Chapter 103
The Omniscient Parents’ Perspective is a variety show commonly regarded as boring online.
A plot centered on observation that has long since grown tiresome, along with cast members who are boring in the most predictable ways.
In particular, the people brought on simply to keep the program going after everyone worth inviting had already appeared were bound to be boring.
Usually, they were actors promoting a new release or mediocre singers promoting a new song.
Most of them either pretended to be ordinary people and earned the resentment of viewers who really were ordinary people, or were simply so boring in their daily lives that even the most entertaining editing couldn’t save them.
But this episode was different.
The moment its teaser was released, it took over the algorithms of every online community and social-media platform.
[Kim Seol and Seo Si-yeon’s daily lives revealed on “The Omniscient Parents’ Perspective”?]
-No, why are these two here lol
-Is the PD maybe the Singer Star PD?? How did they manage to cast both of them?
-No, both their houses look freaking nice…
↳For real
↳The view alone is on another level lol. You can see the Han River right away.
-They should give the casting person a bonus.
-When did Seo Si-yeon buy a house?? Wasn’t she living in an orphanage?
↳She bought it at the beginning of this year.
↳How much money did she even make…
↳Would Seo Si-yeon, the producer of Noiris, have earned just a few pennies?
People were puzzled by Seo Si-yeon appearing on such a mediocre variety show and tried to figure out why, but their anticipation outweighed all those questions.
Seo Si-yeon had never revealed her private life to the public.
It wasn’t as though she had deliberately cultivated a mysterious persona, but there had never been any reason to share her life at the orphanage, and viewers hadn’t wanted that, either.
So although people knew that Seo Si-yeon was good at music, they knew absolutely nothing about what she usually did with her time.
The only information they had was that she was occasionally spotted gaming with her friends at a PC café in Juan.
Even that wasn’t certain.
That was why the mere fact that Seo Si-yeon’s completely veiled private life was about to be revealed sparked countless conversations about this week’s episode of The Omniscient Parents’ Perspective.
-But they probably won’t show things properly anyway. Every celebrity does commoner cosplay like crazy.
↳This is so true.
↳Would Seo Si-yeon do commoner cosplay? Isn’t she a commoner to begin with?
↳Commoner (lives in an apartment with a Han River view) lol
↳That’s self-made wealth, fuck. She lived in an orphanage her whole life. Would earning some money really change her that much?
Still, the internet also focused on the fact that Seo Si-yeon had bought an expensive apartment.
It had technically been public knowledge for a while, but this was the first time it had appeared officially, so it became an even bigger issue than when it was first leaked.
「Honestly, it’s kind of a turnoff.
She’s insanely good at music, and I admit it’s amazing that she developed her talent in such poor circumstances, yeah.
But seeing a kid who’s barely ten years old buy an apartment overlooking the Han River with money she earned herself… I feel so deprived.
I could work and save my entire life and still struggle to buy a home of my own in Seoul…」
[Likes: 3.2k][Retweets:672][Quotes: 2.1k]
As usual with an issue like this, Twitter was the first to pull the trigger.
The post uploaded by a fairly popular Twitter account was met with a flood of heated reactions.
Keyboard battles reminiscent of a war broke out in the quotes and comments, and the post spread across all kinds of websites, both male- and female-dominated.
It became such a hot topic that various sites saw more than a thousand comments, and then Instagram and YouTube content farmers reposted those arguments until the matter rose to the level of a full-blown social issue.
People had already been putting the name Seo Si-yeon back in their minds because of Podium’s chart resurgence, so this issue probably felt even more provocative.
And then the whole issue vanished in a single minute when the episode aired.
“What was the most important factor when choosing this house?”
The PD’s question and Seo Si-yeon’s answer to it.
“Security. There were so many strange people loitering around where I used to live… I felt sorry for the police officers, and I was scared myself. So I moved to an apartment with good security.”
-What’s with the people who cursed her for moving to a well-secured apartment when she said there were tons of stalkers? lol
Seo Si-yeon’s answer was enough to silence every keyboard warrior.
* * *
[Summary of this week’s The Omniscient Parents’ Perspective]
Kim Seol is living the life of a modern-day aristocratic young lady, just as everyone expected.
That isn’t particularly surprising, so let’s skip it…
Seo Si-yeon is living surprisingly like an ordinary? middle-school girl.
(A scene of her typing in chat while playing a game, then deleting it)
(Various manga and otaku merchandise scattered throughout the study)
(Her staring blankly at an RPS concert)
(Watching an action series on an OTT service after inviting a friend over)
But she seems closer to a middle-school boy than a middle-school girl lol
If you chalk up watching RPS concerts to occupational hazard, her lifestyle is exactly that of a middle-school boy: LoL, otaku stuff, and so on lol
-Was Seo Si-yeon an otaku?
↳Yep, Blooming got her into it.
-But watching a concert doesn’t look like something a middle-school girl would do at all lol. Look how she watches it in total concentration without even screaming.
↳She seems more like she’s watching it as a musician.
↳Seo Si-yeon is a producer too, after all, yeah.
-Seo Si-yeon is Seo Si-yeon, but that friend was freaking cute too, for real.
↳She’s Kim Seol’s younger sister.
↳For real?
↳From her name to her looks, anyone could tell… lol
↳Their vibes are different, so you might not recognize her. She was incredibly lively.
-Even just looking at their faces was entertaining, for real.
-It was actually watchable for an observational variety show, for once, yeah.
-So what are they doing next week? Is there a teaser out?
↳I heard they’re going to show her going to work?
↳This is kind of exciting too.
↳Did Noiris’s special appearance get announced??
* * *
“At least public opinion has calmed down somewhat…”
If I had to pick the most bewildering period I’ve experienced while seriously working in the entertainment industry, I’d say it was probably this past week.
Honestly, while filming this program, I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that my home would be revealed.
The fact that I had moved into an expensive house had already been made public, and the communities had recycled the topic until it became stale.
But the reactions that suddenly poured out—scarily so—as soon as my house appeared in the teaser were enough to leave me bewildered.
Honestly, it is a pretty nice house.
Even after pooling all my music royalties, I couldn’t afford it, so I’d had to get help from the bank.
So I understood why people would feel jealous and a sense of incongruity.
Because from their perspective, no matter how much of a genius they thought I was, they could never have imagined that a mere orphaned kid had earned that much money.
‘This is why I went through all that trouble trying to shed my orphan image.’
All my desperate efforts toward the end of Singer Star to be remembered as a musician rather than an orphan had been virtually useless.
The story of a musical genius from an orphanage was simply too sensational for me to replace my image with anything else.
And only when that sensational story was on the verge of strangling me did I wonder whether I should have established a stronger image sooner.
But it was too late, so I had to come up with a solution.
And the easiest way to escape being attacked for being an orphan was simply to play up the fact that I was one.
That was how I barely won the public’s sympathy and made it out alive.
“That interview idea was brilliant, even when I think about it again.”
“I agree. I was bewildered, too, since it was a situation I’d never experienced before… It was a real lifesaver.”
Thanks to the interview video the PD had asked me to hurriedly insert at the beginning of the broadcast, we had managed to completely turn public opinion around.
Even if it wasn’t quite a full-blown career collapse, I had escaped a moment when my image was about to become awkwardly muddled.
The PD had done me an enormous favor this time.
I even thought that if the PD ever asked me for something later, I would do them at least one favor in return.
“People really are scary…”
If I’d inherited the money, I might at least have understood their resentment, but was moving into a house purchased with my own hard-earned wealth really something to be so jealous of?
Well, I didn’t completely fail to understand them, but the public sentiment over the past week had been genuinely frightening, even to me.
“Of course, this kind of public sentiment couldn’t have arisen naturally.”
There had definitely been people fanning the flames, and I could roughly guess who they were.
But that wasn’t a problem I needed to think about right now. For the moment, I needed to focus on the episode that would air next week.
What I needed to be careful about there was…
“There’s nothing.”
Because I had really done almost nothing but work that day.
There were events that could become issues, but nothing in them would get me cursed at or require any additional response from me.
The sudden incident that had happened that day had turned out to be a blessing in disguise.