Chapter 54
Chapter 54
"The agency?"
Baek Gyeonwoo dropped his tablet onto the bed and said helplessly.
"It's a photo I submitted to the agency."
I moved next to Baek Gyeonwoo to assess the situation.
The 'evidence' I confirmed through the brightly lit tablet... was a common selfie.
"When was this taken?"
"Last year. ......After I got into the debut team."
It's common for agencies to request photos for viral marketing or content creation.
In these cases, since completely new photos are usually required, the agency takes extra care with security to ensure nothing gets leaked.
So, if what Baek Gyeonwoo said was true... that really meant the culprit could only be the agency.
'Isn't that too stupid?'
Would Youth really do something so easily exposed?
But thinking about it more, an individual trainee was the most underdog of underdogs, a total underling who couldn't do anything even if they knew about the company's misdeeds.
So if they thought it didn't matter if they got caught from the start, then sure, they didn't need to put any brainpower into being meticulous.
In that case, the remaining question was this.
"......Why would the agency do that?"
Any guess I made couldn't be more accurate than the answer from the person involved, so I quietly waited for Baek Gyeonwoo to open his mouth.
Thud. Baek Gyeonwoo leaned back against the wall as if collapsing.
"I originally signed on the condition that I'd go straight into the debut team."
"Yeah."
"By the time I joined the company, even the team name was already decided."
"Yeah."
"All I had to do was shoot my debut profile, but at the meeting......."
Baek Gyeonwoo paused momentarily, as if recalling that time.
"They cried. Saying they didn't want to debut with me. Those guys."
"......They cried?"
"Said I didn't fit in with them and they didn't like it."
'Those guys' must be referring to Giddeun.
I thought about them for a moment.
Giddeun's debut song had an oriental concept, fitting for Youth, which had started pushing a Korean classical music base in recent years. All the singles released after that were songs emphasizing soft melodies, too.
'It's not like Baek Gyeonwoo is lacking compared to them.'
If anything, for that kind of lyrical concept, there's no one who fits better than Baek Gyeonwoo... wait, no way.
Was that the reason he started thinking he looked scary?
"......."
I looked at Baek Gyeonwoo's composed face and considered for a moment.
Whether saying, 'That was probably just an excuse because they didn't like you' would serve as comfort in this situation.
After a not-so-short silence, I reached a conclusion.
'Let's just... move on to the next topic.'
"Why hadn't you been leaving the agency?"
It had been over a year since Giddeun debuted.
By industry ethics, Baek Gyeonwoo, who had been dropped from the debut team, should have already terminated his contract with the agency.
Since the exclusive contract itself was conditional on debut in the first place, wasn't it basic decency for the company to let them go without any special agreement if debuting them seemed unlikely?
"Because I haven't been dropped yet."
"Huh?"
"They put it on hold, saying they'd decide after seeing the response to the 5-member group first."
"Ah, um......."
I couldn't help but ask.
"Is Youth struggling a lot these days?"
Baek Gyeonwoo offered an affirmative silence.
To think Youth was operating in such a slapdash, amateurish manner. It seemed like the title of 'Four Major Agencies' was about to become history.......
Beside me, at a loss for words, Baek Gyeonwoo resumed his story.
"There was already talk of me joining the team back in the second quarter of last year, but I refused it. I did."
"Yeah."
"But with an exclusive contract, they have to have me do something, so they told me to at least go on a survival show."
Hearing up to this point, the picture was starting to come together.
Youth hadn't postponed his joining out of consideration for Baek Gyeonwoo's wishes.
They were simply conscious of fandom opinion. Because it was blindingly obvious that adding a new member would lead to backlash and internal conflict.
So they quickly needed to create a pretext for Baek Gyeonwoo's addition, and the method they came up with was the survival show.
It seemed the company's audacious mindset was at play here too. If Baek Gyeonwoo's fanbase grew through the program, Giddeun's fandom would shrink, and even if Baek Gyeonwoo's fans protested fiercely at first, they'd eventually accept it.......
Additionally, saying 'we had no choice but to bring in Baek Gyeonwoo' was better for saving face than saying 'we reorganized the members because the group's performance was poor.'
If it was a rumor the company created, the company could easily clarify it later, so once Baek Gyeonwoo joined Giddeun, they'd probably diligently push viral posts with attached explanations.
'It's a completely different picture from the Youth I knew.'
Youth used to be famous for having their artists proactively praise the company's welfare system, but now that I saw it, I wondered if that, too, was a company directive.
"......Hmm, right."
The story was finished, but it was a situation with absolutely no clear solution in sight.
Contract issues were a domain requiring a specialist, not me.
And as for encouraging him by saying he'd debut here without a hitch... I knew this program was going to crash and burn from manipulation.
'Did I just butt in for no reason?'
Baek Gyeonwoo's expression had become deeply dejected. It was a face you'd never imagine belonging to someone about to sing a fresh, youthful confession song just a few days later.
This was bad. If it affected his stage performance like this.......
"That's why I wanted to get close to you."
Destr.......
"Did those words just come out of your mouth?"
"Who else would be saying it."
Why did that suddenly come up.
As I stared at him, Baek Gyeonwoo narrowed his brows. It looked like he was belatedly retracing the nuance of what he had just said.
Baek Gyeonwoo added, as if telling me not to get the wrong idea.
"There was something I was going to ask once we got close."
"Ah, you can ask."
"I was going to ask how you got out of Mary."
Ah.
Um.
"It's a secret."
Baek Gyeonwoo let out a fiercely dismissive scoff.
"I told you everything, and yours is a secret?"
"No, it's not that......."
I sighed and added an explanation.
"I can't talk about it because the termination was on the condition of keeping it confidential."
"......."
"What's with that look?"
"Just wondering how shady that place must be too, if they're paying hush money."
Hush money, huh.......
'He's not wrong, though.'
Still, I didn't feel wronged. Because it was a perfect deal for me at the time.
The secret I held as collateral was something that would heavily damage the company's image.
If you had to choose between a trainee and the company's image, it's obviously the latter, isn't it? I made a choice for myself, and the agency made a choice for itself.
If it was a publicly traded company, they especially had to prevent the stock from tanking over something like a complaint posted by a trainee. With how many teams they had to feed.
'.......'
Youth was the same, wasn't it?
"Gyeonwoo."
"What."
"Let's absolutely nail this stage."
"What are you talking about now."
"We just have to make it so they can't rig it."
I already had a picture forming in my head.
But it was hard to convey clearly. Because this was a picture that could only be drawn if you knew the future.
So I just barely managed to spit out words like this.
"No matter what, the finals are paid votes, so they can't rig it too obviously. So if we do so ridiculously... well... that debuting looks certain, the production team will have no choice but to give up too, right?"
Baek Gyeonwoo narrowed his eyes as if skeptical, but I paid no mind and finished speaking.
"Then we can debut together."
I know it too. That what I said was abstract to the point of being childish.
But let's try changing the ending.
What if the production team stubbornly manipulates the rankings, and it eventually gets caught?
After that, Youth would have a high probability of dodging the initial backlash. Because right now, anyone could see Baek Gyeonwoo wasn't a PD pick.
But it was clear that Youth had exerted influence over the editing direction for Baek Gyeonwoo. And elimination rigging was still unmistakably rigging, so once a proper investigation started, Youth would surely get snagged too.
And at that moment, if they faced a crisis where the circumstances of intentionally trying to eliminate their own trainee came to light...
Youth would try to cut their losses to protect the company image.
In other words, the probability that they'd let Baek Gyeonwoo go without trouble increased.
......Right. This was merely a plan to increase the probability. Not a perfect solution.
'Still, we can't let him go on stage in this state.'
Honestly, the real purpose of what I said was encouragement.
Because he could never create the best stage in this gloomy state. Especially when the song itself was already an easy-listening refreshing concept that lagged behind in buzzworthiness from the start.
Fortunately, it seemed my intent got through, as Baek Gyeonwoo's expression relaxed.
One corner of Baek Gyeonwoo's mouth lifted into a smile. No matter how I looked at it, it was a sneer, but a sneer is still a smile.
......No. A sneer just seemed to be a sneer. Baek Gyeonwoo expressed his disbelief with that exact same expression for a long while.
And after a moment, he straightened his face and spoke.
"I never planned on doing it half-heartedly in the first place."
Ah, right.......
* * *
[If Euni quits, you're responsible, unnie]
"Tch."
Joo Yeonhee clucked her tongue as she deleted the message she was about to send to her former member.
"......I don't want to go to work."
"Then why did you do it if you're going to be this scared."
Her manager scolded her.
It had been two days since Joo Yeonhee disobeyed the production team's instructions.
She was currently sitting in a car parked in front of the <MAKE100%> training building, her heart racing with anxiety.
'Why haven't they said anything yet? How badly are they planning to chew me out?'
Then irritation surged up again.
"No, they should be the ones being fair first!"
"Broadcasting station folks are like that, what's new......."
"No matter what, that song was seriously too much!"
The situation was this.
The claim that composers personally chose their own muses for the 3rd competition was a lie from the start, and all the pairs had been predetermined by the production team.
And in the script Joo Yeonhee received, the partner for was set as Choi Junbin.
When Joo Yeonhee first got that instruction.......
She hadn't thought anything of it.
Because, to begin with, it wasn't the first time. She had reached the point of thinking it was now natural for the production team to intervene in key elements like song selection.
What made Joo Yeonhee change her mind was when she first heard the competition song that was matched with Seo Cha-gyeom.
Let Kim Ikhyeon's behind-the-back bitching sum up her feelings about the song.
—Wow, people were already telling these old guys to quit writing lyrics, and now she's just pouring oil on the fire!
It was a song that looked like nothing more than a sacrificial card.
At that moment, all the blatant discrimination she had turned a blind eye to came into sharp focus, and a sense of favoritism based on defiance began to grow in Joo Yeonhee's heart.
And around that time, Joo Yeonhee, who happened to see a perfectly-timed community post, ended up.......
'Getting completely provoked. Honestly, because every word it said was true.'
The rest of the story is already known.
Since Joo Yeonhee had a habit of slightly ignoring the script anyway, carrying it out wasn't difficult. Even though it was the first time her defiance was enough to derail the scenario.
'That senior helping me out was unexpected though.'
Joo Yeonhee recalled the memory of safely getting through the situation thanks to the MC's assist.
The MC's repeated emphasis on 'reality' to prevent the writers from calling for an NG was clearly very deliberate.
'Sim Doyoon... Hmm.'
He was an idol from the same generation as Joo Yeonhee, but they had only ever exchanged the bare minimum polite greetings back then, too.
Naturally, she had never had a proper conversation with him even now.
'If I'm getting chewed out, I wish I could get chewed out together with that senior.'
No matter how awkward things were, it'd be less scary with the two of them together, right?
"Ah, I just want to get slapped on the palm ten times and be done with it!"
"What are you, a kindergartner?"
Pushed out of the car by her manager's nagging, Joo Yeonhee trudged toward the building.
The path to go get the script from the writer felt much longer than usual.
Of course, it wasn't something that would lead to her retiring, and the worst disadvantage she'd face was probably just not getting called back by the network again.
'The problem is that I have an agency.'
What if they held the people affiliated with the company jointly responsible?
Then she'd be properly screwed.
'I swear I'll follow instructions well from now on, so please let me off this once.......'
Joo Yeonhee approached the writer, hiding her nervousness.
"Ah, Yeonhee-ssi."
"......Hello."
However, the writer's expression she was met with was completely unbothered.
She wanted to just get scolded quickly and feel at ease, but her pride hurt too much to apologize first.
Thus, Joo Yeonhee rattled off a half-hearted excuse.
"Last time, um, well, I misread the script."
"Hmm?"
The writer, who met Joo Yeonhee's eyes, smiled gently.
"Ah, that? It's fine."
'F-For real?'
It ends this easily?
Before the color could return to Joo Yeonhee's face, the writer added,
"It became irrelevant anyway."
"Pardon?"
Without any further explanation, the writer handed over the script.
"Please review it."
Joo Yeonhee took the script from the writer.
"Huh?"
Reading through the single sheet of paper that was too shoddy to be called a script, Joo Yeonhee raised her head.
The writer had already disappeared.
'What's this?'
In previous shoots, the things written in this script had mostly been like this.
[★★ Team
―Trainee A, Trainee B
Please give some advice about teamwork.
♥♥ Team
―Trainee C
Praise their vocals with a 'He's diligent' vibe~~
◆◆ Team
Make sure to mention Trainee D as the center!!]
And as for the case of Seo Cha-gyeom, who had inadvertently become Joo Yeonhee's favorite student.
There was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Until now, there had not been a single piece of script related to Seo Cha-gyeom!
But this time.......
'Why is there one?'