Thanks for giving my comment a Good button.
I hope you’ll also check out what I posted, since it includes some background from the producer about how Zodiac Girls was developed and produced. I also hope more people can become aware of this background and keep it in mind when discussing the series.
For some context, this is a retrospective written by the former producer of Zodiac Girls. His name stopped appearing in the credits starting from Chapter 37.
-PD's Instagram(translate)
The last project I worked on was Zodiac Girls.
After about a year of serialization, it came to an end with 51 chapters, including the afterword!
I had planned to write this as soon as the author’s afterword was posted, but...
Anyway, this is my somewhat belated retrospective on the completion of Zodiac Girls.
Like <Realization of Justice> and <Kowloon: Soroka>, this was also a difficult project to work on, but Zodiac Girls was especially challenging.
The genre we originally wanted to make was something closer to a realistic romantic comedy with stronger drama elements. However, the company and the platform kept rejecting the proposals, and Zodiac Girls was eventually created after seven different project pitches.
I suppose this kind of thing happens throughout the industry, but there were parts of the process that were difficult to understand.
One of the initial project concepts was based on shamans and spirit possession, but we were told that those were too niche, and that we should avoid making works based on shamanistic themes in the future.
But not long after that, <Exhuma> was released and surpassed 10 million admissions, and dramas based on Korean shamanistic beliefs, such as <Head Over Heels>, were also launched.
<ShaMONEYism>, another series on Naver Webtoon, had also done well, and with ShaMONEYism-related OTT productions, games, and other content already in development and lined up for release, it was honestly very difficult to understand that feedback at the time.
But what could we do? If they told us to change it, we had to change it.
By the fifth or sixth proposal, we had already removed everything we were told to remove and changed everything we were told to change, only for even that project made almost entirely according to their instructions to be rejected. At that point, feeling almost completely defeated, we decided to abandon that direction altogether and switch to a high-concept premise instead. Since we had already lost so much time throughout the process, we put the new proposal together in about a week and submitted it almost out of desperation... and somehow, that one was approved exactly as it was.
Anyway, if I may make a bit of an excuse, if readers felt that the story or some of the setting was lacking, this complicated development process was one of the reasons behind it... haha.
I have a lot of respect for the author, who kept trusting the project and patiently waiting despite all the setbacks along the way.
@jiji__man
This was a project that taught me a lot and gave me many new perspectives as a producer. At one point, the author and I also participated in Seoul Comic World together. It was my first time meeting readers in person, and I was surprised by how many of them were elementary and middle school students.
The comments section was mostly filled with somewhat sexual remarks and mischievous comments, but meeting readers in person also made me realize once again that there were many people who genuinely cared about and seriously enjoyed the series.
Because of what you might call adult circumstances behind the scenes, we had to bring Season 1 to a close for the time being and take a break. Still, for the sake of the readers who have followed the series so sincerely, I hope we can somehow create the right conditions to return to it someday, show the story we originally wanted to tell through this work, and bring it to a proper conclusion.
