Tomorrow, Together: Understanding TXT’s Original Coming-of-Age Story

All coming-of-age stories reach an ending -TXT’s did in 2025.

From their debut, TOMORROW X TOGETHER have built much of their music around one of the experiences contained within their own name: different people meeting, growing together and moving towards a shared tomorrow. Beneath the changing sounds, aesthetics and individual stories of their albums lies a larger exploration of youth - what it means to dream, form relationships, lose certainty, discover who you are and continue growing when neither you nor the people beside you can remain unchanged.

This was present from the beginning. When TXT debuted with The Dream Chapter: STAR in 2019, BIGHIT described The Dream Chapter as a story about the experiences boys encounter as they grow from childhood into adolescence. Rather than ending with that first album, those experiences continued to develop across subsequent releases, gradually forming a much larger coming-of-age journey.

The structure of TXT’s discography reflects that idea. Their major releases are organised into named Chapters, with smaller minisodes appearing between them. Much like chapters of a coming-of-age novel, each explores a particular stage of growth while building upon questions raised by what came before. Friendship gives way to separation; dreams encounter reality; love becomes heartbreak; heartbreak raises questions of identity; and learning who you are eventually makes possible a more mature understanding of what it means to be together.

As Beomgyu explained in 2023, “Each of our albums and chapters are generational narratives of our youth.” He described the albums as reflecting experiences and emotions TXT were encountering at different periods in life - feelings often shared by people of their generation. That relationship between concept and lived youth is important. TXT’s story is not simply an autobiography of the five members, but neither is growing up an abstract subject they observe from a distance. The members themselves grew alongside the narrative they were performing.

That is also why the story is better understood as an emotional narrative than a conventional fictional plot. There is no single named protagonist who remains fixed across every album. Official descriptions shift between “the boys,” “the boy,” “I,” “you” and eventually “we/us,” depending on the experience or relationship at the centre of a particular chapter. Nor should the discography narrative be treated as identical to The Star Seekers, TXT’s separate fictional universe. The two can complement and parallel one another through shared imagery, themes and motifs, but The Star Seekers has its own characters, mythology and plot.

Across seven years, TXT’s musical narrative instead follows youth through friendship and dreams, conflict and isolation, love and heartbreak, temptation and identity, adulthood, memory, reunion and finally the decision to continue choosing connection after change. Recurring images - stars, dreams, names, magic, promises and tomorrow - accumulate meaning along the way, often returning years later transformed by everything that has happened since.

The result is a discography best understood not simply as a succession of different concepts, but as a story whose meaning builds over time. The questions raised in one chapter often become the foundations of the next.

The story begins with a dream and ends by asking what it really means to remain together.

The Dream Chapter: growing up together

TXT’s story begins with The Dream Chapter: STAR, where a group of boys stand at the beginning of adolescence and encounter the confusion that comes with discovering that you are different from the people around you. Meeting others who carry their own differences changes what those differences mean: something that once made you feel strange or alone can become a source of connection when another person recognises and accepts you as you are.

The “star” becomes another name for the dream guiding them forwards. Across STAR and MAGIC, adolescence feels expansive. Friendship provides belonging, imagination transforms ordinary life, and young love, rebellion, adventure and self-discovery exist within a world where impossible things still seem achievable if you have the right people beside you. Magic becomes an emotional language for youth itself.

But growing up inevitably introduces change. By The Dream Chapter: ETERNITY, the friendship that once seemed unbreakable begins to fracture beneath misunderstanding, emotional distance and the pressures of adolescence. What the boys believed might last forever suddenly feels fragile, transforming “eternity” from a youthful certainty into something they desperately wish they could preserve.

TXT’s story has therefore already encountered one of the questions that will follow it all the way to its conclusion: what happens when something you believed would last forever begins to disappear?

Blue Hour: between what was and what comes next

minisode1: Blue Hour occupies the twilight between Dream and Chaos. The blue hour is beautiful precisely because it is temporary: daylight is disappearing, darkness has not completely arrived and the world briefly exists between states. That makes it an ideal image for this stage of growing up.

The familiar world is changing. Relationships feel more distant, and time continues moving forwards even when you are not ready for it. Released during the COVID-19 pandemic, the album also carried an unavoidable real-world resonance as young people around the world experienced disrupted routines, physical separation and the strange sensation of losing moments they had expected to live differently.

TXT’s magical adolescence has not entirely disappeared, but the certainty surrounding it has. Blue Hour captures the uneasy space between the world they knew and whatever will replace it.

The Chaos Chapter: when the world freezes

With The Chaos Chapter, the perspective narrows towards the boy. The world he once understood has collapsed; dreams no longer provide certainty, and reality feels cold, unstable and indifferent. Within that frozen world, he encounters “you.”

In FREEZE, that person becomes the one source of warmth when everything else appears meaningless. Love seems like the only thing that is unquestionably real. It is exhilarating, but also precarious: when another person becomes the only source of meaning in your world, connection begins carrying the weight of salvation. Love offers warmth, but the boy’s entire sense of hope has become dependent on someone outside himself.

FIGHT OR ESCAPE pushes that desperation further. If reality feels unbearable, should the boy fight against it or escape with the person who makes survival possible? The dreamlike magic of growing up together has become something much more unstable.

That dependence will matter later. TXT’s story does not ultimately reject the idea that people can give one another strength or meaning. Instead, it has to discover whether connection can survive without one person becoming the other’s entire world.

Thursday’s Child: who are you after love ends?

minisode 2: Thursday’s Child removes even that certainty when the relationship ends. For a boy who had placed enormous meaning in another person, heartbreak is not simply the loss of romance; it means confronting the emptiness left behind when the person who made the world feel meaningful is suddenly gone.

The album passes through grief, anger and emotional destruction before gradually turning towards the possibility of a future beyond the relationship. If another person cannot permanently provide your identity or purpose, eventually you have to confront yourself.

The question driving TXT’s story therefore begins to change. It is no longer only whom do I love?, but who am I when that person is no longer there to tell me who I am?

The Name Chapter: finding your own name

The Name Chapter takes that question of identity to the boundary between adolescence and adulthood. In TEMPTATION, the boys encounter an alluring alternative to growing up: Neverland.

Drawing from Peter Pan, the album presents a world without adult responsibility, uncertainty or pain. Remaining young forever is appealing precisely because reality is difficult. But Neverland is also a trap: to remain unchanged forever would mean never discovering who you might become. Eventually, the boys choose to leave.

The Name Chapter: FREEFALL confronts the reality waiting beneath that decision. Adulthood is not immediately liberating; it is frightening, imperfect and capable of causing real pain. Yet accepting that imperfection becomes an important act of self-determination. Rather than remaining inside a beautiful illusion, TXT’s protagonists begin searching for reasons to embrace reality and for identities that are genuinely their own.

The “name” at the centre of the chapter represents that process. Who are you when childhood dreams, other people and outside expectations can no longer answer the question for you?

Finding an answer does not require abandoning connection. In fact, developing a stronger sense of self eventually allows TXT’s story to imagine a more mature form of togetherness - one in which “me” and “you” can become “us” without either person disappearing into the other.

TOMORROW: remembering what still matters

After learning to face reality, minisode 3: TOMORROW appears to do something contradictory: it looks backwards. Crucially, however, it does not go backwards.

The album follows a boy who remembers a promise made with “you” in the past and decides to search for that person again. He recalls the aspirations they once shared and begins moving towards the tomorrow where they might meet. The distinction from TXT’s earlier fantasies of escape is crucial: the past is not somewhere the boy can permanently return to. Remembering it instead gives him a reason to continue forwards.

Drawing from The Little Prince, the album explores relationships as invisible ties created through time, care and memory. Someone becomes unique because of what you have shared with them. Distance can make that bond painful, but it does not automatically make it meaningless.

Growing up therefore does not require discarding everything your younger self believed in. Maturity does not mean proving that dreams, promises or ideas of “forever” were foolish simply because reality made them more complicated. The question instead becomes which of those beliefs can survive contact with reality - and what they might look like once they do.

Some promises remain worth keeping, and the boy begins searching for the person waiting somewhere in tomorrow.

The Star Chapter: finding one another again

The Star Chapter: SANCTUARY begins when that search finally reaches its destination: two people meet again beneath a starry sky.

The reunion brings warmth back into TXT’s story, but it does not erase everything that happened before it. The people who find one another again have experienced distance, heartbreak, temptation and growth. They cannot simply return to the innocence of The Dream Chapter; they have to reconnect as the people they have become.

BIGHIT describes SANCTUARY through the emotions experienced when “I” meets “you” again. The person who makes their shared moments feel magical becomes the reason to stop running away and begin facing reality. TXT call this feeling love.

That represents a major transformation in the meaning of connection. Earlier in the story, another person could provide somewhere to escape from reality. Now another person provides the courage to remain within it. Love becomes sanctuary rather than escape.

The stars above that reunion also recall one of the story’s oldest images. What began as a symbol of dreams and possibility has accumulated new meanings through the years: people, promises and lights that remain visible through darkness. Returning beneath a starry sky therefore does not return TXT to the beginning. Like the people standing beneath it, the image itself has grown.

But reunion is not the same as permanence, and The Star Chapter: TOGETHER asks the final question of TXT’s original narrative: once you have found one another again, how do you keep choosing one another?

The answer is more mature than the effortless togetherness imagined at the beginning of the story. Connection now requires trust, empathy, memory, generosity and the willingness to recognise another person as they continue changing. “I” and “you” become “we,” but becoming “us” does not mean becoming identical. Togetherness depends on recognising and accepting each other as individuals.

This is significantly different from the dependence of The Chaos Chapter. Another person can still be profoundly important without becoming your entire identity or your only reason to exist. By the end, connection is strongest when “me” and “you” remain recognisable within “us.”

Love therefore becomes something active rather than a feeling that automatically guarantees permanence. It is the repeated decision to remain beside another person despite the forces that can create distance - a form of resistance against isolation, fear and everything that once pulled people apart.

TXT’s story began with young people discovering the joy of being together. It ends with people who understand how easily connection can fracture, how much both people can change and what togetherness can ask of them - and choose it anyway.

The changing meaning of tomorrow

Few ideas reveal the development of TXT’s story more clearly than tomorrow.

At debut, tomorrow represents possibility: the unknown future towards which young people sharing a dream hope to move. As the story develops, that future becomes more complicated. Tomorrow can contain adulthood, uncertainty and loss.

By minisode 3: TOMORROW, it becomes a promise: somewhere ahead is the person the boy hopes to meet again. Then, in The Star Chapter, that tomorrow begins to arrive. The future is no longer simply something waiting for the protagonists; it becomes something they participate in creating.

The changing narrative perspective follows a similar progression. A group growing together becomes a boy and “you”; eventually “I” and “you” become “us.” What begins as finding people with whom you can dream ultimately becomes learning how to preserve connection without losing yourself within it.

Tomorrow exists because they continue choosing it.

Tomorrow, together

TXT’s name has always contained the basic promise at the heart of their concept: different people coming together under one dream in hopes of building a new tomorrow. Their original narrative spends seven years testing what that promise means when growing up makes remaining together more complicated than it first appeared.

Friendship fractures. Dreams collapse. The person who seemed capable of saving you can leave. Fantasy becomes tempting when reality is painful. Time and distance change people who once believed they would remain together forever.

TXT’s story does not answer those problems by pretending change can be prevented. It accepts change as inevitable and gradually arrives at a different answer: connection can change too.

The people at the end do not need to become the people they were at the beginning. Their understanding of dreams, love, identity and togetherness has been transformed by everything that happened between. Nor does growing up require them to dismiss the hopes of their younger selves as naïve. Those hopes are tested by reality, altered by experience and ultimately chosen again with a fuller understanding of what they mean.

That is what makes the conclusion a coming-of-age ending rather than a return to childhood. The promise survives, but it does not survive unchanged; it survives because the people who made it learn how to let its meaning grow with them.

Tomorrow is no longer simply the place they hope to reach. It is something created every time people who have changed still recognise one another, call each other by name and choose to continue forwards together.

The story began with the dream of tomorrow. Seven years later, they arrive there together.