| Episode 75. Performance Review—Self-Evaluation Edition
You could tell Kim Iwol had a unique personality after watching only a few pieces of their self-produced content.
『You forgot to put on sunscreen? How are you going to atone for this sin?』
『Who read the notice and didn’t press the confirmation emoji? Do this one more time and I might just stick the notice to the back of your head.』
『Take selfies with the mindset that if you take two hundred, you’ll get one good shot. Don’t trust your face and just half-ass three or four.』
To put it nicely, Kim Iwol was a thorough, professional idol.
Among fans, Kim Iwol was already being recognized as a man who embodied the virtues of a living idol, a man who understood fan sentiment far too well, and a man who kept strict discipline in the group.
At the same time… to put it strangely, he seemed suspiciously like someone on his second life.
Even right now.
『Hyung, the comments say you’re handsome!』
『Huh? Oh, uh……. Th-thank you.』
At times like this, he was unmistakably a freshly debuted idol.
『You said you wanted to try making a Rube Goldberg machine? I do have a blueprint I drew up for practice…… Should I send this to you by email?』
『I’ll ask separately whether we can open a shared drive at the company. If not, I’ll at least make a Dotion page.』
And then immediately afterward, he had a talent for making people unable to let their guard down.
To people who were office workers, remarks like these from Kim Iwol seemed even more bizarre.
≫ A male idol who knows Dotion is such a weird sentence
It feels like “an agency that’s good at work?” or something
└ That comparison is making me cry
≫ Spark’s Iwol is kind of insane in a different way
They told him to say something to the members and he went, “When interest rates go up, make sure you each open an installment savings account” lololol
Up until he was tying the kids’ neckties for them, he seemed like a grown-up eldest hyung, but now he’s just like a student dean who nags a ton
└ But I opened an installment savings account after hearing that too. First-tier banks have rates over 5%
└ That’s a positive influence
└ “Positive influence” my ass lolololololol
Baek Haewon couldn’t understand all of those words, but there was one thing she did know.
At the point where she was searching Kim Iwol’s name in the SNS search bar and looking through reactions to Spark.
She had become a fan of a piping-hot rookie group that had only released a single mini album.
* * *
The second week of Spark’s debut.
And the night of roughly one year and two weeks since Kim Iwol and the system’s forced contract began.
I shook a sad ballpoint pen with a broken neck and watched Spark’s content one by one.
And I thought.
‘……Not bad.’
Just looking at the reactions so far, it seemed likely we would more than surpass Spark’s debut results and number of mentions from the past.
The communities were the same.
A separate board hadn’t been created yet, but new posts mentioning Spark went up on the idol board every day.
Roughly speaking, it seemed they were being consumed as “Palseong Cider-dols who bring a refreshing fizz to the flashy idol scene.”
‘Refreshing fizz, huh.’
I moved my gaze to the laptop I had paused just in time. The screen was filled with Choi Jeho’s face, smiling like a hearty, likable guy.
To think the day would come when this guy smiled like that.
Among Spark’s fandom in the past, it had been famous how rare Choi Jeho’s smile was.
If he was onstage, he would at least smile for the sake of expressing the concept.
But unfortunately, because Spark only did concepts that were rather bad, Choi Jeho’s smiling face ended up earning only honorable titles like “the strongest contender for a sinister smirk” or “the second male lead who is definitely plotting something.”
But now it was different.
Choi Jeho on the screen was smiling so refreshingly that you wouldn’t know whose center he was, dancing that difficult choreography with ease.
Is this really the 0.5 dead-fish-eyed Choi Jeho I knew?
Even the scenic beauty of Geumgangsan has nothing on this. A sight that stands shoulder to shoulder with the Ten Great Views of the idol world personally selected by Kim Iwol. I like it very much.
And it wasn’t just Choi Jeho who had improved. The other guys had shown remarkable growth too.
Park Ju-u found the camera even as it switched around rapidly and met its gaze, while Lee Cheonghyeon, with makeup that wasn’t overdone, made full use of his features and lavishly proved that the end point of tuning is the original stock version.
I might have been jumping to conclusions, but perhaps because all the members were doing their part, Jeong Seongbin also seemed to be handling his parts far more comfortably than before.
Most of all, I was deeply moved that Kang Giyeon could show the entirety of his dancing ability in front of the camera.
It was the moment all my nagging until now bore fruit. See, you little sh*ts? Isn’t it nice when you listen?
Unable to overcome the swelling feeling in my chest, I watched the music video and performance videos on repeat as if possessed.
Maybe because they were talented guys, their abilities went without saying.
Thanks to making them eat relatively balanced meals, their complexions were good too. And seeing them smile brightly while working hard enough to sweat was rather admirable……
Wait.
What am I thinking right now?
Have I already forgotten what kind of guys these bastards are?
It was Department Head Nam who created overtime I didn’t have to do, but these were the guys who doubled that overtime.
You think my anger will disappear just because we spent a measly year together?
I shook my head vigorously, imagining myself shaking off the idle thoughts in my mind. Then I focused on monitoring again.
Just as there are departments that earn money for a company, there are also departments that only spend the company’s money.
If you asked me to name a representative example, wouldn’t it be the HR team?
True to the expression “back office,” our team’s work almost never appeared on the surface.
The same went for my work. The only thing I made that came out visibly was probably the recruitment notice image.
Maybe that was why.
Seeing an idea I had come up with completed at a location I had scouted, according to my intentions, felt strange.
That wasn’t the only bizarre phenomenon.
≫ Tried dipping my toes into UA’s new boy group
These days everyone’s coming out with intense songs + their teasers also looked kind of like a dark movie? so I just thought, oh, another similar group is coming out~
But they came out so refreshing and pure that I was kind of surprised lol a little unexpected
But I think that actually makes them stand out more
If they’d come out with something conceptual, they would’ve been buried under PRT
└ If you’re going to do viral marketing, at least make it less obvious lolol
└ Who gets paid to do viral marketing this half-assedly lolololol so ridiculous
≫ Hair, makeup, and styling this good on a debut stage, is this for real?
Usually when a group just debuted, their makeup hasn’t settled yet, so no matter how stylish they try to make it, it inevitably looks tacky, but these guys have none of that
You can tell the staff poured their souls into preparing it, yeah
└ This is so real…… They wore uniforms, gym clothes, jumpsuits, school looks, all of it, but there wasn’t a single bad outfit
≫ Rookie idol whose live vocals are stable as hell.gif
It’s Spark
They debuted this time and their live vocals are totally solid on every stage!
Even just hearing them sing here and there in their self-produced content, it seems like all the kids sing well
└ Who can’t sing live if there’s AR underneath lol
└ Isn’t this good enough? Just looking at groups who debuted around the same time, their live vocals fluctuate a lot
It might also be thanks to the fact that they weren’t that well-known yet, but aside from trolling hate comments, there were hardly any reviews containing negative content about the group Spark.
Of course, we hadn’t gotten that hair, makeup, and styling for free. We got it with the outfit reference collection I’d made while shedding tears of blood.
Even so……
‘This feels weird.’
I had never once failed to make an effort to create a better result until now.
At Hanpyeong Industries or at part-time jobs, I worked hard because I thought that since I was being paid, I had to earn my salary.
The reason I worked harder for Spark than what the system demanded was the same.
To compensate as much as possible for the loss of image this team would suffer because of my withdrawal.
So all of this was, in other words, the bare minimum duty I owed in return for what I had received.
‘Assistant Manager Kim, if a person has no flexibility, that’s a problem too. Are you not going to have a career? Are you the only one at this company?’
‘Assistant Manager Kim, you think you’re really good at your job, don’t you? Don’t kid yourself. Where else do you think you could adapt besides here?’
≫ The agency’s good at their job + the kids are the best
They only just debuted, but even in their self-produced content, they put in subtitles and member introductions that all match the debut album concept
I also like how on every stage, they bring out the props from the music video in chronological order
How do I put it? It feels like they pay attention even to really small details
You can also see that the kids really put effort into their photocards…… When I see things like this, I feel like small-agency idols often have better quality than big-company ones
└ Even though it’s a mini album, besides the photocards, just seeing how packed the inclusions are with student photos + group-picking slips + class timetables and so on shows they’re serious, yeah. Seems like they thought a lot and prepared it well
The fact that the words I heard at Hanpyeong Industries and the words I heard outside Hanpyeong Industries were a little different felt unfamiliar to me.
I hoped the system would check whether I had achieved my KPI as soon as possible.
So this sense of dissonance wouldn’t last long.
* * *
Just as there were schedules that focused on the stage, like music shows, there were also many schedules that did not.
“Visible radio” was one of them.
“Visible radio,” which live-streamed the broadcast site on video as well, quickly became popular starting with channels that invited idols as guests.
Spark’s scheduled appearance today was also on visible radio.
≫ Bringing over 2X1023 bora screenshots
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
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.
.
It’s a shame you can’t see even 1 bit of their faces because of the ball caps, but I’ll endure it since I get to see the kids for an hour…… lol
(Source: SNS)
And I had experience taking screenshots of that visible radio until my fingers almost broke.
All five of them came out wearing brimmed hats, so I couldn’t even describe how pissed I was the entire time I was making the transcript.
If they were going to cover all their faces, they should at least have worn different clothes. As if they had coordinated it, these bastards insisted on black hats and black clothes.
Ah, I found out surprisingly recently why they had worn shadow looks day in and day out.
‘You’re asking if there are too many black clothes in our closets?’
‘Since we just go back and forth to the practice room anyway, I didn’t really feel the need to pay attention when buying clothes.’
My roommates told me.
That’s right.
For these bastards, as long as the clothes were comfortable to practice in and didn’t show it even if they scraped against the floor a bit, everything was okay.
Are you guys office workers with a dress code? Why only wear solid colors?
If I had known this earlier, I would have gotten them practice tracksuits not in black but in rainbow colors.
There was no use regretting something that had already passed.
Instead, from now on, when we went on visible radio, no one was allowed to wear a hat. Unless there was a legitimate reason, such as preventing spoilers for dyed hair.
And so that whether someone was seeing them for the first time or was an existing fan, they could tell the members apart even after glancing briefly at the video or screenshots……
“Do we really have to wear this?”
“If you don’t want to, write your name on your forehead instead.”
“…….”
We decided to all wear name headbands made in glittery tones. They were even handmade at home in collaboration with the dexterous Lee Cheonghyeon.
I spoke to Choi Jeho, who was holding his headband with a disapproving expression.
“Don’t worry. We all checked last time to make sure there were no allergic reactions.”
“Forget it……”
Choi Jeho looked at his burgundy headband and sighed.
You got a problem? If you’re that annoyed, become successful enough that people know your name just by looking at your face.
And so, the six members of the rookie idol group Spark entered the radio booth with solemn expressions, each wearing a glittering name-tag headband.