ok gonna preface this by saying im a cubehead so this answer will be cube heavy. ive been in cube entertainment's business long before kim geonwoo has ever stepped foot in that building and ive known about his nametag on the cube lockers in yeeun's selfie since 2021. AND. im the one who first mistakenly labelled jang jinhyuk as kim geonwoo before we learned all of their names. lol

most of the guys who spent time at cube still look back on that time fondly. i especially see this with sung hanbin who doesn't get as noticeably emotional about anything as much as his cube past. like the way he talks about his cube friends is so soft and you can tell he loved them a lot. not even going to get into the mattbin of it all... a lot of the cube guys had real and close friendships with each other. they practiced together day in and day out (haha) but also lived together in a dorm, went on field trips and took care of each other. of course they were bonded together. from the endless 4cuts to exchanging the saddest letters on earth to making rings together, all of them had their inside jokes and gifts for each other.

i genuinely dont think geonwoo was a horrible person based on what the former cube boys have said about him. both hanbins and min spoke fondly of him and i dont think they would do that unless they loved him for real. there's that one clip of shanbin completely falling limp when he sees geonwoo is performing on mcountdown that i think about. plus park hanbin's story about geonwoo fighting off his attempts to kiss him until when hanbin had to leave and geonwoo was so sad he let hanbin kiss him. idk. breaks my heart a bit.

but on the other hand, i also think the "scandal" is partially true. i think when he was at bill entertainment, geonwoo did act in a way that made other people feel bullied or treated horribly. he basically admits as much in his apology (that he deleted.. hm) and it's somewhat corroborated by donggun, but from what i understand geonwoo seems to have a more playful/cocky/abrasive personality that was egged on by his environment (bill staff?) rather than being inherently evil. for this reason, i dont think i can ever be a full throated geonwoo stan or anything, but i can tolerate his existence in ald1.

so how do we reconcile these two sides of geonwoo? i think geonwoo started as a dorky little kid who bounced through that stint in source music but cube was always gonna be the place for him. he has that cube in him; that hungry, driven and slightly manic energy that cube looks for and more importantly, actively cultivates. it makes sense that he was close to park hanbin lol. but i think that changed when he left cube. he was soooo close to debut. he was the last member who was cut out of the lineup in 2022 for reasons still unknown, though i doubt he left on his own terms? if he was cut, i can understand him having a generational crashout... i suspect being cut out of cube is what changed geonwoo when he went to bill instead.

as a cubehead i understand geonwoo. hes been a trainee for so long but specifically at cube only to get cut last minute. that does things to people. so i can see how he might have changed drastically as a result... it seems he went into b2p being really confident that he's going to debut and acted that way, though i think he also learned from the scandal as well... i think he's more mindful about the way he acts with other people now. hes in the category of cube boys im going to keep up with, especially for future lore drops, but i just feel sad when i look at him and think about his cube trauma