The First Stream
Streams with almost no one watching are commonly called minor streams.
And because those rooms sit well outside the mainstream, they draw every type of person imaginable. If you had to name the two extremes:
One kind chats with the streamer directly, taking real pleasure in watching a channel grow.
The other ducks into those tiny rooms on purpose — the ones where every single message is impossible to miss — just to drop the nastiest comments they can think of.
Here. One such toxic viewer: Jiyeong.
Her hobby was slipping into nearly empty streams, hammering the chat in that uniquely infuriating register of hers, and bouncing. The hobby came with its own fastidious little rules. She never, for instance, entered a stream with zero viewers. She wanted an audience for the work. Somewhere in her was the urge to show other people the sight of her making someone angry.
And here. A male streamer who caught her eye.
Nickname: Geum Taeyang. Viewer count: fifteen.
The tags said he was running a game stream, but the screen was nothing but his face. What was this, showing off?
Fifteen was too perfect a number to pass up. She clicked in.
The broadcast hit her like a slap.
He was handsome enough to rank among the best in the entire country, and that face turned his dull blond hair into something decadent, almost ruinous. A single piercing in his earlobe only sharpened the effect. The way one corner of his mouth curled up was too dark to call confidence — it looked like some damp, private hunger. The leather jacket slung over the chair said the rest.
Jiyeong thought the nickname Geum Taeyang fit him disgustingly well.
At least he was a man. If a woman with that face had been streaming, Jiyeong would have fled to another channel on the spot.
Then a cool voice cut through.
"Hey. Why the hell are your eyes open like that?"
Jiyeong dropped her gaze under the screen, then, embarrassed, looked back up.
Wait. Wasn't this supposed to be a game stream?
Most streamers tucked a small webcam into the bottom-right corner and let the game fill the rest. This was the opposite. His face ate the entire frame. The game was a tiny window in the corner — and it wasn't even something that matched the image. A sandbox packed with square blocks.
What was he going for? Was this not even a ban-worthy offense?
"Yo, your house looks nice. Mind if I use it?"
He had claimed a single house in a villager village and was doing god-knows-what with it. He let his tongue slip out, caught it between his teeth, and smiled like a bastard.
He delivered the next line looking at a bed in the game.
"Heheheh… isn't life just tragic, having to tuck some washed-up female into a comforter this plump? How about you try hugging this six-foot wall of muscle instead?"
By this point, the brain went a little blank.
But Jiyeong was a professional. She had the confidence to crack any streamer's mental, no matter who they were.
She opened with a single lol. That one character, dripping with mockery no matter how you read it, had always been the highest-value play against streamers trying to manufacture a funny moment.
"What. If you wanna laugh, type at least five of those."
A minor streamer… talking back?
Unforgivable. How fun would it be to play with the feelings of someone who looked like that much of a thug?
"You pathetic female… talking back?"
Huh?
You have been banned from this stream.
Geum Taeyang
The ban notice filled the screen. Jiyeong had never been hit with anything like it. She tried to come back in and complain, but a banned user was not permitted a single thing.
"Trolls showing up too. My stream's gotten pretty big."
"…You talking back too?"
"No. Ha… I'm a guy, why are you calling me unnie? Watch your word choice!"
I wasn't actually angry. Run it through the Reverse Filter and it was the same energy as calling a female streamer "hyung" — affection, or a joke, take your pick.
About an hour had passed since I went live, and in all that time the viewer count had not dropped once, except for the one person I had just banned. I took that as a pretty good sign. A minor stream doesn't get much inflow to begin with; holding onto whoever wanders in is the whole game.
I clamped the stick from the convenience-store hot bar I'd eaten that morning between my teeth and replayed the last few minutes.
The thing I'd realized after hitting Go Live was that my very expensive computer did not, in fact, have any impressive games installed on it. The one title I had put on it for streaming was this square little world. Minecraft, as everyone called it.
It had once been dismissed as a kids' game, then it ate a whole era, and it still had a rock-solid audience. These days people loaded it with mods and built entire RPGs out of it. The thing simply refused to die. A minor streamer like me couldn't just sit there doing radio, so a game like this felt like a decent call.
A delinquent playing a peaceful game. That had its own charm. I was confident it would work.
The first viewers hadn't typed a word — probably because of my face — but I kept tossing out light comments, and the room loosened up a lot.
Caves. In this game they were where the ores and the monsters lived, and they could get a little creepy, but the graphics were the graphics — it wasn't actually that scary a place. I wasn't a coward, either.
The main loop was mining, so heading into a cave was the obvious next step. Still. You couldn't just walk in.
I made a sour face.
"Uh… do I really have to go in a cave…? It's kind of…"
"No! Who's scared of a stupid cave! I'm just saying it might be boring…"
See? They loved it.
Showing this kind of thing once in a while did wonders for building a reverse-charm. It felt a little like lying to the viewers, but wasn't that how the world worked? We were putting on a WWE match for each other's entertainment.
I kept it from going too far, then went and found a cave anyway. When I arrived at the mouth of it, I opened the 1.5-liter bottle on the desk and took a drink, like I was steeling myself.
Or I missed my mouth. Why was the water going on my clothes?
"Ah, shit… tch."
I glanced at the cam. The chest of my T-shirt had gone slightly see-through where the water hit it, and a trickle was still running from the corner of my mouth.
I hadn't been going for that at all… but a win was a win, right?
I yanked the leather jacket off the back of the chair, threw it on, and wiped my mouth.
"Hah… you guys that into a man's chest?"
"Tsk. You're all trolls too."
They weren't trolls. Just horny little cuties.
Anyway, the game still had to go on, so I started the cave run. Every so often I let a veteran-player move slip, and the chat filled with ohs. Every time a monster popped I gave a little full-body flinch, and they ate that up too.
Fifteen minutes of cave-crawling later:
"Diamond!"
The whole reason Minecraft players dug and wandered — ore so useful it was almost as hard to find as it was worth. They had been chanting diamonds at me this whole time, and the second I actually found some, a grin crept out of me before I could stop it.
"Pffheh…. How about that? Insane, right? You falling for me?"
…?
"Huh? What. Did the stream die? What's going on? …Hey, type something."
Ridiculously good-looking, they said. The praise was so blunt my face went hot. I had definitely gotten better-looking than before, but still…
I played it off.
"Khheh. Never seen a handsome guy before? Had me thinking something was wrong."
"That's enough, you."
These adorable little shits. I smiled on the inside at the viewer count, which had somehow become twenty-seven. This many on a first stream was, objectively, an insane number for the industry. Insane in the good way.
I finished mining out the diamonds and pushed the character forward with one eye on the chat. The whole appeal of a minor stream was talking to the streamer, wasn't it? I thanked them for game tips even when I already knew them, and I reacted every time a follow notification popped.
"Even when I get huge, this oppa's gonna remember all twenty-seven of you… haaah-ahm…"
Maybe it was all the cave-wandering on loop. A long yawn pulled out of me.
Tick-tick-tick—
Huh? Something was burning.
"? What are you guys doing."
Why the sudden riot? Was someone spamming? I was still busy reading the older messages when something snagged at the edge of my vision.
A nasty little chill went through me. I looked back at the game.
In the handful of seconds I had spent yawning, my character had fallen into lava and died.
The hollowness lasted a heartbeat. Then rage took my whole body at once.
"Ah! Ah! No, seriously, no!"
Bang! Bang!
Slamming the keyboard with an open hand. In the industry they called it a shotgun.
I was not the kind of person who treated objects like this… but an hour and a half of my life had just evaporated into thin air, and I could not stand it.
I grabbed the empty hot-bar stick that had been sitting in the corner of my eye this whole time and snapped it.
"Ah… for fuck's sake… that goddamn lava, I swear… hah…"
I took a five-second breath, looked at the stream, and found myself wearing a truly ugly expression. Getting angry with a face like this made the intimidation feel like it was punching through the screen.
Ah. The laughter in chat was about to die. Even rage-content had a dosage. I smoothed my face out before the mood went fully sour.
"Laugh. You're not laughing? Can you not read the room right now?"
"…Why are you cracking up. Am I a joke to you?"
"Heh… I'm kidding, guys. Hah… life's such a bitch, seriously."
I knocked back some water to cool off, capped the bottle, and tossed it behind me.
I'd probably pulled a pretty good bit out of that, if I thought about it. Getting angry at every little thing would make streaming miserable.
I'd handled myself reasonably well, too… hadn't I? Well. Thinking positive never hurt.
I could not keep up with this chat to save my life. Every time I looked away for a second they were on a completely different topic.
"Why are you guys having a conversation without me. Let me in on it."
When something happened and you were slower than the chat, you lost control of the stream… I was starting to wonder if my instincts were just bad when I turned around, and—
The water bottle I had just thrown was standing perfectly upright.
On the bed. More precisely: on my pillow.
Cap down.
"Uh…? Heh heh… hahahaha!"
God had a hand in this.
I had hit legendary on the first stream.
Had the Gender-Reversed World thrown in a streaming buff as a signing bonus?
I could not stop laughing. How did a situation like this even get staged?
I threw off the leather jacket, got down from the chair, and bowed in the direction of the bottle. Then I came back, looked into the webcam, and shouted.
Geum Taeyang, live. Day one.
The stream was sailing.