#bc of the whole digital 'metaverse' technobabble that's going around rn

[sanstropfremir]

so maybe i'm really dumb, but you mentioned once on your blog that the kwangya concept is really straightforward - so what actually is it?

it's literally just the universe that all the sm groups' "worlds" exist in. that's it. it's just a bunch of conceptual connective tissue that makes it easier for them to tie all the groups together for things like smtown and to further the company branding. the new sm building is called kwangya, the sm fanclub got a relaunch as kwangyaclub, etc etc. it's a thing all the groups live inside, literally. i think it's a bit harder for people to grasp who didn't watch the smtown 2022 new years live, bc that's where they really 'launched' the concept, and prior to that no one really gave a good explanation. honestly i hate that sm is so fucking annoying about archiving stuff bc i wish there was a record of smcu express @ kwangya (the new years concert livestream) bc 1) it was actually a pretty fun concert and 2) it did a fantastic job of visually explaining how kwangya 'works'. the concert director did a ton of working making the visual scaffolding that connects every stage and i so badly want to point you to the actual concert to see what it looked like, but all those vcrs and transitions are pretty much gone. and it loses a bit of the elegance when you type out "so there's an intergalactic space train that travels to different planets and every group stage that the train stops at is a different 'station'". they had a bunch of different alternate sets but the main performance stage was a huge warehouse that had a bit of set dressing to look like a train station, including a ticker that showed what station you had 'arrived' at, and they filmed a couple of vcrs where different idols would 'hand off' stages to each other. most notably was minho doing a literal briecase handoff between thank u yunho and fever changmin using his dematerializing pixel sports car a la the heartbreak mv. you can see a tiny bit of this in this screenrecord of the fever stage, and the only other connective tissue-y evidence i can find is this very poorly cropped recording of key and taeyeon's hate that performance where each of them are filmed on their group traincars from the concept photos and then 'meet' on a station platform. sm has been using the train motif for ages (sm stations, literally), and they used it again for the live smtowns that they did over the summer too. personally i think if you were to do a huge company brand like this this is precisely the way to do it, because it allows for those crossovers but also allows for groups to not 'be involved' in it conceptually/literally on an individual basis, since those 'worlds' can still feasibly exist within kwangya even though they don't explicitly say so.