The Price of Exposure
28
The internet was a space where anonymous strangers could move freely. That meant people who were just as free with their fingers behind the screen were everywhere, too.
Anyone who had ever dug even a little into K-pop had probably come across malicious posts tearing down the idols they liked.
In the end, being loved by everyone was impossible, even if Jesus himself came down. No place was an exception.
Anonymous 202N.07.12 | Views: 705
202N.07.12 | Views: 84,511
The selection criteria were groups that had been mentioned a lot on forums lately and were setting their own best first-week album sales records. I left out the already huge top-tier boy groups, so don’t ask why they aren’t here.
< Debut order >
The Road > Eternal Seven > Zero One ≒ DTD
Zero One debuted two days earlier.
< SNS subscriber ranking >
NewTube: Eternal Seven > DTD > Zero One > The Road
Tweety: Eternal Seven > Zero One > The Road > DTD
Instaglam: Eternal Seven > The Road > Zero One > DTD
< Highest first-week album sales, ever >
- Eternal Seven 332,5**
- The Road 313,8**
- DTD 302,6**
- Zero One 301,8**
Honestly, you have to admit they’re getting a lot of new listeners lately and growing popular. You can see fans all over the anonymous entertainment board, and even among middle and high school kids, they’re getting a reaction.
The next day, at Manager Do Sa-jin’s summons, the Zero One members gathered in the living room, each of them radiating a chill colder than anyone could have looked reasonable for. The dorm’s about to freeze to death, you bastards.
None of the members spoke. They were all obviously unhappy with the situation.
On the surface, of course, they looked fine. Lim Se-bin still wore his usual gentle smile, Cheon Sa-yoon had that bright, polished face on, Kyeon In-woo seemed bored, and Pyo Jae-ho looked like he wasn’t thinking about anything at all. Not a single one of them wore a cold expression, but it was obvious as day.
Go Young-in wasn’t pleased either, but what bothered him more was the atmosphere. Even Cheon Sa-yoon, who normally would have said something, stayed quiet.
"A survival show."
That was Go Young-in’s first line, spoken in place of the members who were trapped in silence. If he didn’t like it, what was he going to do? It had come eventually. Now that he thought about it, this did seem about right for the timing.
The manager, who had brought the members this somewhat abrupt news, wore the same timid expression as always today. For some reason, after yesterday, it was hard to trust him. Not that he had ever really trusted him to begin with.
[Clause 32 | A perfect idol must be skilled at managing expressions.]
Ha. Go Young-in tried to smile as naturally as he could. At least someone had to answer. If only these bastards would make their dislike obvious for once. They were truly, disgustingly vicious.
'WHO'S THE K'
It was a survival competition program scheduled to air on the cable network Knet. And it was Season 2.
Season 1 had featured only female idols, and even then it had been torn apart with vicious criticism. Since Season 1 had done well, everyone naturally expected a male idol version to follow.
In fact, during Season 1, a real fight had broken out live on air when one group stormed another group’s stage during a broadcast performance. The audience had to be evacuated, the police were called... it had been a complete disaster. Weren’t they disciplined in the end?
It was so intense he couldn’t forget it. Thanks to that, it had been huge for its notoriety as well.
But this time, there was an extra condition. Unlike Season 1, they’d gone and grouped idols together by similar performance levels and turned it into a contest of measuring acorns against one another.
The premise was simple, and precisely because of that, controversial. The slogan said it all.
"A war among stars to determine the most outstanding group among K-pop idols!"
People already argued enough when ranking contestants on audition programs, and now they wanted to rank already-debuted groups? Of course the bulk of the backlash was aimed at the station for pretending it had any authority to rank them at all.
Open differences in treatment according to ranking changes, and blatant differences in editing quality, were practically minor sins by comparison.
It was a sad state of affairs for a competitive society. Ranking trainees before debut hadn’t been enough, so now they were even ranking whole groups.
It was, quite literally, a competition. Groups competing, rankings being assigned, and a winner taking the throne. Honestly, it was a very common format.
Since the entire point was to determine the number one group, the winning group would be given the label "Top Idol," and that was one of the reasons Season 1 had been blasted so mercilessly.
That word, Top Idol, was extremely sensitive.
In an idol scene where people fought viciously every time they tried to decide which group was the biggest, which one was truly top, and who deserved the crown, the broadcast station had simply declared itself the authority and labeled the winner top on its own show. Of course people would lose their minds.
It started with: who the hell were they to hand out the title of top to anyone? And from there, the reaction was all too easy to imagine.
On top of that, because the station aired music shows and all sorts of idol-related content, it had gleefully used the term Top Idol for every winner of every program, and it had driven fans absolutely insane.
That was also screwing over the winning group. If their next album tanked, everyone knew exactly where the ridicule would land.
How many teams were in this thing again?
Whatever else happened, he remembered clearly that it had swept up a mountain of bad press.
And no wonder. The broadcast concept itself was provocative, and it was a program produced directly by Knet, a station famous for being called both "the makjang drama of drama-land" and "the guilty pleasure of idol broadcasting."
Spiteful editing was a given, and Knet was the kind of station that would rather be hated than ignored, to the point of leaving behind the legendary insane saying: "Viewership rises in proportion to hate."
Shit, are they some kind of perverts?
He even knew they had been hit with warnings from the Korea Communications Standards Commission more than once for writing subtitles like lunatics and deliberately stirring up inflammatory conflicts.
And still, they never gave up.
According to Manager Do Sa-jin, the main PD producing this show was strongly insisting on having Zero One appear.
Strongly insisting on it meant there was something he wanted, because otherwise that kind of line was just empty politeness. It was probably for the same reason as last time.
Wasn’t there a group that had been positioned as a rival? What was their name... something like PT. He had the impression the people they’d been booked against before had been chosen because someone wanted to make them fight.
Believe it or not, the original Zero One had been known to the public as a quiet, well-mannered group. Maybe it was a tragedy born from everyone hiding their true nature.
Anyway, “well-mannered” was the generous version. The harsher version was that they were a little too bland to use for variety shows.
The reason he was bringing that up was simple: the PD who had cast Zero One purely for the sake of stirring up attention, ignoring that public image entirely, had just struck jackpot in a way even he probably never expected.
He must not even have known whether there was a hidden personality there at all. It was the kind of thing that looked like catching a mouse while backing over a cow.
"When does filming start?"
"The lineup’s revealed tomorrow, and filming starts right away next week."
What the hell. That was fast. If the lineup was coming out tomorrow, this was basically a notice, not an offer. When even Go Young-in shut up, Manager Do Sa-jin quickly wiped the sweat off his face and finished speaking. Whatever he was thinking, he had definitely sensed from instinct that the mood was bad.
"The PD said he absolutely had to cast Zero One. Originally, since the show is so controversial, we were thinking of keeping you off it, but that’s how it turned out. At least the buzz should be massive."
Sure... but the problem was that the show’s buzz would also be the starting point for one of the groups they’d be forced to fight, and for Zero One’s glamorous little personality to start spilling out one piece at a time.
Yes, it was a jackpot in more ways than one. It would be the starting point of every negative image. Compared to the schedules they’d done so far, this one was on a completely different scale.
You idiots. If you’re going to keep hiding your personalities, then keep hiding them properly... no, wait. They couldn’t hide it. Damn it. This time, he had to stop these bastards somehow.
* * *
Anonymous 202N.07.16 | Views: 73,986
Knet’s August 26 premiere of WHO’S THE K has finally revealed its final 6-team lineup.
Season 2, and Season 1 was that infamous, messy Top of the Queen...
It featured groups that ended up in actual fistfights on live broadcast after grabbing each other by the hair, groups that exposed each other’s pasts and traded stories about all the delinquent crap they used to do when they were minors, and other things... etc.
- The Road
- Eternal Seven
- XINX
- Triple Shot
- Zero One
- DTD
According to Knet staff, the selection criteria for this competition program were male idols with strong skills who either hadn’t been debuted for long and were still relatively unknown, or lacked mainstream appeal.
4th year: The Road, Eternal Seven
3rd year: XINX
2nd year: Triple Shot, Zero One, DTD
They say this lineup is almost identical to what fans had been predicting, except for one or two groups.
+) I fixed the order by debut date, so stop fighting...
[ By the time the final broadcast of Who’s the K ended without major controversy ]
"……."
Go Young-in, who had been writing a new goal in his memo app, stared at the sentence he’d just typed, then silently hit backspace and added one more adjective.
[ Finish filming Who’s the K’s entire run without any major controversy ]
And just like that, Zero One’s name ended up in the final lineup for WHO'S THE K. Fuck.