Nap of a star

a kinetic journey through Asterhythm's history with the Hallyu Wave

Before You Read

My name is Asterhythm, and I'm a relatively anonymous Wattpad author. I started writing again because I was in an abusive situation (I won't tell details) and because Agust D and BTS saved me and helped me learn to love myself.

I’ve almost been on Wattpad for an entire year, and I’m really happy with all of the progress that I’ve been making. I never thought in a million years that I would be using fanfiction to recover from a horrible, traumatic incident. Especially fanfiction about K-Pop.

I make reference to my past on occasion. I talk about how K-Pop, outside of Big Hit, is “triggering” to me. While it is still triggering, I think I have finally gotten to the point where I can start talking about some of it. So I’ve decided to tell you a story, a soft fairy tale with no warnings and no triggers, with one caveat: I don't want a conversation about it. I’m laying my soul pretty bare here. I don’t need people asking for clarification or “is this who I think it is?” or blowing up my DMs for any reason. It's taking a lot of bravery for me to even tell this story, in the weird way that I am, and honestly I'll probably be out for 24 hours with a bad dissociative episode once I post this.

But it's high time I addressed this. So please don't bug me about this until I say it's okay. For my sanity. Please.

Part 1

There are only so many ways I can tell this story, so I’ll begin at the very beginning: once upon a time, there was a girl. (For sake of this story, she can be a girl.) The girl already knew she was weird, not like her peers. She watched anime, and she listened to music from anime. She got so good at listening to the music that she started to become fluent in Japanese. And nobody else understood her, but she was happy.

The girl loved the J-Pop that existed at the time. It was filled with strong women: Hamasaki Ayumi, Koda Kumi, Otsuka Ai, Crystal Kay, and the Utada Hikaru that so many people still know and love. Sometimes, an artist who would sing in Japanese would also sing in a different language. And the girl did not understand, but she still supported her. For this was BoA, the first ever crossover artist from Korea who had seen stardom in Japan. After decades of embargoes, K-Pop music was finally crossing over.

But the girl did not understand K-Pop as a genre. And she definitely did not understand what was up with all those boy bands and all those girl groups. Everybody was doing the same exact dances, singing simple songs that sounded nothing like the raw emotion of her J-Pop. Where were the moving, powerful lyrics? Why did everybody look so happy all the time? And how could you even tell anybody apart? Of course, the girl had been into J-Pop long enough that she could tell East Asian people apart. But give her a boy band of over fifteen members, and she wasn’t even going to try.

The girl graduated from college, but was still a girl, as she did not want to become a woman. One day, her best friend (who was definitely into these fifteen-member K-Pop groups) wrote a post about a new group she had found. Okay, but you should really listen to this group, the friend told our heroine. First of all, there’s only five members. But also, their leader sounds like he is classically trained and doesn’t sing in his head voice! I want to hear your opinion!

The Light Bulb Goes Off

And so our heroine thought, okay, might as well. It’s just one music video. What could go wrong? She loaded YouTube up and pressed play. Five boys stared back at her, all smiling. They said, “hello.”

Or rather, they sang, “hello, hello.”

(And at this point I know some of you know EXACTLY where I am going with this, and you understand EXACTLY what I have been through, but I am not done with this story and it does NOT end the way you think it does. LET ME FINISH.)

The Hallyu Wading Pool

True to form, the leader had been classically trained, and it showed, as his timbre when singing was completely different than the rest of them. But it wasn’t just that he stood out: the five molded together into one cohesive sound in a way our heroine hadn’t heard since boy bands were a thing in America at the turn of the millennium. It wasn’t only a sound that she could appreciate: she found herself liking it.

So when people asked, do you know K-Pop? she would answer, I have one band that I like. I have one band, with five members, and that is all I need. K-Pop was a community, kind of like a suburb, where everybody lived in shining houses and even when there were feuds, everybody got along. You had to, back in those days. K-Pop wasn’t mainstream yet! The public didn’t know who Girls’ Generation or Super Junior were. So the girl found herself as part of a new community of music lovers, who talked about VIXX and TVXQ and a new band called EXO that was then twelve members (and most everybody talked about Luhan), and f(x) and Teen Top and Big Bang and 2NE1, who were clearly the best.

And they would ask our heroine who she stanned, who her bias was, and her answer was the same. I have one band, with five members, and they are all I need. So our heroine stood on the outskirts of the Hallyu wave, and she did not drown. She didn’t need to be part of the Hallyu wave, but she could still get wet, and so she went with her five boys to the supermarket and bought a kiddie pool for the summer. For it was hot and sparkly and the season of magic and potential, and as long as she had her five boys with her, every day was a blast, filled with music and joking and copious amounts of banana milk.

And they would sit in her backyard for hours, and she would cool off in her Hallyu kiddie pool, blasting their hits for anybody to hear. And sometimes, people did. She even wrote a few fanfics back in the day! But at the end of the day, she would sit at home, with her five boys around, and she felt safe, and she felt loved. Even in those moments where she could not live as she wanted so, she would live vicariously through her boys. They were pop stars, after all. If they could win the daesang at Melon, then anything could happen, right? The sky was the limit.

She called herself stardust, for she considered herself “dust of a bigger star.” And as a star, she shone on the boys, and true to their name, they received the light. And she made a promise to them that she would stay with them forever, no matter what happened. And so the story goes: once upon a time, there were five boys and a star. The boys and the star made a promise. “Even if we go our separate ways, we will meet here again.”

Part 2

And the seasons passed and new music was made, and her boys were never as popular as other groups, but she didn’t care. They were her five boys. They would always remain her five boys. The band would be nothing without all five of them in the band. That’s how it was supposed to be, right?

Right?

Summer turned to fall, and the girl stayed inside with her five boys. Times were rougher, and she lost touch with her other friends, but she knew she would be fine as long as her boys were safe. She made sure the house was prepared for the winter, and everybody would gather around her piano, and they would sing together.

It happened one chilly morning, just before winter began. The storm brought winds that knocked out the windows, glass shattering everywhere. The girl woke up from her long sleep and ran around the house. She found four of her boys, gathering them in the basement until the storm passed. But the fifth boy was nowhere to be found, and when the storm was over, the shed in the backyard had been totaled. The plastic Hallyu wading pool, where the girl had spent her summers, was in a million pieces.

It was the year the Midwest did not have a spring.

The House of Blue Roses

She picked up the pieces and put them in her garage, not yet willing to part with them. Then, she returned to her house. But three of the boys were gone now, off to take care of duties that awaited them, with the promise that they would be back. She turned to the one remaining boy. You’ll stay with me, right? “Actually, my company put me in a new band!” he said, excited, and ran off to join his new friends.

And so, the girl was left alone, in a broken house, with a broken pool, with no boys. When the rains finally came, she boarded up the windows, which prevented herself from having an outside view. And so the seasons passed, and the girl did not know. She was stuck in a neverending winter, where spring would never come. And she stayed in bed, remembering the good times, hoping that someday the remaining boys would come home. Things wouldn’t be the same, but maybe by then, it would hurt less. Maybe by then, she could greet them with a smile, say hello, hello back to them.

“You’re always so quiet,” a new friend observed one day. And so, our heroine explained what had happened -- the house, the windows, the Hallyu wading pool, her five boys, everything. “That’s so sad,” her new friend said, and then, “I always feel like I’ve been called to fix something. I think it is my destiny to fix your plastic pool.”

That’s not how plastic pools work, the girl said to this new woman, but she didn’t seem to care. The next morning, the girl found the woman in her garage, laying out pieces of plastic pool in a haphazard pattern. “There,” she said at the end of the day, “all done! Good as new.” But the pool was a flat disc, mostly covered in duct tape, and all the girl could think was, I can’t swim in this, and neither can my boys if they return.

Since there was space for her, the woman decided she was moving into the girl’s house. She took over the living room, posting pictures of all five boys everywhere. She hung the plastic pool on the wall, as a testament to her hard work and how she had “saved” this girl’s life by fixing the pool. The woman used alarms to wake up, to eat by, and to sleep by, and she used the boys’ music. It would come out of nowhere, scaring the girl, but she wasn’t allowed to make the woman stop, she needed those alarms to survive! And she read all of their favorite books, streamed them on Spotify, showed the girl all sorts of their videos, even drove the girl everywhere she needed to go as they blasted hello, hello down the interstate.

“This was his favorite book, right?” she asked the girl, showing her A Little Prince. “We’re just like the rose! You can be the pink rose, and I can be the blue rose.” And so the house was decorated with blue roses, with paintings of blue roses, bouquets everywhere, without a pink rose in sight. And every time our heroine stood up for herself, she was ignored. Her house was no longer her own, but she could not move out. She had nowhere else to go.

And if her boys returned, they would find the blue rose there, and be welcomed by her with open arms. And the girl would sit in the corner and be forgotten, because no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t forget that she had lost one of them. She couldn’t forget how the other three had left so quickly, and how the remaining one had joined a new band. Like the loss had meant nothing to them. And she stayed awake at night, and she mourned, and she went through life without any meaning. She stopped shining, and the light was gone from her eyes. And so the story continues: Time passed, and the boys separated. The star fell asleep. As a result, the stars stopped shining in the night sky, and people were no longer able to dream.

Part 3

Unable to sleep in her own house, the girl would sit outside on the curb until the wee hours of the morning, staring off into the distance. She began to accept that it was her duty in life to suffer. There were no more good things for her. She had broken her promise; she could no longer stay with her boys forever. She secretly hoped that a car would run her over, but not kill her; after all, as she has said time and time again, there is no death in K-Pop.

And a car did pull up, on a particularly rainy morning. A man with mint green hair got out of the car. “Are you okay? You can’t stay out here in the rain. Come with me.”

I can’t, replied our heroine. I don’t deserve happiness or kindness.

“Well, I thought the same thing about myself for a long time,” the man said. “At least sit in my car for a while, dry off. I can take you wherever you need to go.” And this is the part of the story that so many people know: that the girl was caught in a rough spot, and the man we know and love as Suga, Agust D himself, swooped in and saved the day. In the context of our story, it means that Suga took the girl first to a late night convenience store, where they ate instant ramen and he let her dry off a bit. He used that time to convince her that she couldn’t go home, so they returned in the dead of night, packed her things, and left the blue rose woman and the broken house behind.

The Hallyu Pool Party

Suga drove up to the middle of the K-Pop suburb, to a huge house painted white with gold accents. It was a mansion indicative of the success Suga had found. And Suga helped the girl take her things into the mansion, late at night, silently, up three flights of stairs to an attic room. “I hope this is okay. We have lots of people here. We are open to all who need a place to stay, because...well, we’re bulletproof.”

And so the girl finally slept. She woke up on her own time and heard noise coming from the backyard, and found a window that overlooked the scene. A huge swimming pool was out there, and seven men were running around, playing in the pool, generally being crazy. Four of them were in a chicken fight, one was on a floatie, and another was bringing out food for everyone.

The girl noticed that Suga was the seventh man, taking a nap in a lounge chair. And she suddenly realized it was summer. It wasn’t raining or cold anymore. The weather was perfect for a swim. So she changed into short shorts and a t-shirt, and when she opened the door, the men turned and cheered. One of them ran toward her and enveloped her in a big hug.

“Welcome, welcome!” they yelled. “We’re so glad you’re here! Welcome to the ARMY!” And then J-Hope dunked our heroine in the pool, and even though she wasn’t wearing a bathing suit there was something about it that was so refreshing, crisp, a needed change.

So it was that the girl began to stay at the Big Hit mansion. She lived in the attic, as the boys -- our wonderful, amazing seven boys -- let her have her own space. She was, after all, still recovering from immense trauma. And when she needed help, she would go downstairs, and the boys would help her. Jin would swim laps with her, RM would sit and watch Friends reruns with her, and J-Hope would play all of her old favorite songs for her. Jimin would take her to his dance classes, and when the stress was too much, she would cuddle with V for a while, no strings attached. And Jungkook took her trauma recovery books and worked through them with her, and she learned how to lean on all seven boys. For there were seven, and it was true that without all seven, the group would not be whole. But there was an understanding and a trust among the house that the girl hadn’t known before. There was no fear that one of the boys would suddenly be left behind.

“It’s like this song,” Jungkook said, letting her listen to Spring Day. The music she heard directly contradicted the life of pain and suffering she had known so far. The blue rose woman had profited off of not only our heroine’s suffering, but the boys she had left behind. But now, our heroine was being told a different message. It was okay to be open about your suffering. It was okay to seek help. And no matter what happened, the pain would pass. No darkness, no season is eternal, she whispered. You were wrong, love. I wish you could see it. Spring did come.

She did not feel comfortable leaving the house yet, because the world was still a dangerous place, and the moment she stepped off the premises, her mind was filled with horrible memories and blue roses and her missing boys. But she was safe within the confines of the mansion, with her new boy scouts, and she was healing. And for any normal person, this would be the end of the story, a happily ever after.

Tomorrow

But then, one day, Suga told our heroine, “hey, we’re having a few other people stay with us for a while, some of our younger brothers. I know how nervous you are around new people. Is that okay with you?”

She was in the pool when they arrived. Jungkook and V were on either side of her, and she watched, peering over the edge, as five new boys walked in. And they looked so different from Bangtan. And there were five, and if her vision blurred, she could have swore it was an illusion. But no, the leader did not have a classically trained voice of gold. He did, however, have a backwards baseball cap and a bunny smile.

They sang, “hello.” Or rather, they sang, “masurisuri.”

And she said hello back to them. She was, after all, at the Big Hit mansion. It was safe here! And so she learned that the leader’s name was Soobin and that he was really shy; that the oldest was the most legendary so far; that the youngest loved stuffed animals probably more than he liked people; and the middle moodmaker member of the group liked to write music. And she became their friends, and they played badminton in the backyard and helped cook dinner with BTS, and everybody was one big happy family.

...you know, except for the one boy who was constantly a pain in her ass.

“You lived there before? Omigosh, I’m so jealous. What was it like? What’s your favorite song of theirs? Tell me everything!!! They’re my heroes! They’re the reason I’m an idol today!!” And she wanted to drop kick Kang Taehyun off the roof of the mansion, because he couldn’t keep his damn mouth shut. So she kept hiding behind walls and conveniently missing him, just so he couldn’t talk about her old boys that she couldn’t keep because she broke her promise. It was much more comfortable hiding behind Soobin, because he was tall and soft and loved bread.

She sat alone in her room late at night, catching up on TXT’s antics, learning more about them just like she had with BTS. Since they also lived in the Big Hit mansion, she knew she could watch without fear. Until the name of a certain song popped up on one of their performances. The KBS Song Festival. Was it Taehyun’s decision to choose that song to cover? Probably. That asshole.

She clicked on the video. The stage appeared. Five boys -- the new boys on the block -- smiled back at her. And each one had a blue rose in his hand.

Youvegottobekiddingmeyouvegottobeabsolutelyfuckingkiddingme --

Each boy posed perfectly, and then, with a flourish of the music, they walked up to the front of the stage, tossing the blue roses away. Then, they got back into formation, and they became. For a moment, she was watching a bunny rabbit leader; an impeccable prodigy with massive charisma; a moodmaker with endless talents; a young smiling maknae with a fondness for a certain drink; and a perfect singer defined as the vocal of his generation.

The question was -- was she watching TXT?

Soobin and the others heard something from the attic, running upstairs. When they got to her room, she was on the floor, sobbing openly, iPad in her hands. She looked up. “Where have you been? I’ve missed you all so much!”

Together

The myth says that the goddess Virgo gathered the stardust from the heavens and planted it on Earth, and from the stardust bloomed flowers...aster flowers. So it was that the flower bloomed anew, with five new boys to stay by her side. Though our heroine was just a flower, she still shone on her new boys, and true to their name, they used the light to build a greater tomorrow, together. And this time, she made a promise that she would stay with them as long as she could, but the difference this time was that the boys made the promise back to her, to remain with MOA forever. And the seasons passed and new music was made, and her boys were never as popular as other groups, but she didn’t care. She had one band, five boys, and they were all she needed.

From time to time, she would worry about something happening to one of them. Or she would find out something that made her cry. And time and time again, she found solace in her new home, in the bulletproof boy scouts that lived there, and her new five boys who received her light. She never knew if, someday, she would be able to welcome the others back home. But she knew that, someday, she would make peace with it. For now, she was safe, and happy, and she had people who loved her, and she could finally love herself -- themself -- for the first time in her life.

And so the story concludes: The boys met again, and the star woke up. And the boys felt it: “Now, the magic happens.”

Thank you for reading.