Chapter 1 – It’s a Familiar Ceiling
I had lived my thirty-three years of life driven by two major forces.
The first was rationality.
It was the most important thing.
If something was rational, I followed that path.
All that nonsense about—
You have to love the fans first if you want the fans to love you.
You can only succeed if you put your heart into your songs.
I had thrown garbage like that out of Do Junhyeok’s planning office a long time ago.
What mattered was thoroughly analyzing current trends and keeping track of the industry schedule.
That was all.
I worked with the firm belief that only rational management could take an idol group to the very top.
And in the end, I proved it.
Just look at my masterpiece, Victory.
By last year, Victory had accumulated album sales of fifteen million copies.
It wasn't only the group that was successful.
Even the individual brand value of each member was beyond anything rival companies could compete with.
If their solo albums were included, their total sales would probably have nearly doubled.
For example, people claimed that one of Victory's members, Wonwoo, had some kind of irresistible charm written into his destiny.
Ridiculous.
I'd even checked his fortune before.
There wasn't anything like that in it.
The true identity behind that so-called irresistible charm was his light emo-style makeup, red lip gloss, and carefully drawn lower eyeliner.
Every little detail people found attractive about him was nothing more than the result of a collaboration between me and the styling team.
From the top of those guys' heads to the tips of their toes.
Even the smallest movements of their hands.
There wasn't a single part of them that wasn't my work.
So saying that their success was entirely thanks to my planning wouldn't exactly be an exaggeration.
And the second thing was...
Wait.
[Web Message]
Mom my phone
stopped working. This
is temporary number
when you see this
text me here..
Yeah, right.
"Mom," my ass.
Anyway.
The second driving force of my life was my love for girl groups.
You might ask whether that completely contradicted my obsession with rationality.
Not at all.
The fact that humans had emotions was itself an unchanging law of nature.
People dated.
People got married.
For me, it just happened to be girl groups.
If there was a pretty girl group somewhere, I followed that path.
Cold and calculating when it came to work.
Burning with passion when it came to being a fan.
That was me.
Working in idol management had nearly become the classic mistake of turning your hobby into your job, but knowing how to separate being an idol fan from managing idols was another virtue of rational thinking.
Of course, the fact that the idols I managed were a boy group certainly helped separate work from hobby.
That didn't mean I would've turned down a girl group just to maintain that separation, though.
...I really wanted to manage a girl group.
...
Another text arrived.
Spam again.
Since I needed to know promotional schedules if I wanted to photograph idols, I'd joined practically every fan café imaginable.
Apparently, somewhere along the way, the personal information I'd entered must have been sold.
There were always a few bastards running fan clubs for flop groups who sold their members' personal information.
"Ah, seriously."
Still, I couldn't just ignore the message.
The moment I took out my phone to check it, the photographer I'd been talking to let out an irritated sigh.
"If you're going to talk, then talk. If you're going to look at your phone, look at your phone. You're making it hard to focus."
"Ah, I keep getting spam messages. I've gotten into the habit of checking texts as soon as they arrive... Haha. Where was I?"
The photographer waved his hand dismissively.
"Forget it. If you're really such an amazing guy, why are you sitting here working as a photographer now?"
If you wanted the short answer, I'd say it was because taking responsibility for things beyond your control was apparently the fate of a manager.
From beginning to end, the whole disaster had been decorated by that bastard Wonwoo and his fake seductive charm.
Come to think of it, he had also been the one insisting that since they had enough experience now, the members deserved more freedom in their private lives.
Normally, I would've rejected him immediately.
But as time passed, Wonwoo had completely forgotten what he was like before becoming famous and slowly started acting like he was my equal.
And honestly, their fandom had already grown beyond anything I could personally control...
I figured that unless they were complete idiots, they wouldn't go somewhere and get photographed with women.
Yeah.
It was my fault.
I'd betrayed my own principle of rationality.
There had been absolutely no reason for me to approve his proposal, yet I'd approved it anyway.
And then came the incident that practically everyone with a television had heard about.
The mass drug use and prostitution scandal at Club Area.
And right at the center of it—
Was Wonwoo.
Photographed with a woman somewhere?
Yeah, right.
When the photos came out, he was happily posing with five or six women who were completely wasted on drugs.
Even through the censorship mosaics, I felt like I could get high just by looking at them.
Imagine how shocked the fans must have been.
It didn't matter whether Victory had sold fifteen million albums or a hundred million.
By now, probably half the albums they'd sold had been thrown into fires.
Wonwoo's trial was still ongoing.
But far more important to me than whatever trouble that bastard's lower half had gotten him into was what happened to my neck.
The company dumped everything on me, claiming I'd failed to properly manage him.
They said I'd looked the other way.
I hadn't looked the other way.
I'd merely lowered my guard a little.
And I genuinely had no idea something like that was happening.
"Come to think of it, why'd you get fired? You're standing here outside prison perfectly fine, so you obviously didn't do anything."
I had been investigated at first.
Naturally, they couldn't find a single piece of evidence connecting me to the incident, so I was released.
After I'd more or less gotten my own situation under control, I called another team leader from Management Division One, hoping to let him know that I was innocent.
That was when I finally learned the real reason I'd been fired.
The second team leader told me that shortly after I was dismissed, a scheduled tax investigation into the company had suddenly been canceled.
I had no idea what kind of interesting money games the company president, Ji Cheonwoo, had been playing.
Either way, that was how I ended up getting fired for the most ridiculous reason imaginable.
But who was I?
The embodiment of rationality and girl-group devotion—
Do Junhyeok.
Drowning in sadness and anger wasn't going to help me.
Besides, there were far too many beautiful idols in the world for me to lock myself inside my room and live like a hermit.
Before blaming myself for accepting Wonwoo's request, my first mistake had been trusting a bunch of men I had no affection for in the first place, even if it was only professionally.
Rationality became more absurd than anything else when it was built on a false assumption.
If only I had remained faithful to my fanboy heart...
So, starting now, I had decided to survive this difficult life using nothing but my passion as a fan.
That was why I'd seriously started working as an idol photographer.
Nothing illegal like paparazzi work, of course.
I'd follow idols to places like concerts, take several excellent pictures, and legally sell them to their fandoms.
It was a little disappointing that I had to split the profits with entertainment agencies, but even pocket change felt better when it was earned legally.
"Sounds like you're pretty good with a camera, then?"
"Obviously. I don't know why everyone acts like pressing a shutter button is so difficult."
Of course, simply pressing the shutter wasn't enough to produce a good photograph.
If I was going to become a proper idol photographer, I now had to push forward with pure fan devotion.
Whenever I saw an idol I liked, I'd photograph them first, send the pictures to their agency, and wait for permission to operate.
If my pictures were overflowing with enough love, even agencies that already had plenty of dedicated photographers would probably be desperate to issue me a permit.
Exactly.
For an obsessive fan, passion was the greatest qualification of all.
"Of course, rational observation skills are the most basic—"
"Uh...? Wait. Your rational-this and love-that philosophy isn't what's important right now."
The photographer cut me off and raised his camera toward the side of the stage.
If he was reacting that urgently, a famous idol had to be walking past.
"We're at Music Bang Bang. Why are you looking for anything important? Just take good pictures."
That was what I said, but I still looked in the same direction through my viewfinder.
At that moment, my grip nearly loosened.
Not because the camera was heavy.
It was because the people walking past were none other than—
Victory.
"If you really know them personally, you should at least be able to make them look this way once, right?"
Just imagining it hurt my pride.
Still, perhaps refusing to cling to the past was the cooler thing to do.
Hesitation only weakened the heart.
The moment I heard the photographer, I immediately raised my hand high.
"Hey! Chahun! Yunbin! Jicheon! Your hyung's here! Hyung!"
I shouted toward Victory, which now operated as a three-member group.
There was no way they'd forgotten my voice already.
The three members heard me and began turning their heads in my direction.
But before they had even fully turned around, they suddenly stopped.
Then they continued walking.
They had deliberately ignored me.
"Wow. You can really tell they're ignoring you. Guess you weren't lying about knowing them."
I wasn't in the mood to laugh at the photographer's joke.
I'd practically carried that boy group on my back for eight years.
