The Social Butterfly of the Idol Boy Group

Beloved by everyone, a sweet and refreshing fan-favorite bottom × rugged, straight, bursting-with-testosterone blue-collar top

The top isn't really a laborer. He just has a laborer's build and a laborer's personality (?).

Also, the top appears rather late, so don't ship the wrong couple!!

Jiang Xu's father is from Foshan, and his mother is from Hong Kong. He was born in Wenzhou, moved with his family to Vancouver at age ten, and went to Korea at fifteen to become a trainee. Growing up in such diverse places gave Jiang Xu an extraordinary gift for languages:

When he speaks Cantonese, it sounds like the Wenzhou dialect; when he speaks Wenzhou dialect, even people from Wenzhou can't understand him. Koreans think he's Thai, and Thai people think he's Korean. His English sounds like a jumble, and he loves to invert his word order in Chinese. He's a foreigner wherever he goes, and looks like an outsider in every country.

Even so, all this has given Jiang Xu a vast social circle and an impressive network of connections.

On the first day, he arrives at the competition venue with bags and suitcases in tow. Of the 108 trainees, he spots over a hundred familiar faces...

On the second day of the show, several mentors make their appearance. The dance mentor is a big name in the industry, a professor at the Beijing Dance Academy, and their counselor. Every day, he frowns and singles out Jiang Xu's moves from among more than a hundred people...

The movement mentor is his longtime rival. They were once obscure little models who did runway shows together. Later, Jiang Xu halfheartedly switched to the entertainment industry, while his rival worked diligently and clawed his way up to become a top supermodel...

The vocal mentor is a senior from his agency, and also a longtime friend of his mother. In Jiang Xu's memory, this weird uncle often came over for dinner when he was a child. He was the one who recommended Jiang Xu to the agency as a trainee...

On the third day of the show, a wildly popular, hugely famous star mentor arrives. He is stern and impartial, and over the course of the entire episode, he and Jiang Xu exchange fewer than sixty seconds' worth of words in total. The audience holds its breath, then relaxes, thinking, At least you don't know this one.

But before long, determined fans with eagle eyes painstakingly dig up a grainy old video from years ago. In a dance studio, two short-limbed little kids wrestle, tugging each other's hair and poking each other's sides, until they roll right out of frame...

Theme: Better to date than to debut