The Power of Broadcasting
The Late Emperor was a remarkably open-minded man. Or rather, to be precise, he was a wise ruler who had noticed before anyone else that the Empire's ossified aristocratic society was slowly rotting from within. He believed that for the Empire to revive and reform, the old customs had to be smashed apart.
During the height of the war, I once sat down with him on the front lines and made a proposal. If we wanted capable people to flourish without being shackled by their station, we had to shatter the bloodline supremacy that underpinned it all.
After much deliberation, the Late Emperor took my suggestion and abolished the law that had enshrined marriage as an exclusively noble institution. The path was opened for nobles to legally marry commoners.
Of course, while the Empire still stood strong, the law was a dead letter — a scrap of paper and nothing more. The haughty nobles, with centuries of pedigree behind them, were never going to let commoner blood into their houses.
But now, after the Century War had laid the continent to waste, after the times had changed and a new generation had taken over, the story was entirely different.
The storied ducal houses that had once commanded the continent were, in the war's aftermath, bereft of their heads, drowning in debt, and struggling just to feed the people of their territories. Meanwhile, commoners who had shown a talent for wartime profiteering and postwar reconstruction had become nouveau riche, amassing fortunes that put most nobles to shame and dominating local commerce.
It was an age of chaos — a time when values themselves were being turned on their heads. This was precisely the moment when social mobility would explode, and that radical system the Late Emperor had put in place would finally shine.
Ambitious commoners, flush with wealth, wanted to climb the ladder of status. Declining nobles wanted spouses with deep enough pockets to restore their houses. A market where both sides' needs aligned perfectly.
And there was one more decisive reason I'd cheered when I conceived this whole Imperial Men and Women scheme.
No parents around to get in the way.
The horrors of the Century War had demanded a price from the Empire's greatest heroes and highest nobles. Noblesse oblige. They had not spared themselves for the glory of their houses. Some had fallen gloriously on the front lines after taking the head of a demon legion commander. Others had strapped bombs to their own bodies and charged a demon outpost, vanishing in the blast.
Thanks to that generation's selfless, life-disregarding devotion, the Empire had clawed its way back from the brink of annihilation.
The result? Their young children had inherited their titles far, far too early.
The average age of the Empire's high-ranking noble house heads was now a staggering twenty-eight. Compared to fifty-five before the war broke out, the number was absurdly low. It meant that wet-behind-the-ears twenty-somethings now occupied half of the Empire's leadership.
And for me, as a producer of entertainment, the implications were enormous. It meant that the mothers-in-law who'd splash a glass of water in your face screaming "I object to this marriage!" and the fathers-in-law who'd shove a cash envelope at you and bellow "Stay away from my son!" — they were all gone.
Young, hot-blooded house heads who could decide everything for themselves, with no parental opposition and no superiors to tiptoe around, appearing on a dating show in person? I could barely contain the pounding in my chest. Adrenaline surged through my veins.
God, I can't wait.
And so, after five years of scouring the continent and digging into backgrounds, I sent invitations to the ten men and women I'd carefully selected as contestants. Of course, they looked like lavish invitations on the surface. In practice, they were inescapable summons stamped with my Chancellor's seal.
The cast was assembled. The next problem was the host.
Hmm. I need at least one MC who can talk and fill the airtime.
I could host everything myself, of course, but that wouldn't look right. For variety entertainment to really work, you need an MC in the studio watching the contestants roll around inside the rules the production team set up, representing the audience's reactions. Just showing their dating footage wasn't enough. You needed a panelist with flavor — someone who'd throw a well-timed jab and then empathize in all the right places. That's how the fun actually comes alive.
And fortunately, this world had a profession that was absolutely unmatched at running their mouths. The bards — the ones who'd been wrapping the heroes' sagas in exaggerated song ever since the war.
Over the five years I'd spent building the station, I'd scoured the entire continent and lined up a few of the bards with the sharpest tongues and the quickest wits. Half of that, of course, had been intimidation via the Chancellor's office. But the moment I mentioned the salary, they started wagging their tails.
And the most outstanding of the bunch was sitting right in front of me. An eccentric elf who'd lived for centuries and found human affairs endlessly fascinating.
Aaedos Moonleaf.
He sat on the reception room sofa, flipping through the detailed proposal and rulebook for Imperial Men and Women that I'd handed him, his mouth hanging open. The emerald eyes unique to elves, scanning down the print, began to tremble ever so slightly.
"D-Director.... This is truly, truly...!"
Aaedos was over seven hundred years old this year. Even he, who had spent those long centuries watching every shade of human joy and sorrow and spinning them into verse, was losing his composure in the face of this explosive proposal. The fact that he dropped all formal honorifics with me on account of his age — well, I could let that slide as a charming quirk.
"I-it's genius!! This is insane!! I cannot even begin to imagine how many tempests of emotion will unfold inside that little manor!!"
Aaedos shot to his feet, trembling all over. Elves' ears go red when they get excited, don't they? His pointed ears were flushed crimson with thrill.
"Men and women colliding with nothing but their raw charm, their origins completely hidden! A grand duke floundering, smitten by a country bumpkin's allure — a commoner coldly kicking a noble young lady to the curb! Such farces could actually happen! To concoct such a terrifying scheme in an Empire where the class system is this deeply rooted!"
I grinned at Aaedos.
"Right? It'll be fun, won't it?"
"Fun doesn't even begin to cover it!! Need you even ask!! This is going to be huge! Truly, a sensation! Five years ago, when you suddenly sought me out and asked if I'd like to be a host, I thought you were talking complete nonsense...."
"So, what do you say. Want to be the main MC?"
At my offer, Aaedos slammed the table without a second's hesitation.
"Of course I do! You must let me do it! Nay, I would gladly work for nothing! How could I possibly let slip the chance to witness this tangled epic of love and jealousy from the closest seat, before anyone else!"
Exactly the reaction I'd expected. And just like that, recruiting the main MC was done in an instant.
But just Aaedos and me — two men sitting there running our mouths on screen — would look a bit drab. We needed a female panelist to balance things out. I naturally turned my gaze to Sylvia, who was clearing away teacups beside us.
Me, a seven-hundred-year-old elf grandpa with no sense of shame, and the Empire's most elite secretary — a woman so overworked she radiated cynicism at everything. If the three of us sat in the studio as a set and tore into the contestants, the banter would be absolutely perfect.
We're short on professional broadcast staff for now, so we'll just have to throw our own bodies at it.
That was a problem that would sort itself out in time.
With the first shoot of the actual variety show still ahead of us, I was filling the daytime regular programming so that tens of millions of Mana Displays wouldn't sit idle.
The basics any state broadcaster ought to have. A news program to tell the people how the nation was running and what decisions the people at the top were making. That was why I'd given IBS's entire daytime slot over to the news.
There was just one problem. The trainee magitech reporters I'd dispatched across the continent had only just started working, so there weren't any juicy stories to grab onto yet.
So as a stopgap, I pulled the most reliable, ratings-guaranteed card I had.
His Majesty the Emperor's private life.
A kind of vlog content, basically.
Fortunately, the Emperor's popularity was punching through the sky with each passing day. A one-line report like "His Majesty the Emperor had potato soup for breakfast" would draw tens of thousands of comments. I figured I could milk this subject for months and still have some left over.
Besides, for the Empire's citizens, the mere act of peeking into His Majesty's private life was shock and entertainment enough. There were even lunatics comparing the Emperor's hair length down to the millimeter every single day and insisting the vibe was different.
Congratulations, Theus. You've got yourself some stalker fans....
Even just rebroadcasting the morning news in the evening like a parrot, the ratings scraped thirty percent. That said it all. The public squares were packed so tight with commoners who'd laid out mats just to catch a glimpse of the Emperor's face that you couldn't take a step. This much, I could call a roaring success.
And yet Sylvia's eyes, as she flipped through a stack of documents, grew darker by the minute.
"Director... is it really okay for us to be sitting around like this? This month's budget is already wrecked. At this rate we won't even be able to pay the staff."
Sprawled on the sofa chewing snacks, I asked back, unbothered.
"That so?"
"Don't 'that so' me!! There's no money! Money! The broadcast is a smash hit, but there's nowhere the actual money is coming from!"
Crunch—!
I bit into a potato chip fried from Imperial-grown raw potatoes, infuriatingly casual, and replied.
"Sylvia, you worry too much. You saw the power of broadcasting with your own two eyes yesterday, and you're still going on about this?"
"But..."
I couldn't really blame Sylvia for being anxious. That's just how broadcasting works. Even if the ratings explode, virtually no money actually drops into the station itself. The real money is in the value-added industries that start rolling once they use the broadcast as a springboard. And the sharp ones would already be on the move by now.
I was just chewing my snacks, waiting for that moment.
The closer an ecosystem is to capitalism, the more the smart, sharp-eyed ones sweep up all the money.
The thirty-second commercial I'd deliberately slipped into the launch broadcast. The butterfly effect that short clip had set off had far exceeded my expectations.
Within a day of the broadcast, the new product from my trading company had sold out across the entire continent. Noble young ladies were showing up with sacks of money only to find nothing left to buy, grabbing the company staff by the collar and shaking them. Farces like that were breaking out everywhere.
The Empire's massive merchant guilds and trading company heads who'd witnessed that impact with their own eyes would, by now, be stampeding toward our station with their eyes rolled back, wearing the threshold down to nothing.
"So just wait a little, I'm telling you. The bite's about to—"
I didn't even finish the sentence.
Knock knock knock—!
An urgent knocking at the director's office door. I answered, unhurried.
"Come in."
The door burst open and a staff member rushed in, gasping for breath.
"D-Director! Vice Director! I-it's chaos outside right now! Please help!!"
I stood up with a smile and looked at Sylvia.
"Let's go, Sylvia. Time to pay the staff. And while we're at it, let's pile on a fat bonus too."