The Most Beautiful Moment in Life

If the School Trilogy was a period of rebellion, the era of The Most Beautiful Moment in Life marked a turn toward poetry. Also known by its Korean title Hwa Yang Yeon Hwa, shortened to HYYH, a name that describes the most beautiful, blossoming moment in life, this trilogy in three parts, two mini albums and the closing Young Forever, marked the group's artistic breakthrough and their shift into a softer, more cinematic mode of expression. At its center was youth itself, in all its beauty and fragility.

The phrase itself describes a brief period of blossoming, one in which everything seems possible. BTS, however, did not portray it solely as a happy time, but as a time in which beauty and insecurity intertwine, when the future is uncertain and fear is real. It was a youth much like the one most people actually live through, beautiful and painful at once.

One powerful motif runs through the entire era: the butterfly. Just as a caterpillar must transform to become a butterfly, so too must young people go through painful change in order to grow up. The butterfly appears throughout the videos and photographs as a sign of transformation, but also of transience. Alongside it, the recurring motif of water returns again and again, in which the members struggle and from which they then emerge, an image of both danger and rebirth at once.

It was also in this era that the connected story told through the music videos began, the narrative fans call the BTS Universe, a tale of seven friends that they began analyzing in painstaking detail. The songs I Need U, Run, and Save Me speak of support and of pleading for help, while Fire brings a sense of release. Whalien 52 holds a striking image within it, a whale singing at a frequency no one else can hear, a metaphor for loneliness and for the longing to finally be understood by someone. The era closes with the optimistic message of Young Forever, the assertion that youth is not an age to be mourned, but a state of mind we carry with us. With this era, BTS also won their first major annual award.