What Is Trainee A, and How Does It Connect to CORTIS?

Trainee A was going to be Big Hit’s next boy group. Seven trainees, almost two years of their lives filmed and uploaded, a finished lineup, a photoshoot done and a debut evaluation under way. Then the accounts were deleted and that was it.

March 2021

A group you were allowed to watch before it existed

In March 2021 a set of accounts appeared under the name Trainee A and introduced six trainees: Leo, Sangwon, James, Jihoon, Junil and Inhyuk. The layout left space for more names, which told everyone paying attention that the lineup was not finished. The first YouTube video went up on 19 March 2021 and it was Leo, doing a vlog.

The idea was unusual, and it is the reason any of this is documented at all. Instead of hiding trainees until debut day, Big Hit put them on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok while they were still training. Vlogs, dance practice, covers, songs they had written that week. Producers and executives inside HYBE followed the accounts, which is a large part of why people took the project so seriously so early.

So a fandom formed around a group that did not exist yet. That detail matters for everything that happens next.

August 2021 to May 2022

The lineup kept moving

In August 2021 Junil left and JJ joined. In January 2022 Inhyuk left and Woochan and Yorch came in. By May 2022 the final seven were confirmed: Leo, Sangwon, James, Jihoon, Yorch, JJ and Woochan. The group photoshoot was done. The debut evaluation was in progress.

That is as close to debuting as any of them got.

December 2021

The “Showdown” apology

Before any of that, in December 2021, the channel posted a rap battle video called “Showdown”. Leo, who is Australian and was nineteen at the time, had written his own English verse. The lyrics were widely criticised as misogynistic and as making light of violence against women.

On 29 December the production team published an apology in Korean and English, said they had failed to recognise how serious the content was before releasing it, and deleted the video. Leo apologised separately.

25 August 2022

Leo leaves, on camera

Eight months later, a video went up on the channel explaining that Leo was leaving. It is a strange thing to watch, because it is a company filming itself losing a member.

The reason given, on the record, is pressure. A lot of fans connect it instead to the eight months of abuse he took after “Showdown”. Nobody outside that room knows which it was, or how much of each, and anyone telling you they know is guessing. What is documented is that he asked to stop during the debut evaluation, that the conversation went on for a long time afterwards, and that in the end they let him go.

23 December 2022

And then it just stopped

In September 2022 the accounts went quiet. On 23 December 2022 they were closed and the content was taken down. There was no press release, no explanation, nothing addressed to the people who had been watching for nearly two years.

The person who actually told the fandom was Yorch, on his own Instagram, because he had the biggest following of any of them.

That is the part people still bring up. Not that the group did not debut, which happens constantly and usually in private. It is that this one had been made public on purpose, for commercial reasons, for almost two years, and then ended without anyone from the company saying a word to the audience they had built.

What the years cost them

We only see the finished ones. The trainees in that channel were doing full days of practice, monthly evaluations in front of instructors and executives, and then going home to a dorm to do it again, for years, with no guarantee at the end of it. Trainee A is one of the few times the K-pop machine left the footage up while it was happening.

Sangwon, who spent two and a half years after the disbandment without a company at all, has been the most direct about it.

He went on to finish first overall on Boys II Planet and debut as the centre of ALPHA DRIVE ONE. Which is a good ending, and does not cancel out the part before it.

Where all nine of them are now

This is the bit that makes Trainee A worth writing about. Almost every one of them made it, just not together and not there.

The CORTIS part

James joined Big Hit in 2020, was revealed as part of Trainee A in March 2021, and trained for around seven years in total before he ever stood on a debut stage. When the project ended he was the one who stayed.

He did not sit still either. In the gap between Trainee A and CORTIS his name shows up in credits for other artists on the label, and he was on stage as a backup dancer while the group he would eventually debut in did not exist yet. Then CORTIS debuted on 18 August 2025, and the only member of Trainee A still inside the building finally got the thing all nine of them had been working towards.

If you want the full version of his story, it is on his profile page.

The members stayed in touch after the project ended. They have gone on live together since, and the photos keep turning up: two people who trained side by side for years, who were supposed to debut in the same group, and who ended up debuting eleven months apart in two completely different ones.

One more thing

Trainee A never debuted. But seven of the nine names on that list are on a stage right now, at five different companies, and one of them is in CORTIS. Whoever wrote that word on a padlock in 2022 got it right. It just took longer, and it went in nine directions instead of one.

Keep going: James’s full profile, his Vogue Man Korea cover, or every song CORTIS has produced for other artists.