For reasons no one is thrilled by, this was a year that will go down in history. But in spite of everything, people carried on with their lives, and did their best to make it through. The stories on each of the performances by the six teams across three days from December 28 to 30 is also a documentation of how people live their lives.

June 22, 2020. Mnet ‘SEVENTEEN COMEBACK SHOW [Heng:garæ]’ : ‘Fearless’

“Fearless,” performed on June 22 by SEVENTEEN on Mnet’s SEVENTEEN COMEBACK SHOW [Heng:garæ], opens with the sound of marching drums. As soon as VERNON strikes the massive drum to the heavy beat, the stage becomes a battlefield. The whiteout conditions caused by a combination of blinding light, flames, and smoke on the stage imbues the performance with a sense of realism. Their torn uniforms seem to suggest the severity of the many battles they weathered before, yet still SEVENTEEN heads “back into the ring” to put an end to the fight. Their enemy: their past selves, seized with fear. “Fearless” is really an exercise by SEVENTEEN to recall the sincerity in “Fear,” a song they released last year, and twist it to gain the upper hand. In their old song the boys, eaten away by fear, buried their faces in their right wrists; now, they free themselves from the shackles and wipe the corners of their mouths on the same wrists after ingesting poison. SEUNGKWAN, who was “too afraid to break it off” and turned away, now confronts his reflection head-on in “Fearless.” JEONGHAN, who can “remember the scars” of the past, pulls DINO up. DINO kneels, speaking of “today,” while JOSHUA steps over him and hopes they can go “a little bit further” tomorrow.

These three selves representing different viewpoints were severed and in conflict, but now embrace one another. Then and only then is a “new me” born. In this instant, they are one step closer to that “Fearless” inner world. It is at this point that DK reaches his hand out to WONWOO, but WONWOO turns away, refusing to be created. Facing forward, he instead obtains the kind of self-born independence that eluded the first humans Michelangelo painted on his ceiling canvas. WONWOO then lifts up high the fruit he bit and crushes it. This action shows he is at the stage of moving beyond the “Fear” that resulted from the weight and terror that come with success. Along with a metallic sound, the members let out a sharp high-pitched wail together in the chorus, singing, “Because I’m fearless.” As a result, the song exists as a weapon designed for victory and as the group’s sharp-edged, hardened heart. Once unable to stop their anxiety over their own limitations in “Fear,” they now willfully put an end to their fears and move forward. In short, “Fearless” is an epic: a grand narrative about how the ego experiences extreme agony, reflection and, finally, triumph over fear. Perhaps this is why “Fearless” was destined to become SEVENTEEN’s reintroduction to the world after a nine-month-long hiatus, and the first performance of COMEBACK SHOW [Heng:garæ]. Henggarae—when a group tosses someone up and down—can never be accomplished alone; only when the person being thrown into the air and the people who catch and cast them up again all overcome their fears of falling and the weight and all trust one another is this act possible. The SEVENTEEN of the past gathered the nerve to throw themselves into the world, even though they knew “nothing is forever but still [couldn’t] let go”; the SEVENTEEN we hear singing now is really saying, “I know nothing lasts forever, so I can let go,” and in this way they prop themselves up to keep from being hurt. In this moment, SEVENTEEN soars. Because they trust “me” and “us.” And because they know that, even if they happen to fall, they can soar again.