the company pins everything on her longstanding image as the sweet girl who would shoulder the world if asked to. pleads for the public, the fans, the media to support this budding romance between two close friends who made it through thick and thin as trainees all those years ago.

but the damage is done.

the fandom and the public remain divided.

when the hate comments begin to seep through the cracks and makes it way up top, msg realizes what could’ve been a good publicity stunt to garner her more individual branding backfires. realizes they overestimated her value. realizes she’s not quite enough, not quite there. not yet—that her reputation, though pristine prior, could not support the weight of negative public scrutiny and backlash.

so msg pulls her. benches her. gone are the growing piles of scripts and role offers. gone are the ever present promises that she could eventually get that solo she wanted and has begged for year after year.

all that remains are the cyclical group promotions.

prison has a new name and it’s the four pillars that are fame, fortune, reputation, and public perception that traps her within its midst.

2016 begins with a bang and ends with a whimper.

she’s twenty-one when he kisses her goodbye the night before their breakup goes public.

she’s twenty-one when the internet reports that they’ve called it quits, lamenting the tragedy of yet another “perfect” couple succumbing to the woes of distance and busy schedules.

she doesn’t cry, doesn’t laugh, doesn’t smile when msg unfreezes her. she says nothing when they warn her to behave and simply nods.

days turn into weeks into months. and, slowly, her heart mends itself. suture by painful suture, scar over invisible scar. healed over by the weight of time and a perpetual kind of numbness that seeps through skin, through muscle, through bone and into her very soul.

like this, she stands back up and trudges on forward—an energizer bunny running on the last dredges of its batteries.

holding out as long as she can. as hard as she can. as always.

TEN.

twenty-three and she’s found herself embarking on a new journey. a new chapter to write.

she’s got a budding acting career ahead. cherry bomb! is still afloat. the road to stardom is long yet, but she’s getting there.

slowly, but surely.

deep down—some day, somehow, she prays for anonymity. wants a life shrouded in mystery, no longer talked about in superlatives, made infamous by gossip, speculation, and rumors.

maybe in fifteen years, lim seolhee can be found again in a small town off the coast of some river city. a wanderer, an anomaly amidst a sea of faceless people.

there, a modern-day wraith finally content with her place in the world.

once lost, now found. just a woman. plain and simple.

#id.msg #id.cherry bomb!#id.bio #id.kim jisoo #id.guild

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