How Am I Supposed to Make a Living?
I'm Seong Yuhan. A guy who lives right.
And now that I've already turned into a Geum Taeyang who looks like bad news at a glance, if I run that through the Reverse Filter...
Ahh. What's going to happen to my social standing...
Nothing I can do about it. At least my face jumped to the top tier of handsome in the country. I'll take the win where I can get it.
If I keep living kindly, somebody out there will notice. Right?
...The public-image problem can wait. There's no answer anyway, and now my head hurts on top of everything else.
Anyway!
A Gender-Reversed World. A world where a great many things about men and women have been flipped.
The problem, if you want to call it that, is this.
Hunting around online over a meal, I managed to get a decent sense of where I'd landed.
It isn't that men have no sex drive—it just doesn't hold a candle to women's. In practice, women committing sexual crimes against men is apparently common.
And when I looked up photos of heads of state around the world, most of them were women.
Another oddity worth flagging: female conscription is in effect. The whole pregnancy-versus-military-service argument never even gets to happen.
Honestly, I have no idea how the science of it is supposed to work, but the average woman is said to be physically stronger than the average man.
And the real bombshell... polygyny is practiced worldwide.
The general idea seemed to be that, with male libido running lower, a man capable of getting several women pregnant is the kind of man people welcome. There are probably deeper sociological meanings on top of that, but that's a realm I couldn't pretend to understand even if I tried.
Even so, a man actually marrying multiple women isn't all that common, and a man married to three or more is a genuinely rare case.
Hearing that even in a polygynous society you don't get treated well if you sleep around left me briefly disappointed... but, well. It's not like I died bitter over never being able to meet women.
Ah. That reminded me, so I looked up Japanese gyaru too—and a tan plus blonde hair doesn't even come close. You apparently need the full unhinged makeup job before you count as a gyaru. As for a gyaru guy's face... I'd rather not picture it.
Me, I'm more like someone with a strong presence? A schoolyard thug? A TS Geum Taeyang? Something in that neighborhood.
Hah... When I first realized I'd landed in a gender-reversed world, my head was spinning with every kind of thought, and I was happy, even.
Honestly, the question of how I'm supposed to make a living is bubbling back up again.
Objectively, yes, I turned extremely good-looking. But there don't seem to be many places eager to hire someone who, from any angle, looks like he has a personality problem and is about to start bullying somebody.
In a sour mood, I flopped onto the floor for no reason and rolled from side to side.
Thud—
No. I just smashed my head on the chair. Nothing's going my way.
Gender reversal. What did the protagonists of novels who dropped into places like this usually do to survive?
Use the handsome face to seduce a pretty, rich woman and live as a househusband?
No matter how I turn it over, I can't see a woman like that marrying a guy who looks this shamelessly rotten. A one-night stand, maybe.
I don't particularly want that life anyway.
...
I'm not confident, if I'm being honest...
Internet streaming, then? For real?
This needs careful thought.
Just because it's a gender-reversed world doesn't mean the streaming industry changed in any major way.
You don't blow up because you're handsome. You don't blow up because you're a man.
I figure I'll get some kind of edge, but if I walk in treating it as easy, I will fail. Guaranteed.
Hmm......
Uh......
......Still. If something dropped me here, there's a buff in it for me, right? There has to be?
The hopium circuit started spinning.
A ten-thousand-won donation! A hundred-thousand-won donation! A chairman with a suspiciously large amount of money!
Honestly, don't I look pretty unusual right now? A face that jumps out at you! Built for aggro!
...Trying this might not be so bad.
Still. Always be careful. Flooring it on impulse has never helped anyone's life. Making a living matters, but this is far too special a situation to be chewing on that already, isn't it?
For now, as a day-one newbie in a gender-reversed world, what I need is more information than I have, and more time to adapt.
...Staying holed up at home for a few days and looking into this and that is the right call.
For the five days after that, I did nothing but commute between my apartment and the convenience store, staring at my computer.
Five days later, it was Friday morning.
I can say with some confidence that I know this world reasonably well now.
And the conclusion I reached after turning it over carefully: trying internet streaming, right in line with the gender-reversal cliché, might actually be fine. I even have a spare monitor I impulse-bought off a hot-deal site a while back. The timing could hardly be better.
So yesterday I spent the entire day scouting the streaming scene and thinking about what streaming even is.
If you're entertaining, you'll blow up... but I don't have much saved. Two months of rent and I'm basically bankrupt. If I want to make money as fast as possible, I have to push the odds of success as high as they'll go.
If I'm going to set foot in this industry, I should use every weapon I've got.
And the weapon I can use is... a face even I have to admit is handsome?
The cam... I'll show my face.
If I'd been the cute kind of handsome... I might've gone the VTuber route, "accidentally" turned the cam on, and pretended to be embarrassed.
If I were just ordinarily good-looking, building it up and then revealing the cam later could pay off.
But... I'm a Geum Taeyang.
Picture it. A streamer you've been watching reveals their face, and sitting there is a delinquent who looks like he's about to put his hands on somebody.
...I'd unfollow on the spot.
Right. I have to enter the industry with my face out from the beginning.
Ah. Come to think of it, I probably need a concept too, don't I?
...
...
...
Me, reflected in the computer screen.
Concept: locked in.
Ambiguous heat, and a breeze that was only ambiguously cool.
The signal that summer was coming brushed against my skin.
Becoming a Geum Taeyang had somehow put a leather jacket I'd never worn in my life constantly in my line of sight, so I'd thrown it on again on the way out—and yeah, this was a bit hot. Next time I go out, I'll try to resist.
Even in a white T-shirt that might show a hint of body, I had the jacket on over it, so why were the stares still sticking to me like this... It isn't as if this is a world where men wear bras.
As for why I came outside... I didn't have a cam or a mic.
In my whole life, I'd never been on the receiving end of gazes this clingy. I couldn't get used to it.
A gaze isn't even a physical thing, and yet I could feel, with ridiculous clarity, whenever someone was looking at me.
I'll get used to it eventually.
I am thinking nothing... Nobody is looking at me... I am completely fine...
"Hey."
No. Why would you break someone's concentration like that.
"Yes?"
"I like the look of you. Mind giving me your number?"
A woman holding out her phone, talking to me.
A delinquent. You're not supposed to judge people by their faces, and someone who looks like the delinquent of delinquents—namely me—should be the last person doing it, but...
Neon shorts, an Under Armour shirt, and some tiny bag of unknown identity to finish it off.
The exact kind of outfit you'd see in those internet posts where someone photoshops Doraemon characters and titles it "delinquent fashion that's trending these days."
Behind her, a chubby woman in a Thom Browne cardigan was looking this way and grinning. Is she not hot?
"Ah. Quit staring and just give me the number already. You're embarrassing me."
Is that how a person making a request is supposed to sound. Not that I would have given it to her no matter how she'd asked.
"I'm sorry. I have a girlfriend."
The fact that I actually got to deliver that line was a moving moment.
"What's that got to do with giving me a number. Just write it down once, yeah? I won't even contact you."
"What... I said no?"
A shocking lie, that. She won't contact me. How little material did she have to work with.
I figured there was nothing more worth hearing and started to walk past, but the words that followed stopped me in my tracks.
"Ah, fuck, playing so hard to get, you slutty-looking bastard."
Unbelievable. What did I even do to get sworn at?
No, and our neighborhood isn't exactly high-class, but people this shameless live here too? Coming to a reversed world shouldn't have changed people this much. Bad luck, I guess.
I'm Seong Yuhan, a Sweet Hannam. I am not the kind of sucker who sits still for an insult of this caliber.
Some leftover memory from the world I used to live in made the idea of dumping curses on a woman feel unpleasant, but this situation, run through the reverse filter, is... a man picking a fight because a woman turned him down.
Hmm... that's painfully pathetic, isn't it?
"What did you just say?"
"I said you look like a slut, fucker."
"Don't act like a goddamn idiot. Go home, you sorry-ass looking bitch. And change out of those neon shorts while you're at it. Mommy buy those for you with your allowance?"
"The fuck did you say?"
Pedestrians around us started murmuring. From the snatches I caught, nobody seemed to be cursing me out.
Dropping a string of profanity on a woman and not catching any heat for it. A novel experience.
The face of the woman in Under Armour went red in an instant. That was even more novel.
"You know you look pathetic as hell, right? Huh? Oh, wait—sorry. Looking at that chest I thought you were a guy. My bad. Khuhuh!"
"You fucking bastard!"
No. She's even grabbing me by the collar.
A woman who, after getting cursed out once by a man, floors it straight into a collar grab. People gathered around. A few of them were clearly on their phones. Calling the police, by the look of it.
I pulled my hand out of my pocket.
Honestly, in a reversed world, this counts as self-defense, doesn't it?
The real-deal, compressed parcel-loading muscle that had been upgraded even further when I became a Geum Taeyang twitched.
The target... the chest. The place they say really hurts when a woman gets hit.
The Under Armour woman raised her hand.
Going for a slap?
Fine by me.
Her hand came down fast, but a Geum Taeyang's eyes caught every frame of it.
In the instant her palm was about to meet my cheek, I threw the punch.
Thwack—
A right hook landed dead-center on the Under Armour woman's modestly sized chest.
The sound was far too loud for something that should have been just flesh.
At the same time, I turned my head. As if I'd been slapped.
"Ah! Fuck, that hurts like hell, you bitch."
"Ghk... ghhhk..."
Eyes bulging, bent at the waist—she didn't seem to hear a word I said.
The women nearby went dead silent in an instant.
?
Ah. Run it through the filter, and it's a man who just got hit in the balls.
Ugh, that's horrific. Who would do something that awful?
The chubby Thom Browne woman glanced at me, flinched, then hauled the Under Armour woman up and vanished in a blink. This one. She felt the difference in strength.
Hah... Getting worked up over a single punch, and now heat was rising through my body.
I came out to buy a cam. How did it come to this.
I'd take a bit more of a walk and pick up the webcam after.
I pulled the jacket off, bunched it in my hand, and pushed through the crowd. Women's faces, faintly flushed, slid past me as I went.
I thought I heard a few men scolding their girlfriends.
A webcam from a household discount store wasn't going to deliver miracle resolution. Same for the mic's audio quality.
I picked the most expensive option they had and brought it home.
A lot happened on this outing... but honestly, getting picked on isn't the important part.
What actually matters is... my body.
Even granting that I was fairly strong, I was never strong enough to hit someone and make a sound like that, and my dynamic visual acuity had been strictly ordinary. It isn't just that my body got better—every physical faculty seems to have gone up. I guess a Geum Taeyang has to be a superior male, huh.
Back home, I tried lifting something that used to be a struggle. It came up much more easily.
Well. Strength is strength.
Dynamic visual acuity.
I could probably use this for game streams too. I'll check that later, bit by bit.
For now, the prep seems more or less done.
Hmm...
Right. They do say to strike while the iron's hot.
I'd already finished setting up the stream yesterday, hunting everything down online, and I'd made an ID.
Starting the broadcast today is the right call.
A sensation like my chest was trembling, for some reason.
I couldn't tell whether I was nervous or excited.
Anyway.
My concept is the blonde, tanned delinquent.
I don't do polite speech.
I don't care about other people's eyes.
I don't show weakness.
I show myself taking what's theirs—people or things, doesn't matter.
But not so delinquent it tips over the edge.
Sometimes I fall apart a little.
I let a streak of hopeless dorkiness show.
A blonde, tanned sweet guy with a twist.
From now on, that's who I am.
Geum Taeyang has started streaming.