Chapter 136
At the same moment.
“Whoa…!”
As soon as the music video teaser went up, the home master of the idol group’s fandom — like every other overexcited survival-show viewer — clapped both hands over her mouth and stifled a cry.
I wasn’t even the one getting a phone call, so why am I this flustered?
There wasn’t much packed into it, and yet somehow the teaser felt electrifying.
For one thing, Neoul in a school uniform was absurdly beautiful. The makeup had been kept natural, not piled on too heavily, and that only made him look even more like a student.
Then there were the details: the teaser didn’t show his whole face at once, but kept cutting to close-ups of his lips, the sway of his hair, and other tiny things that delivered a ridiculous visual jolt.
I don’t know who the director is, but he’s definitely a well-educated pervert.
She didn’t know what the suddenly appearing canned coffee at midnight meant, or why Neoul was making a phone call, but… after he recited only two syllables, “Hello,” his voice completely seized her ears and heart.
The home master scrolled down to open the comments. The video had just gone up, and reactions were already pouring in by the dozens.
Even after the short, twenty-five-second teaser ended, the home master was still taking shaky breaths, lingering in the afterglow of it all—until a strange thought finally surfaced.
But what about the others? Why is it only Neoul?
“Exactly…!”
Sure, Neoul was the winner of Idol Travel, so giving him a little extra push made sense, but… it was still an idol group. Having the teaser show absolutely none of the other members was a little startling.
As was typical for fandoms built through survival programs, Jjokbit’s fans still didn’t have much cohesion or sense of unity.
A few people were supporting the members in clusters, but for the most part the fandom leaned heavily toward individual stans. There were almost no true all-fans.
In groups like this, who the center was and how many seconds of screen time each member got often led to individual fans policing one another or tearing down other members inside the team.
This is… a little worrying.
Then her eye caught the text in the “See more” section beneath the video. It said that the second and third teasers would both be uploaded tomorrow.
Oh, so there’s a third teaser too. Then maybe the other members will all appear in the second and third teasers?
That changed things somewhat. She still worried that individual fans might complain Neoul was being given special treatment, but… there were more teasers coming. At least this much could probably be brushed off on the grounds that he was the winner.
Ha On-ha’s vicious solo stans were already ripping into Neoul, snarling that he had unfairly stolen the victory at the end with benefits.
Or they were saying On-ha would be better off as a soloist and that a group that hadn’t even debuted yet should just disband already…
Still, thank goodness On-ha’s home masters and the louder individual fans are generally favorable toward Neoul.
It helped that Ha On-ha, Neoul, and Yeo Do-bin had been enthusiastically packaged together as the “Twenties Trio.”
Besides, Jjokbit’s fandom had a lot of young fans, but it also had plenty of veterans—people who’d been through every kind of storm, seen every kind of fandom war, and come out more mature for it.
They were the ones who had once stanned idols from an earlier generation, then had no choice but to step back when their old bias group dissolved into nothing, only to later get swept up in Idol Travel after planning to watch it casually and move on.
They all know that fandoms run by vicious solo stans collapse fast.
For that reason, most of On-ha’s fans immediately stepped in to stop the fights and apologized on behalf of the troublemakers.
“Those people aren’t real On-ha fans. If you truly cared about On-ha and the group, you wouldn’t throw around words like ‘disband’ so casually.”
They also drew a hard line, calling them grim people pretending to be fans in order to stir up conflict.
Jjokbit’s fans encouraged one another not to feed the solo stans and held the line together, responding only with silence and reports.
They also praised On-ha’s fans for apologizing, built friendly ties across the fandom, and quickly took control of the mood before the fire of the argument could spread.
They couldn’t let the fandom get torn apart before debut, of all times. On top of that, Jjokbit’s fans had one more reason to unite as quickly as possible.
What? Wait—Flux’s representative changed? It used to say Jae Ik-hoo, and now it’s Kim Woohwan?
The people shocked by the change in Flux’s CEO weren’t just the members.
After looking it up, they found that KWH was that useless bastard with no sense at all, the one who ran the company into the ground; he’s the guy who made Jumping Boys, right? I follow and look up a lot of smaller idol groups, but I’ve literally never even heard of them, and they’re apparently some deep, dark flop group;
Jumping Boys… lol, there’s a kiss scene with a woman in the music video, damn.
I just watched the MV and, wow, what is this… a stray-dog concept?? I’ve never seen that before, so it’s bizarrely shocking, lol.
Putting the members’ names and traits into the lyrics could have worked if it had been introduced lightly at the beginning or woven in naturally, but this forced stuffing of details felt awful too… and the lyrics themselves were just hopeless.
That was how it had been.
The mysterious “sea nymph, water god, fairy” and so on that the members had been startled by was, in a very real sense, a huge improvement over the stray-dog concept they’d done before.
There had been idols and singers who released albums with concepts like sea fairies, mermaids, or sirens before.
The problem was that most of them were girl groups, and those concepts were usually one-off promotions rather than the group’s overall identity.
If it had only been a single, disposable concept, the members might have accepted it after scrapping the song and choreography and starting over. But to use “We’re water gods. We’re nymphs.” as the image that defined a group’s first debut album—the one that would establish their first impression—was… too much.
Fans encountering idols for the first time, and the general public, were more likely to feel pressure than immersion. A nymph concept like that built a wall that kept people from easily approaching them, so it had to be completely torn down.
Without knowing any of this, fans who had seen Kim Woohwan’s shocking previous work had fallen into even greater confusion than Jjokbit’s own members.
Wait. So the creative lunatic who made that is now the CEO of our kids’ company…?
“I’m losing my mind.”
In the emergency situation of having a public enemy named Kim Woohwan, there was no room for fans to keep ripping into one another when they were already on edge.
Our kids are already like perfectly polished gems. They’d be more than enough just as they are! And now some insane bastard has shown up and might ruin everything by slapping on some terrible concept—where is there time to waste energy on solo-stan fights?
The fans crushed any sign of a solo stan lifting their head and shut the fights down instantly.
They used the public enemy as fuel, deliberately burning it to drive harmony and unity within the fandom.
Thanks to that, internal conflict never really broke open—but resentment toward the agency grew even stronger. When one fan found Kim Woohwan’s social media account and his latest posts, the fandom only grew more anxious.
The group name Jjokbit sounded like something no one had thought about except Koreans. Global fans were being ignored outright.
If it were me, I’d have called it BlueLight or FFF, for fortississimo—you know, the notation meaning to play very, very loudly.
And honestly, jade-green sea sounds prettier than indigo sea.
BlueLight… sounds like something terrible for your eyes.
The meaning of fortississimo is good, but no, lol. As a college student, it just sounds like I’m about to get a failing grade and I hate it.
When they announced the group name, I was like, “Jjokbit…?” But wow, what kind of thought process leads to naming an idol group FFF? And not even crescendo, either—specifically FFF. Are they doing that on purpose to make it fail? lol
“Jade-green sea is prettier than indigo sea.” What even is that supposed to mean? You can’t just name an idol group Jade.
And so the group name, which had first been dismissed as strange, ended up looking much better by comparison.
Looking at this makes Jjokbit suddenly seem pretty cute, lol. For a Korean idol group, it feels meaningful and nice to use a native Korean name instead of yet another English one, and I hope more groups do that in the future.
Am I the only one who likes Jjokbit? The group color comes through so clearly, and just hearing the name makes me think they’ll do a lot of refreshing concepts. I love it.
And hearing foreigners pronounce it as “Jjokbit” somehow makes it cute, lol.
Kim Woohwan’s recklessly loose fingers and equally empty head, enough for him to post something like that on social media, only added to the fans’ anxiety.
“The company’s CEO is publicly sniping at the former CEO on his personal SNS? No, this situation is so absurd it feels like a comic. This is real life…? Just tell me I’m dreaming…”
“Please, noㅠ What on earth changed the CEO?”
Some fans also dug up post-resignation reviews left on JOBPlan by employees who had been laid off from Flux, and that only made them more unsettled. Most of the reviews said something like this:
The fans worriedly debated whether they should join hands and pressure the company together, or wait a little longer, see how things developed, and then unleash hell afterward.
Then, after a chalkboard-doodle spoiler was posted on Jjokbit’s official SNS account, opinion shifted a little more toward “let’s wait and see.” At the very least, it didn’t seem to belong to the same category as Jumping Boys’ stray-dog concept.
And then today. Without warning, the first teaser dropped!
The teaser was normal! It was actually normal!
They had braced themselves for some bizarre cat-stray concept this time, too, but their fear had been unnecessary. In fact, it was rather artistic.
It’s still only a teaser, so we won’t know for sure until the full music video comes out…
Using the blue sky, blue school blazers and ties, and blue chalk to match the group’s name and create a refreshing color palette had been a great choice.
In particular, Neoul’s black hair and black eyes matched the blue clothing perfectly, like they had been made for each other.
The fans breathed a massive sigh of relief and enjoyed the moment. Neoul’s home master was no exception.
Neoul would probably suit an energy drink commercial too.
She had been tense, wondering what sort of garbage Kim Woohwan would bring in…
“It’s good! Really good!”
Thanks to the teaser turning out far better than expected, Neoul’s home master could only watch it over and over in satisfaction, eagerly waiting for the next teaser with bright anticipation.
That the members had fought desperately to achieve this quality, and that Neoul had even staked his settlement money on a bet with the CEO… that was something the fans could never know, and should never know.