If You Have Eyes, Watch It
"It's starting!"
Ae-ta-mi's heart was pounding today too, thanks to the constant stream of treats being dropped her way.
I love you, JC ENM….
She offered up her daily prayer of gratitude to JC ENM, the provider of her daily bread. She'd turned on the TV to watch on the big screen, kept a real-time forum thread open on her phone, and had the InTube live stream up on her tablet.
Why is the ad break after the recap so long lmao wtf just get on with it
do it do it do it
Seo I-deun's definitely gotten better at MCing than he was early on lol. Is it the idol experience? Even his expressions look natural now
Refreshing the thread, Ae-ta-mi turned to check the chat window on her tablet. Foreign fans were watching the broadcast in real time.
"I can hear Yeo-reum's follower count going up…."
Thanks to Pachehi marking a turning point for K-web dramas, even foreigners with a casual interest in the Korean entertainment industry seemed to be slowly learning Yeo-reum's face. And once again today, her hosting was flawless.
"How on earth does my girl memorize scripts that well?"
Barely glancing at her cue cards, Yeo-reum spoke with such natural ease that her eye lines were already perfect too. Even live, she never stumbled over a single word.
And Ae-ta-mi wasn't the only one who noticed. Every viewer watching the broadcast live could feel it.
"They're all going to come crawling into the fandom sooner or later, aren't they?"
MNAA was an awards ceremony for singers, but with its global ambitions and trend-focused image, actors attended as well. Actor fans, for whom every scrap of content was precious, would naturally search InTube once the broadcast ended — and then the algorithm would serve Yeo-reum to them all over again.
"And after that, this video will show up right alongside it on their timelines!"
[12.21 KNUA Final Performance <Romeo and Juliet> Team B — Myeong Je-ha, Han Yeo-reum]
Ae-ta-mi gazed at the screen with a proud smile.
A user of the Theater*Musical Mini Gallery, going by IP 85.152, searched the name Han Yeo-reum.
"Why… isn't it there?"
Once again, she came up empty. There wasn't a single video that captured the KNUA performance in any real depth.
The post she'd written the moment she got home after watching Romeo and Juliet Team B was already on the gallery's best list, but some of the comments left a sour taste in her mouth.
Anyone with a deep knowledge of theater could see it plainly: it had been Team B's victory.
But watching these idiots who hadn't even seen it with their own eyes hurl absurd rebuttals was making her chest tighten.
"Ha. Every last one of them only got halfway…."
They were people beyond reasoning with. Lost in over-immersion, IP 85.152 at last pulled out the true tone of voice she normally kept hidden behind the mask of social grace.
IP 85.152 was absolutely, categorically not a Han Yeo-reum stan. It was simply suffocating — this moment where a fact could not be accepted as a fact, where "it was good" could not be said because it was good.
"So this was their level, huh…?"
IP 85.152 glared at her phone with naked disgust. If she'd known this would happen, she should have sucked it up and set up a recording from midway through, even at the cost of proper viewing etiquette. A masterpiece without evidence did nothing but torment people.
"It was all below expectations…."
The KNUA final plays were famous, but only insofar as the graduating class was concerned. The freshmen's stage took place in a small auditorium that would strain to hold a hundred people.
A rotted-through stage. Subtract the reporters, the students' families, the friends who came to watch, and the people dragged along by friends of friends, and the actual theatergoers are an endangered species.
Because of that, even ordinary members of the public who'd taken an interest in the Do Gyeo-ul vs. Pi Chae-won play-off refused to believe the accounts of the true fans.
IP 85.152 had exercised her prodigious powers of concentration to memorize the play almost in its entirety. And still, she wanted to see it just one more time.
A stage like a mirage, one that permitted no repeat viewings, and the ignorant users who'd never even seen it — together, they were driving IP 85.152 out of her mind.
"To think I'd meet people this impossible to talk to. Ahh… what a disappointment."
The stage every true fan acknowledged — but one that existed only in the memories of those true fans, unrecorded. That cruel contradiction stabbed at IP 85.152 like a double-edged blade.
The only Team B footage circulating online showed Han Yeo-reum and Myeong Je-ha smiling brightly at the curtain call, and nothing more.
Meanwhile the only proper video of the play that exists is Do Gyeo-ul's!
Ordinary audience members who'd come to watch friends had uploaded short clips of Do Gyeo-ul's performance — which meant the arguments of IP 85.152 and the other true fans, who insisted Team B's stage had been the better one, carried no weight at all.
And so Team B's Romeo and Juliet had been reduced to a two-line summary.
So where's the evidence? There isn't any, is there?
"Cowardly enough to demand footage?"
Therefore, the discussion of the KNUA freshmen play ends here. Rebut me and you lose.
"In the company of the ignorant… the true connoisseurs… the glow of a phone screen is never to be seen… kgh…."
The one sin of IP 85.152 — failing to record what no one else had — seemed destined to leave her unable to pass on in peace.
"But I saw it."
She murmured with grim resolve. She would allow herself the moral victory: those of us who saw it beat those of you who didn't. A masterpiece that had graced the stage exactly once would live forever in the hearts of IP 85.152 and the audience who witnessed it….
[12.21 KNUA Final Performance <Romeo and Juliet> Team B — Myeong Je-ha, Han Yeo-reum]
"Wha— no way!"
That was the moment. As if by magic, the video of that night appeared on InTube. IP 85.152 immediately wrote a post.
Then she clicked the video at once. Whoever had filmed it must have done some post-production on the quality, because the picture was remarkably clean.
The problem was the sound. In the early scene of Romeo's entrance, the voices of every character except Myeong Je-ha came through muffled and indistinct.
"Something must have gone wrong with the recording. They probably planted the mic on Myeong Je-ha's side. The limits of amateur work…."
Muttering to herself, IP 85.152 focused on the play once more — and the moment Han Yeo-reum opened her mouth, she understood.
—Ah….
This was not the microphone's fault.
As the conversation flowed between Romeo and Juliet alone, all other cast members excluded, certainty settled over her.
"Who guided you to this place?"
"Love guided me."
The voice cutting through the poor audio reached her ears with perfect clarity. Just then, the camera capturing the stage wavered for a moment — and it felt as though IP 85.152's heart had wavered with it.
"Do you love me?"
"I swear it, my lady — by yonder moon that paints every treetop silver."
Han Yeo-reum's voice swept IP 85.152 back to that moment in a single breath.
"O, do not swear at all. Or if you must swear, then swear by your gracious self."
The emotion she had felt then, the voices she had heard then, even the quality of the air in a room so silent that breathing itself felt too loud.
"I would take you as my lord and follow you to the very ends of the earth."
Before she knew it, the screen had gone black. The replay button floated up, as if asking whether she wanted to watch again.
Only then did IP 85.152 draw a deep breath. At some point, she had been holding her breath all over again as she watched.
IP 85.152 was an intellectual. She therefore never, under any circumstances, cared for cheap web dramas. She swore on her life that she did not like Han Yeo-reum.
But some things simply had to be said.
Han Yeo-reum's acting had exceeded all expectations, and this play was absolutely not the quality one could expect from ordinary university freshmen.
I actually attended this play in person. Allow me to add a few points of interpretation.
Look at Myeong Je-ha's costume: his hat cord mixes glass beads with amber. In an era when a sack of rice cost one nyang, this was a luxury item worth anywhere from several dozen to well over a hundred nyang. Since one nyang in Joseon-era terms is roughly 1,000,000 won, he is wearing somewhere between 20 million and 100 million won on a hat string. Furthermore, a jade ornament went for 10 to 50 nyang, so tallying it up, his Montague accessories alone would easily clear 100 million won — he is playing wealth on an entirely different tier.
If he flaunts himself to that degree and yet never hears a word of censure from the rival households, you can begin to imagine just how far his family's power reaches. And surely you can feel how much resolve it took for Romeo to plan a flight of love with Juliet, the daughter of a fallen noble house like the Capulets, can't you? (abridged)
But interpretation aside, the voices that carried from the actual stage were on another level entirely (abridged)
Which was why people needed to know.
No matter what anyone said, IP 85.152 was an intellectual and a woman of culture, and her interpretation was correct. It was absolutely not because she liked some lightweight actress like Han Yeo-reum.
IP 85.152 refreshed the page to check the upvotes climbing onto her comment.
[▶ Replay]
Click—.
Absolutely not because she liked Han Yeo-reum.
Just as Ae-ta-mi had predicted, the fervor around MNAA showed no sign of cooling even after the ceremony ended.
Timelines filled rapidly with MNAA as users streamed in through links shared across forums and social media.
The algorithms of idol fans, who mostly watched K-pop stages, filled up with performances related to what they'd just seen — but actor fans were different.
"Oh? It's Pi Chae-won?"
Drama fans and theater fans who clicked a video to watch an actress accepting an award found their timelines dominated by dramas, films, plays, and musicals.
And so the algorithm adapted to match, quite naturally.
[12.21 KNUA Final Performance <Romeo and Juliet> Team B — Myeong Je-ha, Han Yeo-reum]
At the news of it, a smile curved across Jegal Rok's lips.