Where Should We Meet?
Where should we meet?
“So this is the last of them?”
I scrolled straight through the send log of the throwaway email I’d set up for the broadcast.
Exactly thirty people.
Not some cheap few-thousand-won meal either — I’d sent every one of them a burger set that cost over ten thousand won.
I’d only be tossing these out once in a while from here on, so it was worth polishing the image.
“Nice.”
I double-checked the winners’ email addresses against the list, then leaned back into the chair.
What a long day.
The tournament alone had kept me wound tight, and then I’d gone and thrown in a prize drop on top of it. My brain was soup.
And of all of it, the worst by far had been that damn interview.
…No matter how tired I am, I’ve still got work to do.
Still slumped against the backrest, I clicked the mouse.
There was one place I had to check before I could call it a night.
Search “Serin” in the V-Snipe Gallery, and that was the kind of thing that came up.
Exactly as expected — they were going at each other hard.
Yeah. This is how it should be.
If the board had been quiet, or just wall-to-wall soft praise, I might’ve been disappointed.
Sharp, vicious back-and-forth was what made something go viral.
A solid wall of forced fans plastering every thread only bred resentment and backfired.
I clicked the title that looked the most fun out of the ones I’d skimmed.
What Yoo Serin played today was a brand-new game.
And it was a tournament.
So all that crap you keep screaming about — hacks, smurf math — she can’t use any of it, you get that?
What, is Yoo Serin a time traveler or something?
That’d be pretty sad, actually. Having that kind of power and still just being a VTuber.
Just admit it already.
You just hate VTubers who are good at games.
You sit there click-farming money off streams and it kills you that she’s got talent on top of that.
To you people, a VTuber is some talentless, ugly girl who had no other options and fell into streaming as a last resort.
No? Hand on your heart and say it. Still no?
Yeah. Exactly.
That’s called inferiority complex.
A vicious little war of nerves playing out in the comments.
Every line was a bullet, and the whole thread was high-ground fighting.
And they weren’t even aiming at a target — most of it was just blind spray against a wall.
Ninety percent of them had zero interest in persuading anyone.
“That’s savage.”
As a spectator, it had always been pure entertainment.
Being the subject of it, though, was a little unnerving.
How terrifying must this kind of aggression feel to a VTuber with no immunity?
Well. Not my problem.
I almost felt sorry for VTubers for a second, then let it go.
They knew what market they were walking into, didn’t they?
Like the gallery users said — once you hit orbit, the money comes easy. So you endure what comes with it.
If you can’t take it, go find another job.
Still, these people are relatively tame.
Even the V-Snipe Gallery, supposedly a hive of the worst of the worst, mostly kept its filth in the gutter.
If someone started dumping on a stream in the open, the gallery would dogpile them for crossing the line. They had standards, of a sort.
So if a VTuber simply never looked at the gallery, they never got hurt.
Compare that to the cam scene next door, or the idol market over there?
If those people had a complaint, they drove it straight into you with no reverse gear.
Comparing malice levels was almost rude.
Granted, if a VTuber got caught doing something like a guy VTuber running a backroom game, even the V-fans would turn vicious…
But even then, if you just ignored it and kept streaming, eventually only the hardcore leftovers remained. You might earn less, but at least the stress dried up.
I’m used to it, so it doesn’t even land.
Thinking that, I was picking the next post to read when—
…Cancel that.
One title punched me right in the gut.
First of all, starting her RP as a 13-year-old kid already makes me think something’s wrong with her head.
Why else has she only ever done solo streams this whole time?
From where I’m sitting, Yoo Serin’s social skills are basically zero.
And you remember last time that recent small-time streamer attached himself to her?
Same smurf, and she didn’t even cut him a break — just UFC’d him into the dirt. Sense of the room: completely dead lmao
And at the end she basically told him to go eat shit, right?
Every single one of those things is social skill, and she just faceplanted all of it.
Even in today’s tournament interview she answered everything in one-word replies.
If a broadcaster could succeed on game skill alone, every ex-pro would’ve cracked ten thousand viewers lmao
In the end, it’s communication. That’s what I’m saying.
Go farm ranked all day, speedrun first-clears, whatever.
If the most important thing — fun — isn’t there, all those inflated viewers are going to peel off.
100% she slides back to small-time before long lol
This son of a bitch!
…I couldn’t even argue.
My banter really was lacking. That much was true.
It wasn’t that I had zero communication, but I was definitely below the streamer average.
I’d spent years doing nothing but games with no talking. What did people expect?
“Hmm. Good work.”
Seeing people throw up shields for me settled my nerves a little.
Silent streamer? I wasn’t that bad, okay?
Reading that post, you’d think I ran a meditation broadcast.
…I should still put in the effort, though.
It stung a bit, but I was a pro.
I had to know how to take criticism with some humility.
The fact that the criticism existed at all meant there was something to fix.
Even the worst haters didn’t usually attack with something that had zero persuasive force.
I’ve got to force the habit of talking more, even if it feels unnatural.
Look at President Hanryang — that guy never shut up.
Explaining the game, reacting to the situation, reading chat.
Going out of your way to entertain the viewers first — that really was the mark of a real broadcaster.
Should I set up a collab?
But practicing talking at a wall alone was basically torture.
Finding a person and trading banter would be way easier.
Which left the question of how to gather streamers for it…
Ding—
Speak of the tiger and it appears, or so they said.
The ancestors never got a single proverb wrong.
“…Seol Yunha?”
The sender name read “Hayeon Unnie.”
No one else by that name in my contacts, so it had to be Seol Yunha.
An overly bright, forced-cheerful greeting.
It had been a full three months since the last message.
She’d been buried in work and streams, and Arin had been fighting through illness.
Naturally the contact had just… stopped. That was my guess.
I glanced back through the old messages for the right tone, thought for a second, then sent the reply.
Upbeat. Polite speech.
As long as I stuck to those, there was no real reason for her to get suspicious.
Calling her “Unnie” still felt a little heavy, but apparently even guys used to do it before — so I decided to just take it in good spirits.
Just as planned.
Whatever I’d done back then had clearly worked.
Her reaching out first proved it.
And with timing this perfect, it almost felt like destiny.
She was warming the engine.
The setup was so obvious I could see it glowing.
This was about the point where the real topic should drop.
And as if she’d read my mind, Seol Yunha asked.
If it was tomorrow, I’d need to post a day-off notice on Y right now.
I skimmed that far, thought that, and then my eyes blinked and I read the message again.
Wait. What was this…
She wants to meet in real life?!