This Is Clickbait
Now this is clickbait.
Have you ever heard the terms "male-dominated" or "female-dominated"?
They're the words people throw around whenever a group skews heavily toward one gender or the other.
Some places end up with a decent mix of men and women. Others don't. Mechanical engineering, electronics, electrical engineering — those fill up with guys. Early childhood education and nursing fill up with women. Nobody sits down and engineers the ratio on purpose; it just sorts itself out by gender. Ironic, if you think about it.
Internet streaming wasn't all that different. Streamers themselves might go either way, but the audience watching them never escaped the gender imbalance. It was safe to assume the vast majority of viewers were men.
That was half the reason some people said if you weren't a woman, you might as well forget about streaming. Unless you had some genuinely exceptional talent that could grab attention on its own, just getting noticed by an audience that was overwhelmingly male was already an uphill fight.
There was a time I brushed that off with a shrug — Is it really that bad? — but looking back now, I had to admit they had a point. I myself had reaped more than a few benefits from the gender swap, hadn't I?
In the early days of my stream, I remembered pulling in a solid chunk of viewers off the image of a skilled female player who'd been mainlining Camilla for seasons on end. Sure, there'd been some groundwork laid before that — but if I'd still been a guy, that same setup never would have hit half as hard.
Anyway. Back to the point.
The fact that my new trainee — username SuperCuteCamilla — turned out to be a woman set off no small amount of chaos.
I was surprised too, but honestly, my student's gender wasn't that big a deal to me.
Think about it — I wasn't going to teach differently based on whether they were a guy or a girl. The factors I'd already listed out earlier mattered way more.
The viewers, though, clearly felt otherwise. The chat had swung noticeably friendlier than before. Seriously, put a woman in front of them and they lose their minds.
Just a minute ago they'd been screaming at me to kick her out and pick someone else.
Well, it was a good thing. I'd been worried my student might get crushed watching an angry chat — but that didn't look like it was going to be a problem.
"Ah, um… yes! I'm a girl!"
"No, that was my bad for saying that… if anything in chat makes you uncomfortable, just tell me privately. I'll take care of it."
"Mm… I'm fine. It's a little overwhelming, but. Hehe, barely anyone's being mean…"
I left the nonsense in chat alone and, before starting the lesson proper, asked about a few things I needed to know upfront.
"How old are you, by the way?"
"Uh, my age… do I, um, really have to say…?"
For the first time since the call connected, she hesitated. Sensitive about her age? Thinking about it, that was fair enough. No point digging into something she clearly didn't like, so I changed the angle.
"No, nothing like that. I was just curious what SuperMilla's daily life looks like."
"M-my daily life? Wait, more importantly, what's SuperMilla even—"
"I shortened SuperCuteCamilla. Is that weird?"
"Oh, like a… nickname? If it's something Teacher calls me, anything's fine."
Anything's fine, huh. Between setting my face as her profile picture and reacting like this, she was definitely a fan.
Whether I should be happy about that or not… I was only human. Being harsh while teaching someone who clearly liked me wasn't exactly easy.
"But why are you curious about my daily life? Why…?"
"Ah, nothing that private. It's just — yesterday alone you played fourteen games, so I was wondering if you usually grind that hard."
The average game of Abyss ran somewhere between twenty and thirty minutes. The nature of the game meant there was no fixed end point — sometimes it wrapped up fast, and on rare occasions a match dragged out past an hour.
Setting those outliers aside and assuming thirty minutes a game, SuperMilla had spent a total of four hundred twenty minutes in Abyss yesterday.
Converted to hours, that was seven hours. Add roughly another hour for queue times, dodges, and lobby waiting, and you were looking at eight hours total.
Someone might argue that on a good day you could easily put in that many games — but the real question was whether you could do it every single day.
The point of the question was to figure out her usual routine, how much practice time she could carve out, and how much of her day she could actually invest in the game.
But her reaction wasn't what I'd expected. Just like when I'd asked about her age, she started hemming and hawing, trailing off mid-sentence.
"I do usually play that much, yeah…"
"So you game about eight hours a day, then?"
"Sometimes ten hours, and uuugh… when Teacher goes live I either stop or leave the stream open on the side while I play…"
A long string of chat messages rolled up the screen.
"Ahh…"
That was when I finally figured out why SuperMilla had gone quiet.
"You can be unemployed, you know. People can not have jobs. That goes for all of you too. Being unemployed is nothing to be ashamed of."
I was trying to encourage her — why was she reacting like that? I'd spent a long stretch as a job-seeker myself once, so I knew exactly how it felt.
Though SuperMilla's situation was a little different from your average unemployed person.
"So money isn't really an issue, then?"
"Yes. It's the kind of situation where not working is fine."
The short version: her father's business had done well enough that she'd quit a stressful job and dedicated herself entirely to watching my streams and playing Abyss.
The viewers, who'd thought she was one of them, felt a deep sense of betrayal at discovering she was a fraud. That was just a bonus.
"That's actually great. It means you're in an environment where you can focus entirely on the game."
"Yes…! Other than sleeping, I can play as much as I want!"
"Perfect, perfect. Are you looking at my stream right now?"
The screen I'd pulled up earlier was back up. SuperCuteCamilla's match history, pulled from the stats site — a solid wall of red that was honestly impressive in its own way.
Confirming she could see my screen, SuperMilla hurried to explain.
"Teacher, it's not like that — I mean, I am Bronze, but there's a reason for all of this—"
"I'm not trying to give you a hard time. I just genuinely want to know how your rating ends up looking like this."
I meant it. What kind of teacher criticizes a struggling student? I'd deliberately gone looking for someone who was struggling — giving her grief over it would make me the crazy one.
This was simply a process of getting a clearer picture of where my student stood.
Those little numbers on a stats page never captured the essence of what was actually going on inside them. At that point, watching her play a game in person seemed like the better approach.
"Would you queue a ranked game the way you normally would? I'd like to watch you play."
"Y-yes…!"
Work through things one step at a time and a path eventually reveals itself.
That was just how life worked. Even problems that looked completely unsolvable tended to unravel once you started picking at the smallest pieces, bit by bit.
I carried that truth around in my head. It was one of the bits of life wisdom I'd picked up over a not-insignificant number of years.
But maybe those years hadn't been dense enough — maybe, put crudely, I just didn't have enough mileage. Because with this particular problem, I had absolutely no idea where to even start.
"…Why did you go in just now?"
"I thought I was alone. It was a free kill and they kept giving me the angle…"
"You dove in just like that a minute ago and died. This is basically the same situation— wait. Chat. Stop typing in chat. Don't fight with your teammates…"
"I'm sorry, they keep saying stuff… just now they didn't even look for me and then they have the nerve to—"
Lack of learning ability, lack of teamwork with allies…?
I started cataloging the scattered minor issues in my head, and then—
There was so much to point out that I finally just opened Notepad.