The Shin patriarch and his dutiful wife sent their youngest daughter to America so she could become an educated, classy, confident young woman capable of representing the Shin name.

Instead, they got Shin Hari.

Shin Hari is too much of a nuisance for her father. She came back from the states with a mouth on her - gone is the young, nice girl who said yes to everything he told her to do. Now, Hari must know “why”, and if she doesn’t like the answer? She’s going to tell you all about it. Her father and mother talk, a lot. They look at Hayun, perfect Hayun. Then they look at Hari, and they know that they’ve made a mistake raising her. They shouldn’t have given her so much freedom.

But it is exactly this freedom that Hari values most. In the states, all alone with all the money she could possibly want, she has grown rather used to figuring out what she thinks, what she feels, and what she wants. The confidence that has been bred into her since even before she was born only boosts her opinions until no one can force her to change her mind - unless Hari decides so herself. And her pride, her sinful pride, it rarely allows for that. If Hari sets her mind to something, it will take a mountain to keep her from going where she wants.

After America, she doesn’t care for traditional societal norms anymore, especially not the ridiculously outdated ones in South Korea. How is it that being gay still means that your career is over? How is it that killing yourself with alcohol is legal, but smoking one blunt will get you thrown in jail? Hari thinks everyone should be more open minded, even if that means abandoning all tradition and everything that makes Korea the nation that it is.

That is who the Shin patriarch and his dutiful wife received when their daughter returned from America. But they’d be damned if their daughter stayed that way.

See, America has made Harry confident and independent and opinionated and fun. But Hari’s parents don’t want any of that. What do they need freedom for? They need control, and obedience, and perfection. Their daughter has never been good at any of those, but she is their daughter. They will keep trying until one of them breaks.

Sometimes Hari hates them so much she can’t look at them without seeing blood.

America has made Harry confident and independent and opinionated and fun. But she's back in Korea, and it's like she's fourteen again. She needs to keep her opinions to herself, and be a good girl, and not disappoint - never disappoint, not her company, not her family. Disappointment is the worst offense she could commit, and Hari, well she's always been the not quite disappointment. She's not her sister, not her mother, not her father. She's just Hari, and in America it was all she had to be. But in Korea? It has never been enough.

In Korea, her pride needs to be utilized as a weapon. She needs to pride herself in everything - as long as it isn’t herself. Pride for her family name, for her money, for her looks, for her connections and fame. They all engulf her like a diaphanous case that reflects the world what they want to see - Shin Hari: graceful and beautiful; sociable, polite, but never loud; intelligent yet never challenging. The perfect fake non-heiress to the perfect fake non-chaebol family. Why does she need to keep up this act, she wonders, who are they trying to impress? How do her parents, and Hayun, and Moon Manchul, and everyone around her wake up in the morning and look in the mirror without wanting to scream?

In Korea, her opinions and thoughts mean nothing. She’s not supposed to think, you see, that’s the job of her superiors. She only needs to listen, and behave. And every time she says something - a suggestion, a complaint, a disagreement - she is put back in her place, reminded exactly who she is and who she is without her family and their money. And every subtle threat, every look of disappointment, every sneer followed by “do not dare embarrass me”, it reminds Hari just how trapped she is. And , she did that to herself. If only she wasn’t so damn selfish.

Korea, her family name, and her money are Hari’s prettiest cages. Yet she is too vain, too prideful, and too spoilt to give them up. Freedom? She’s still not sure it can compete with being rich.

So now she has this perfect dissonance inside her brain.

She has a confidence that is so fragile it might as well have been made of glass. She has a desire for freedom, for recklessness, for youth and life, but every step she takes in this direction is taken bare-footed on a road of knife-sharp stones. All she wants is to do what she wants, to say you to anything she doesn't agree with, but one look from her father or from Moon Manchul and she is a hopeless little girl nodding her shame and tears away as she is scolded for being who she is.

She has a pride that is so inflated it might burst any second - especially when all around her people tell her how lucky she is on one hand, and how spoilt and unfair she is on the other. She has a love and a desire to be surrounded by people, experience life with them and share her own with them. But none of them get it, get what she’s going through, and it’s driving her mad. But she won’t say a thing, because if they all say these things? They don’t deserve her truth. them. them all, even if it means she’ll cry herself into a mental breakdown.

She has a love for disobedience and a reckless nature that screams to use everything that life has given her, but every time she listens to her heart, her bare feet step on the glass pieces of her father’s disappointment, and that part of her - the part that she so desperately loves - gets locked under a tighter lock inside her heart. 

She is twelve, and she is twenty. She is the perfect Shin daughter her parents refuse to have, and she is the worst nightmare they could ever dream for.

Hari has no idea which one she is.

Seven years. 

That is a long time to earn your freedom. It’s also a long time to completely lose yourself.

TL;DR - 

Too influenced by American culture to truly feel like she belongs in korea. She loves her freedom, loves the lack of honorifics and hierarchies, the lack of expectations. In Korea, it's the exact opposite - she can't be herself. She needs to be whoever everyone else wants her to be, keep up appearances, submit to those who think they deserve it, all while keeping a pleasant smile on her complacent face.

Too bad she's too prideful to go back. She would've, in a heartbeat, if it didn't mean losing to herself, her father, her sister, and everyone around her. Too bad she's also too spoilt and too dependant on money and luxury to disobey daddy dearest to the point of no return. Some minor disobedience, a party or a drunk hookup here and there? That's fine, she's still their daughter. But anything beyond that? The only lifestyle Hari has known is that of luxury, and losing all of that? She doesn't know if there's something that scares her more.

Maybe this Sol Ai thing would actually be good. Seven years for her to get her own, unrestricted fortune, and then she can do whatever she wants without anyone controlling her? And she gets to wear and advertise brand clothes, eat in restaurants, travel all around the world, and be adored by countless people? Sounds like a pretty good deal to Hari. Only every day she keeps trying to satisfy her family while going against everything that she has become is slowly making her advance towards an existential crisis. Hari doesn’t know if she can survive for 7 years like that.

Good thing Hari was born to be a disappointment. If only Moon Manchul knew from the beginning.

Hari had previously taken ballet, gymnastics, and ballroom dancing classes before moving to the states, so she had some previous experience when it came to dancing - experience that has been all but forgotten in six years and had to be relearned through blood, sweat, and tears. 

Singing proved to be even more of a challenge. With no prior experience and no particular disposition and a lower tone than your typical female k-pop sound, Hari struggled improve, even though she actually enjoyed singing quite a bit. Rapping too, which proved to be Hari's most... natural skill, as her rapping coach explained diplomatically to her father. Perhaps if she was given more time she would've gotten better at it. As it was, Hari was fine, good enough to fit in a group. That's all that matters - she was here for her prettiness and for her father anyway.

The social aspect of training was even worse. By the end of her very first training day, every single trainee knew that not only was Hari Hayun's sister, but that she was put into training thanks to her father's connection to Manchul. Half the trainees immediately tried to befriend her. The other half stared at her with open resentment and distrust.

With every monthly examination where she, lacking in everything, passed while someone more deserving left, the resenting faces grew. Not many said anything openly, as going against Hari meant potentially angering Moon Manchul, but a lot of passive aggression and plenty of competitiveness. It felt lonely. Hari snuck out a lot to hang out with Sejun (as he is the closest one to understand what she's going through), but that got her into plenty of trouble with her father and Moon Manchul. So the trainees looked at her with distrust, her parents and boss looked at her with disappointment, and Hari looked at herself in the mirror and didn't know who she was anymore.