You're Calling That Plagiarism?
What I called acting foresight was entering the light and watching myself perform.
Because I could see the acting I would have to do in the near future.
But now it seemed I would have to let go of the acting part altogether.
Because I was seeing a future that had nothing to do with acting.
"Yaaawn~"
I'd come home from kindergarten and was drawing when drowsiness came crashing down on me all at once. I usually refused to nap because I hated wasting the time, but my eyes kept sliding shut anyway.
Crayon in hand, head bobbing, I felt a bright light wrap itself around me.
This was the first time the light had come while I was awake and drifting off.
A dream...?
I was standing in the middle of the sea.
It was a strange sea where no matter where you walked, the water never rose past your knees.
Fish glided between shimmering shafts of emerald light. In the far distance I saw spray bursting into the air, and I walked toward it.
The edge of the spray ended at a chasm that plunged a thousand fathoms down. Water was falling into the darkness like a waterfall, its bottom lost from view.
I walked only as far as the current would let me hold my footing, then gazed across at the far side. There too, just like here, the spray rose and the water tumbled into the abyss below.
It was as if someone had carved a great rift through the very middle of the sea.
Behind the spray, I caught the silhouette of a person.
Standing far off on the other side, just like me, looking this way.
A girl my own age.
It's Sora.
She stared at me with eyes full of heartbreak. I wanted to run to her, but the gap was far too wide.
I looked around for something, anything, that might help, but all I could see was seawater.
Then a voice echoed inside my head.
[What you see is not all there is.]
[Trust, and step forward.]
It was a friendly voice, one I instinctively trusted.
It was telling me that even though a chasm lay ahead, I could cross it — if I believed.
Somehow I felt like I could, and I slowly set my foot forward.
The current grew fiercer and my body wobbled, but I didn't stop. Even when one or two more steps would send me plunging into the void, I didn't stop.
The instant I flung my last step into empty air, I squeezed my eyes shut.
Thump.
Astonishing sight unfolded before me.
The empty space began weaving itself into a bridge of transparent light. It curved in an elegant arch, stretching all the way to the cliff on the far side.
My own belief that I could cross — that was what had brought the bridge into being.
The moment I set foot across, Sora broke into a radiant smile and ran to me, throwing herself into my arms.
As I patted the head of the girl snug against my chest, letters etched themselves into the air.
A World, Reconnected — TTN
It was the TTN commercial Sora and I were going to shoot.
The light that had enveloped me faded, and the world snapped back to normal.
The shock hadn't worn off yet; I was still breathing hard.
It wasn't the ad that had shaken me.
It was because after the ad ended, I'd seen something I never expected.
Plagiarism. Of all things.
The moment it aired, the stylish visuals and the fresh new models became the talk of the town. That part was fine — but not long after, the plagiarism scandal erupted.
Usually such things devolve into a he-said-she-said controversy, but this was copied so brazenly that there wasn't even a debate to be had. The ad was pulled almost immediately, and the whole affair ended with SJ Telecom issuing an apology and cutting ties.
And so my very first commercial vanished from the airwaves without a trace, and Director Park Myung-chul's career took a wound it would carry for years.
"You absolute lunatic! You copied this, this blatant, right out in the open!!"
I kept seeing it over and over — Director Park grabbing someone by the collar and screaming.
If what I'd seen in the dream was real, then I could not let this ad be made. Ever.
What do I do?
Things had gotten even more tangled now that Sora was involved too. Somehow I had to reveal the plagiarism with a reason that anyone could accept.
But the ad hadn't even been filmed yet. What reason could I possibly give that anyone would believe?
Think about it — the whole situation was absurd. I racked my brain this way and that, and then suddenly remembered the ad from my dream.
So that gorgeous thing was a copy.
Director Park's signature dreamlike imagery, with Sora and me reflected in it — the impact would have been nothing short of devastating. If not for the plagiarism, it was easily strong enough to be hailed as the resurrection of the entire TTN campaign series.
My eyes fell on the sketchbook lying open in front of me. A crayon still in my hand, as it happened.
I started drawing the ad from my dream.
Why? I couldn't say. The scene was simply too beautiful; I wanted to preserve it somehow, even as a picture.
Page by page, like a picture book, I kept drawing each scene as it shifted, turning page after page.
Before I knew it, I'd finished a storybook of more than ten pages. When Mom came back from the market she saw it and praised me for drawing so well.
A few days later, at the ad agency —
Sora and I sat in the conference room, waiting for Director Park Myung-chul.
A woman who looked like a staffer came in carrying drinks and snacks.
"The director will be here soon, so just wait a little longer."
"Thank you, pretty noona."
Her eyes turned into hearts and she left the room cooing omo, omo.
Sora shot me a sidelong glare.
"Prettier than me?"
"With grown-ups, you compliment them like that to start a conversation. It makes getting along easier."
Dozens of question marks floated above Sora's head.
"Hajin, you keep using hard words. We're still little kids."
"But when I tell you you're pretty, you don't have any trouble with the hard words, do you?"
"Hehe."
In an instant, her face transformed into a golden retriever's.
With Sora, calling her pretty solves everything. Though that only works when it's me saying it.
"Sorry, sorry — the meeting just wrapped up. You two waited a long time, huh?"
Director Park came in, sweat streaming down his face. He must have run here for our sake.
I nudged the drink sitting in front of me over to the director's seat.
"Drink this and catch your breath. You can talk slowly."
Director Park blinked down at the drink.
"Every time I see you, I'm struck by it — Hajin, you're not like a child at all. Talking with you is like talking with one of my own staff."
Six years old, twenty-two years of experience, sir.
"It's both your first ad, so I wanted to walk you through how we'll shoot it, and show you the storyboard. I'll explain the expressions to you while we go over it."
The TTN ad had to convey its meaning through nothing but expressions and movement — no dialogue. That made the models' emotional acting more important than anything else.
"This is the final storyboard. The background is supposed to be—"
Director Park froze as he spread the storyboard out on the table.
Wait — this isn't what I saw in the dream!
It was not the ad set against the sea.
What Director Park showed us was a fantasy world where a boy and a girl traded voices through an old magical device — in today's terms, something like online pen pals.
"Hajin, what's wrong? Something bothering you?"
When I flinched, Director Park tilted his head.
"Director, are you really shooting the ad with this?"
"Yeah. SJ Telecom gave it the green light too."
My brain spun into overdrive.
The plagiarized ad of the future wasn't the one I'd seen in my dream. The dream had shown me that ad so I would film the proper one instead — the one without a stain on it.
It had handed me both the disaster that was about to happen and the way to avoid it, all at once.
The moment the thought crystallized, I couldn't sit still a second longer.
"Um, Director?"
"Yes, Hajin?"
"It's just that..."
Now. This is the exact moment to stop the plagiarism scandal before it starts.
"The content of this storyboard... I think it might be plagiarized."
The smile drained from Director Park's face in an instant.
Plagiarism was one of those chronic diseases of the ad world that surfaced again and again. Even a heavyweight like Director Park Myung-chul could watch his career implode if he got tangled in the wrong case — it was pure venom.
"P-plagiarized? Hajin, do you even know what that word means?"
"Of course I do. It's when you take someone else's work and pass it off as your own."
"So you do know. Then explain it to me in detail. Why exactly is this plagiarism?"
I had heard it clearly in the dream — what the creator of this storyboard had copied.
A fantasy adventure game that had been wildly popular in America and Japan ten years ago. It turned its event-cutscene art into animation and was praised as a visual masterpiece.
When I'd looked it up to see if the game really existed, I found quite a few people in Korea had played it too. Some had even gone so far as to post accusations on forums and fan cafes, reporting it directly to SJ Telecom's PR team and the game's developer. The plagiarism issue was eventually escalated all the way to the executives, and the ad vanished from broadcast overnight.
Because I'd spent the past few days agonizing over how to convince Director Park, the words came pouring out smoothly.
Apparently he found my argument convincing, because his expression turned impossibly grave.
"I don't want to appear in a plagiarized ad. Please, you have to check it for yourself."
Though I had no idea why I was doing it, I frowned sternly as I spoke, and Sora nodded along in solidarity.
"Phew. All right. This is absolutely not something I can let slide, so I'll look into it for certain. But Hajin — how on earth did you know about this?"
"My dad loves old games, so we've played a lot of them together. This one's a favorite of mine and Dad's."
Sorry, Dad, for throwing you under the bus — the man who doesn't know the first thing about gaming.
In truth, I only knew this game by name, and I'd jumped to the wrong conclusion. I'd assumed the sea-crossing scene came from the game, but seeing today's storyboard, it had nothing at all to do with the ad I'd watched.
"I see. If it's true, Hajin, you've done something enormous. Then there's no point in me explaining this today. You two should head home."
I had done everything in my power. All that remained was to wait for the result.
Director Park Myung-chul came to visit us at home.
In the few days since I'd last seen him, his face had grown haggard.
"Hajin, you were right. Some of the scenes were copied, blatant as anything."
A copywriter he'd been mentoring had brought him a storyboard he fell in love with, so he'd put it through internal review and chosen it as the final draft. He'd even secured the client's approval — and then at the last minute, I'd come to him talking about plagiarism. He checked the game and confronted the copywriter, who hung his head and confessed.
"Said the ideas just wouldn't come, and he did something he should never have done. Hearing that, my blood boiled backward. Hajin, if it weren't for you, this would have been a catastrophe."
That mountain of a man seized my hand and bowed his head, wearing the look of someone ready to serve a ten-year sentence of gratitude.
"So... what happens to the ad now?"
"We start over from scratch. The client talks went smoothly, though."
As I listened to Director Park, the ad from my dream drifted back into my mind. The one I'd thought was plagiarized — and yet drawn a picture of anyway, because the visuals were simply too magnificent.
Hold on. That one... isn't plagiarized at all, is it?
"Director?"
"Yes, Hajin?"
"Do you think I could pitch an idea too?"