Ecosystem Survey

I checked the time. I'd been streaming a little over an hour. It was only three o'clock — still a long way from dinner.

"I was planning to go until five. Now what?"

Streaming until dinner had been the original plan, but I'd been forced offline before I even hit the halfway mark. My laptop was a few years old; it simply couldn't handle that many viewers.

"I can't even game on this thing."

Gaming was out of the question. Even a 4K video would stutter and freeze.

"Come to think of it, didn't I say I was going to check the communities?"

Just like on old Earth, this world had thriving communities where people with shared interests gathered to talk. There were three big ones, and I went with a site called Galleria From — a place where ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠users spun up genre-specific galleries and posted among themselves.

My reason for picking it was simple. It had a reputation for being the mildest of the three. The others were supposedly full spice.

"So I just hop into the Streamer Gallery, right?"

Famous streamers seemed to have personal galleries of their own. I'd only started today, so I headed for the general board that covered streamers as a whole.

New posts were flying up. I clicked into a few. My name wasn't in the titles, but the threads were definitely about me.

And then there were posts with titles that had nothing to do with me — until I clicked in and found they were about me anyway.

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That sort of thing.

"Overall, the image is 'nice guy.' Well — that's just me, so there's no real need to force a different lane, is there?"

One stream, and the direction already felt roughly locked in. The biggest difference between me and the other guys was personality, no question.

I still hadn't shown my face, but plastic surgery could cover that to a point.

"Not that anyone's catching up to my face, but still…"

The second the words left my mouth, I slapped myself hard across the cheek. Lately I'd been getting shameless. Something inside me had clearly broken when the world flipped.

"Hoo… Don't get cocky. Act the way you did on old Earth."

The truth was, I had a mild temperament. As long as nobody crossed a line, I didn't genuinely get angry — and that line was pretty generous. People at work used to call me easygoing all the time.

Better to just be myself on stream than manufacture a character, fail to stick the landing, and end up awkward. That way nothing would peel off over time either.

"What are the other male streamers even doing?"

Curiosity hit me out of nowhere. What kind of content were the other guys running? And what on earth had they done to make people flinch at the mere mention of a donation reaction — and drag the entire male-streamer image into the dirt like this?

I was the type who acted the moment I decided on something, so I went straight to NewTube. I didn't know a single streamer here, so I just searched "male streamer." Accounts and videos flooded the results.

I clicked the one sitting at the very top: Fresh Hwani.

Eight million subscribers. An absolute giant. That was why I picked him — and I shouldn't have. Or at the very least, I shouldn't have watched the video.

I hit play on a video with that title.

"Hi~ HwaniSunflowers! It's Fresh Hwani! Heehee~"

From the jump, a whiny, nasal voice poured out. Whatever "fresh" was supposed to mean, he'd clearly left it with the dogs — the sound grated like a mosquito in my ear.

Still, I figured he had to be better than the other guys with their garbage personalities. At least he didn't come off arrogant.

The voice was so hard to listen to that I scrubbed straight to the middle of the video.

And every charitable thought I'd been holding shattered on impact.

"Unnies! Please stop sending gifts like this. Who even uses this stuff, seriously."

Better than the other garbage-personality guys? No. This bastard was the poster child for garbage-personality guys.

Hwani tore open a gift from a viewer, checked the contents, and scowled. Whatever cosmetics he'd pulled from the box clearly weren't to his taste — he heaved a long sigh and chucked them over his shoulder.

A full-on trampling of someone's goodwill. And the chat…

They defended the streamer to a grotesque degree, and any scrap of criticism that slipped through got publicly executed. My face twisted on its own.

But that wasn't even the end of it. The real shock came next.

"Be more careful next time. It just ruins the mood for no reason. You unnies don't like seeing me in a bad mood either, right?"

How was any of this possible? Was this bastard even human?

The person who'd extended goodwill was the one apologizing — and paying money to do it — while the guy pocketing it acted like it was the most natural thing in the world. The viewers watched all of that and slobbered over Hwani, and for a stretch the chat was wallpapered with HNU, the initials for "Hwani Up."

"When Hwani smiles, the unnies are happy too? Heehee~!"

In that instant, something nauseating surged up my throat. I nearly emptied my empty stomach right there. I killed the video in a hurry, went to the fridge, and downed cold water in long gulps.

"Hoo… That insane bastard."

I wasn't the type to swear much, but there was no way to put it nicely. How could anyone do that? It was behavior I simply could not comprehend.

I knocked back another mouthful of cold water and went back to the desk. I didn't have the courage to watch another one of his videos, so I decided to check out a different male streamer.

"Beaming Bangul's NewTube?"

Alarm bells were going off for some reason, but I went in anyway. He was a famous streamer too — 7.2 million subscribers.

That was the video I picked. I wanted to see the game that was popular in this world, and what kind of reaction he'd give.

"No, why are you walking in there? Do you not have a brain?"

A guy with a round face and big eyes said it. From the description alone he sounded cute — except his face was either aging badly for his years, or he was just straight-up old. A withered-looking man. The voice alone was pretty adorable, though…

I didn't play games, so I had no idea what the actual problem was. What I could see was everyone piling onto someone they decided had messed up — and piling on way too hard.

The match kept going and ended in a loss.

"Ah, this is so fucking annoying. Does he not have hands, or does he not have a brain?"

He was seething, fuming beside the screen, when a bright little notification chimed and a donation landed.

"Huh? Wha—!? Ten million!?"

The same guy who'd been raging moments earlier went wide-eyed with shock, then broke into a full-face smile.

"Chairman unnie! Thank you!"

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He tilted his head and threw a wink. The edit matched it with a sparkly little effect. Then he beamed and queued up another game.

"…Huh? That's it?"

He took ten million won and that was the whole reaction? No way. There had to be more.

But a match popped, and the game just started. He locked in a character and sank into the match. Looks like that really was the end of it.

I'd taken three million myself and given basically no reaction, so I wasn't in a position to talk. In my defense, I was planning the reaction today and showing it on tomorrow's stream.

The chat, though, was losing its mind — in a good way. Everyone was praising him for a "value reaction."

Value… reaction?

I closed his video, dropped back to the NewTube home page, and thought it over.

"Is the bad-boy style just what's trending right now?"

Even if it was, that wasn't a bad boy. That was just an asshole, wasn't it? And if it were a bad-boy concept, nobody would be calling it a "value reaction."

I clutched my throbbing head and chugged more cold water. I emptied an entire bottle, then went back to studying male streamers.

The third one wasn't an account — it was a video sitting in trending. The guy on screen was doing aegyo nonstop. More precisely, it was something he seemed to think was aegyo. It was not aegyo.

"Ugh. My stomach."

If it were a paid donation reaction, I could understand. Even granting a hundred steps of charity — if it suited him or he was good at it, fine. But this guy? No. Too disgusting to call aegyo. What even was he?

"Do I keep watching?"

I seriously considered bailing, but I decided to push through. For all I knew, I'd just stepped on every landmine in the worst-odds run possible.

Next streamer: SexyMuscleKing, 6.1 million subscribers. The name alone was aggressively unpleasant, but I had to check.

"Uh. Ohh… um…?"

How was I supposed to process this? Some half-finished muscle guy in skin-tight clothes was reading chat. Height looked like high 160s to low 170s, and his head was enormous.

He was talking to chat when a donation came in, and with upbeat music he launched into an oil show.

I should have known from the fact that most of his videos were age-restricted. Still, I could force an understanding of it. Just picture a good-looking woman from old Earth doing an oil show.

"Is the body… good…? No! Don't decide that. Maybe people in this world are into that kind of build!"

Looking at chat, plenty of messages were calling him sexy.

Ah. I wanted to cry. After that, fighting back tears, I forced myself through at least one video from each of the other male streamers. The conclusion: being a man alone already got you halfway there.

"I am never becoming like that."

The streamers I needed to study weren't the men. They were the women.

I'd take finding that out as the win for today.