The Conditions for Becoming a Kind Idol Leader - Episode 55
Watching Go Young-in’s back grow smaller in the distance, Jeong Hae suddenly brought up the subject with a worried look.
"How’s Go Young-in doing?"
Kyeon In-woo, who had also been glowering at the back of Go Young-in’s head, turned toward him at the question. He had no way of knowing what had happened, so the question came out of nowhere.
Especially since they’d just come back from hearing, through their manager, what had happened to that insane stalker. Apparently the woman had long suffered from a mental illness, and under the medical treatment custody law, she’d been locked up in a psychiatric hospital instead of prison.
It was such a shitty conclusion that he felt sick just thinking about it. The bastard probably thought Young-in was being overprotective again for no reason.
"What about him?"
"Nothing. He just looked tired, I guess?"
"Oh. Is that so."
Realizing it was just a casual poke, Kyeon In-woo immediately lost interest and answered flatly.
From the start, he and Jeong Hae didn’t actually talk all that much, not as much as Go Young-in seemed to think they did.
That Go Young bastard. He really does have a knack for being wrong about this kind of thing.
Since there was no point in correcting the misunderstanding, Kyeon In-woo didn’t bother bringing it up either.
Maybe because his answer had been too curt, Jeong Hae kept pestering him.
"I just feel bad, that’s all, because the internet’s reacting weirdly too. I mean, it wasn’t my intention or anything. I haven’t been on a broadcast in a while, so I guess I was just genuinely happy to see you guys again. I didn’t mean anything by it."
"What reactions?"
"…Huh? You don’t know?"
"No."
"I said I was glad to see you guys after so long, and I guess some people took that the wrong way. …They’re trashing you guys."
"I don’t give a shit. Just ignore the weird ones."
Jeong Hae stared at Kyeon In-woo, dumbfounded.
"You really couldn’t care less, huh."
Kyeon In-woo nodded instead of answering. He wasn’t the sort of person who held on to every word said by people who had nothing to do with him.
"Haha... still, you know. I just wondered if I was hurting your image because of me and all that……."
Setting aside everything else, it wasn’t even an interesting story. That was partly because Kyeon In-woo himself had never cared about that sort of thing to begin with.
"People don’t exactly look kindly on idols being rude, either……."
"Hey, is that really something you need to bring up right now?"
Unable to listen any longer, Kyeon In-woo cut him off, his boredom plain in his voice.
"Huh?"
"So what am I supposed to do about it? If you felt that bad, you should’ve kept your mouth shut in the first place. What changes just because you tell me? I got cursed at either way. If you want to say something, go tell Go Young-in instead. He gives a shit about that stuff way more."
"No, no, I’m not asking you to do anything. I just meant I was worried Go Young-in might see it and have a hard time."
Out of habit, Kyeon In-woo lifted a hand toward the back of his neck, then stopped. He asked back.
"Young? Him?"
"He didn’t tell you? Um... I thought he had, of course. He used to contact me a lot whenever he was having a hard time."
"Contact you? Him?"
Contact me, my ass. That was the first he’d heard of it. Kyeon In-woo frowned deeply and fell into thought. So Jeong Hae had been in touch with him in ways even he wasn’t.
"What. He usually doesn’t talk about himself much, either. I only found out when I contacted him recently."
"…Then what the hell. Stop beating around the bush and just say it. It’s driving me crazy. Why is everyone around me a bunch of idiots who communicate however the hell they want?"
"Yeah... when we were in high school, too... you know? I wondered if Go Young-in pretending not to know me and acting like he didn’t see me was maybe an extension of that. It’s not something he’d want to bring back up, and getting dragged for it just fits the pattern from before."
"……."
"Our broadcast got a lot of attention in a lot of different ways, and a few people reached out, so I started worrying."
"Ha……."
"Honestly, there’s no reason it’d be a good thing to run into each other, right? If you meet by accident, Go Young-in might……."
"Hey, enough. Stop. This has been fucking boring since a while ago."
Kyeon In-woo lowered his voice, unable to hide how unpleasant he felt, but Jeong Hae stubbornly kept going.
"Anyway, if possible, try to make sure it doesn’t get back to Go Young-in."
Kyeon In-woo stood there in silence for a long while, saying nothing.
He’d snapped at him and told him to stop, and yet when there was no reaction at all, Jeong Hae began to sense something odd. He watched Kyeon In-woo’s face, then cautiously spoke again.
"You two... didn’t fight, did you?"
"What kind of brain-dead fucking thought would even get you to say something like that?"
It already annoyed him to talk about old business when the people involved weren’t even there, and now Jeong Hae was saying things that kept poking at his nerves.
Beyond that, Kyeon In-woo was already irritated that the matter of Go Young-in collapsing had been allowed to slide into a half-baked non-resolution.
Knowing Go Young-in’s habits, it was obvious he’d break down if they pushed him all at once, so Kyeon In-woo had let himself be dragged along by that ridiculous excuse, but that didn’t mean he’d truly accepted it.
He simply wasn’t thoughtless enough to keep pressing a sick man until he cracked. And for all that, there had been something admirable about Go Young-in trying to make excuses and say anything at all, so he’d left it alone.
Then, in that situation, some bastard who had no idea what had happened recently had to open his mouth and say something like that, and there was no way his answer was going to come out nice.
Goddamn it. I’d just barely forgotten about it.
"No, it’s just that you act like you don’t know each other at all even though you’re in the same group. Don’t you guys not talk much?"
Under ordinary circumstances, Kyeon In-woo would’ve just cursed and ignored him, but he hesitated and clicked his tongue inwardly. It wasn’t wrong, so he had nothing to say.
Jeong Hae seemed to read the silence for what it was, because he gave an awkward laugh. "Haha……."
The second round of the competition was divided into a total of two rounds.
In the first round, two groups were paired up into one team. Then, within that setup, they split again into vocal, dance, and rap positions and competed against the opposing team by position. In other words, it was team versus team.
For the second round, they returned to their own groups and, without any restrictions, simply had to show off their own songs, so there was nothing especially unusual there.
This feels like I’m about to witness the “group project disaster” edition. That was Go Young-in’s first thought the moment he saw the word team.
At the same time, he also felt a little relieved, thinking that whether it was Zero One and one other team or another team and one other, wasn’t it all basically the same? Whatever it was, wasn’t it still better than dealing with these guys?
That was when it came to cooperation alone, completely separate from skill.
"To truly become a group member with real talent, you have to be able to show excellent ability even in collaborations with other groups. In the first round, the key is how high a quality you can pull out of the stage when you’re working with people you’re not used to and have never matched with before!"
The MC’s explanation felt strangely unfamiliar to him.
Even though Zero One’s positions had been officially decided, they had never attached much meaning to them, so hearing it laid out like this felt new somehow.
"In other words, the first-round stage of the second competition is a team battle in which two groups are combined into one team and compete against another team! But if we split the groups into pairs like that, one group will be left over!"
The MC held the cue sheet upright and pointed at Zero One.
"So one of the privileges the first-place team will get this time is!"
"The right to choose whichever of the two teams you want! If possible, it’s best to join the team with the higher chance of winning when you’re paired together, right?"
Whether you looked at skill or personal preference, the group-only view made either side feel about the same.
They’d split up the groups that were strong in dance and performance, and then split up similarly themed teams as well, so the balance seemed fair enough.
And since the PD already looked like someone who’d drag them into malicious editing no matter what, the chance of avoiding the mess entirely had already sailed.
If they were going to edit it to make it look bad no matter what they did, it would be better to minimize the chances of clashing as much as possible... The problem was that whether they ended up on the same team or on different teams, it didn’t feel like anything would go smoothly.
Maybe they should just give up on getting through this without controversy... Should he change his goal now? No. As long as it didn’t make the news—no, entertainment news couldn’t be helped, but if it didn’t make the society section, then it wasn’t that big a controversy, right?
Let’s think about priorities first. Malicious editing was bound to show itself eventually, one way or another. Even if they got hated the same way, getting hated because of bad editing could at least be explained someday.
If they got hated because they actually caused a real incident, then explanations and all that would be useless.
An incident... come to think of it, wasn’t that exactly how things started to go bad between them and DTD in the previous round?
Wasn’t it something like plagiarism?
Shit.
Go Young-in stole a sidelong glance at Pyo Jae-ho, who was seated beside him.
Pyo Jae-ho sat there so naturally it looked as if the throne had always belonged to him, and he seemed to be staring down at the stage without really listening to a word the MC was saying.
Pyo Jae-ho... why did everything involving him somehow end up tied to plagiarism issues? Was it because they shared the surname Pyo? Apparently having a horrible personality wasn’t enough on its own.
No, no... as much as he personally disliked him, he should look at this objectively. It could all just be a coincidence stacked on top of coincidence.
And it didn’t seem like Pyo Jae-ho would have had any particular motive. This was bad. For all that they were in the same group, he was starting to side with him for some reason.
Who had DTD’s composing member been? Park Ha-un, maybe? There had definitely been some disaster where Zero One ended up as the opposing team to DTD, but somehow the song from the team DTD was in and the song from the team Zero One was in turned out to be nearly identical.
The second round had no interim evaluation, and the PD and staff who checked the prerecorded tracks in advance had stayed quiet, saying it would make for good television.
At the time, Zero One’s manager would have still been their former manager, so there was no way the matter had been handled properly.
The atmosphere during rehearsal had probably already been a total mess.
The chosen songs and the details were obviously different, but the overall flow, the genre, the instruments used, and even the arrangement of certain measures overlapped... and the concept did too......
He couldn’t remember exactly how things had been settled back then, but one thing was certain: the real plagiarism scandal hadn’t broken out in this broadcast. It would come later.
What happened here would probably end up being one of the anecdotes that gave that later plagiarism controversy more credibility.
So this is what it comes down to.
Would they become the team that was paired with Triple Shot, forced to drag along the innocent teammates they’d have to beat the DTD team, while being accused of even stealing the other team’s song out of some viciously shameless personality?
Or would they become the rival team paired with DTD, burning with ruthless determination to crush the hard-working opposing team no matter what?
Fuck it... I’ll take the latter.