Fate is often considered synonymous with destiny, but unlike fate, which is permanently set in stone, your destiny can change depending on the choices you make. For &TEAM, fate and destiny are one and the same: They accept their lives as werewolves. Werewolves are packs of followers, like in the idol group’s debut trailer: “The pack follows the alpha, who leads the rest through all manner of hardship.” For example, both “Under the skin” and “War Cry”—the lead singles off &TEAM’s albums First Howling: ME and First Howling: NOW—open with K all alone. In “Under the skin,” K is just like Khan: a lonely boy who doesn’t yet know who he is or any pack he can belong to. He wants to “change” and find brothers who share “the same blood,” but he’s left “simply searching.” On the other hand, in “War Cry,” K has “form(ed)) a herd” with the brothers he’s found, but before he can “initiate a challenge,” he chooses to wear the Silver Fang necklace representing the previous alpha—the now deceased lycanthrope (portrayed by Kentaro Sakaguchi in the “Under the skin” music video)—to fully embrace the position for himself and step up to the challenge. The &TEAM members are seen waiting up for HARUA in the group’s debut trailer, and his character in DARK MOON, Ruslan, is the smallest in the pack. Falling behind until the “War Cry,” he “cast(s) … aside” the “young me” to “confront the world,” and seeing him fight alongside his brothers—thereby proving “none are left behind” and that “even someone weak like me has a role to play”—shows how he’s learning and growing. Chased out of their homeland in GREY CITY, the boys fight for their home and their brothers, choosing to accept the reality that they’re werewolves and to not try and live ordinary human lives—showing their capacity to “choose” a path when confronted with “one or the other” in “Road Not Taken.” They worry whether they’re “lost or found” after taking that untrodden road, but in the end they expand their territory to protect the pack and accept their identity as werewolves. At the same time, it’s an explanation for the fate of these werewolves who “had no choice but to band together and form a new family” because “they’d all lost” the same thing (GREY CITY, pt. 50).

On the are side of things are ENHYPEN’s vampires, for whom fate is a matter of choice—in their case, the freedom to choose to make it their destiny to turn their backs on their life as vampires. The group of vampires in BLOOD ALTAR live by submission and obedience, but with each of them having their own abilities to make them strong as individuals, their decision to stick together is strictly a matter of choice. Their relationship with Sooha in the story echoes the aptly titled ENHYPEN song “Fate”: Even though they know “all the power and authority comes from” her and “grew out of the eternity” they “will soon return,” they readily “doom” themselves for her, knowing that destiny “again came into my hand.” That’s their destiny as they choose it to be, even if it means “endless agony, thirst” as “punishment” for “def(ying) fate,” and even when it all feels like “arrogant illusion” that causes them to lose their most cherished thoughts to “oblivion” (“Sacrifice”)—even, in fact, “if what’s waiting for me is an empty, sunken end” (“Mortal”). These are “the most precious things” that they “have to give away” that they talk about in “Intro: Whiteout” off DIMENSION: DILEMMA, when they “either got to get through a brooding monster” (Scylla) “or a swirling tornado” (Charybdis) and “choose … to run.” They endure the punishment and defy the destiny that could have been their fate. Perhaps it all comes down to knowing that vampires, as immortal beings who can neither change over time nor choose to die, paradoxically have only one thing they can choose and one thing they can change: their own destiny.