Twin Spotlight
After a little while, Mun Gayoung’s stage came to an end, and the school festival naturally wound down with it.
The students who had enjoyed the festival through the camera mounted at the front gate streamed out one by one, and at last, the lights of the school began to go out, one after another.
Standing against that dimming backdrop, Mun Gayoung looked a little happy, and a little lonely.
Her voice was laid over the image.
"To other people, it’s just an ordinary high school festival—maybe not even worth much."
"But to me, it was like a treasure I’d never really gotten to hold."
Then Mun Gayoung, smiling brightly, walked off into the darkened backdrop of Jeongun High School, and the Star Observation Cam segment came to an end.
We cheer on every young person’s challenge in pursuit of their dreams!
With that very public-broadcast-style closing caption, of course.
Did they really need to include that caption?
The image had been good. They should’ve just left it hanging in the air as the afterglow.
“My grandson, you see...”
As soon as the broadcast ended, I fell into thought while watching my grandmother pick up her phone and call someone.
This episode had been unofficial, but it had really been a twin-centered showcase for Mun Gayoung and OKTOP.
Of course, if you judged by airtime alone, there was no comparison.
Mun Gayoung had taken up about seventy percent of the broadcast, and we’d gotten around twenty.
The remaining ten percent had gone to students from the practical music academy, Yoo Yeongeun, our homeroom teacher, and Jeongun High students—outside figures filling out the frame.
But in storytelling, what mattered wasn’t airtime. It was volume.
That was why, in audition programs, someone could shoot to stardom in an instant with just a two- or three-minute scene.
So it was fair to say this broadcast had been a twin-feature for Mun Gayoung and OKTOP.
And that wasn’t something only I could see.
The actual broadcast time had only been about fifteen minutes, but viewers would come away feeling as if OKTOP had been on the screen the entire time.
Honestly, it was a pretty complicated issue.
Genius marketing and forced-pairing marketing both had to be handled carefully.
The phone buzzed.
— Kim Jihoo
I smiled as I looked at the call that came in the moment the broadcast ended.
Smart Kim Jihoo had probably already sensed, unlike clueless Heo Junseong, that this variety show appearance wasn’t entirely in our favor.
But it didn’t matter.
“Yeah, Kim Jihoo.”
Because all of this was, in the end, just the first step toward making OKTOP a nationwide band.
* * *
Mun Gayoung’s Star Observation Cam episode had been planned as a three-part feature, and the one that aired yesterday was part two.
Part one hadn’t made much of an impression.
Both the average ratings and the peak ratings had been low, and it hadn’t generated much buzz either.
It had been decent enough to leave on and watch, but it was the kind of episode that vanished from the viewer’s mind the moment it ended.
But part two had been hot.
Extremely hot, in a very positive way.
The weakness of most observational variety shows was that, once viewers started staring at the star’s glamorous life, they felt the sting of relative deprivation.
But in part two, the protagonist wasn’t the actress Mun Gayoung. It was the eighteen-year-old girl named Mun Gayoung.
Thanks to that, viewers could immerse themselves in the program without discomfort, and they found it genuinely interesting.
Of course, not everyone was pleased.
There were always people who found a reason to be offended, but they were not that numerous.
Compared to the whole, they were just a handful.
But OKTOP was different.
Judging by the overall mood, there were a lot of positive things being said about OKTOP.
That response was especially strong among middle-aged and older viewers, the core audience for terrestrial variety shows.
But if you looked a little deeper, it was a different story.
The first stream of criticism came from the offense of daring to call someone a genius.
Anyone could see that the show was clearly boosting OKTOP.
Even if it had nothing to do with OKTOP’s own wishes, the public was not the sort of crowd that cared about things like that.
The second issue was the piggybacking controversy.
To be precise, the public usually wasn’t all that sensitive about piggybacking.
It wasn’t rare for ordinary friends to appear on Star Observation Cam.
But once Mun Gayoung’s fans started driving the narrative, the broader public began to think, maybe that’s true.
And then there was the last one...
That was the backlash from the band scene.
At first glance, it might have seemed strange.
2017 was the year the band scene had died.
The players who had once risen to the surface had gone extinct, and the money flowing through the industry had dried up completely.
So you’d think that if any band act went viral, the fans would be happy—but in reality, that wasn’t the case.
It had to do with the nature of hardcore fans in any minor culture.
As a rule, the smaller the culture, the more fervent its fans were, and the more strict, solemn, and unwritten rules they carried around with them.
Without pride, there was nothing left to hold up the scene.
The old hip-hop scene had shown a similar face.
Before hip-hop became mainstream through Show Me The Money, even a rapper singing a sweet love song could become the target of criticism.
To ordinary people, that behavior made no sense. But to those who had kept a scene alive with only a handful of people, it was a serious matter.
That was the focus of the criticism aimed at OKTOP.
The reason they loved band music was the roots buried inside it, and the pride of loving something that had roots.
So what they wanted was for the scene to be revived through “authentic music,” not for some “fake music” to suck the image out of the scene and sell it back to the public.
And just like that, the name OKTOP began to spread quietly here and there.
* * *
“You already thought this far ahead?”
“More or less. But I didn’t think it’d be this explosive.”
“I admit defeat.”
Kim Jihoo nodded lightly.
He was talking about the bet from a few months ago, the one that had put a wish on the line over whether OKTOP would end up getting hated in the nationwide band scene within two months.
“What’s your wish?”
“I’ll use it slowly. I’m sure I’ll have a chance to cash it in soon.”
“Kowai, Seoha-kun. That’s way too much of a mastermind line.”
I ignored Kang Min’s attempt at drama as if it were nothing, and Lee Doyeong spoke up.
“But is getting hated really that good a thing?”
We had already talked about the marketing direction.
“We could make every fan of the indie scene hate us.”
“Hate us? Why would they hate us?”
“Because they’d say we’re a rootless idol band. But I’m not going to explain away noise like that. I’d welcome it and use it.”
“Why?”
“Because even if it’s only to hate us, they’ll end up listening to our music more. No matter what we do, if the music is good, that’s what matters, right?”
Lee Doyeong still seemed to be wondering whether this had to be the only way.
Well, I hadn’t explained this part in detail.
“First, this is hate we were going to get anyway.”
“Huh?”
“The moment we showed up in the band scene, this was going to happen no matter what. The scale might be a little smaller, but still.”
“How do you know that?”
In the original timeline, OKTOP’s music had been much worse than it was now, but some things hadn’t changed.
Namely, our looks and our age.
Last life, when we appeared in the scene for a brief moment, the established bands had started talking as if they’d seen us somewhere and decided we were trainees from an agency.
They said we’d just rack up a little indie career to cash in on nostalgia on some variety show, then go straight to an agency afterward, as if that were obvious.
Back then too, there was no shortage of people asking why Kang Min was even mixed in with us.
Heck, once I became a celebrity, there were people who claimed the other guys had failed their debuts while I alone had succeeded.
Back then, I hated that so much it made my skin crawl.
Now, I felt differently.
The people who hated us would hate us no matter what we did.
So didn’t that mean we should use it?
Then we should turn it to our advantage.