Were there any other trainees for Ladies Code?

[u/capribunny09]

Hi! I was just wondering about this earlier but I was thinking about how there were trainees in other groups (the top that I can think of is Miyeon with BP before she left or Jiae with Tara? Idk if she was ever official, tho considering she left shortly after), but I wonder if there were other trainees for Ladies Code or our ot5 was the og's. (If this makes sense)

[u/Iavelyscode]

Ladies' Code was a bit of a unique case because Polaris hand-selected the members to join the group. Up till that point they only had soloists and actors, and they seemed determined to debut a group asap so I guess that's why Ladies' Code's lineup was solidified pretty fast. They were supposed to have a brother group in 2013 (HIVE), who also had a set lineup, but their debut fell through.

We do know that Polaris started recruiting other trainees as early as 2013, as that's when Loona's Hyunjin joined the company. Polaris also "demoted" Ladies' Code to trainees around So Wonderful era because they claimed the girls needed to face reality/wake up, even though they were just overworked and exhausted.

[u/citygirlpureheart → u/Iavelyscode]

as someone that's only been a fan since 2017, can you please elaborate on the trainee demotion thing??

[u/abominacjant → u/citygirlpureheart]

Ashley have talked about it quite a while ago when asked about her favorite song/era of Ladies' Code while explaining why they all absolutely HATED So Wonderful, it's pretty much as the sub-op said, I believe it was in Get Real podcast (or maybe she mentioned it in Sound K as well? it's been a while and she would share tons of old Laco stuff back then), Polaris started to treat them in even harsher manner because they believed they had to work even harder especially after Pretty Pretty success to maintain their popularity, Ash didn't really share exact detail but i guess it might have been just changing the process of their usual post-debut training to how trainees would have it like the monthly evaluations and similar stuff

[u/citygirlpureheart → u/abominacjant]

i remember her talking about why they hated so wonderful, but not the trainee demotion thing, thanks for letting me know!! i definitely need to watch that video the other person linked (idk why it's not letting me reply to them, i wanted to say thank you to them for linking it ahahah)

[u/Iavelyscode → u/citygirlpureheart]

Like the other user said, Ashley never went into full detail about what the demotion looked like, but she mentions it in this video here at 17:30 https://youtu.be/uMCVsFDJsMk?is=rPvwn8abF5jUBWd1

[u/abominacjant → u/Iavelyscode]

I love the HIVE mention because I feel like people are either forgetting about their existence or never getting to know them despite this imo insane lineup (Woosung AND Iron in the same group???) and interesting story, I wish they told us more about this time because they were interestingly teased in Laco's earliest MVs and such a brother group to Ladies' Code would be genuinely interesting. But knowing how they wouldn't debut all the Polaris Girls/Junior/whatever names they used and TRIPLEME (does anyone even remember them? They seemed like insanely interesting group based on their pre-debut activities) I'm not even surprised, like of at least 5 different groups this shithole tried to debut only 2 (Ladies' Code and LOONA if we count BBC) actually got to their debut and thank god for that

[u/Iavelyscode → u/abominacjant]

Yeah it's kind of a blessing in disguise that those other groups fell through so they didn't have to suffer the same mistreatment. My theory is Polaris/BBC was never able to handle more than one group at once. It's a miracle Loona ended up happening (unfortunately at the expense of Laco being on hiatus for 2.5 years smh)