background:

trigger warning: mentions of substance abuse with light detail; very briefly implied child abuse (both in first paragraph only)

whenever I reference a specific age, I'm speaking on international terms.

Life is never easy and nothing in this world is free.

That's a lesson that Miso learned, even without realizing it, from the very early age of two. Born in Seoul, she was briefly in the care of both parents before her father, a man who worked multiple manual labor jobs to scrape by with his little family, died in a work accident when she was barely three. That left her with her mother who, to cope with the death of her second half, turned to substance abuse and misdirected anger.

Eventually, the woman grew tired of her daughter as she found more and more solace in her substances and the partners that would come and go through their little apartment's door regularly. She dropped Miso off at a local police station and made herself scarse. So, the little girl was sent to Yeongdo-gu, Busan to live with her paternal grandparents. At 5, Miso was legally adopted by the couple and she grew up as the very middle child between four other adoptees, with only deeply suppressed memories of her mother. And she had absolutely none of her father—as far as she was concerned, she only had this one set of grandparents and an aunt.

Things were happy for a while; a long while, in fact. Miso enjoyed half days at school which allowed the small town's children the time to help around family farms, fisheries, and other businesses. Miso and her siblings worked around the farm and general store that their family owned and it was always an unspoken plan that at least a couple of the Kim kids would step up and take over everything when it was time. No one really had qualms with this...except for Miso.

Miso always had big city dreams and she wanted more than what their sleepy little farm-fishing town had to offer. Her admitting this when she was 17 caused a bit of a tiff among the family with some people in full support and others quite apprehensive given the fates her parents suffered after moving to the city. Eventually, though, she was let go and she started her first semester at Ewha Womans Univeristy.

At Ewha, Miso was working toward a degree in Agriculture, paired with a minor in dance. For her, the plan had always been to become a choreographer and Agriculture was just a backup plan with the idea that she'd do her best by her grandparents' if she ever had to return to Yeongdo with her tail between her legs.

Life in Seoul was hard—much harder than Miso had anticipated and, without the money or a huge scholarship—most of her tuition being paid out of pocket—she ended up living in a dingy studio with a roomate, worked part time, and busked on weekends. This sort of grind was the only way she could feed herself and keep up with tuition, but she always dreamed of buying herself a real apartment one day.

An apartment is how I know I've made it, she decided in the midst of a particularly rough night where the central heaters were broken and she was keeping warm with layers of clothes and a cup ramen. One near all the hot spots and excitement.

It was a very grueling period in Miso's life and she almost dropped out a few times, but she was determined to graduate so she could make something of herself and not dissappoint the family members that believed in her—particularly her older brother and her grandmother. Plans changed, however, when Miso was scouted after one of her busking sessions. She was 19 then and she dropped her uni program to part-time (and eventually dropped altogether) after signing, given confidence by Dallae Entertainment's promises of big things. It was a very small company that had apparently been promising and homey in the beginning, but it was standing on its last legs by the time she got there.

g The next two years were spent in even poorer conditions than she had left. It was bug infested, the trainees paid for their own meals and, sometimes bills. They even had to drive themselves from festival to festival due to short-staffing. Yes, she refined her singing voice. Yes she learned to rap because none of the other girls seemed to get it. But it ultimately felt not worth it when Morgen (the boy group) debuted and plunged the company into debt with the failure to make up the costs of debut. So, Stiorra, the girl group, never had their shot and the company shut down.

The Dallae fiasco left Miso with nothing, save for a few lifelong friends. She went back to her shitty apartment, appreciating it much more because she wasn't existing on top of a bunch of other people, and she found a soul-crushing department store job to pay bills when busking didn't give much while picking up the pieces of her shattered spirit. Later that year, she found another part-time assistant job at a dance studio called Audrey & Marilyn.

Audrey & Marilyn was perhaps the best thing to happen to Miso. When she rose up rather quickly through the ranks to instructor, she was able to quit her other job and stop spending every single weekend dancing in the streets for little pay. Though it wasn't paying a ton, it was enough for her to live somewhat comfortably. She became a staple in the studio and on its social media channels. It's through A&M that she was scouted by Diamond Soul Factory and she continued building a popular name through their YouTube channel up until debut.

After training with the company for a little over 7 months, Miso debuted as a late member of Aurora. Aurora's comeback was successful enough that, along with money she'd been saving from A&M, she was able to buy her first true, good-quality apartment. Then, between their 1st and 2nd comeback, their leader graduated and memebers left and joined and Miso was appointed to the title.

This constant moving wasn't just with Aurora, either. Executives, staff, fellow artists, and trainees were constantly changing and it was hard to see more than two or three familiar faces in a day. Amid the company's constantly changing roster, she even found herself in an odd in-between phase where she was supposed to eventually be graduating from Aurora to join their sunbae group, DIA. With a mounting resurgance of anxiety around her career's many false starts and restarts, she decided to break contract and leave DSF. She joined Mama under the promise of redebuting as a soloist and nothing else. And, for once, she feels like she can actually trust her higher ups. When she isn't in the vocal practice room or dance studio, she's the host of Simply K-Pop and the Miso's Lullabam web talk show.

personality:

Despite her hardships, Miso is a very bright and smiley person—hence the stage name Miso that she's carried over from childhood. She's outspoken, confident, and a little goofy. She loves skinship, being cute, and she's not afraid to stand up to someone two times her size. Even in school back home, she got a lot of bad marks for fighting/defending the shy, disabled, and foreign peers that the bullies loved to target.

Miso, in turn, struggles a lot with social confidence and a fear of abandonment. It makes for a difficult combination where she latches onto friends quickly but assumes they'll be sick of her just as fast. she's also never dated anyone outside of a two month relationship during her uni stint. So far, no close friends have proven her anxieties right, but she's literally always a little on edge just in case. She also suffers with an innate need to solve her own problems with absolutely no help. Being raised by her grandparents as the middle child among five always made her feel the need to lighten their load, so it's an awful habit she's carried for as long as she can remember.

i have soooo many dance videos saved, it'd be a crime not to have this obligatory collab plot up. there's unlimited collab opportunities but not everyone's gonna get a thread out of it, because it can get tedious and repetitive.

A little over two months. That's how long you and a, then, 19-year-old (int'l) Miso dated before a combination of overwhelming schedules and far more suffocating insecurities accumulated at once and prompted her to break things off just a few days after a two-monthiversary that she put a lot of heart into celebrating. It was brief, but taxing meet up that made her wish she was one of those people who had the audacity to break up through text. You haven't seen each since that day that left you with unanswered questions, but life has a funny way of forcing closure.

You have a crush on Miso. Which is unfortunate because she's as dense as a block of styrofoam, over friendly with most, and in a constant state of thinking even her closest friends secretly hate her. It's a triple whammy that makes your confession plans much more complicated than they already would be. What hilarity shall ensue?

Likely won't end with reciprocated feelings tbh, unless it happens naturally. This is mostly an excuse for some goofiness. But you'll definitely get a really sweet golden retriever friend out of it if there's no hard feelings on your part!!

Miso's world is shaken when a letter from her estranged mother shows up at the DSF front desk one day. Though she tries to shake off the unearthed traumatic memories and bury the letter deep in her junk drawer, there's no mistaking how off she seems in the days following. She's unusually quiet, distracted, and she's picked up a nervous tick she hasn't had in literal years—all while trying to convince the little girl inside that desperately misses their mother despite everything that writing back would be an awful idea.