The Maknae Has to Be an Idol

The shooting was halted, and there was a slight commotion after the producers called Dong-Jun.

“Is there some kind of problem? Can you brief us on the situation a bit?” The host approached the producers and requested an explanation. Then, the producers glanced in our direction and moved locations while taking only the host. In the end, the only ones remaining in the ‘School Restaurant’ were us four, excluding Dong-Jun. Of course, we could also sense that something serious was happening.

“What happened?”

“...Did something come up?”

“Will Dong-Jun be all right?”

My members voiced their concerns while looking around their surroundings. Then, they looked worriedly at where Dong-Jun was taken. Dong-Jun was walking towards a conference room where producers often waited. I couldn’t help but notice how small and lonesome Dong-Jun looked then.

“...What in the world is happening...?”

My members appeared to die in anxiety seeing that everyone was sharing important conversations amongst themselves while excluding us.

“Give me a moment.” I took out my phone from my pocket and said, “If a problem happened right now, maybe I can search for what it is.”

My members glanced at their surroundings after seeing me act. Using our phones while shooting was an implicit taboo. There were many cases when people left their phones to their managers before starting filming since casts using their phones instead of focusing on the filming gave off a bad impression.

“Is it okay for you to use your phone?” My members asked.

“The shooting has been suspended for the time being anyway.”

“...That’s true but...”

My members were still discomforted by the idea of using their phones before the cameras were removed. Yet, I knew that there was no way this whole scene would be aired on TV anyway. Furthermore, fewer people were looking at us now since the staff was controlling the site. Above all, I needed to use my phone right now.

“We need to at least know what’s going on. I will check what happened for all of us,” I said. Since I knew what happened to Dong-Jun, I especially couldn’t put my phone back down. I went into Bluebird first. As I thought...

‘He’s trending first...’ The trending feed on Bluebird was Park Dong-Jun’s personality. There was no need for me to see more of Bluebird. If I saw pages of unfiltered raw responses here, I could lose my calm from the very beginning. Thus, to get a better and more exact sense of the situation, I went into NacePann[1]. As expected, it appeared the controversy began at this place and I easily found the original post about Dong-Jun.

—Exposing S group’s PDJ’s personality. (I’m his middle-school classmate. I can show my graduation album and school ID as evidence.)

Even from the title, it was asking to be clicked. It appeared the poster had been worried about getting sued and didn’t write Park Dong-Jun’s name blatantly. Yet, using only his initials could have invited more views. This post was one of the most viewed posts on this website for today, and I clicked on it to read it.

—I was in great agony before writing this post. It happened a long time ago, and I was afraid that we could be sued for telling the truth. Yet, we couldn’t let the person who used to trample us in our childhood go on broadcast and receive so much love from the public.

We were middle-school graduates with PDJ. We went to the same school in our third year but because of PDJ, my last year in middle school turned into a nightmare...

It followed a very standard format of an ‘expose post.’ I didn’t think exposed posts were necessarily bad, and the internet could be a viable and effective space to make certain people who needed to be held accountable for their past crimes pay.

‘But hm...’ Yet, it was also a place that could make even an innocent person a sinner however a random person liked. I read through the post. It was a detailed and believable story, and in summary, it went like this.

Dong-Jun was the most influential person in the class. Though he wasn’t the class gangster, he was someone who had the most authoritative voice among all his classmates. And though he didn’t declare that his family had a lot of money blatantly, everyone could tell because he always came to school wearing expensive clothes, bags, and shoes.

He also spent a lot of money on his friends and was always surrounded by them. When someone became close to Dong-Jun, it didn’t take long for them to have a new set of running shoes. Sometimes, it was bags, and friends who were especially close to him came to school wearing new bubble coats. For middle-schoolers, these were huge presents, and because of that, Dong-Jun always had many friends.

‘They make it sound as if Dong-Jun went around buying friends with money.’ The post made Dong-Jun appear like an arrogant rich kid. The Dong-Jun I knew would never purposefully wear expensive goods to show off his riches, so buying expensive presents to gain friends was out of the question. He probably would’ve just worn anything his parents bought him and thoughtlessly bought gifts for friends who asked for them.

From my past life, I knew Dong-Jun’s family had enough money to use it without a second thought. Thus, I read through the rest of the post. The writers of the post said that regardless of all that, they befriended Dong-Jun because his personality appeared to be good. Though everyone else befriended Dong-Jun to gain expensive gifts, they alone were his ‘true friends,’ according to the post.

Yet, there was a big difference between them and Dong-Jun. It was their families’ wealth.

—Unlike him, we both grew up in poor families. All the clothes, bags, and shoes we wore were far different from his.

Dong-Jun was the rich kid while the posters were kids from poor families. At this point, I could tell what kind of image this post was trying to establish.

—When PDJ realized that we were poor, he began to look down on us and treat us as his inferiors. He used his other friends to outcast us and tease us for being beggars. They didn’t hesitate to insult my parents either.

The post was saying that Dong-Jun used his wealth as a weapon to one-sidedly torment and bully two classmates from poor families. The claims that Dong-Jun used other people to bully them set the message of this post and clearly established two sides: there was Dong-Jun who bought everything with money and the other side who were too poor to have anything. The structure became clearer as the post continued.

—I have included our album pictures, graduation certification, and student ID below. If I find more evidence, I will upload them.

The posters emphasized that they went to the same school as Dong-Jun again and ended the post. The post swarmed with comments from below. Some comments protected Dong-Jun and supported him and some criticized him saying that they saw it coming from miles away.

Other comments encouraged others to keep their neutrality for now while the comments below them asked how they could keep their neutrality with evidence such as the graduation certification. All sorts of opinions and arguments were mixed to create a commotion.

“You guys.”

“Huh?”

“...Is it more severe than we thought?”

“...Ha...it makes me worried.” I handed my phone to my members. I thought it would be quicker to show them than to tell them what happened. After receiving the phone from my hands, my members’ expressions gradually darkened.

“What, how?” Yeon-Hoon struggled to form his words.

“What’s going to happen to...Dong-Jun?” Woon worried about Dong-Jun.

“Haa...” Do-Seung seemed to have felt conflicted and stroked his face and sighed.

“I get why they halted the shooting.”

“This already spread all over the place.”

“There are already ten thousand shares on this one.”

“At this point...I supposed everyone who would know saw it.”

My members seemed to have realized the severity of the situation then. Though there were a lot of things I wanted to say, I held myself back. We were in a public setting right now, and though the shooting was halted, it wasn’t canceled.

‘The post only has claims and little evidence.’ Personally for me, I was leaning towards one side even more after reading this post. I thought Dong-Jun was the victim in this situation. It seemed not only me, but other people sensed it too, and quite a few people in the comments thought the original posters were twisting the story a bit.

The posters claimed to have gotten bullied by Dong-Jun who used his great wealth. They said they were helpless in their poverty, and this set-up between the rich and poor was so blatant and dramatized that it felt artificial in a way. Furthermore, there was no evidence or detailed stories specifying exactly how Dong-Jun tormented and bullied them. Even if they couldn’t provide evidence for the events, the details of the bullying should’ve been more thorough.

Yet, they simply said Dong-Jun outcasted them and made other people insult their parents and look down on them. These were all general things. Furthermore, the only things they showed as evidence were that they used to be students of Cheong-Hyung Middle School.

‘That’s not evidence of violence.’ The way to make a lie believable was to insert truths among the many lies. With just that one truth, it could cover up all the lies.

‘Hm.’ The post had too many holes to be bulletproof. Other comments expressed the same sentiment as me.

—If you write posts like this, shouldn’t you write other evidence? You just made a bunch of claims and told us to believe you by saying you are a student of this school.

‘I don’t think we would end up in the worst-case scenario,’ I thought.

Yet, the problem wasn’t over just because we could avoid the worst-case scenario, and I didn’t have an inkling of how I was going to solve this issue. I wondered if we should sue the posters for defamation and spreading false rumors or if we should find the addresses of these posters and try talking to them. Either way, I thought we would need to find the people hiding behind the screens first.

‘This is giving me a headache.’ I couldn’t think of the most effective method.

“Tae-Yoon.”

“Sorry?”

It was then Woon called me.

“Here’s your phone.”

“Ah, yes.”

Woon called me to give me back my phone, and I put my phone back into my pocket. Then, Woon suddenly proposed, “Do you want to go to the bathroom with me?”

It was natural for one to go to the bathroom, but there was something about his tone and atmosphere that was...different from normal.

“...Woon?”

“Let’s quickly go.”

It was then that I became sure.

‘He’s a regressor.’ The one who just spoke to me was Woon with the regressor’s memories.

***

Siren’s company and a subsidiary of the Jaeil Group, Next Wave had been struck by a sudden catastrophe. It hadn’t been long since they finished collecting all the rest of the shares that WD Entertainment possessed by half-blackmailing, but another huge incident broke out.

“Ah, yes. I am asking about the article that just went up...”

“We are still confirming the other party’s stance.”

“We will prepare to make our statement as fast as possible.”

In the entertainment businesses, where their main product was ‘people,’ a controversy about a person’s image was the biggest catastrophe there could be. The head of Next Wave, Yoo Won-Dong, watched the situation and sat thoughtlessly on his chair. It hadn’t been more than a couple of months since Yoo Won-Dong had been stationed as the Next Wave’s boss. He had become a perfect machine for sealing Letters of Approval by now.

If he was a proactive leader, he would’ve personally jumped into the scene to clear this issue. Yet, for a machine that just stamped on documents, no such drive existed.

“Secretary Kim~ Come here right now and please brief me on the current situation simply and succintly~” he said.

1. Probably a reference to NatePann which is a community forum popular in South Korea ☜

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