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“Hello, we’re trainees from Happy Friends Entertainment! I’m Lee Sejin, main dancer.”
The judges laughed at his confident statement, and Moondae started speaking a little too early, before the noise died down.
“I’m – I’m Park Moondae, vocalist.”
He was supposed to say ‘main vocalist,’ but he’d never actually agreed to that, Sejin realized with an internal sigh.
The judge who’s a famous choreographer spoke into his mic, “You know, it can be difficult doing a duo performance because then it’s like, there’s no way to avoid direct comparison between the two of you, right?”
Moondae had warned him the judges were going to be obnoxious. “It’s TNet,” he’d said. “They’re going to milk everything for drama. Just smile and let it roll off, should be easy for you.” His caustic tone made that sound insulting, but he wasn’t wrong. If there was anything Lee Sejin was good at, it was looking directly at someone trying to cut him down and grinning into their faces.
“We’re both very confident,” Sejin said into his mic, flashing a smile. Beside him, Moondae just nodded in agreement as the judge laughed.
“Alright then, let’s see what you’ve got.”
When they were on the stage doing this casual sort of interview before their audition, Sejin didn’t feel like the judges were setting him up as the more talented one. It just felt, as it always did, that it was him and Moondae against everyone else.
But now, watching the first episode of Idol Inc: Relisted, the editing tells a different story. The camera catches Sejin’s confident grin, the easy way he holds himself on stage as if he’s meant to be there, everything short of actually editing sparkles around him. Meanwhile Moondae’s only shown at the worst possible times, the moments when he looked down at the floor or squinted into the bright stage lights, making him seem nervous, practically falling into Sejin’s shadow.
Only the knowledge that this editing can’t possibly be sustained for long keeps Sejin from throwing something at the TV. That, and Moondae is watching beside him with an amused little smile. So Sejin settles for clenching his hands on a pillow and waiting for the judges to eat their words.
The episode flashed back to contextual footage, clips of him and Moondae dancing together that were provided by the agency. Of course, that was more flattering to Sejin, since dance is his focus; the show didn’t include the vocal clips the agency had surely sent. Another angry squeeze of the pillow from Sejin watching the show. Over the clips, TNet played soundbites from his and Moondae’s pre-show interviews.
“We’ve been friends for a long time, and we want to debut together!”
“I’ll do my best to keep up with Sejin.” (Moondae, Sejin wants to groan, why would you give them that soundbite?)
“I’ve been working toward this for a long time…” The footage changes to Sejin giving his initial interview in front of the show’s logo. “Debuting is everything to me.” They’ve chosen flattering footage that makes him look determined and emphasizes his years of training and how much he wants this.
In the clip of Moondae’s interview, his face is bland. “I started training because Sejin wanted me to try out in high school. I wasn’t sure it was for me, honestly, (here the footage is edited together, words cut out) now it’s been about six years.”
Switch to footage of the two of them backstage just before they were called on, Sejin excitedly shaking Moondae back and forth. “Our turn next!”
“Please stop shaking me,” Moondae says calmly.
Sejin stops shaking him but maintains his grip on his shoulders. “Park Moondae, we’re going to debut together.”
The camera angle doesn’t show that Moondae was smiling when he thumped Sejin’s back and agreed, “Let’s kill it.”
Back to their audition stage, to the judges talking quietly among themselves. This conversation must have happened while the two of them were handing their handheld mics back and getting into position.
“Hm, this might be rough…” the judge who was a pretty famous solo singer murmured to her fellow judges, looking between the self-evaluations Sejin and Moondae had filled out earlier.
“Yeah, you can just tell when someone has it,” the choreographer agreed. “One of these boys does, and the other…” He raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’m excited to see how Lee Sejin does.”
The third judge concurred, and only Youngrin, the SaintU member, refrained from making any kind of comment about being more interested in Sejin. Her only contribution, at least that TNet deigned to include, was to look up in mild surprise when the music for their audition started playing and nod slightly in approval.
They’d chosen a somewhat recent, but not too recent, hard hitting song by a top tier four-member girl group that everyone would know. It opened with punchy talk-singing, the camera focused on Sejin as he danced in front, Moondae a few steps back, executing moves that emphasized Sejin’s part rather than calling attention to himself.
The opening lines are replayed several times as the episode shoves in reaction shots of both the judges and other trainees being impressed by Sejin’s impactful opening. The song is designed to open with a bang, and he delivered. Captions point out his strong voice and even stronger dancing.
“There’s no contest,” the choreographer says with a smarmy grin when Sejin’s opening part is almost over, even though Moondae hasn’t even had any real lines yet. Sejin wants to scream, it isn’t a contest, jackass, it’s an audition, we’re on the same team.
He and Moondae are always on the same team.
The energy of the song slowly dipped as Sejin’s opening part went on, which is maybe why several of the judges took the moment his part ended to look down at their papers and jot their first impressions. They should have known better; Youngrin sure did. The point of the song’s opening sequence, the way the initial burst of energy dies down, is to set up a second, even stronger punch when the main vocalist comes in.
Moondae slides neatly around Sejin and delivers the first line of the chorus with perfect timing and a flash of a smirk, hands raised in the song’s signature point move, like a gun aimed at the audience.
“--cause I’m gonna getcha like a sonic boom,” rings through the audience. And Sejin, watching from the couch weeks later, understands why TNet’s editors were so careful not to include any shots of emotion on Moondae’s face up until now. The combined impact of holy shit, this guy can sing with the way Park Moondae lights up when it’s his turn in the spotlight changes everything.
Suddenly, it’s not Sejin vs Moondae anymore. The switch TNet created just to flip, flips hard. Now it’s the two of them, completely in sync, at the same intense energy level, putting on one hell of a performance.
Of course, because it’s TNet, the moment is repeated twice, to emphasize the judges being shocked back to full attention and the trainees in the audience getting hyped up.
“You were right about the song choice,” he tells Moondae. He doesn’t need to take his eyes off the screen to know Moondae will look smug, and he doesn’t want to. He wants to watch the Moondae on screen killing it the way he promised they were going to.
When they were done with their performance, still breathing hard from the exertion, the judges exchanged wide-eyed looks with each other. Sejin remembers that moment, though at the time he had no idea exactly how the episode would be edited; he saw their shock and knew he and Moondae had given TNet some of the best audition material they could get, and he grinned and grabbed Moondae into a one-armed hug.
TNet must have liked that, because they include a shot of another hug that Sejin hadn’t even realized was caught on camera, on the periphery of the stage as they started toward their assigned seats in the ranking. Sejin had been so high on the joy of a great performance that he’d practically hung off Moondae’s neck, and the camera caught what even Sejin didn’t at the time: Moondae smiling as Sejin nearly toppled them both off the steps.
Hug Moondae more on the show, noted. It’s all for the sake of their screen time, of course.
Naturally, the judges gave Moondae the higher ranking. It’s the only possible conclusion to the storyline TNet created for the two of them. He has to wonder if they’d prepped the judges on how they planned to present Moondae and Sejin, or if maybe the judges were being told what rankings to give through their in-ear monitors, because there’s no way TNet left this all up to the judges’ discretion.
They wanted the drama. If at all possible, they wanted to see Sejin disappointed to be ranked lower. But they must not have been able to find a single shot they could use to create that narrative, with all the elated grinning Sejin did from the moment they finished performing to the moment they sat in their seats.
Instead, TNet is forced to present a heartwarming scene of Sejin applauding loudly as Moondae sat in the number one seat, while Moondae groaned and looked like he wished he didn’t know him. The trainees around them laughed and congratulated the two of them as Sejin took the second seat, which was where they stayed until trainees like Cha Eugene and Kim Raebin were slotted in front of and between them. When a politely apologetic Ryu Chungwoo came up to sit between them, Sejin took his hands with mock sadness and begged him to take good care of Moondae while they were separated.
“You’re so embarrassing,” Moondae says, watching the TV between the fingers of his hands over his face.
“But our screen time,” Sejin says.
“Then why are you the same off camera?”
There’s no need to answer; Moondae already knows Sejin loves him, has loved him since they faced down bullies together in high school, since Sejin dragged him to dance class, since Moondae followed him out of a company that would have given him a spot in a debut group just because they weren’t keeping Sejin.
It used to always be Sejin reaching out, grabbing for Moondae’s hand the way you reach for a flashlight in the dark, but somewhere along the way that changed. At some point, he found that he stopped reaching out, because Moondae’s hand was already in his, pulling him off the beaten path and confidently into the darkness.
This way, I know a shortcut, he seemed to be saying every time Sejin set a new destination for them. Sejin decided where they were going; Moondae got them there. And Sejin knew he could trust, hold tight, and follow.