Become a Star

For those fresh out of college, their first job is like a piece of art where they draw their big dreams on, and to Choi Ji-Won, TM was that kind of place. So when he was assigned to the PR department, which was directly associated with his major, he was so excited that he couldn’t sleep.

“Take one each and register on the websites you’ve been assigned to.” Assistant Manager Kim, who was in charge of training, handed the three new recruits papers with different forum websites written on them.

“Including yourself, you need to make at least three accounts, and that can be your family or whoever,” he said.

“So, what do we need to do?” one of the new recruits asked.

“You’re slow. What is this place?”

Assistant Manager Kim opened his arms wide and cursed the new recruit that asked a stupid question while pointing at the PR office. The PR department’s job was to promote the agency’s celebrities in any way possible. So what the new recruits usually did was register on famous forums, then pretend to promote the agency’s celebrities’ schedule and work and compliment them.

“When promoting using the different accounts, don’t forget about managing the IP address. If your account gets caught or the location of the head office gets leaked because you used the same IP address, I’ll kill you,” Assistant Manager Kim warned.

He always lectured the new recruits on managing their IP addresses and avoiding defamation. On their first day at work, the new recruits’ shoulders drooped a little after hearing what they would be doing at the PR department. They thought that this kind of work was done by part-timers, but it seemed like it was a task that full-time employees had to do.

“Also, make sure to focus on attacking Chae Woo-Jin,” Assistant Manager Kim added.

“Chae Woo-Jin?” one of them asked.

After hearing what he said, the new recruits widened their eyes and stared at Assistant Manager Kim. They thought he had randomly said Chae Woo-Jin’s name, but they understood and nodded.

Even though Blue Fit held a press conference because of Chae Woo-Jin, it seemed like the public wouldn’t forgive them. Not only were they no longer receiving commercial deals, but the advertisers filed a lawsuit. Overseas concerts were the biggest source of income for both TM and Blue Fit, but they had to cancel all of it. TM had said they were going to reflect upon their incident but were planning on keeping the concert schedule they had originally planned with the excuse that it had been contracted. However, it was all useless now. The concert halls and event organizers that signed the rental agreement sent the termination notice first. According to the contract, Blue Fit was at fault for damaging their image, so the agency couldn’t even receive the cancellation fee. More than that, as the agency’s leading celebrity, the symbolic meaning behind Blue Fit’s downfall was more potent than the economic effect. Because of Blue Fit, the image of other celebrities under the agency got ruined, and there were even rumors that the company’s support was falling apart.

They hired so many new recruits this time because they wanted to show that TM was doing well. Even though Blue Fit was amazing, they worked hard to show everyone that even without them, the agency was still doing well.

Considering how this all started because of Chae Woo-Jin, they understood why Assistant Manager Kim gave them that task, so the three new recruits nodded at the same time. As long as they worked for TM, Chae Woo-Jin was their enemy too.

“I can register with mine, my mother’s and my little sister’s….”

After he finished registering on the forums he was assigned to, Choi Ji-Won looked at the message board first because depending on the mood of the website and the plan, the type of post and the content changed. The website he was assigned to seemed pretty easygoing, and the members were really interested in celebrities. However, since the members possessed a lot of knowledge about the celebrities, it could easily work against him if he approached it carelessly.

“But I need to know about Chae Woo-Jin if I’m going to start attacking him.”

Choi Ji-Won wasn’t normally interested in Chae Woo-Jin, so he was getting worried. When he applied to TM, he only researched the celebrities under this agency and didn’t care about the others. Anti-fans were also considered fans in the entertainment industry, so he had to know something about Chae Woo-Jin to attack and curse him.

When he searched Chae Woo-Jin on the internet, he noticed a lot of data about him even though it had only been a year since he debuted. There were paparazzi pictures that looked like pictorials, still cuts and videos of works he filmed, and a lot of GIFs that fans had made.

He got sick of looking at him even before looking at the data properly, so he looked over at his colleagues sitting next to him to see what they were up to. The male colleague on his right was writing something down, so when he stretched his neck out to see what he was working on so passionately, he saw Chae Woo-Jin’s picture on his monitor. The post was a compliment about Hanryang Doryeong, who revealed himself to be Chae Woo-Jin on yesterday’s episode of The King of the Masked Singers. His colleague wrote a comment saying, ‘Hey sissy~! No matter how many times I listen to him, I can’t tell if he’s a good singer or not. Did the group get hypnotized or something?’

“Do you know anything about Chae Woo-Jin?” Choi Ji-Won asked.

“No,” his colleague replied.

“But you’re writing it so well,” he said.

“All bad comments are usually about the same thing. It’s just talking negatively without any logic or content,” the colleague said.

Choi Ji-Won sighed after hearing his colleague talking calmly. He applied to this company with aspiration, but the first task he was assigned was leaving negative comments.

After shaking his head, he looked at his female colleague, sitting on his left. She was writing something down while looking at her monitor. She had written down the dramas and movies Chae Woo-Jin was in and his personal information. Like him, this colleague seemed like the type who wrote negative comments after gathering data.

“You’re working hard,” Choi Ji-Won said.

“Of course!” the girl said.

For some reason, her answer sounded aggressive. She must’ve felt Choi Ji-Won flinching because she lifted her head and spoke while glaring at him.

“I’m a fan of Blue Fit. If I got hired by TM, I thought I would become a successful otaku, so you have no idea how hard I’ve worked to get hired! But this bastard… because of him, my Blues!!” she said.

Her every word was filled with resentment, and as Choi Ji-Won awkwardly nodded, he encouraged her to keep up the good work. The fact that one of them was highly motivated and was working hard was a good thing.

He barely managed to suppress the sigh that was going to come out and decided to promote the agency’s celebrities and place Chae Woo-Jin on hold for now because he didn’t want to write nasty comments about someone he didn’t know. However, when it was time to get off work, he knew that he had made a bad decision. While Assistant Manager Kim checked to see what the new employees completed for the day, he got angry at Choi Ji-Won. He basically said that attacking and slandering Chae Woo-Jin was the new employee’s primary task.

“You ignorant little bastard!”

Assistant Manager Kim’s evaluation of Choi Ji-Won was short and blunt. The talented employees of the PR team were already promoting the agency’s celebrities. Though he wasn’t straightforward about it, the homework given by the assistant manager was Chae Woo-Jin. So Assistant Manager Kim made an example of Choi Ji-Won and scolded him badly for not following instructions.

The next day, Choi Ji-Won started working hard in writing nasty comments. Even though he didn’t know anything about Chae Woo-Jin, when he began writing them, he realized what his colleague meant when he said that there didn’t need to be any logic involved. All he had to do was write whatever came to his mind.

“Ah! What is this!”

“What’s wrong?” Choi Ji-Won asked

“I created an account on Chae Woo-Jin’s fan cafe, but they rejected my promotion and blocked my ID.”

“Chae Woo-Jin’s fan cafe?” Choi Ji-Won was surprised because it was none other than his female colleague who was a big fan of Blue Fit and also the most motivated.

“Being in disguise is the basic part of getting to know your enemy. So after I registered, I logged in for 10 days straight and even wrote empty compliments about Chae Woo-Jin, but I still got rejected. When I messaged the admin about it, they said they couldn’t promote me because of an issue with the procedure, so they just kicked me out! So I tried to register again, but they blocked me. It’s so ridiculous!” she yelled out in frustration.

“Are you sure you didn’t make a mistake in your post?” Choi Ji-Won asked.

Even if she disguised herself, the fact that she was an anti-fan was difficult to hide, and to make things worse, she was a genuine anti-fan. It was possible that she expressed her hostility towards Chae Woo-Jin without realizing it.

“Did I?” she asked.

“Is there a different reason? Try registering again by using someone else’s name,” Choi Ji-Won suggested.

After getting encouraged by Choi Ji-Won, she signed up on Chae Woo-Jin’s fan cafe a few more times but failed to get promoted and got kicked out each time. At this point, Choi Ji-Won felt that something was off, but since he didn’t know the reason, he couldn’t make any guesses.

—Good looks aren’t everything!

—The bastard only donates when he has money left.

—If he’s so good at studying, why not take the bar exam instead of becoming an actor? Such a waste.

—He’s nothing but an otaku that can’t enjoy the world because he’s studying, acting, and singing!!

—Is it possible to have that kind of face without going through plastic surgery? I’m sure he used the power of science to get that face.

While writing nasty comments on a post about Chae Woo-Jin, Choi Ji-Won thought it didn’t sound right, so he tilted his head. Though it was a malicious comment, it sounded like a compliment for some reason.

“I think I need to gather data about Chae Woo-Jin,” he said.

When Choi Ji-Won complained that this wasn’t going to work, his female colleague next to him suddenly interfered.

“Ask me anything. What do you want to know? His height is 186 cm, weight is 74 kgs, blood type is A, his birthday is March 28th, making him an Aries, and even though he has monolids, he gets double eyelids when he’s tired, and he usually drinks an americano. Director Moon Seung-Kwon and Director Choi Yi-Geon adore him a lot, so they meet often. His favorite restaurants are….”

All Choi Ji-Won could do was open his mouth as he listened to his colleague talk about Chae Woo-Jin.

“You know a lot,” he said.

“Well… this is nothing,” she replied.

His colleague proved that not anyone could be an anti-fan, causing Choi Ji-Won to become motivated. But the more time passed, the more suspicious he was of his colleague’s motives.

“Ah, this pin is beautiful.”

It had been five months since they got hired. Choi Ji-Won’s colleague insisted that she was still a Blue Fit fan, but she would stare at Chae Woo-Jin’s picture, compliment the accessory he was wearing and spend her day talking about the movies and dramas he appeared in.

“Is that Chae Woo-Jin?” Choi Ji-Won asked.

He even saw a picture of Chae Woo-Jin as his colleague’s phone background.

“You see, it’s… a way for me to get motivated. Every time I see his face, I’ll be filled with motivation!” she said.

“But that necklace is simple, yet cute. It looks pretty expensive, and I think I’ve actually seen it somewhere….” Choi Ji-Won said.

“Jewelry like this usually has pretty similar designs!”

Choi Ji-Won felt awkward and agreed with her when she suddenly got angry, but he really did see it before. It was strange because as a single man, there was no way he would know of a necklace like that, and after a few hours, he figured out where he saw the necklace from. It was the same Gaon necklace Chae Woo-Jin wore in a paparazzi picture. Only a small batch was made and sold by Gaon, and after checking their website, it showed that it was out of stock. Choi Ji-Won naturally found out about it because his fans posted dozens of posts per day about how much they wanted to buy it.

“No way! Well, if an item like this does get popular, people are bound to make fakes.”

Just like his colleague stated earlier, all jewelry designs were the same.

“Don’t you think it’s too much?” Choi Ji-Won asked.

The problem was his other male colleague, not her. Even though posting malicious comments and slandering Chae Woo-Jin was their job, his other colleague was starting to break away from that.

“You think so? It’s becoming more provocative the more I write it,” he said.

“But you shouldn’t get his family involved. Let’s just focus on Chae Woo-Jin,” Choi Ji-Won suggested.

“Then I have nothing to write about. I’ve already hit rock bottom.”

There was a line when writing malicious comments and slandering others. They needed some kind of foundation to work with, but Chae Woo-Jin himself was almost perfect no matter how they looked at it. His appearance, skills, intelligence, figure, and talent were all perfect, so asking to write malicious comments about him was very troubling.

Thinking about it now, his colleague had been writing malicious comments about Chae Woo-Jin’s younger sister. He would mock her, saying that she should become a celebrity too instead of studying, and sometimes, he would write really harsh comments that caused Choi Ji-Won to frown.

“Once I started doing it, it became fun,” his colleague said.

Choi Ji-Won became skeptical about coming here and doing something like this, but his colleague, on the other hand, seemed to have realized his true nature while writing malicious comments.

As expected, when he had a feeling that something was off, one of his colleagues resigned.

“I can’t continue doing stuff like this anymore. And there’s a company that I really want to work for.”

His colleague who prided herself in being a Blue Fit fan resigned and left the company. The trash bin beside her desk was full of pictures and data about Blue Fit. On the other hand, the data about Chae Woo-Jin that she collected to post malicious comments about him was nowhere to be found.

A few months later, DS’s legal team sent a letter of complaint to Choi Ji-Won and his male colleague working in the PR department.

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