showended

▶ PLAYER
HANDLE: Jan
CONTACT: discord: jans#9413,

cantito
OVER 18? Y
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: Shogo Satake, Chikara Doumeki

▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Do-yoon Han
CANON: Buried Stars
CANON POINT: Route A, End of All Suspicions END
AGE: 25
BACKGROUND: There's no wiki so here's a bulleted list. Spoilers ahead, though I kept the big ones vague enough.

In high school, Do-yoon and his friends form a band called Masquerade. They play mostly metal and rock.
Following high school, and his father's appointment for work overseas, Do-yoon leaves his home to the big city with his friends to try and make their big break.
After several years of relative obscurity, Masquerade adds several new members, including a vocalist.
The band is approached by a record label to sign them, but only if they agree to go more mainstream and play different genres of music. The band's vocalist who also happens to be the newest member, gets into an argument with Do-yoon over this. Do-yoon doesn't think they should sell out, so ultimately the deal falls through.
The band has a falling out and takes a break, but agree to come back together to join Buried Stars, a reality TV / idol show (think American Idol, but also Terrace House) for aspiring musical artists. They hope that this will get the word out about them and land them another record deal
Before the preliminaries, Do-yoon is approached by the show's star producer, Seungyeon Shin, about leaving his band behind and continuing to advance in the show solo. The others would only hold his career back, but she believed only Do-yoon had real potential.
Do-yoon takes the deal, agreeing to outshine his bandmates. Following this, the show starts to focus more on Do-yoon than his bandmates, and rumors begin to circulate on social media that he sold them out. Phater (Twitter) brands him as "the betrayer" for leaving them in the dust. With social media being what it is, the band's earlier issues come back into the forefront, and all of them get blamed on Do-yoon.
Despite choosing this path for himself, Do-yoon pushes back against the title and denies it both on-camera and behind the scenes, but the fact remains that he's the only one of his bandmates who makes it past the preliminaries, and into the semi-finals.
On the night of the semis... disaster strikes. An explosion is heard, along with a crash, as the stage and studio for the broadcast of the Buried Stars semifinals collapses, trapping the 5 finalists (and 2 staff members) in the crumbling studio. (Miraculously, all the audience members and staff escape...? Hm.)
During the cave-in, Do-yoon and the rest of the finalists panic, though none more than Gyu-hyuk Lee, who is nearly catatonic as everything begins to go to hell. Fearing damage from fallen debris, Do-yoon jumps to action and saves Gyu-hyuk's life (they had been friends since they both got on the show, so.)
Unfortunately between this and the blast, Do-yoon ends up falling unconscious, and wakes up a good while later, once all the shaking has mostly stopped.
When Do-yoon and the rest of the finalists regroup, they discover that their smart-watches (which are heavily regulated by their sponsors) do not work as they should, and they can only contact the outside world sparingly. A rescue team is on the way to try and save them, but the building's construction was so rushed and shoddy that there's no proper blueprint, and the rescue team will need to move slowly in order to avoid a total cave-in. Their estimated rescue time is 6 hours...
Naturally a dead body shows up. Seungyeon Shin, the famed producer, winds up dead from fallen debris. (Just kidding, she was definitely murdered, though they don't realize it at the time.)
Following Seungyeon's death, a troll shows up on Phater pretending to be "her" (un: S_Seungyeon) and claiming that more bodies would soon follow, as the contestants all pay for their sins.
These threats cause the contestants to panic, leading to some very bad choices and some very dumb social media posts. (Don't tweet about dead bodies? Oh, my god.)
I don't want to totally spoil the game and this is getting very long so I'll just summarize the story beats: Hyesung, the 5th-ranked contestant, fears for his life thanks to S_Seungyeon's threats, which leads him to isolate himself in a dressing room. Isolation, as you know, is how people get killed in murder mysteries. Hyesung is killed, with 0 chance of it being an accident this time.
The rest of the group finds his body at exactly 2am like the troll had said, and they begin to panic. This is a crisis point as well as a divergence in the timeline of the game. The first time around, finding Hyesung's body will lead to Do-yoon to lose all of his Sanity, prompting him and the rest of the contestants towards the bad end.
Do-yoon is not from that timeline though, so rather than freak out, he pulls himself together thanks to these annoying texts he's been getting from some asshole (hacker) who calls themselves Plughole. He helps investigate the body, yadda yadda, time passes, it's a lot.
Long story short, with a lot of social media sleuthing, questioning the others, and learning about metadata, Do-yoon and Plughole uncover the identity of the troll as someone completely unrelated to the cave-in. There's no mysterious additional person trapped with them, and everything is fine.
Except it's not fine because that means one of the surviving contestants (+1 staff member) is a murderer.
For a while, all the evidence points to the lone staff member, Seil Chang, who refuses to stop being cagey and turns out to be hiding some pretty huge blackmail on his person. Seil, meanwhile, thinks it's Inha Oh, a contestant that he'd favored and projected on from the start, who the last person to hear from Hyesung before his death.
After a physical altercation between Seil and Inha, Seil runs away (bad idea) and isolates himself from the group.
Inha chases after Seil, and Gyu-hyuk chases after Inha to make sure the two don't come to blows.
Guess who ends up murdered!!! It's Seil, who the group believes killed Hyesung. Well, it looks like a suicide... except for a few key details.
Now accustomed to this awful murder thing (and thanks to some more cheering from Plughole,) Do-yoon investigates Seil's so-called suicide and decides that it must be a murder. But the suspects are only Gyu-hyuk and Inha... could it really be one of them?
Do-yoon questions them all one last time as the clock ticks down to their eventual rescue.
After so much death, the group agrees to let things lie and let Seil's death be ruled a suicide.
But Do-yoon can't let it go. He wants... no, he needs to know the truth!

I'll be grabbing him from right this moment, before he starts to really dig into the fact that he thinks that Seil was murdered, and that even Hyesung's murderer is still among them. Sorry this was super long, this is the "True Ending" route, so it's got a lot.

PERSONALITY:

Do-yoon is the protagonist of Buried Stars. He's decisive, laid-back, a little gruff, but ultimately emphatic and always willing to listen to people. Despite being on a reality TV Show, his on-air persona isn't all that different from his real self. Naturally this makes his title of "Betrayer" difficult for him to stomach, as he believes he's always acted in the best interest of his band and likes to think he's not the type to turn his back on his friends.

(Of course, we learn close to the climax that he is that kind of person. More than aid his bandmates, Do-yoon wants to achieve his own goals. But more on that later!)

Do-yoon joins Buried Stars to try and further his band's career, and is actually pretty strict with himself when it comes to achieving his goals. He practices diligently, does his best at competitions, and takes advice to heart. You don't sign up for a reality TV show where even your clothes and hair are picked out for you if you aren't serious about making it big.

Despite being a 'betrayer' he is a good person. He can be swayed by enough public opinion, and affected by trolls on the internet just as much as a normal person. He is driven by his goals, seeing stardom as the endgoal to all the years he's spent with Masquerade. He's kind of a music snob, and he likes metal and rock but he's warming up to more mainstream stuff after his time on BStars. He's a little gruff, but he always means well and was friends with most of the cast of Buried Stars. Even Hyesung, who was a spitfire who thought of everyone else as his competition, liked Do-yoon for his emphatic, non-judgemental attitude and general chill.

He's less the type to start fights and more the type to stop them, usually by calming people down or being the voice of reason. People have a tendency to open up to him, but this isn't just because he has one of those faces... Do-yoon is investigative and curious by nature, asking people for their thoughts and opinions, talking them through their fears and uncertainties, as a way of calming them down and learning more about them, all at the same time. He's the protag, after all. Whether this means trading jokes with Inha, dealing with Hyesung and Seil's increasing cynicism, or finding comfort in Juyoung and (especially) Gyu-hyuk's soothing optimism, Do-yoon is the glue that holds the group together during the collapse. It's no mistake that the first route, where he loses all of his sanity and starts to let social media get to him, ends with the highest death count of all.

His co-stars words still get to him, and he can be stubborn and get offended by flames on social media and Plughole's stupid text messages, but ultimately he keeps it together. Once he focuses on a goal, he commits to it 100%. In the case of the stage collapse, Do-yoon makes it his personal mission to get everyone out alive (oops, that doesn't necessarily go well) and making sure everyone can at least make it out with their sanity intact. To do this, he takes on strong burdens on himself, and the strain on his psyche leads him to spend almost a month in the hospital following the Buried Stars incident, but Do-yoon is happy so long as his surviving friends make it out alive, and the truth is found.

So what's this about him being a "betrayer"? I mean, it's show business. Personally, the game treats Do-yoon's decisions as a way bigger deal than it is. For all his talk of joining BStars with the hope of getting Masquerade a better deal, it turns out that Do-yoon agreed to split up from his band so that he could make it into the semi-finals and get closer to winning Buried Stars. Despite making that choice, he keeps pretending that things just happened to work out that way, and there was nothing he could do -- but the fact is that, yeah, Seungyeon gave him the choice and he took it. Decisive and driven as ever, Do-yoon chooses his career over his friends, following-through on why he joined Buried Stars in the first place: to make it big. Once everything goes to hell, he begins to regret that decision, but at that point it makes him look like a huge hypocrite so he keeps it quiet. It's only when Gyu-hyuk is having a meltdown that Do-yoon admits to lying this whole time -- it's not quite a lie to the level that Gyu-hyuk was making, but he comes clean for the sake of comforting a friend.

They can pay for their sins when they get out of the collapsing stage. First they have to make it out alive.

POWERS/ABILITIES: Do-yoon has no supernatural abilities. He is able to keep cool in a crisis, but he's just a normal person. He is a talented singer and bass player, and can presumably dance and learn choreography, etc. He's an idol, and just a normal person.

INVENTORY: His BStars watch, headphones, and the clothes on his back (which aren't even his, they belong to the show)

MOONBLESSING: Sanguis

▶ SAMPLES

link #1
link #2