The Age of the Straws
The viewership ratings for episodes three and four of Space of You and Me came in dramatically higher than the previous week's.
It was a figure you could justifiably call a miracle for a show airing on a major network.
Just as quickly, the debate over Yoo Seul-ho's acting ability died down. Everyone had seen it with their own eyes during this week's broadcast — whether the man could act or not.
It was a performance that left no room for controversy anymore.
The production staff knew exactly what was happening. Once it became undeniable that Yoo Seul-ho could act, public interest was going to plummet. The drama had blown up because of him in the first place, after all.
And the investors knew it too. These were people who understood exactly how the industry turned its gears, and some of them actually floated a proposal: "Let's release the NG takes from Yoo Seul-ho's scenes at a fifty percent ratio."
The stroke of luck for Yoo Seul-ho was that Jang Min-gu, the PD at the helm of Space of You and Me, was no rookie. Any greenhorn fresh off his first credit might have gone along with it, but to a PD with real years under his belt, the suggestion was nothing short of absurd.
Is this person out of his mind?!
Sure, Jang PD had dug in his heels this time — refusing to do as he was told from above and insisting on shooting a script he'd written himself — which had earned the drama the dismissive label of a "filler project." But he was still a director with a respectable name in the industry. Only his volcanic fury — You want me to hand the world a failed work just to drum up a little attention?! — kept the NG footage from ever leaking.
We need something else to draw the eye.
They could no longer ride Yoo Seul-ho's acting to viral fame, so a new plan was in order.
What the production team pinned their hopes on was Woo Jun-seo's thick fanbase. He was a male actor wildly popular with women in their twenties and thirties, and a celebrity already famous for lavishing fans with service. It had gotten to the point where people sneered, "He might be the only actor alive who builds a fandom off a quasi-dating image — the man's not even an idol."
Through no design of their own, a supporting actor's heroics had thrust the drama into the spotlight. Now it was time for the lead to take the baton.
Nobody expected him to push the ratings even higher. The production team's position was simple: he's the lead, so the least he can do, in good conscience, is hold on to the attention the supporting cast dragged in!
That was where the trouble began.
There was not a single scene in this week's broadcast where the male lead's charm could be felt. And that wasn't for lack of screen time — Woo Jun-seo's part was bigger than Choi Ran's, the female lead.
Yoo Seul-ho, who had been the talk of the town, had merely gotten more footage than in episodes one and two; measured in total volume, his share was still thin, still supporting-actor territory.
There had been plenty of episodes where Woo Jun-seo could have radiated charm, yet somehow none of them landed. And for a romance drama, the leads' chemistry being MIA didn't help matters.
The drama itself has no problems, mind you.
The two leads looked good together on screen, the dialogue was decently witty, and the acting was rock-solid. Space of You and Me was dutifully delivering everything audiences expect from a youth drama.
But there was nothing to sink your teeth into beyond that. In a word: nothing to eat.
Even the behind-the-scenes videos — practically mandatory for any romance drama — were being given the cold shoulder. Warnings were circulating that if you truly wanted to immerse yourself, you must never, under any circumstances, watch the behind-the-scenes footage.
What nobody knew was that the production team had already combed through everything with the finest possible sieve, hand-picking only the rare moments where the two leads looked even remotely friendly.
The one who ended up basking in the spotlight via the behind-the-scenes footage, once again, was Yoo Seul-ho. In that footage alone, he had more screen time than either lead, and he came across as a genuinely charming young actor. The editing was so blatant that one incredulous comment asked whether Jang PD was Yoo Seul-ho's sugar daddy.
But what can you do.
The production staff were only human. It's human nature to want to show off the actor who's good to you.
Woo Jun-seo grew more high-strung by the day, to the point people joked he needed a rabies shot. Choi Ran was impeccably polite, but always behind a wall of glass — not exactly a "friendly" celebrity. And through it all, the one quietly buying the staff coffee, reading the room, and moving with uncanny attentiveness was Yoo Seul-ho.
Of course we're going to spo— no, forget all that, you absolute idiots, if we don't put Yoo Seul-ho in there won't BE any behind-the-scenes footage at all!!!!!
The production team was dying of frustration. With the two leads having effectively signed a pact to treat each other as invisible human beings outside of takes, they wanted to scream — what exactly do you expect us to do?
Anyway, to get to the point…
The "Woo Jun-seo magic" the production team had counted on had produced, by and large, nothing.
Sure enough, episode five, which aired the following week, dropped below the previous ratings. It wasn't a catastrophic exodus, but the wailing was automatic — if we're losing viewers from episode five, what happens by episode twelve?
If things kept trending this way, Space of You and Me would soon be best explained as "Oh, the one Yoo Seul-ho was in?"
While the production team sank into despondency, one man alone flew into a towering rage. That man was…
"You people have really gone too far, haven't you? Huh? And you call yourselves fans after this?"
Woo Jun-seo, who had failed to get his rabies shot in time.
Barely hours after episode five ended, he switched on a live broadcast and proceeded to raise absolute hell. He'd strong-armed his manager into staying behind, wandered into a private bar alone, and promptly caused this disaster.
"Why on earth aren't you watching my drama? Do you SEE these ratings?!"
His agency and his fans went into a full-blown panic, but there was not a soul nearby who could stop him on the spot. By the time his agency begged the platform to forcibly cut the stream, a full hour and forty-seven minutes had passed of Woo Jun-seo whining. That's longer than most movies in theaters these days.
And even that wasn't enough for him. The instant the broadcast was killed, he switched it right back on and began filming a sequel, entirely without permission.
"Everyone else's fans would never do this? Yoo Seul-ho's fans suck that guy dry with everything they've got — why don't you…"
Nobody wanted a Part Two, and within a few minutes it got cut off too.
The fallout from this live broadcast was sizable, to put it mildly.
When Woo Jun-seo sobered up the next day, his damage control consisted of a cutesy, aegyo-laced apology posted on his one-on-one fan messaging platform — the one only registered fans could access. The bulk of his fans let the whole thing slide at that, some even cooing apologies back, sorry for stressing him out over the ratings.
The general public, of course, reacted nothing like his fans. He'd built his career as a male celebrity with a wholesome image attracting romantic appeal, which made the fall-off in affection all the steeper.
Even amid all this, more people were curious about Yoo Seul-ho's fans than were busy cursing Woo Jun-seo. Because the fans who had abruptly become "those girls who suck Yoo Seul-ho dry" thanks to Woo Jun-seo had simply started introducing themselves as Straws.
"Straw" was hardly a pleasant-sounding word, but that didn't matter. These were the fans who had drunk water from underground rock aquifers and labored in the shadows back when the entire nation despised Yoo Seul-ho as a pariah. They had never been right in the head to begin with.
Now, cautiously reading the winds, they were emerging onto dry land.
So what if Seul-ho becomes a pariah again and we have to retreat? We do what we came to do. If I don't promote my own actor, who will? Seul-ho, you just act. Leave the marketing to us.
The Yoo Seul-ho fans — possessed by the spirit of Han Seok-bong's mother, that legendary paragon of devotion — churned out short-form clips and comments through the night, working hard to capture the public's attention.
As the fans playing around became content in themselves and people paid more and more attention, others began to grow anxious. Most of those others were Woo Jun-seo fans.
Truly vicious abuse was pouring into the anonymous contact form on his social media.
But the Yoo Seul-ho fans didn't stir an inch. If anything, they fired back only words designed to shake the other side's mental state.
They stood as solid as a fortress wall. They had no choice. These were people who had grown up swallowing every mockery thrown at them for years. People who had loved Yoo Seul-ho proudly while being told they only liked him because nobody better existed to like.
The tiny band of steel forged in the darkness had gone dark themselves, striding openly across dry land, and everyone marveled at their fearless march.
And so Woo Jun-seo's deranged live broadcast was buried under the Yoo Seul-ho fandom's lunatic advance.
It was, in every sense of the word, the age of Yoo Seul-ho.