Chapter 50
We were the stars of the first episode. I was sure of it as soon as I saw the heavily edited scenes of our dorm—although my members seemed to dislike it.
“Ah...”
“Was our dorm always this small...?”
“Why does it look worse on the screen...?”
The members seemed to be shocked by our poor living environment shown on the screen and began to self-console themselves by saying it wasn’t as bad as it looked on TV. However, everyone implicitly knew that it was just as shown on TV so the atmosphere became gloomy.
“Hey~ We can just do well and move~ It’ll be impactful and nice!” Dong-Jun said something to turn the mood around, and the members felt a bit better after hearing him. Meanwhile, the show was continuing.
—We don’t have a team greeting yet, so can we just do a basic greeting?
The scene where we greeted the viewers for the first time appeared on screen.
—Hello! This is Siren! Nice to meet you!
Compared to how narrow and rundown the dorm was, we were edited as being bright and hopeful. The next scene that immediately followed was of us eating.
—Okay! Get the table out! Ah come on, set up the table!
—Yeahhh!
Do-Seung brought out a steaming hot soybean paste stew while shouting at us to get the table out. When that part came out, Do-Seung almost spat out the water he was drinking.
“...Hmph! Ah, no! Why was that on the show?” Do-Seung seemed embarrassed as it was the first time that an idol got annoyed so far in the first episode. Of course, from an outsider’s perspective, his annoyance didn’t seem like he was genuinely angry but more like a natural annoyance to his family members. However, that wasn’t the only problem.
“We’re the only group who boiled stew in a pot with heaping portions of rice...?”
Our breakfast menu was also too contrasting to the others.
“Wow...”
“We’re legendary in many ways...”
Frankly, we didn’t eat like that every day. In fact, we might eat the least among the groups participating in The Showcase, but that day just happened to be the day we ate a lot. Since we were coming out on TV, we tried to take out high-quality ingredients, and the only ingredients we found in our dorm were food like spam and eggs.
Thus, that’s why we had cooked spam and rolled omelets in addition to our normal meal. As for the soybean paste stew, we ate that every single day. As a result, our breakfast table coincidentally became full of salty side dishes, and Dong-Jun couldn’t stand all the salty food and piled up a lot of rice in his bowl to combat the salty taste. And because of all this, our breakfast table appeared as if we all had massive portions.
‘We became a group with the highest Engel’s coefficient.’
None of the scenes after this were exactly normal as well.
—Park Dong-Jun, I told you that you can’t eat double portions of rice.
—Come on! You said I can eat a lot for breakfast!
—There’s still a limit.
—But if there’s spam and egg rolls, you need to eat a lot of rice.
— No, you should eat moderately.
Do-Seung and Dong-Jun fought early in the morning on screen.
—Do-Seung, don’t be too hard on Dong-Jun.
Meanwhile, Woon was elegant all by himself.
—It’s good~ So good~ I’m starting to hum because of how good it is~
And Yeon-Hoon suddenly began singing while eating. Our breakfast scene was a chaotic mess, and I was shown as a man sitting in the corner and picking at my food. In other words, I didn’t get much footage, but it was hard to get airtime in this kind of situation as the other members were a natural at hogging all the camera’s attention.
Afterward, there was a scene where we ate and cleaned up the table. From up to here, there was nothing particularly strange as the other groups also showed scenes of eating and cleaning the dorm together.
The only difference was that we looked a lot more natural. Other groups seemed aware of the cameras and showed a stiff appearance, but our group didn’t have anything like that. It seemed as if my repeated emphasis to my members from the day before the shooting to show their natural selves had been effective.
However, maybe it was too natural, as the laundry drying rack was clearly exposed on screen. Usually, when a broadcasting crew came, it was normal to clean up things like that, and to make it worse, all the laundry on the drying rack was dry.
—Aren’t you going to take out the clothes?
—Ah, it’s a drying rack that we also use as a hanger...
—You don’t use a hanger?
—It’s because we put our laundry in there right now
—What? You hang clothes on the drying rack and dry the laundry on the hanger?
—Well, that’s how things turned out.
This was a scene that I hadn’t expected to air. Writer Kim Min-Young kept asking me various questions about this and that, so I just roughly gave her answers. And this scene must have been created in the process. I didn’t think too much on the day of the shooting but—
Sigh. “...I’m so embarrassed.”
We didn’t know how to give our greeting at the time so we just went with our team greeting, but I didn’t know the other groups just said hello and nice to meet you. I had no idea it would be like this. Since we were the last to come up to the studio, we had no idea what kind of greeting came by and went. Like this, we became a group that overreacted, and a reaction cut of other groups blinking at us and reacting awkwardly was added.
“Yeon-Hoon, are you okay?”
“Me? Oh, no problem! I’m fine!”
I asked Yeon-Hoon if he was all right because his face had turned so red that it looked like it was about to explode. Since then, miscellaneous scenes from the studio were aired. Scenes where different groups chatted amongst each other and nervously glanced at each other. The scene where we greeted the hosts and watched the declaration of war videos. In our part, the content was edited to focus mostly on our pitiful circumstances. It seemed as if the production crew had taken a liking to our sad story. Then the scene changed to our performance.
“Oh!”
“Wow!”
“The energy is different on the show.”
The production crew didn’t mess around when editing the stage video, since everyone got the same amount of screen time and cuts. They only added reaction cuts in the middle and camera movements tailored to the stage movement. If they messed around with even the stage performance, they would be criticized these days.
Therefore, it seemed that they had given a fair amount of screen time for the different performances. However, just because they provided the same amount of editing and screen time, it didn’t mean that the performances were all of the same quality. Rather, thanks to their limited editing, the difference in abilities between the teams were more starkly revealed. Frankly, Luminin, OnebyOne, and Bleshu, I couldn’t even remember what the difference between them was.
‘I can’t tell between them.’ However, when Only One came out—
“Wow!”
“Awesome...”
“Senior Hyun-Sung is really good with facial expressions...”
Their performance was so good that we exclaimed despite having seen it once before. I thought they had done well in the actual performance, but it was even more noticeable when I saw it on the screen. After Only One’s performance ended, our performance began.
“Hmm.”
“Pwehh.”
The members all seemed nervous as they closed their mouths and focused only on the screen.
“Oh...?”
“Ohhh...”
“Wow...!”
However, as the performance progressed, the members’ faces began to change.
“Wow, we were this good?” The reason was simple–we clearly did well.
Honestly, I thought we were better than Only One. Our performance looked better than Only One, which seemed to be the best among them all. However, the members’ expressions were not just bright. Since we placed last for this performance, they had mixed emotions about it. Complex emotions began to appear on their faces. After that performance ended, the stage performance ended and the ranking announcement started.
The broadcast showed Only One ranking first and us ranking last. The camera zoomed to the members’ expressions slightly falling when we were ranked last and with this—
Da-dum!
“Wow, they ended it here.”
“Haha...”
Episode 1 of The Showcase 2 was over. In the preview of the second episode, which followed immediately, an interview according to the ranking announcement briefly appeared. Fierce reactions to the next mission, and the group’s determination to do really well came out in the preview, and with this, Episode 1 of The Showcase completely ended. Now, there was a TV commercial on the screen. The members stared blankly at the laptop screen without saying a word. The atmosphere was ambiguous. Although we performed well on stage, the show ended with us placing last.
“Well, um, I guess this is good for us...?” Besides our mixed feelings about being last, we all shared similar sentiments.
“...Probably?”
“...We got a lot of screen time.”
The first episode was centered around us. No, the show itself blatantly edited around us.
“We did it, right?”
“I think we won.”
“To be honest, I couldn’t even see the other teams.”
Aside from finishing last, we reaped all the benefits of being on a show.
“...We did it!”
“...We made it!”
“Aghhhh!”
“We did it! We did it!”
The members kept shouting we did it and jumped up from their seats and cheered.
“Tae-Yoon, we did it! We really did it!”
I wasn’t exactly sure what we did so far, but their reactions were enough for me. At the same time, I worried about the internet’s reaction. We became the main characters of episode 1.
‘Then that means the fans of the original main characters won’t stay still.’ This also meant that we would earn the resentment of those who got their positions stolen from us.