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dimensions entertainment » polaris

TAEYONG maknae, main vocal, lead dancer, & rapper 1997 december 24

character information

faceclaim: jeon jungkook, member of bts

legal name: ashton kwon

stage name: taeyong

pronouns: he/him

birth date: december 24, 1997

hometown: san francisco, ca, usa

position: maknae, main vocal, lead dancer, and rapper of polaris

established career claims: 255/250+15

20140819: polaris’s let me know - partial lyrics (4 points)

20150429: the most beautiful moment in life pt 1 - partial concept direction (25 points)

20150429: polaris’s i need u - partial lyrics, partial melody, partial arrangement (27 points)

20150429: polaris’s “i need u” - partial video direction (15 points)

20151002: polaris’s “butterfly (the most beautiful moment in life on stage : prologue)” - partial video direction (10 points)

20151130: the most beautiful moment in life pt 2 - partial concept direction(25 points)

20151130: polaris’s run - partial lyrics, partial melody, partial arrangement (27 points)

20151130: polaris’s “run” - partial video direction (15 points)

20151130: polaris’s “autumn leaves” - partial lyrics and partial melody (8 points)

20151130: polaris’s butterfly - lyrics, partial melody, partial arrangement (16 points)

20160317: equinox’s “one of these nights” - partial lyrics (11 points)

20160502: polaris’s love is not over (full-length) - lyrics, partial melody (12 points)

20160502: polaris’s house of cards (full length) - lyrics, partial melody, partial arrangement (16 points)

20161010: polaris’s blood, sweat, & tears - partial lyrics, partial melody (18 points)

20170213: polaris’s spring day - lyrics, partial melody, partial arrangement (36 points)

biography

triggers: mention of substance abuse

ash kwon is born lucky. loving parents are something he always gets to take as a given. brought into the life of a newly married couple only a few months after their wedding, ash is granted this luck in the form of not only love, but a comfortable family inheritance recently passed down that keeps the family out of the financial troubles they would have been in marrying and having a kid so young otherwise. the inheritance allows the young couple to make their roots amongst overpriced row houses, and despite meeting in college and having ash so young, they do well for themselves in their respective, budding careers.

but the parents of the seo-kwon family are busy young people who hadn’t planned on having a kid. they shower ash with the abundance of love they have in them, but his young days often place ash in the care of family friends or a babysitter. it’s in these hours spent discovering that ash begins to show an interest in music. he only has to ask before he’s subsequently enrolled in every class he wants. his time shifts. now, it’s all spent behind a piano or with a violin in his grasp or in a dance studio, and the lucky thing is, the countless hours that pass don’t dampen his passion in the slightest. he only loves the echo of the keys or the sting in his muscles all the more for the time he spends with it, the way it raises him. his teachers laud him as a natural, but he spends hours upon hours practicing to be better. his drive comes not at the behest of his parents’ search for greatness like many of his peers in the youth orchestras and the dance recitals, but of his own volition.

before he’s even out of elementary school, his days are spent flitting between school, piano lessons, violin lessons, dance lessons, and eventually guitar lessons. it gets harder to keep up with when his mom’s career takes off and she’s requested abroad. often, ash travels with her and they’ll leave san francisco (and ash’s dad) behind for a season or two to make a temporary home in toronto or tokyo or queenstown. in some ways, the world becomes his playground. in others, he makes a best friend in loneliness before he’s entered double digits.

for all the traveling he does following his mother’s shadow in the gaps of his home life, he never steps foot into south korea until he makes the decision to on his own. though both of his parents are only a couple of generations separated from the home country of their grandparents, korean is only spoken around the seo-kwon household in bits and pieces, mostly heard when ash’s dad is on the phone with friends and distant family members. it isn’t something either parent really teaches ash in the brief times they have together when that sort of thing would attach to him the easiest. in what little he does pick up from his dad, there’s no music or films to cling to. the entire world of korean music goes unnoticed by ash for most of his life until a winter trip to los angeles brings him stumbling upon news of an audition for a music label based in south korea.

curiosity turns into determination. the appeal is obvious; making it in the western music scene won’t be easy when he lacks the typical justin bieber appeal and the ceiling of connections he doesn’t have stand in his way. he knows he wants to do music and so do his parents, so though they’re hesitant when he tells them he wants to stay in los angeles a little while longer to audition, they relent. ash spends hours over the days before the audition practicing his audition material and trying to better his basic korean, just in case everything goes right.

he auditions before the end of their trip, with little knowledge of dimensions entertainment or their relative lack of success in comparison to bigger agencies he could shoot for.

a short time later, he gets the news that they want him to come train to debut as a singer in korea.

it’s a fast turn around. they’re willing to take him on as soon as he turns thirteen over his winter break from school, and the holidays allow his parents to take time off to take him to seoul, so next thing he knows, he’s being dropped off in a foreign city by his parents with little knowledge of the language and no one there he knows. at first, it feels like a coming-of-age movie, but the true difficulties of his situation soon become apparent.

only a few weeks after his arrival, he’s thrown onto a television show to compete as the youngest of a team against a debut group from another company that seems so much more experienced and prepared than them. he’s only had a few lessons under dimensions at this point, but apparently his audition rounds and one evaluation is enough to shoulder him with a primary vocal spot as well as spots in the dance and rap line-ups. he’s not sure why he’s chosen, whether dimensions has a shortage of main vocal-material trainees and they paint him as an all-arounder to justify his minimal training, or whether someone had suddenly up and left and they needed a quick replacement.

the competition is a lot to handle being thrown at him so suddenly when he can’t even understand what the instructors and judges and his teammates are saying most of the time. dimensions touts him by his middle name, taeyong, because his identity has become kwon taeyong upon dimensions’ insistence he immerse himself in the language and culture of the industry he’s trying to debut under and he hasn’t had the courage to argue yet. he’s on the verge of tears constantly, and when they lose, he feels like he’d been the lacking part of the puzzle. the judges were never going to choose them when he could only communicate in broken sentences and he hadn’t been able to shake the criticism of his pronunciation when singing.

the show ends and he wants to leave, but he’s under contract. at first, he sinks low into dark waters, but he eventually works his way out and tries his best to fast track his learning of korean. trying to learn a new language isn’t that easy, though and he remains isolated from all of the people around him he can’t communicate with. while that makes it easier to focus on his training when his social life is so barren, the feeling that he’s made a mistake lingers. over the next two years, there are multiple occasions that ash rethinks his decision, but he manages to persevere through. slowly but surely, he learns korean and finds songwriting helps better his understanding of the language through putting it to music. more than anything else, it helps and he’s able to keep his spot in the debut lineup for dimensions’ next group, not only as the youngest member, but as the main vocal, lead dancer, and a rapper — an all-arounder with the burden of extra hours in the recording studio and the practice room.

debuting doesn’t wipe away all of his hardships of his trainee days. once criticized by trainers for being too reserved, ash tries to be more outgoing like he’d been told to, but instead, during their first few rounds of promotions, he’s criticized by some for being attention-seeking. some of it’s excused because he’s a foreigner and the maknae, but others deride him for looking for more attention even with the lines and center time he gets. it’s not the first time in his life ash is subjected to being picked apart by the public. after all, his unpreparedness for next generation had had antis swarming to him like flies, but now it’s on an even larger scale.

ash resigns himself to a background role when he’s not on stage. they’re right — he does get enough attention on stage; he should let others with less spotlight have their moments offstage. he’s too discouraged and anxious to sell the image of the cute and excitable maknae, so the company shapes an image of the artistic type, quiet not because of rejection but because he’s a deep thinker, mature for his age and endlessly talented. it leads to fans forgetting how young he is at times and any barrier on treating him like another hunk of meat to fantasize over fades away. when his maknae status is acknowledged, it’s to point out he’s a maknae who doesn’t really act like it because he’s too attractive on stage or has so much responsibility on his shoulders.

their debut concept feels like trying on clothes that don’t fit. whether they’re going on about the pressures of a school system he’s barely experienced in some kind of costume-ized version of american hip hop or flashing theirs abs as they boast about their tepid success, most of the time, it doesn’t feel very authentic. older now than he had been at the beginning of his journey, all of fifteen or sixteen, he doesn’t know what he’d expected from being in a boy group, but being so intent to prove himself had left him unsatisfied once debut actually came.

he keeps to himself, spending time focusing on becoming a better performer and singer and writing songs to work through everything he can’t share with anyone else. he finds reprieve from pressure in his personal life, but even that’s hard as fans became comfortable overstepping boundaries. he’s the youngest, so they only want to take care of him. he’s mysterious, so they only want to know more about him. familiar faces show up in places they shouldn’t be. he goes from feeling eternally alone to never really feeling alone anywhere.

dimensions decides it’s time for a concept coming at youth from a different angle, and this time, ash gets to have his piece by reflecting his personal feelings of youth into the writing of polaris’s title track for their new era.

from there, they rise. the public takes notice and their fanbase grows. but with fans filling concert halls and fan signs, there comes as well fans waiting around every corner, moving into apartments across from his and chasing his car with theirs, it’s hard to keep much private for too long, even keeping his head down. he has a bad feeling it will be the undoing of him.

between his positions within polaris, his blossoming potential as a songwriter that earns him his first credit on a #1 song within his teenage years, and the looks he grows into, he’s positioned for a solo career once polaris has won their first daesang. he grows into his own identity and his own sound, but as polaris’s stardom rises to unprecedented heights in both south korea and his home country, the pressure of expectation starts to feel suffocating.

dimensions is fully invested in keeping his slate clean, so when a dating rumor bubbles to the surface with a popular actress and a claim of a three-year relationship based on alleged lovestagrams and unverified sightings and couple clothes, dimensions’ team is quick to deny. he’s told to keep his head down, and he tries his best, but an adolescence spent locked in practice rooms in a foreign city, voiceless, starts to bubble up into an irrepressible need for freedom and his search for it gets him into a little trouble.

they’re even bigger now, though, and when another rumors spring forth at the hands of suspicious photos of him with someone the public is less warm to, the company has to work a little harder. they go to work taking down posts and burying the rumor. there are communities starving for dirt, though, and they eventually have to issue a statement asking fans to stay out of his personal life because his friendships are his private matter. when more incriminating pictures leak from a nosey fan or anti finding their way into her private instagram, dimensions doubles down and cuts and pastes together half-truths to feed a story to the press that’s anything but the assumptions everyone makes when they see the pictures.

between dating rumors and increasing stage appearances where he doesn’t seem all there that spark speculation from laziness to in-group conflict to celebrity disease, it becomes an all-too-easy hobby of some galleries to concoct motivations for hate, and concentrated hate campaigns become something he’s expected to simply deal with. if child star discontent hadn’t been enough, it’s then that misery really sets in. he’s already acting out enough to cause trouble with dimensions, but he swears he’ll leave the company when their contract renewals come up to preserve his own sanity.

contract renewal discussions eventually do begin and dimensions entertainment should have the uphill battle of their careers, but instability and heartbreak and spending too much time under the influence of substances and the people surrounding him with vested interest in his contract renewal lead to a period of weakness in which ash re-signs because what else does he have going for him?

he knows better, but he does it anyway.

throwing away his last shot at getting out shatters him completely when it sinks in past the mental haze and one hiatus comes after another because his body starts giving out alongside his mental health that’s been going for a while.

he’s only two years into his new contract and polaris still hasn’t peaked with their piling daesangs and international awards, but some fans begin suggesting he might as well leave the group.

he can’t say he disagrees, but he’d thrown that shot away.

counting down the days until he’s free from his self-imposed prison, he only hopes his head will be a little clearer the next time his fate is in his hands.

image & career

as the maknae of polaris, it was assumed he’d always be a little cuter than the others. it came with the territory of being first thrown into the spotlight weeks after his thirteenth birthday, but he was never that great at taking on the cute role, especially when he was offstage. at thirteen, he’d had little image at all since he rarely spoke during his time on next generation, but his looks branded him with an automatic cuteness. at fifteen, when he was better at communicating in korean, his baby face still sold it, with fans going on about his adorable oversized features, but he was too shy and introverted to be the aegyo machine they might have wanted. it wasn’t a major pitfall, as polaris’s concept in their early days was far from cute.

over the years, he grew up and little by little, more came out about him that shaped an image in the minds of fans. he was quiet, but he always had something to say about music, or a sensitive notion to share, or a musing just philosophical enough to have him branded as the quiet, romantic, and artistic type. fans had no problem with grasping onto his musical talents in singing and instruments and songwriting as his defining personality trait, and his positions branded him an all-arounder or an ace. a wunderkind, a prodigy, a genius.

by the time polaris was soaring to heights in the biggest music market in the world, he’d taken a few minor hits to his image as the baby of the group, but they had little affect on the multi-talented, golden ray of musical proclivity diehard fans made him out to be. the innocence fans had once wanted to attribute to him was harder to nail to him after a while, but adulthood painted a new look on him that looked even better, both in the light cast and in the sharpness of his jawbone. the idea of him as an artist got pushed harder and it defined him more than anything as he established himself as a solo artist.

halfway between rockstar and old hollywood rebel heartthrob and with a worldwide audience following his every move, the name taeyong holds more weight than it ever did before. now a man in his twenties, any lingering shards of innocence and cuteness have long been abandoned for a man molded around a rebel without a cause heartthrob. from the tattoos to the piercings to the self-written songs about heartbreak and longing to the brand deals selling sex appeal via calvin klein or versace eros, he fits to a t and it hasn’t gone unnoticed by consumers. he’s a fantasy to those who dream about fixing the tormented soul of an artist and an envy for those who find his lust-worthy cool something to be emulated.

faux leather jackets over white tees, an intense gaze under shaggy hair, designer silver and heartbreak on his sleeve — he’s a james dean gone gen z, trendy and edgy enough to appeal to those younger, with enough classic tall, dark, and handsome appeal to wrangle the hearts of older women, and cool enough to sell clothes and haircare to men his age.

taeyong’s branded sexy without trying, because of course he’s too busy in the studio to ever think about such a thing, and everything seems to come effortlessly to him. he’s a great singer, a good dancer, a rapper, picks up instruments like counting to ten, and writes and produces songs that move people or become hits or both.

an ideal dripped in honey and halos slipped out of his fingers years ago, but it’s turned out that leather and ripped jeans look better on him anyway.

future

triggers: mention of substance abuse

from the outside, it looks as though ash has achieved everything anyone could ever want. despite the dents in his image, he’s earned himself respect as an artist and a rising world star. ash has long lost the desire for world stardom, but he still, in some sense, wants to feel like he’s made it in his home country, and will continue to struggle deeply with the recognition the group has gotten on an international scale. the more famous they become, the harder it is for him to feel truly safe and anonymous anywhere.

ash is also struggling as he tries to recover from past issues that caused his recent hiatuses. substance abuse, mental illness, and the isolation of fame all contributed to him re-signing with dimensions when he didn’t really want to, so he’ll have to come to terms with that and try to find a way not to crack before he’s finally free of the life he’s re-signed himself back into despite his better judgment.

in his career, he’d like to step back out of the spotlight and focus on being a songwriter and producer, but again, polaris’s relentless stardom won’t allow that, so he’ll have to strike a balance. polaris’s music might be moving away from what he connects with, too, something he’ll have to face head-on at some point if he ever wants to find satisfaction in his career since he doesn’t want solo music to turn into his only true outlet. he’d like to write more for other groups and other artists and continue to express himself in his music, too.

#famedfollow #dimensionsentertainment #polaris #queued post

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