There was this group called AWEEK. It still exists, but I'm not really sure what's going on with it. It was supposed to have 7 members, representing each day of the week. I liked the concept.
The meaning of their name was: “A week goes by quickly, however, a week is repeated.”
I learned about them due to Produce 101, season 2, aka Broduce. Yongjin from Broduce was one of the members. I always liked supporting the underdogs.
I got interested in one of the members, Hyeon, so I kept following the group. Hyeon and Yongjin both left, so I had no interest in the group anymore.
Hyeon:
Well, now the group has 5 members and each still represent one day.
One of the members has the stage name Di1e, which is apparently pronounced Dail. Dail is Friday.
Anyway, one of the predebut members was named Ilkwon. He apparently left because he had to take care of his sick mother in Korea. AWEEK is a K-pop group focused in Japan, so that sort of made sense.
Except, that wasn't the reason.
Apparently they told him he was too old to debut and they didn't want to debut him anymore due to his age. Which doesn't make sense, since there are two members the company did debut who are older than him, and one born in the same year. I think it was homophobia, but it was just my opinion so I can't say for sure. It's interesting that all the members people thought weren't straight ended up leaving one way or another.
So, Ilkwon was almost an idol. From what I remember at the time, he was really sweet. The Japanese fans loved him. They were sad he wouldn't be debuting. He was one of the members with the most fansites predebut.
I'm so proud of him for living his truth openly.
His name is Eun Chan now, Jeon Eunchan.
