The VTuber Market Is Ruthless
"Is this it?"
She'd been so buried in prep for her solo streams that she hadn't checked Pajijik lately. She skimmed the clips at speed.
The ones Ye Youngja had DMed her about.
Pretty organized for an indie, huh.
In Legend of Legends—a five-on-five team game—she was running six whole teams. Thirty streamers total. A quick scan of the roster turned up more than a few names with real weight behind them.
The clips also made the reason for a VTuber named Kano's dropout crystal clear.
So that's what they were flaming about.
It had briefly come up in the VT Snipe Gallery—people ranting about how a hurt cat was no excuse to trash the scrim schedule. Sure, plenty of people would think that way. But if you loved an animal like family, it made perfect sense. Streamers especially tended to live alone in tiny apartments. For dog people and cat people, a pet really was family.
"Ha! No way."
Okay. Fine. She'd grant that much. But what came next was ridiculous.
Emerald 2.
That was the rank of the streamer who'd dropped out. They'd tried to recruit her as a sub for someone stuck in Emerald?
You've got to be kidding me.
The picture painted itself. When she'd been demolishing viewers, bronze and silver had gone down easy. Against diamonds she'd pushed towers first, so they'd figured she was roughly Emerald-to-Diamond. That had to be the calculation. She'd beaten a Master once, too—but they would have written that off as the opponent overcommitting and pure luck.
"If your eye for the game is this bad…"
If Ye Youngja had even Diamond-level game sense, she could have caught the details in Serin's play. This person just couldn't play, period.
And there are other reasons, too.
One more thing. What Yoo Serin currently was on Pajijik.
A monstrous rookie. The future of internet broadcasting. A once-in-a-generation superstar. A freak who'd re-debuted, pulled every scrap of aggro imaginable, and swallowed it all whole—and on top of that, the image of a VTuber who was insanely good at games!!
"I can see right through you."
There was no way that collab-machine indie streamer wasn't salivating. Get a connection locked in and you could use it forever. Convenient dropout slot, and her LoL looked decent—how perfect was that? A normal VTuber would have killed for a scrim collab like this. Refusal wouldn't even be on the table.
But she was different.
Was she insane? Hand over every viewer she'd busted her ass to drag in?
Collabs like this had zero trickle-down. Everyone shared the same screen—people just watched the big-name agency streamer with the chat exploding. The ones underneath got their audiences vacuumed out. Maybe a big server with actual narrative could be different. Stand out there and you might get a viewership pump. But without the talent to hold them, it was all smoke. In the end, unless you were some closed-loop hako-oshi circle-jerk, the ideal was to build your foundation on your own content.
Nervous, aren't you?
She could roughly guess what Ye Youngja was feeling right now. Same pie, same slice—what if it got stolen? Indie streamers especially were pure street performance; the second someone flashed bright, the population migration hit hard. And if the top fans switched over too? Total catastrophe. So the plan was to lock her down. Inside her own orbit. Even if viewers drifted toward Yoo Serin, they'd think, Serin's not live right now, so I'll watch that Youngja she's close with. Not quite hako-oshi, but close enough to keep the wheel turning.
"Sorry about that~"
Ye Youngja's average viewership sat around 1,500. At Serin's current growth rate, she could blow past that in no time. So what? It was a market of eat or be eaten. If it stung, she should've streamed better.
"Hwaaaaaaah…"
Miracle morning! After crying her eyes out and going to bed early, her body felt so much lighter.
"The weather's super nice~"
She rubbed her eyes and looked out the window. Sunlight poured down over an unbroken view. The air in the room was crisp; she felt, all over again, how nice a place she was living in.
She flopped back into the same position she'd been lying in and tapped the phone on the nightstand.
What am I doing today?
She didn't have anything locked in. A few Steam games, maybe? Calling up viewers and wrecking them with pure skill always went over well, but she had to avoid looking like a one-trick.
I'll poke around the gallery and think.
After a brief hesitation she tapped the Outside app. These days it wasn't so much about watching shitposts for the dopamine hit as it was market research.
…Really.
Posts that came up when she searched title-plus-content for "Serin." Nothing that really grabbed the eye. Early morning—the zero-tier shitposters had probably gone to bed. And the aggro she'd pulled had settled down anyway.
Still, true to the VT Snipe Gallery's reputation, there was a title she couldn't not click.
…Did I ever turn on cam before? Or post on SNS?
A chill ran down her spine. These bastards would dig up anything that had ever hit the net. Getting red-pilled in itself she didn't care much about—but not right now. That had to stay a weapon she could deploy on her own terms.
She swallowed dry and tapped the post.
"…Oh, for fuck's sake."
What came up on screen was a photo that looked AI-generated. If you didn't look carefully, it could pass for something shot on a phone. Of course the face was nothing like hers, and she let out a breath of relief.
She clicked her tongue and scrolled the mouse wheel. Comments rolled into view.
Thankfully the person in the photo was pretty, so the reaction wasn't bad. She was better looking than that, sure—but that level of face would still make people excited about the future. The OP had probably just posted it to mess with people, and it had turned into positive viral anyway.
Might as well play along. She left a comment for the first time in a while.
A little giggle bubbled up. Stirring the pot with facts only she knew was weirdly new. Was this that superiority complex only people who actually knew a VTuber got to feel?
Alright. Best posts.
After that brief detour, she got down to business. What kind of disasters had the great VTubers cooked up this time?
Oh wow. Right at the top sat a post with bait that good. Any VT Snipe Gallery regular would click it like they were possessed. The title alone wasn't written by someone who only gallery-surfed once or twice.
Boyfriend. Male friend.
In the VTuber market, that wasn't just taboo—it was a death sentence. You beg every day, "I'm the only one, please keep watching me," and then you dare go cheat with some other guy? That was when Curiosity Heaven! Can Words Kill a Person?! became reality.
Click. She opened the post, grinning ear to ear. How had they caught her?
(animal hospital photo.jpg)
Above is the photo Kano posted on Y as "proof" of taking her cat in.
The front is cropped, but from the sign you can tell it's some "~Dajeong Animal Hospital."
(June Kano Just Chatting.png)
But according to info she accidentally leaked during an old Just Chatting stream, Kano lives in Gangdong-gu.
Problem: there is no "~Dajeong" animal hospital in Gangdong-gu.
So I googled it.
(DagamDajeong Animal Hospital location.jpg)
There's exactly one in all of Seoul.
And if you look at the photo above again, the hospital is on a side alley.
The one that comes up on Google is also on a side alley on the map…
(DagamDajeong Animal Hospital Street View 1.jpg)
Now look at the daytime Street View.
Identical, right?
Kano said she rushed her cat in for emergency treatment—and then posted a photo from an animal hospital way out in Gangseo-gu, nowhere near her house, as "proof."
This girl was prepping for stream until an hour before that. And she's in Gangseo-gu?
(DagamDajeong Animal Hospital Street View 2.jpg)
And as you can see here, the area around that animal hospital is packed with motels.
Case closed.
If Kano feels wronged, she can prove it with a photo of the actual cat treatment or the hospital receipt.
"…What a psycho~"
Finding it from a photo was one thing. Spinning it into a boyfriend scandal was another. Terrifying. VTuber bloodhounds.