Planning the First Collab Stream
“This is amazing if you eat it with cheese.”
“Here, try some.”
“I-I can manage on my own, thanks.”
Food first, before the real fun began.
“Strike!”
“Nice!”
“Jia’s athleticism is seriously something else.”
A round at the bowling alley.
“Could you grab that thing up there for me?”
“Hm? That shelf?”
“Yep.”
Putting their heads together at an escape room.
♩~ ♪♬~
“Whoa… you actually sing really well.”
“Ah, n-no I don’t.”
“If we’re ranking by singing, Hayoon’s easily top three on Pajijik.”
And finally, karaoke to close it out.
After a full day of roaming the city, the three of them arrived at the apartment complex entrance.
“I’ll message you later!”
“Yeah! Get home safe!”
“Let’s hang out again soon!”
Waving hands and goodbyes.
Jia and Hayoon stood there until Arin disappeared from view, then turned to face each other.
“Shall we?”
“Yeah.”
They set off toward the subway station.
Unlike the chatter that had filled the walk escorting Arin home, a stretch of silence settled between them.
It was Jia who finally spoke.
“I never would have imagined something like that had happened.”
Hayoon knew exactly what she meant without asking.
She walked on without answering, eyes fixed on the sidewalk tiles.
Jia glanced over, half-worried she might start crying again — but whatever storm had broken loose over lunch seemed to have emptied her out. She was quiet now.
“Arin probably had no choice but to bring it up, right? With so much she can’t remember, she couldn’t just keep chatting like nothing was wrong.”
“…Yeah, probably.”
“I’ve thought this for a while, but… she’s a really thoughtful kid.”
“…Mm.”
They walked on in silence again.
The late hour left the streets nearly empty, which only made the weight of the moment feel heavier.
“You’re taking the other side, right?”
“Yeah. That way.”
“Well… today was fun. Let’s do this again, the three of us.”
“…H-hey, Jia!”
They had reached the station, and with different lines to catch, it was time to split. As Jia hurried toward the approaching train, Hayoon called her back.
“We… we should really be good to Arin.”
Jia looked at her friend’s solemn, almost sworn expression and let out a soft snort of laughter.
There was so much still knotted up in both their chests.
“You’re stating the obvious. I need that train — I’m going, okay?”
She’s uneasy about it after all.
Back home after a shower, I lay on the bed tapping away at my phone.
I’d been the one to propose the collab first, and sure enough, Hayoon had brought up the viewers.
The gap in our scale was bound to weigh on her.
If they just locked in a collab without care, people might brand them “that duo clinging to Arin with zero self-awareness.”
I need to lay the groundwork in advance.
That problem had a simple fix.
If I — the bigger channel — made it clear I’d been the one who pushed for it, that was the end of it.
Then it wouldn’t look like the small streamers had come crawling, and the backlash would die down.
Sure, a few diehard haters would still twist it no matter what, but they were a handful. Ignore them.
Jia talked a big game, but she was clearly thinking the same thing as Hayoon.
Even if the tournament had been a special case, hitting a peak of five thousand concurrent viewers was no small weight. That was a full hundred times their usual numbers.
I’d gotten so carried away with the plan running smoothly that I’d skipped a whole step.
If the schedule worked, there was no reason to push it back.
The smarter play was to get in front of each other’s audiences as soon as possible.
If another event like the last Fallaxil dropped in the middle of things, we needed to be able to move as a unit.
Once you’d decided to form a team, you grew together. That was the rule.
A group’s name value would become one more pillar holding me up, too.
After a pause, the first yes came from Hayoon, of all people.
Now that she’d made up her mind, she was going all in.
Floating the idea and letting chat pick the content felt like the right move.
To head off comments like “They collab and immediately the game sense goes down the drain,” I needed the arrows pointed anywhere but at the collab itself. And if the worst happened, I’d have the excuse that the viewers had recommended it.
Jia’s admiration popped up — she must have caught my intent.
Yes. Trust me and lean on me like that!
I might not haul them all the way to big-agency status, but I could at least pull them into the mid-tier line!
For a plan thrown together on the spot, it had gone surprisingly smoothly.
Maybe all the bonds we’d built over time were finally paying off.
Even after so long apart, if things felt this natural, we could keep rolling together without any friction going forward.
“Time to put up a Y post~”
Before I could forget, I hurried to draft the announcement.
Yeah, that should do it.
I’d roughly covered what I did on my day off, made sure to underline that we’d known each other for a long time, and even hammered in the line about me being the one who suggested it first. That should keep anyone from looking at the two of them sideways.
“Hmm…”
After confirming the upload went through, I drifted into a short stretch of thought, scrolling aimlessly through Y posts.
Would it be better to just lock it in as official crew activity?
If we were going to keep doing content together from here on, putting a “community” front and center would be the effective play.
The way the big agency groups treated collabs as a given.
Having something that visible and intuitive paid off when major events opened up, too. You could just apply as a group unit.
It’d help my V-Emperor dream as well.
And this market was one where you couldn’t ignore the power of a fandom.
Even if someone said something truly awful, a solid enough support base and an apology was enough to weather it. Sometimes they didn’t even need the apology.
But where there were advantages, disadvantages always followed. That was how the world worked.
Crew activity wasn’t an unconditional good.
One person’s mistake became a stain on the whole group.
Most people would wave it off with a “Even if they’re in the same group, A and B are different people,” sure — but the seed of suspicion was what really stuck.
Wait… is she like that too?
Birds of a feather, as the saying went.
Once that kind of association got welded onto a crew, it became a massive penalty. People would find a way to drag you into every little thing.
Think of those animal-hospital scandals that kept exploding over and over last time — same energy.
These two, though… I can trust them.
The reason I was still weighing a crew at all was because Seol Hayoon and Mong Aji were clean.
Search the V-Snipe Gallery or even Google and not a single scrap of controversy came up.
VTubers got picked apart over the smallest nonsense, so that kind of record was genuinely rare.
Being small streamers meant less spotlight on them, sure — but this was a market where even single-digit viewer counts got dug up and dissected.
I’ll ask them on Distalk tomorrow.
Even if my own heart was leaning toward forming a crew, I still needed to hear their thoughts.
I set the phone aside and closed my eyes.
I don't know what the other two's streams are like besides Yoo Serin's,
but from the way she talks they get along great and had fun hanging out, so I'm expecting some real chemistry?
Her streams have been a little dry lately 'cause even when she pulls off insane plays there's no one reacting out loud.
Chat cheering is nice and all but that's the same in any VTuber's room.
If Seol Hayoon and Mong Aji can play the comic relief properly, this thing is 100% taking off.
The next morning.
Brushing my teeth while scrolling the V-Snipe Gallery, I let out a sigh.
Figures.
I’d stuffed the collab announcement full of the fact that I’d been the one to suggest it, and still — here they came, the ones insisting the two small streamers were just clinging on.
“Ptooey.”
Swallow some mouthwash instead of that spit.