Trivia / LOONA

• Acting in the Dark: The members have admitted that sometimes — but not always, mind — that they don't even know what they're meant to be acting out. Again, however, this is not always the case. For example, on the making film of "Why Not," ViVi provided a Word of Saint Paul confirmation that her character is searching for Yves all throughout the MV.
• Actor-Inspired Element: There's an abundance of these, although the Loonaverse characters are fictional creations at the end of the day. For instance, Team Moms HaSeul, Yves, and Kim Lip are the designated leaders of their respective sub-units, with HaSeul's character being very maternal to YeoJin In-Universe (as she seems to be in real life as well). Chuu is also a ball of fun and cuteness within the universe; in real life, JinSoul (who is one of her assigned roommates at the LOONA quarters) has attested that Chuu's so goddamn adorable that even her sleep-talking is in a baby voice.
• Affectionate Nickname:
  • JinSoul has the habit of referring to the younger members as "babies" because she finds them just that cute. For example, with Olivia Hye, she uses "Boss Baby" because she's super professional on-stage, but the most adorable kid off-stage.
  • Kim Lip has "Jiwooming" for Chuu.
  • HeeJin, HyunJin, and JinSoul have publicly referred to themselves as "3Jin," complete with their own trio gesture and chant.
• Archive Panic: Each of the members had a solo music video before debuting as a group. Then some of those solos had special alternative versions (e.g. ViVi, who has "Everyday I Love You" and "Everyday I Need You," and HyunJin, who has two special versions for her solo). There are the countless teasers, which are usually by themselves already quite cinematic and contribute to the lore. Then include the dance covers, choreography videos, myriad LOONA TV videos.... In short, there are lots and lots of material for fans to go through, and they've only been a group for about two years.
• Blooper:
  • The MV for "LOONATIC" features several unused or alternate ODD EYE CIRCLE cuts from their own other music videos. One is a wide-view cut from "Love Cherry Motion" that was originally zoomed in enough to hide JinSoul hitting her head on the ceiling of the set offscreen.
  • LOONA 1/3's "You and Me Together" also features unused footage and bloopers, including one moment where ViVi is reaching for the plug in the back of her neck, but can't find it.
  • An unreleased special clip for "Perfect Love" that was shown during the LOONAVERSE concert showed deleted scenes and bloopers from "Hi High".
• Body Double: Rather than Olivia Hye Acting for Two, the other Olivia in "Egoist" is in fact HeeJin◊. HeeJin's face is purposely obscured in the scenes in which Olivia Hye is cradling "herself," as is appropriate for the self-love theme of the song.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Oh, boy. Even before she started singing, Spring Girl on the Korean Masked Singer was assumed by fans to be Chuu. The fact that this childhood photo was given as a hint as to her identity, her boundless energy, and heart Motifs... the previews alone made Orbits sure that it was none other than Chuu. The "surprise" was further spoiled by the fact that Spring Girl amusingly greeted the LOONA fandom by name after winning the first round. Her journey on the show is not over yet, but it's safe to say that when The Reveal happens, no Orbit is going to be surprised. Confirmed to be Chuu.
• Childhood Friends:
  • HeeJin and HyunJin, who still go to school together and are inseparable.
  • Chuu and Kim Lip both attended and finished high school together. Chuu, who was a trainee at Polaris Entertainment, chose to move to BBC after they contacted her because JungEun was there.
• Creator Backlash: Kim Lip has said that she's sick of "Girl Front," one of the leading ODD EYE CIRCLE singles. JinSoul even teased Kim Lip for her words against the song, but later ranked it last of the OEC singles as well.
• The Danza: HeeJin, HyunJin, HaSeul, YeoJin, and JinSoul use their real forenames for their fictional LOONAverse counterparts.
• Dawson Casting: ViVi, HaSeul, JinSoul and Kim Lip were all slightly older than high school age when they played their characters, who are all implied to be high schoolers (at first). Averted with younger members like HeeJin. They were the right age when they played high school students, and the characters seem to have grown appropriately with their actresses (as the only one shown to still be in high school by the "So What" era is played by 17/18-year-old YeoJin).
• Deleted Scene: The exclusive vertical music videos made for LG smartphones feature many beautiful snippets of scenes cut from the final products. To a lesser extent, so do DigiPedi's 4K director's cuts.
• Dye Hard: As this is a K-Pop group, new hair colors come with each era. However, some notable cases stand out:
  • Kim Lip and JinSoul bleached their hair blonde, and their blondeness coupled with their "girl crush" concept signaled a new era for the pre-debut project.
  • While Go Won's first promotional photo showed her with black hair, the following one showed that she also dyed her hair blonde. In her MV, she initially appears with black hair, then becomes blonde after eating a piece of pineapple. LOONA TV shows that Park Chae Won actually dyed her hair thrice for Go Won: she dyed her black hair blonde first for photoshoots before shooting "One&Only", then recorded her blonde scenes before dyeing her hair back to black for the rest of the video. Once it was over, she dyed her hair the blonde she kept for a long time after.
    Go Won: [LOONA TV #400] Somebody told me that I bleached my hair and dyed it back to black and bleached it again! (Is your scalp okay?) Yeah, but I'm worrying about my future. Cheer up, my scalp!
• Fan Community Nicknames:
  • Loonatics, though it's unofficial. Orbit is the official fanbase name as of July 9, 2018.
  • "Varbz" for ViVi fans took off, in Memetic Mutation style. (It's a parody of Nicki Minaj's fan community nickname, Barbz.)
• Flip-Flop of God:
  • Whether or not the "Heart Attack" music video is meant to be interpreted in a romantic sense or not is kind of ambiguous. The music video itself has imagery that's very evocative of romantic love in general, such as arrows through the heart and the strawberry-sharing (which are symbolic of romantic feelings being returned), but the description for the music video describes it as interpreting love "not in a serious way, but in Chuu's own adorable emoticon-like ways". Chuu herself explained commented on variety show Fact In Star that, "Heart Attack" was about "me approaching someone I love, like this [demonstrating key choreo], while confessing my feelings."
  • There was some debate about Olivia Hye's identifying color for a while; although she said in a fansign that it's silver, she is always denoted by #00000 black in any material her face is not explicitly shown in. Further clarification reveals that both are technically correct: her color is "shades of gray" and spans every shade from white to black.
  • In the video "one", the four members of yyxy were shown to represent different emotions; Yves was "faith", Chuu was "love", Go Won was "hope", and Olivia was "anger". Some theorize these reflect their motives for falling from Eden. However, in the description for "Butterfly", Chuu and Go Won's emotions are switched^note "Chuu keeps her "hopes" up with her yearning towards Yves. Go Won "loves" her unique self." (though most fans still refer to them the other way around). There was also an interview during a webshow where Yves described her emotion as "trust", however that was an alternate translation of "faith" in Korean.
• Meta Casting: Wong Kahei's origins from Hong Kong being written into ViVi's character in the LOONAverse was revealed in a Cinema Theory clip in a rather chilling way. The clip in question begins as a video-diary-esque letter to her parents back in Hong Kong, with ViVi speaking in her native Cantonese and describing the daily lives of the members of 1/3 in a way that seems to perfectly match their real-life counterparts... until she and HaSeul visit an aquarium, and ViVi's camera shorts out once she finds JinSoul in the crowd with her eyepatch from "Sweet Crazy Love." Given that, the clip also seems to imply that the real lives of LOONA 1/3 are, to a degree, shared with their LOONAverse counterparts.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • As of October 2019, LOONA are facing rumors of possible disbandment after BBC has been reported as deep in debt. The company has lost a lawsuit from DONUTS, an investor that stipulated all of the girls appear on a live show. Cue the cries of people asking why that condition was so hard for the company to fulfill, apparently, with only one member actually appearing on said live show. Although many are optimistic this is not that big a setback and news sources have been sensationalizing, it does bear asking why said condition was so hard to fulfill.
  • Jaden had left BBC by 2019, and due to the large number of destructive incidents in that year, he became a target of hatedom by many orbits, as he was the main creative director of LOONA and moved directly onto another project less than 6 months after his supposed passion project debuted. Due to the unclearness of the situation and the vagueness of his posts, it can be difficult to assign him Jerkass status or Mis-blamed status. At one point, Jaden posted about deleting all of the ballad tracks on an album (understood to mean La Maison LOONA), which has been interpreted as anything from metaphorical to literal and spiteful.^{A little more detail} Assuming Jaden had the sole rights to those songs, it's just a supreme dick move and a way to screw over his ex-employers. Assuming that he didn't have sole rights, this would be highly illegal, so it's more likely that he simply deleted his personal copies out of stress. Difficult to determine is who exactly to point the finger at: BBC, or Jaden. You won't even find a consensus on whether he quit or was fired! What's fairly easy to understand is that the LOONAVerse plot is on hold and several promised albums full of content may never be coming, and that someone is the Network in this trope.
  • On a less sensationalized note, LOONA was the target of very clear sabotage by several companies in February of 2019, a subject which has been endlessly documented. Although there is no more reason to dwell on Kakao M, LOONA still have to be in regular contact with MNet, the biggest host for music shows and competitions, who have developed something of a reputation as LOONA's nemesis for their various attempts at this trope. At MAMA 2018, LOONA were given only three minutes to perform (when every other group got at least six), were made to perform four songs in that three minutes, provided extremely subpar and blurry camerawork, and provided intensely juvenile background art for the perfomances. MNet would go on to partake in the incidents documented above by uploading LOONA's incredible performance of Butterfly three hours late.^note In terms of the competitive spaces of kpop, this is absolutely catastrophic as it cost the fandom a lot of streaming time and voting time, and many Korean and international fans alike wouldn't have even realized they performed. This, alongside Kakao M's disastrous sales sabotage, is commonly understood as an effort to deprive LOONA of a show win. The latest comeback saw LOONA's mics cut off intermittently during their performances of So What, which just feels like a petty dig at this point. MNet already don't have a very good reputation in the K-Pop community, as they, like many other big-name producers, are said to feel threatened by small companies creating huge successes that can compete with their own artists.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting: HyunJin's uncanny resemblance to Olivia Hye was alluded to within the LOONAverse, and in their 2020 comeback "So What," her concept with Choerry is literally just "twins." Cue the abundance of fans marvelling at how HyunJin and Choerry do indeed look like real twins. The likeness between the three is even acknowledged in their endeavors outside LOONA's music; HyunJin, Choerry, and Olivia Hye did a special photoshoot in April 2020 for K-Wave Magazine with just the three of them◊, where they are dressed up as the sisters from Little Women (2019).
• Shrug of God: Many aspects of the "LOONAverse" lore are left ambiguous for fans to speculate on and come to their own conclusions regarding the storyline.
• What Could Have Been:
  • LOONA TV shows that the bonus clip of HeeJin doing the rap portion of "Singing In the Rain" was originally meant for Kim Lip, explaining the deep red lighting. Since it was bonus material, the rap actually came as a surprise to Kim Lip in the middle of shooting JinSoul's MV, and since she wasn't too confident about her rapping she called in HaSeul as backup. LOONA 1/3 came along with her, and HeeJin was so eager to try out a girl-crush style concept that BBC gave her a shot as well. BBC recorded all three of them and ended up choosing HeeJin's clip.
  • The stage name "Adam", and variations thereof, were suggested for every member of yyxy debuting after Yves. While it seemed to be a deliberate gag for Go Won, all the members turned the name down anyway.
  • As meticulous as DigiPedi is for the artistic choices in music videos, some cuts and set decisions had to be changed or dropped. The dance portions of "One&Only" after Go Won turns blonde, for example, originally had dry ice on the floor for a mist effect, but Go Won and the dancers found it too slippery to keep, so they had to go without it. Both of Olivia's fish flops (the reverse somersaults) also never made it to the music video for "Egoist".
  • It was revealed on an audio VLIVE by the members of yyxy that they filmed a music video for "rendezvous 18.6y" while they were in Hungary, but it was never released. The girls described how it was filmed in one take using drones and how they were dancing in a field. A brief behind the scenes clip was shown on LOONA TV episode #349.