The Price of Loyalty Test

About this drama

The listing for this entry is the title alone: The Price of Loyalty Test, twenty-five characters with no synopsis, recorded verbatim including its compressed construction. The reading below is inference, not plot fact. Grammatically the title is a stack: a price, of a loyalty, of a test, three nouns with no possessive or article to say whether the test belongs to loyalty or simply measures it, and that compression is itself a fact of the listing, recorded rather than corrected. Read plainly, the phrase promises a story that runs a loyalty test and then presents the bill, which makes the test an event with stakes rather than a theme, and the singular price suggests one reckoning rather than many. Who administers the test, and who pays, are the two slots the title leaves blank. Sixty episodes stretched that far stops the test from being a moment and makes it a way of life, and the fourth-highest view count in the batch suggests the compression reads as intrigue rather than error. A test held that long also changes hands, and every hand-off is an episode. The run is sixty episodes with 5,549 views, the fourth-highest count in this batch and tied for its longest run.

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