This will be a thread about some of the experiences in the old, pre-produce NU'EST fandom, as a lot of people seem interested~
A little disclaimer: these are all based on my experience & what I've personally encountered & remembered in my years as a NU'EST fan. I may get things wrong, so please feel free to correct me if you see anything!

I'll first do all the points here: https://twitter.com/ProtectNUEST/status/1172422565387620352
1) Dashley
Okay so David = Aron, Ashley = Ren. Dashley is the ship name. From what I remember, Aron was the one who decided those names in a fancafe chat, and he used it on multiple occasions. So yeah, Aron was pushing the ARen agenda since the early days lol
2) Hello Venu'est
Here's a quick thread I made about it! https://twitter.com/ProtectNUEST/status/962692879612178433
3) Music Access
So for two-ish (?) years, Aron was a host on a radio show called Music Access. We got to hear his voice every single day for an hour (yeah I know it sounds too good to be true!) But anyways there were different "corners" with different people and guests...
There were fixed guests on certain segments, and then special guests which often included other NU'EST members. Hello Venus, Amber, After School, Got7, Kahi, Day6 etc. were just a few of the guests that came on, from what I remember, but mostly it was just Aron talking to us...
So we got to ask him questions about NU'EST and learn more about him. And the cool thing was that Aron was actually familiar with the names of the people who often left messages! Like he actually got to know fans personally and he remembered details about them...
And you know how fans get all excited when their idol mentions them? The cool thing about Music Access was that Aron mentioned people so often that they no longer got excited like that; it kind of felt like he was a friend and we were just chatting casually. All in all, fun time!
One more thing to add here that I remembered about Music Access. The other members had once told us that Aron was the richest members because he got paid to do the show, and he often treated them to food with his money, our wonderful caring hyung~
4) "Cute" hashtags
When Aron first started Instagram, every single post he made, he would hashtag "cute" or "cutiepatootie" or some variation of that. It was his thing! (There's a sad part to this story though, but I don't wanna bring that up here; this is a happy thread😁)
5) MinRon
MinRon used to be the in-your-face pairing of NU'EST. Fans loved it & I think that fueled Aron. I remember he even used the tag "minron" on instagram when he took pictures with Minhyun (which was so often like 50% of his feed was Minhyun lol)...
I think Aron found shipping really amusing in general & fed the fantasies (like with Dashley & MinRon). Also I remember once a Music Access listener actually asked "what your favorite pairing in nu'est" & he said "any pairing with me in it"

All the below came from Arons Insta...
Anyways MinRon they had this weekly Music Access corner on Friday, which was so amazing like they were so natural and just goofing off most of the time. What Minhyun said was supposed to be translated but they always forget to do that part and just keep talking to each other...
It was very amusing and filled with laughter. Like there was not a show that went back where they didn't cackle at each other. AHHH the nostalgia. I really miss that uninhibited spirit we saw from them back then.

Anyways here's a small sample of it!
Also I noticed that most of these points involve Aron. That's because Aron was a really really big part of international fandom experience back then. Dare I say that without him, most of the old fans would not have continued with NU'EST. He kept us alive and fed. Thank you Aron❤️
6) Ice princess Ren
Ren's personality felt markedly different. He was generally quieter, more reserved & wasn't as smiley, so he got nicknamed "Ice Princess." Personally, I think he himself tried hard to act to fit in with that image. We all know he isnt like that lol
7) Surprise MVs
This happens these days as well but before it was a lot more often I think. Not Over You, Sandy, Dashing through the Snow in Heels, Fine Girl, Storybook (and more) were all surprise MVs that were not pre-announced so they made us happy~
8) BaekRen erotic fics, BaekRen vs JRen
Okay I think you guys will actually find this one really interesting. So first of all, BaekRen was so extremely popular, even among non-LOVEs. I think people were just really into the feminine boy x macho boy dynamic?...
But it got really weird & cultish at one point. BaekRen erotic fics became sooo popular, there was this one author "Monchi" that popularized it, and her fics had thousands of reads, even though the fics were, um, questionable? Don't wanna get into details about that!
So even non-fans were reading her stories. But that's not even the weird part! There was another author, who was interestingly male, "drakeissocoolxx" who wrote JRen fics which were also popular. At one point, those 2 authors were like legitimately feuding! Not too sure why...
Not sure about the drake guy, but I know that Monchi and many of her friends actually believed that BaekRen was real and thought that other ships were "ridiculous." It came to the point where they hated on other members that they saw as "flirting with Ren" or something...
9) Eatyourkimchi curse
For those who don't know, eatyourkimchi was a popular YouTube channel that reviewed kpop music videos. Kpop videos would be added to this eatyourkimchi chart on this webpage and points would be calculated based on votes and comments and shares...
Whenever a NU'EST MV was released, LOVEs would spend a lot of time on the site to boost points, but always lost in very last minute to more popular groups, so they had the "eatyourkimchi curse" because they never got the chance to be reviewed despite always being so close.
10) Face concept complaining
So since Hello was released and many years after that, a good chunk of the fandom always complained about NU'EST's concepts and wanted them to return to the Face/Action hard-hitting urban electro concepts...
People believed NU'EST would become more popular if that happened. Anywho now these complaints have virtually died out but they were a really big part of the early fandom like it was one of the most common complaints against pledis back then.
11) critical-of-nuest
This was a controversial tumblr blog which mostly complained about concepts and criticized pledis. The account was closed later and it was revealed that the admin had run many other nu'est accounts

The blog is still up btw https://critical-of-nuest.tumblr.com/ 
12) Re:Birth
Pledis used to tease for comebacks wayyy ahead of the actual release. So for Re:Birth and I think also Sleep Talking & Action, the first teaser would be released like a month ahead of the actual release so you can imagine the patience we needed during that period...
Anyways what was interesting about Re:Birth teasers is that we didn't really know the title track until the MV was released? They released Judgement teaser first & people were happy because they thought NU'EST was finally going back to the Face concept...
We were totally clowned though lol. Anyways it was sad because we all felt like the Judgement teasers got better reception than the Good Bye Bye MV. That whole era was sad though but I won't go into details, yall can imagine why it was sad😊

Stream GBB!
13) Aron's friends
As we all know Aron has a lot of friends and there were times where the only updates we ever got about NU'EST came from them. We would literally not hear from them in weeks, and Aron's friends were the only reason we knew they were alive
These updates mostly came in the form of Instagram updates with Aron in them lol

Amber was one notable friend and there was also Joel and a bunch of others I can't recall. @ Aron's friends thanks for feeding us during our time of need and promoting NU'EST better than pledis😊
14) Manager-hyung
There was this manager (JB) that we all knew because NU'EST often mentioned him and we got a lot of pictures of him with NU'EST. Not sure if he's still managing them but I know he really cared about them and was very close to them. There are so many anecdotes...
One thing I remember is NU'EST saying he never went home and just spent the nights at NU'EST's dorm. I also remember there was a LOVE Story episode where he had the day off, but the members called him and asked him to come bowling and he actually came!
Also in Music Access, Aron spoke about the manager's little girl which the members used to play with. There's so much more that I'm probably forgetting right now. If old LOVEs remember something please share ^^
15) Chucky
I'm not sure how it started but all I know is that Ren always had this weird obsession with Chucky the doll and even called the doll "beautiful" at one point lol
More proof:
16) Duusol
"Duusol" is the Instagram handle of Ren's close female friend from childhood. Some started spewing hate at her & she had to clarify that they were just friends. Someone then impersonated her on Twitter & claimed they were dating & she had to clear that up as well...
I feel like the poor girl was traumatized because she eventually deleted all the posts with Ren and stopped talking about NU'EST for a while, but you can see she still supports NU'EST until now and even took a picture with nuble~
17) bandwagon stans
Our Ren has done some really cool things in the past, most notably his viral photoshoot in women's clothing and his epic cover of Girl's Day "Something." And as you can imagine, there were so many bandwagonners in those times...
I remember LOVEs would be so hopeful that maybe this would be Ren/NU'EST's breakthrough moment and the people who claimed to suddenly love Ren will actually support him, but alas, the next album only sold 300 copies (vs. the 10k reblogs on tumblr posts which praise him.... sigh)
18) After School
In the early years, NU'EST came across as the biggest fanboys of After School ever. Not an interview would go by where the don't talk about them! They talked about how After School noonas would treat them well, how much of a happy Pledis family they were..
They even randomly called them in the middle of a LOVE Story episode, and often sung their songs and supported Flashback a lot when it was released.

Too bad Pledis is pretending After School doesn't exist so we don't get to see much of this anymore;;
19) #JRonHittheStage
This came in a time when we as a fandom were so drained and desperate for NU'EST to do something. Our lovely LOVE @Lully_Bunny started this hashtag event project to get Mnet to invite JR to the show "Hit the Stage," a popular dance show back then...
So the whole fandom banded together to try and trend that hashtag and mention Mnet and Pledis and get them to do something. For me it was a memorable experience because almost the entire fandom was tweeting this hashtag and hyping other tweets, so there was this sense of unity...
And we all felt like we were actually doing something to remedy the shitty situation that NU'EST was in and compensating for what Pledis wasn't doing. Anyways I thought for a second that we might get somewhere with this but sadly no. Still, it was a very cool fandom unity moment
20) RTing every tweet about nu'est
Literally I would search "nu'est" every single day on twt & retweet every remotely positive tweet. There were so few people talking about them that you only had to scroll for like 10 secs before reaching the tweets from the previous day...
Anyways the idea was that we all retweet positive tweets about NU'EST, so a tweet as simple as "nu'est is cool" got like 20 rts (from the 20 active nu'est fans lol) and this would make it seem like NU'EST is more popular than they actually were, and, more importantly...
it would catch the person who tweeted off guard, they'd feel happy & validated & MAYBE actually wanna stan. & it worked for some people! hyping their one tweet got them more interested and they actually became fans. Idk if any are still around but yeah, the strategy worked!...
It also kept the fandom busy because we literally had NO updates for WEEKs sometimes, so we busied ourselves with promoting nu'est through this dumb twitter strategy lol.
21) BaekLime
I think i've talked about Baeklime before but basically Baekho and Lime from Hello Venus used to be a ship because of some interactions that fans thought were cute and some things they said about each other.

here's a video about it:
22) Jane
So Jane was a member of a group called BPPOP, and she was also a weekly guest on Music Access. She became really close to Aron and they had such great interactions with him. I was just scrolling through her insta and I found soooo much great material. I'll share a few...
There's literally so much i'm not even gonna include all of it, yall can go through her old Insta posts for more!

and yeah she called him Quackface and I'm wondering why we let that name die?? suits him so much!
...
She also used to interact with LOVEs a lot and replies to them and talks to them. Like when I tweeted this: https://twitter.com/ProtectNUEST/status/806577408790949888 Jane (she used to have twitter but deleted it) replied back saying "omg i meant the second one" 😅
And I also remember she told us this story on Music Access: Aron once got very drunk in some place and called her in the middle of the night, and she had to go to him to take him home lol. I think she wasnt supposed to tell that story but anyways...
yeah she also shared this video on her instagram and captioned it with "he actually thinks he's good"

anyways I miss Jane and Aron's interactions. It was a really fun time and they had such good dynamics!
+ of course, as you could imagine, there were people who assumed the two were dating, but Aron and Jane were quick to deny such things on radio and jane even began tagging her aron posts with "justfriends"

to me it was always clear that they were just really good friends though
23) Yura
Yura of Girl's Day and Minhyun were in a sitcom together and played love interests and it was a really enjoyable time for LOVEs back then because the interactions were so cute and there was this semi-kiss scene as well~
24) Rookie Trinity
NU'EST was quite popular at debut among the intnl fandom, part of a "rookie trinity" as people called it, with EXO and BAP. It was well know that those three rookie boy groups were the most popular and most anticipated in 2012. So much changed since then
25) Ren subtly complaining about Pledis
Basically he tweeted something about complaining, but then he deleted the post and edited it. https://twitter.com/ProtectNUEST/status/731913619785547776
26) Q is Teasers
It's really hard to explain the feeling LOVEs back then had when Q is teasers were released. It had been over a year, almost two, since the last comeback, and everyone had been anxious if NU'EST would comeback at all...
So the relief when the teasers were released was so overwhelming. Personally, I cried so much, and know other LOVEs cried too. I remember how the TL was really emotional and quite silent in those moments.
27) Losing The Show
So up until Canvas era, we were only ever nominated twice with Love Paint. We lost both times to bigger groups. The 2nd time, iLOVEs had this fundraiser and collected A LOT of money to buy Laifeng(?) votes which made up a percentage of the score....
We lost of course, but you can see that we had the highest Laifeng score, which was pretty impressive considering the artist we were up against. Anyways it was a sad day because people literally pooled in hundreds of dollars for this, which ended up doing nothing...
Another thing that happened is that LOVEs were saying that they thought they saw Minhyun cry, and later that night Minhyun wrote on the fancafe clarifying that he did not cry. He said something like "Because we were nominated, this is a happy day, so why would I cry?"
28) Polldaddy Voting
There's this voting platform called "Polldaddy" which can be embedded in any website, and fans can vote as much as they like. Whenever NU'EST was in those polls, somehow they always won. It was this NU'EST fan thing that we owned the Polldaddy polls haha...
I think it's because a fews LOVEs managed to bot it that we always did so well. It even won us the title of "Best Male Rookie of 2012" on a major news site, and Pledis actually made a statement about it!

Source: http://prlovenuest.weebly.com/nuest-news/nuest-voted-as-the-best-rookie-of-2012-beating-exo-k-bap-and-btob
(sorry I just can't get over the fact that Pledis made a statement about a dumb Internet poll in 2012 but can't make a statement about things that actually matter🙄)

anyways, moving on...
29) Mel
Before Noah & KKotsooni, Aron had Mel, an adorable dachshund we heard so much about in Music Access.

It seems like Aron no longer has custody over Mel, who has been under care of Minhyun's older sister since 2016 when Aron had to promote in Japan for an extended time
30) Baekho's tragic hairstyles
Need I say more😅
31) Ren's Deleted Instagram Updates
Ren used to upload some questionable instavideos that he always deleted later. Unfortunately, most of these videos are gone now but here's one that I saved that will give you a sneak peak into what I mean by questionable :)
I don't know if this should be considered "questionable" or if my head's in the gutter. In any case, here's another of Ren's Insta videos~
32) Jason
As you may already know, NU'EST promoted in China as NU'EST-M with an extra member, Jason (Fulong Fei). All I can say about him was that he was nice and seemed to get along with NU'EST well. Honestly, I can't remember much from that period...
It was such a weird time because there was so much going on that we didn't know about. There were some unexplained issues with Jason's pre-existing fandom? & some fandom drama with ships. And other weird things that I never understood? Idk how to explain it. It was just weird...
What I can remember is that Jason was really sweet and praised NU'EST a lot, and joked around with them a lot, and he posted about them them for a long time even after NU'EST-M's promotion time ended. It was an interesting dynamic.
33) The Naver Poll
This took place like just a few weeks before Produce 101 began to air. It was a time when NU'EST were dead quiet, and we rarely got to see them. This Naver poll got us to vote for NU'EST and if they got first place, we were promised a v-live...
As you can imagine, we NU'EST fans were STARVING for content, so we voted our butts off on this, making accounts & voting every few hours. There was this issue where the other group's fans stole a tutorial video made by LOVEs, which led to some drama. We really worked so hard...
But of course, there were like 20 of us, and the other group had so much more. They ended up winning and we were so butthurt & bummed, as we really wanted that v-live lol.
Naver ended up reopening the poll for the following week, & we won that time so it was all good in the end😊
34) NU'EST Antis
There was weird cult of NU'EST antis that always interacted with one another and bonded over their hatred of NU'EST. They pretended they had some insider info on the boys and spread fake rumors about them. They were usually fans of other Pledis artists.
I remember one funny thing is that one anti claimed to have found Minhyun's Melon account and was hating on him because he didn't stream for Seventeen lol.

Anyways this particular cult of antis virtually disappeared after P101, and I bet they're NU'EST fans now😌
35) Ren's nail art
Ren used to be very interested in nail art and did his nails every comeback to match the theme :)
Here's Ren talking about his nail art in an old LOVE Story episode! So many years have passed since then but it seems like Ren's passions have not changed lol
36) "Don't touch me"
So in the first show NU'EST ever did (Making of a Star), Aron had this reputation of being overly touchy with all members & he liked to tease them by always hugging them. So at one point minhyun had enough and needed to send aron a message loud and clear...
Minhyun said it in English of course (because Aron's Korean was not that great back then lol). Anyways, this quote became a meme for LOVEs. It inspired fanfics, fanedits, fanart, and was this inside joke that the old fandom constantly referenced!
37) "NU'EST New Project"
This was the name of a Japanese video series they did over an extensive period. It was literally the only content we got for months, released once a week (sound familiar? looks like pledis NEVER learns)

Here's the playlist:
38) Aron's weird insta updates
Aron was soooo much fun on Instagram! He would make the stupidest posts, he would tease & embarrass the members, and so much more! Here are some examples!

(side note: I wish he starts using Insta like this again🥺)
39) Aron's crushes
Sojin (from Girl's Day), Sujin (Minhyun's sister) and Suzy (from Miss A) were girls that Aron blatantly admitted to finding attractive on Music Access or otherwise. He was really open about this!

(Interestingly they all have similar names lol) ...
Sojin: I remember he said he found her age(?) attractive and thought she was so sexy

Sujin: there's the whole story I spoke about earlier in this thread, but I remember when they released "Introduce Me to Your Noona" Aron would say he would sing it to Minhyun

...
Suzy: JYP artists (15&) would go on his show and he would ask them to introduce him to Suzy. I think of all three he was was most open about his love for Suzy.

Just added some screenshots of people who used to listen and tweet about Music Access:
40) Japan company promoting nu'est better than pledis

This one is self-explanatory. But yeah, we really relied on their Japan accounts for content because at one point Pledis actually seemed to have abandoned them.

That's why y'all should stream Drive:
41) COMEBACKS (especially Overcome and Love Paint) were sooooo stressful for LOVEs. like we all knew what was going on, we all knew something had to change or else bad things will happen to the group we loved so much. Idk about others but I cried so much during Love Paint era...
right now, we stream and buy albums for nu'est to win awards, but back then, we streamed and bought albums so that nu'est would SURVIVE. comebacks were a completely different experience; they were hardly fun. It was soul-crushing tbh...
Thankfully, it's different now. Like we can actually enjoy comebacks now without heartache and stressing about potential disbandment. I know we all want nu'est to be more popular, but please dont take the popularity we already have for granted. It's actually a miracle.
In conclusion, THANK YOU SO MUCH to all the LOVEs that fell in love with NU'EST at a later stage. Y'all are a godsend, and I'm so grateful everyday that you came into this fandom and let NU'EST shine as bright as they deserve to shine!
I think that's all I have, but if any other old LOVE thinks of another memory they want to share, please quote and I'll add it to this thread!😊
You can follow @nuestness.
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