National Trash
The celebrity had done something that thoroughly deserved a roasting, yet the whole thing got buried with surprisingly little uproar. Was that a good thing? It's not even like it was a borderline case, either.
Plenty of celebrities had botched things on live broadcasts, but Woo Jun-seo was the only one who'd ever snapped at his own fans, snarling at them to tell him exactly what they'd ever done for him. The most stomach-turning part was that instead of looking for his own shortcomings as the reason the drama's ratings had slipped, he'd decided his fans simply weren't trying hard enough.
He deserved every curse the world had to offer, and then some — but unfortunately for justice, all eyes were suddenly on Yoo Seul-ho's fans, and the vitriol aimed at Woo Jun-seo evaporated in an instant.
"Ugh, that's a solid ten years of my life gone right there."
"Thank goodness. I was seriously agonizing over whether we'd have to post an apology."
Woo Jun-seo's agency and his manager both breathed a sigh of relief that things had blown over quietly, all thanks to Yoo Seul-ho. But Woo Jun-seo was a different story.
These bastards… they're insulting me twice over?
Honestly, celebrities, fans — all of it left a sour taste in his mouth. To douse the fire boiling in his gut, he gulped down glass after glass of cold water.
When the agency's president told him to at least call Yoo Seul-ho and thank him, and while he was at it, offer a light apology for mentioning him during the live broadcast — a string of meaningless nonsense — Woo Jun-seo ignored it completely.
Me? Apologize? If anything, I'm the one owed an apology. Woo Jun-seo genuinely believed that.
His agency's president had no idea how much anguish the man had suffered lately because of Yoo Seul-ho. Just look at him — a nobody supporting actor strutting around like he outranked the lead.
I distinctly told him not to get ahead of himself….
Woo Jun-seo cast his mind back to the moment he'd first met Yoo Seul-ho. No — further back, to when Park Sang-in had first pitched him the idea of taking Seul-ho on as their next plaything.
He definitely said the guy would be an easy mark.
Woo Jun-seo had always believed he was a born predator. Where there were strong, there were weak — that was simply how the world worked. In an industry where image management was life itself, there came moments when smiling pleasantly at people day in and day out made him want to claw his own skin off. That was when he absolutely needed a weakling to torment. This time, he'd assumed, it would be Yoo Seul-ho.
A pampered little prince, helpless on his own, fragile as spun glass.
With rumors like that circulating, it would have been abnormal not to be intrigued. Just how pathetic did a man have to be to live his life getting slapped around by his own manager? Woo Jun-seo had been dying to find out.
Of course, even while dismissing him as an easy target, he hadn't forgotten that Yoo Tae-ho and Lee Seul-myeong stood behind Yoo Seul-ho. With backing that solid, he couldn't grind the guy down as savagely as he had his last toy.
It'd be a real problem if my name ended up on his will.
And so he'd promised himself he'd torment Yoo Seul-ho only in moderation. He was old enough to know better, anyway — physical violence was out of the question. He'd never stooped to that.
PD Jang had balked at the idea of casting Seul-ho, and only after Woo Jun-seo pestered him endlessly did the meeting finally come together. On the day he was set to meet Yoo Seul-ho for the first time, Woo Jun-seo had pictured a terrified animal cub creeping out to face him.
But the Yoo Seul-ho who actually stood before him was….
"Hello, Senior Yoo Seul-ho. I'm Woo Jun-seo. It's a pleasure to meet you."
"Yes, hello."
The moment he looked into the man's eyes, Woo Jun-seo faltered.
…?
Oh, he was definitely still an animal cub. But something about him was… off.
Even as his instincts whispered a warning, Woo Jun-seo chose to laugh it off. Perhaps it was wounded pride that stopped him from simply trusting his gut and playing nice.
But his instincts had been right all along.
From the day they first met to this very moment, Yoo Seul-ho had never once moved the way Woo Jun-seo wanted.
A guy who wouldn't have gotten a shred of this attention without me.
And yet there Seul-ho was, overstepping again and again without the faintest sense of his place. It had grated on him plenty of times, but every time it did, recalling one magic sentence — he's a supporting actor, and I'm the star — cured it in seconds.
This time, though, even that magic sentence had no effect.
Ha.
Come to think of it, Park Sang-in was the real problem here. Fine — Woo Jun-seo himself had never met Yoo Seul-ho in person, so relying on hearsay was understandable. But hadn't that bastard met him face to face and still recommended him to Woo Jun-seo?
It was pathetic, the way Park Sang-in kept hovering around him trying to curry favor — and yet Woo Jun-seo had judged him useful enough to leave alone. That made him the fool.
Ugh, I'm pissed.
His heart, unable to contain the fury, thudded hard against his ribs. The manager and the agency president watched Woo Jun-seo anxiously, a man who looked for all the world like a volcano barely holding itself together, and threw themselves into soothing him before he could erupt.
In the meantime, Episode 6 aired, and one piece of good news arrived on Woo Jun-seo's doorstep. Who knew whether yesterday's shitshow had actually accomplished anything, but the ratings had jumped sharply from Episode 5. Thanks to that, the pivotal scene in Episode 6 drew enormous attention.
Unfortunately for Woo Jun-seo, the scene everyone was talking about was….
"We're not strangers, are we? We're family!"
Once again, Yoo Seul-ho was the center of everything.
In Episode 6 of You and My Space, the male lead defied his brother for the very first time. Following the female lead's advice, he had been trying to be honest with his own feelings — and all the while, he'd braced himself, thinking, the moment I blow up, hyung will fly into just as much of a rage.
But against all expectation, his brother didn't get angry.
"……How can you do this to me?"
Instead, his brother only stared back at him with a wounded face, hollow and lost. When the male lead faltered at the sight, Kang Min-woo spat out his words in a rush, as if he'd been waiting for exactly this.
"You've got nobody but me. And I've got nobody but you. We're each other's only family."
"……."
"And you turn on your own family over one woman? You really…."
He was the one who had thrown every punch, yet Kang Min-woo carried himself like the wounded party.
"We're not strangers! We're family! Who treats family like this?"
"No, I—"
"If we were strangers we'd have gone our separate ways ages ago. We're both adults — why do we even live together? Because we're family! So when things get hard, you suck it up and endure. That's what family does. I've swallowed plenty from you, believe me. And this is how you repay me? Isn't this just too much?"
It was a barrage of words that stopped your breath the instant you heard them. Violence, sanctified within the fence of family — the very words that had tortured domestic abuse victims for decades, now pouring out as drama dialogue.
The male lead, forced to listen, was lost.
Did I really go too far? The one at fault was his brother, so why did it feel like he was the one who'd done something wrong?
Confused and wavering, he squeezed his eyes shut and shouted.
"Then what about you, hyung?! Don't you think everything you've ever done to me is too much?!"
The words came pouring out of him with a face set hard, as if to declare he would never again be jerked around by his brother. But for all the steel in his resolve, the voice that carried it trembled forlornly, like a bare branch in winter. Whether from years of banked-up resentment or from fear of his brother, some unknowable tangle of emotions shook him to his core.
Kang Min-woo answered with a sorrowful expression.
"……You're right. I did, didn't I."
His lips moved. For a moment he seemed to be weighing what to say, mouth pressed shut — then he let out a short sigh. He had held that image the whole time: drooping brows, hollow eyes, a mouth turned down at the corners. And then, in a single breath….
"So? What about it?"
The mask snapped off. His face now said, plain as day, that he was sick to death of this whole tug-of-war.
The younger brother, blindsided by the sudden transformation, went mute on the spot. And while he stood there stammering, Kang Min-woo waved a hand as if swatting away flies.
"Ugh, fuck's sake. Forget it. I won't touch your girl. She's gross and she's sneaky — honestly. You think I don't know there's nobody better out there for you? I won't lay a finger on her. Happy now? Problem solved?"
With that carelessly tossed-off line, he trudged into his room as though exhausted. Left alone in the living room without warning, the male lead stood frozen for a long, long while. His expression had gone blank. It looked as though his mind had simply fled his body under the weight of too great a shock.
I… what have I been….
Everything the male lead had endured over the past six years — gritting his teeth through his brother's violence, clawing his way into the architecture department through sheer study — had all had a reason. He'd carried an ambition: one day, he would build with his own two hands the house his family would live in. What his parents had repeated like a mantra while they lived was, let's all live cozily together, just us, in our own home.
For Koreans, a house carried exactly that kind of meaning. It wasn't simply a building or a plot of land — it was a word for the future, for how securely your family could live out its days. And because his parents had died without ever holding that future, he'd been desperate to achieve their goal in their stead.
For that, he'd needed money. He'd needed to be able to build a house. And last of all, he'd needed family. That was why the male lead had worked part-time jobs from a young age, studied himself raw to get into the architecture department, and finally — endured his brother's fists while living under the same roof. Because if he just kept living like that, someday, he believed, his parents might forgive him.
All this time… what have I been doing?
The camera, cradling his trembling pupils in close-up, captured his grief along with them. And then the male lead set his jaw and walked out to reclaim his own life — and the first step of that journey was meeting the female lead.
The story raced onward from there, but viewers couldn't tear themselves away from the earlier scene. The chilling realism of Kang Min-woo's dialogue in particular raised goosebumps across the audience.
The response dwarfed even the smiling performance that had first put Yoo Seul-ho on people's radar back in Episode 1. That hadn't exactly been a scene built to showcase acting chops either, but the brutal authenticity of the lines kept his name bouncing endlessly in and out of everyone's mouths.
By now, the comments had stopped being simple praise about good acting and were overflowing with people outright calling him trash. He'd been disliked at first for acting badly — and now he was disliked for acting too well.
National Trash.
Yoo Seul-ho had earned the title reserved only for the greatest villain actors — and a few days later, something like this happened to him.
SPLAT!
"Go die, you son of a bitch!"
Yoo Seul-ho ran a hand over his head, which had gone warm with some unidentifiable liquid.
What lay in his palm was a crushed eggshell.