NCT DREAM's Jisung Debuted at 15, and That Is Not Even the Wildest Number in SM's Debut Chart

A chart of SM Entertainment debut ages went up on theqoo and the thread turned into a group therapy session about how old everyone actually was. The headline detail: NCT debuted a 15-year-old and a 24-year-old in the same group, a nine-year spread, as one commenter pointed out.

The original post listed the ages at which SM groups debuted. We don't have the chart itself here, only the reactions, so the exact figures for each member aren't reproduced below.

Who fans couldn't believe

NCT DREAM drew the loudest reaction. One user said the members were "extremely young" and that they had assumed A2O were young, but the two looked similar on the chart. Another zeroed in on Jisung: he was 15 at debut, and the commenter called it crazy that he started that early.

First-generation acts got the same treatment. Commenters said TVXQ were "so young" and that S.E.S were "honestly young," while another summed up the whole first generation as seriously young, with a couple of exceptions. f(x) were also called very young.

The groups that skewed older than expected

Not everyone moved in the same direction. One fan said Super Junior were younger than they remembered, guessing they had pictured everyone around 26 at debut. Another noted that, aside from a few members, some of the older groups were unexpectedly older than people assumed.

The thread also raised a technical question: whether the chart used international age. Nobody in the excerpted replies answered it, which matters, since Korean age can shift a member's number by a year or two. One commenter asked who the 23-year-old in NCT was, and another guessed Taeil. That is a guess from a reply, not a confirmed figure.

The nine-year problem

The comment that stuck was the arithmetic one. Put a 15-year-old and a 24-year-old in the same lineup and you get a group where one member is still in middle-school territory while another is old enough to have a long trainee career behind them. SM has run units like that for years. Fans just hadn't lined the numbers up in one place until now.

The agency hasn't commented, and there's nothing to comment on: it's a fan chart and a comment section. Still, the reaction says something about how little casual fans track debut ages once a group becomes a fixture.