BTS Eighth Member | The Life: Year 2018

Chapter 32- BBMAs 2018 Comeback Performance

May 20th, 2018:

The presentation for our award, Top Social Artist, was coming up and I still wasn't sure what the speech setup would look like if we won, which from our last check, looked likely. So, at the next commercial break, I stood up to talk to Namjoon who was a few seats down from me.

"If we win, who's doing the speech?" I ask since we'd both been given the speech written by Big Hit and together edited it to make it seem more like us.

"I'll do it," he says, pointing to himself.

"You sure?" I asked to verify given what had happened on the red carpet.

"Yeah," he nods, looking at me a little insulted I was double-checking.

"Okay, cool, sounds good. Just making sure so we're not confused when we get up there," I nodded reassured, giving him two thumbs up before heading back to my seat, passing Jimin and Taehyung who were playing flip the bottle with their water bottles.

Twenty minutes later, actors from This Is Us walked onto the stage to present Top Social Artist.

"Social media allows us to voice our opinions, share our creativity, connect with friends and new people, and it keeps us in the know," the actress said almost drowned out by ARMYs cheers.

"And it allows music fans to vote for their favourite artists at the top of the Billboard weekly social 50 chart. Here are the nominees for Top Social Artist," the actor said reading from the teleprompter.

A female robotic voice rang across the auditorium listing the nominees: Justin Bieber, BTS (the crowd's cheers got even higher pitched), Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Shawn Mendes. Jungkook was grabbing my knee so hard his knuckles had gone white. I was working on declawing his third finger individually from my knee by the time he realised. I smiled reassuringly at him as he quickly apologised. I mouthed "we got this, don't worry". He nodded back with a stressed smile.

"So, the Billboard Music Award goes to..." the actress said as she opened the envelope, "BTS!" she shouted excitedly to the explosion of what felt like everyone in attendance.

Namjoon brought us all in a quick group hug before we walked onto the stage. Taehyung helped me up the stage and wrapped his arm coolly around my shoulders as we stood behind Namjoon beaming.

"Thank you so much Billboard Music Awards for this precious award two years in a row," Namjoon said to even more cheers from the crowd if that was possible, "And this time we had the chance to think about what social really means for us and some of our fans told us that our music has really changed their lives and now we realized that our words truly carry weight thanks to you guys..." Namjoon paused letting fans shout in excitement. Directly in front of us, I could see Khalid, Halsey and Taylor Swift still standing cheering with ARMYs as Namjoon spoke, "And armies out there! You guys are what keeps us going and keeps us excited!"

We could see the time we had to speak counting down and Jimin quickly took the final few seconds we had left to thank ARMY for their constant support in Korean. The lights changed as the show went to commercial and we were ushered backstage.