Chapter 76
The non-negotiation, if it could even be called that, collapsed. Son Jeong-hoon’s agency cut off contact with a message that they were very sorry to hear it, then immediately started churning out articles full of righteous grievance, even though not a single thing had happened on this side afterward.
It looked like they were trying to seize the narrative before it settled, since there were probably more people who hadn’t watched the broadcast than people who had.
At first, once the official articles began to appear, people split over whether this had really been a slip of the tongue or not. And that was despite the fact that Jeong-hoon had said it himself. If you hadn’t seen the livestream, you could at least understand the doubt, but even some of the people who had watched it were still arguing.
By and large, public reaction to the whole affair fell into four camps. There were those who supported the victim, Go Young-in, no matter the details; those who took Jeong-hoon’s side and insisted it might truly have been a verbal blunder; those who started suspecting that Go Young-in must have done something wrong, because otherwise there was no way someone could slander him so viciously; and, finally, the miracle-workers who decided both men were at fault and therefore equally guilty.
The majority of opinion still leaned in Go Young-in’s favor, but there was no hard evidence yet beyond the perpetrator’s not-quite-confession, so confusion spread in every direction.
The moment things began to turn decisively against Jeong-hoon’s side was when an anonymous user on an online community board posted an exposé claiming to be a classmate of Go Young-in and Jeong-hoon.
“I’m Ahn Tae-yeon, and I went to school with Go Young-in and Son Jeong-hoon. I’m exposing Son Jeong-hoon’s true nature.”
According to the post, the writer laid out the situation in detail, but there was still no proof that Jeong-hoon had personally pulled strings behind the scenes.
What it did include, however, were repeated signs of Jeong-hoon’s suspicious behavior: testimonies from classmates saying he had recently told them not to stay in contact with Go Young-in, plus messages showing that he had paid another classmate to ask the original poster about the meeting between Go Young-in and the person who wrote the post.
The thing read less like fabrication and more like the guilt of a bystander spilling through every line, so vividly that people started saying if this was fake, the writer should major in psychology.
At the same time, the post dragged Kyeon In-woo into it as another classmate, with people asking whether he wasn’t actually the same kind of abuser as Jeong-hoon and whether it wasn’t suspicious that, as a friend, he must have known something and pretended not to.
But once testimonies began to surface from classmates who said Kyeon In-woo had helped Go Young-in, the suspicions about him faded almost immediately.
Even with the situation turning against them, Deluxe Music refused to admit to school violence so easily. Using the fact that Jeong-hoon’s relationships with his peers had generally seemed good, they pushed the line that he had been a poor, kind class president who had merely been used by the bullies in his grade.
Just as they were starting to spin a pity narrative around Jeong-hoon, Yoo In-hyeok—Triple Shot’s former leader, and the man who had already stepped down from the program after causing a scandal—appeared again.
That bastard Jeong-hoon is just a pathetic little loser, okay? You know what’s the first thing he does when he wakes up? He searches Go Young-in on the internet and writes hate comments. Holy shit, it’s fucking hilarious. For all I know, he might even have shown the comments he wrote himself. That asshole would absolutely do that.
"@do.jjin_gae.jjin You’re saying I was the one who trashed Go Young-in too? Fair enough. But what the hell am I supposed to do if he’s so damn frustrating? I said it because I was genuinely worried, all right? Thanks to that, I got kicked off a boring-ass broadcast, so I’m pretty damn happy about it. Judge for yourself or don’t. I don’t care.
"Jeong-hoon, you bastard, you’re getting your ass kicked right now. You’d better keep a close eye on your nose bridge. I’d hate for that face you worked so hard to rebuild to get wrecked, haha. Hey, if you know who he was copying, you’d pass out. Everybody who needs to know already knows our CEO’s a thug, right? He’s not about to go easy on him just because he’s his nephew. (…) Sounds like someone’s pounding on the door, so I guess the agency came to drag me away. I’d better go. If I’m gone for a while, assume we all got our heads cracked open together, lol.
"When Go Young-in learned about it later, even he thought In-hyeok was more insane than anyone reasonably imaginable. But then again, weren’t the rest of them just different degrees of the same sickness?
In-hyeok’s behavior sent shock waves through Triple Shot’s fandom as well.
The fanbase basically became a war zone between In-hyeok’s fans and Jeong-hoon’s fans. Most of Triple Shot’s fandom was already made up of Jeong-hoon supporters, and the next-largest share belonged to the leader himself, In-hyeok.
The few fans of the other members had already been driven off, exhausted by the mess, or had chosen to pretend they saw nothing and knew nothing at all.
Some of In-hyeok’s own fans, after getting properly bitter over this, turned into vicious solo stans. Others, shocked by the content but disappointed by how recklessly he’d gone off the rails, simply washed their hands of him and left.
Whatever else changed, one thing did not: Triple Shot’s fandom was on the verge of total collapse.
And the people watching the whole thing burn weren’t just the fans and the viewers.
Some anonymous insider, already furious over the PD and the broadcaster’s abuse of power, saw the growing attention around the school violence scandal and thought the moment had come. They fired off yet another article.
Just as people had already started talking about the broadcast’s unacceptable boundaries, the manipulation and hospitality scandals exploded too, and the station itself began to burn.
Seeing public opinion swing more and more against him, Jeong-hoon chose to run.
Hello, this is Jeong-hoon. I’m sorry to the fans who believed in me and voted for me, and to everyone I disappointed.
Right before the final stage, Jeong-hoon wrote an apology and then vanished. Vanished in the literal sense.
Two members of a single team had now dropped out. The moment Jeong-hoon left, he also deleted every social media account he had, changed his phone number, and disappeared completely. The messenger name he had used to keep pestering Go Young-in throughout the entire filming period had been changed to (Unknown), which made Kyeon In-woo furious enough to say that if the bastard showed his face even once, he’d kill him.
Deluxe Music’s official explanation for Jeong-hoon’s disappearance was to pretend nothing was wrong and insist it was only a temporary rest period for health reasons.
That, naturally, made everything noisy again. The line had already been crossed long ago between Jeong-hoon’s fans and Go Young-in’s fans; there was no bridge left to come back over.
Because Jeong-hoon had so irresponsibly run away, filming for the final episode was pushed back too.
Once the shoot was delayed, Go Young-in also went to the company’s personal psychologist for counseling, but as expected, there wasn’t much progress.
Part of it was that the Status Window restrictions made the sessions difficult to carry out properly, and part of it was that he had already, in a previous timeline, gone to the hospital of his own accord in order to recover his memories and come away with nothing to show for it.
It wasn’t as though the source of his mental strain could be removed, either.
Kang Ba-da and Manager Kwon Je-won kept urging him to keep going, but Go Young-in refused on the grounds that he was busy for now.
Meanwhile, the PD of Who’s the K received a notice to appear before the Broadcast and Communications Standards Commission.
He was already a producer who had been warned more than once. Appealing with promises to prevent any repeat had long since stopped working. It was obvious this wasn’t going to end with a simple demerit.
The chief producer, who had overall responsibility for the broadcast, and Knet’s station side decided to throw the PD under the bus first in hopes of containing the bribery-and-hospitality scandal. As the one in charge of the program, the chief producer claimed he felt responsible for not carrying out his duties properly, while also drawing a firm line and insisting that this was truly something he knew nothing about.
Of course, that didn’t mean they could dodge every accusation forever.
There had already been far too many programs in the station’s history that had been warned for one thing or another.
In truth, there were so many problems that had exploded besides Jeong-hoon’s that the show could barely have kept going. And yet it couldn’t simply be canceled outright.
So Knet, perhaps for the first and last time in an idol survival program, delivered a finish so outrageous that no one had ever seen anything like it before.
In other words: The winner has been decided, but the true first place belongs to all of you who participated in this program. That kind of ending.
Exactly that.
Knet said the voting process had been called into question, so they couldn’t keep using the results as they stood. They reset every vote and ranked the contestants only by the votes cast in the final episode broadcast. That was how they ended the final broadcast of a competition program whose entire purpose was to determine a single winner.
Or, more precisely, it was the PD, driven mad by being used and discarded the moment he was no longer useful, who committed this sudden act of sabotage and decided they should all go down together. Even a cut loose PD was still a PD. Inside the broadcast, he was still the one holding the knife—unless you were some top star so famous that even booking them was difficult.
Then what had all the suffering been for? What about the comeback show promised as the winner’s reward back when the program first started? Did it make any sense to wipe out every vote that had happened so far just because the vote itself had become a problem?
By the time the final episode began, most viewers had been cursing at the show for shamelessly continuing on as if nothing had happened. But after watching it, they were all too stunned to do anything except say they had never seen a broadcast like this in their lives.
They had made the contestants compete against each other for rankings, made viewers vote, and then, at the very end, not only invalidated everything but declared that “we are all first place” just because the final vote was all they were willing to count?
Once the nonsense reached that level, it was guilty. No— it really was guilty. Wasn’t this, by any definition, fraud?
Who’s the K ended with the first truly catastrophic anticlimax in its field, failing to determine a proper winner and finishing in a way that completely betrayed the premise of a competition program.
Of course every fandom rose up in revolt. Truck protests and mass-email campaigns aimed at the broadcaster and the agency never seemed to stop. In the end, Knet had to write another apology.
And from then on, whenever trolls came looking for trouble in comment sections, one of the favorite bait questions became: Should we really call Zero One the true winner of Who’s the K?
The Broadcast and Communications Standards Commission handed down disciplinary action against Knet’s Who’s the K for causing controversy.
As a severe sanction that fell within legal penalties, the chief producer, who had been the program’s top decision-maker, was issued a formal warning and written censure, while the director was placed on probation and fined.
Knet, having become a broadcaster that had violated the same review regulations on the same program more than three times, could not escape an additional surcharge.
With the rerun ban extending even to the episodes that had aired live, the incident that idol fans would continue to dredge up for years finally drew its closing line.