The Unscripted Kiss Controversy
The tenth episode of Forest of Flowers had aired. Woo Dan-wol and Lee Hye-ri began discussing the matter in the CEO’s office.
“Was it really that wrong?”
“It’s not wrong. It’s not, but…”
“I know that. But is it really such a big deal?”
He genuinely had no idea. Woo Dan-wol’s face said exactly that. He truly could not understand. What was the problem with a kiss scene?
“Anyway. Don’t look at the articles.”
“Ah, why not…!”
“There will definitely be hate comments. No matter who it’s about.”
“It’s only a minority, though.”
“Aren’t even a minority of hate comments still hate comments?”
“Sis…”
His eye acting was flawless, as expected of a professional. Woo Dan-wol gazed at her with a pleading look. But this time Lee Hye-ri refused to yield.
One of life’s small joys had vanished. Was it called ego-searching? Woo Dan-wol loved attention as much as he loved acting. Was there anything happier than people watching him and liking him? He had received plenty of hate comments in his previous life as well. He had assumed this life would be no different.
Lee Hye-ri’s position, on the other hand, was rock-solid. Though the words weren’t coming from her own mouth, hate comments could drive a person insane. Hadn’t countless celebrities from major agencies suffered because of them?
At the very least, she did not want to watch Woo Dan-wol struggle like that. Not as the CEO of his agency. Not as his fan. And not as Lee Hye-ri.
“Haah…”
Lee Hye-ri let out a heavy sigh and stood up to fetch some cold water. At first she had thought he was simply crazy about acting. Now she realized he was just plain crazy. It felt wrong to curse one of her own talents, yet no other word described Woo Dan-wol so perfectly.
Should she call it a completely different way of thinking? Woo Dan-wol was unlike any other man. He almost seemed feminine. It wasn’t that he lacked strengths. On the contrary, he had far too many compared to his flaws.
He had no pointless pride and none of that peculiar sense of superiority, so there was no gender-based alienation at all. The only problem was that the occasional flaw that slipped through was painfully sharp.
Most of the reactions were positive. The single kiss scene had made the character Kang Min-hyeok feel like he had finally blossomed. The sharp divide that had split the audience in two slowly began to fade.
…Correction. The community was still the same. And the reactions to the interview clip uploaded on YouTube were gradually turning strange. The comment sections were buzzing about it too.
The community was steadily heating up. Anyone watching from the outside would have thought he had driven drunk or done drugs. Yet the only thing he had done was perform an unscripted kiss scene, and that alone had plunged him into controversy.
Of course, many women who felt frustrated with the current entertainment industry and Korean society supported him. Gender aside, any normal person with healthy thinking either had no particular opinion or reacted with a simple “Is it really that bad?” after hearing the story.
However, there were always people who viewed any situation in the worst possible light. Especially in modern South Korea, where, under the banner of equality, certain groups advocated for the rights of a specific gender.
Masculism. An ideology and movement that pursued political, economic, social, and cultural equality for all genders, including men.
On the surface, the ideology and the groups seemed fine. After all, forty years ago discrimination against men had certainly existed. The problem, as always, was the extremists.
In modern times… that is, among young men from a small number of privileged households, the ideological movement had created problems. Society had fallen into chaos from the resulting conflicts. Although an uneasy truce had been reached, the internet remained a constant battlefield of debate.
So what did any of this have to do with the current situation? The people leaving hate comments on Woo Dan-wol’s posts were precisely from that crowd.
Think about it. They were pathetic men who stayed shut inside their homes, living off their mothers’ allowance while badmouthing their own mothers.
Yet look at the celebrity on television—handsome, smiling and laughing with others, monopolizing everyone’s attention and love. Jealousy? The reason didn’t matter; it certainly wasn’t a positive emotion.
Of course, the keyboard warrior who never left his room hadn’t walked a hundred steps today either. Why men were so eager to curse other men was a mystery, yet he continued crossing every line.
Beyond personal attacks, drunk on a sense of justice, he kept waging his online crusade for men’s rights and social enlightenment.
The comments born from that hollow sense of duty were nothing but blind criticism and insults aimed at appearances.
When Lee Hye-ri returned with cold water and saw Woo Dan-wol staring at his smartphone on the sofa, she shouted at him.
“D-Dan-woool!!”
“What? There’s hardly anything here.”
“…?”
Hadn’t they just made a promise? That he absolutely would not look at article comment sections or communities. Yet there he was, calmly scrolling through comments as if nothing had happened, and continued speaking.
“Is this what you were worried about?”
“Y-yeah… You’re really not bothered?”
Lee Hye-ri stood behind him and looked at the smartphone screen. The article comments were filled with hate. Questions about how a man could be so loose. Assumptions that he would easily sell his body.
It was a festival of speculation and condemnation. Nevertheless, Woo Dan-wol maintained a blank expression as he kept scrolling down.
“Who usually writes comments like these?”
“Um…”
Lee Hye-ri thought back to the past. Female celebrities rarely received hate comments unless they made a serious mistake. And even when they did, the comments never burned with such malice that they tried to drag someone to their grave.
So she decided to check for herself. The hate comments left on the male celebrities at her agency. Although they weren’t her own talents, she wondered how much despair it would take for someone to self-harm or attempt suicide.
After visiting the legal team and reading the hate comments, she truly came to despise those people. And the funniest part? It wasn’t that they were cursing a specific gender. Every single one of the more than fifteen caught attackers had been male.
Wasn’t that hilarious? You would think at least one woman would be among them. Yet when considering social perception, not a single woman had been accused of being a beast obsessed with men and lusting after their bodies.
Instead, they simply accepted things as they were, appreciated them, and expressed their feelings. Of course some crossed the line, but they were relatively mild. The demons were simply too vivid by comparison.
Therefore, Lee Hye-ri began to speak about the men she had seen.
“Um… men, right?”
“Well, the insults themselves do hurt. But were those people model citizens living diligent social lives?”
“…No.”
See? Woo Dan-wol shrugged. A hollow laugh escaped Lee Hye-ri’s lips. Whether he was pretending to be strong or truly fine would require further conversation, but that expression was genuine.
And then his face slowly began to change. He looked like a general hungry for battle.
“D-Dan-wol…?”
“Can I participate in communities and such? Will you allow it, CEO?”
CEO. She never imagined that single word used to address her could sound so terrifying. Lee Hye-ri swallowed hard. Her brain spun at full speed.
His values were healthy, yet calling them normal was difficult. She had no clue what kind of statements he might unleash inside those communities.
“M-maybe it’s better if you don’t…?”
“Then how am I supposed to just sit here and take this?”
Woo Dan-wol manipulated his smartphone. When he opened the video platform YouTube, a large thumbnail from a news-like channel appeared.
It was not a public broadcaster but a personal YouTuber—one of the so-called “rekka” clickbait channels.
It might have been TTS. An awkward male voice was reading the captions aloud. She didn’t know where the footage had been taken, but Woo Dan-wol’s photo appeared as the voice began explaining the events from the interview.
It then moved on to the community reactions and the growing controversy. If trouble was brewing, adding a rekka channel to a fight between minorities would turn it into public opinion. The snowball kept growing until it became the “sexual objectification of Woo Dan-wol” controversy.
“Should I write a statement?”
“…Yeah.”
Like a woman who had just been dumped, Lee Hye-ri answered with her head hung low. They said female-pattern baldness was a sin, yet she felt as if her hair was falling out by the handful.