Really a Man?
“What? BlackStar tried to hit on a guy? What the hell are you talking about?”
Yurayura, the Twinkle female gaming streamer, had arrived at the studio a little early to get ready for the collab and was waiting in standby mode.
Using her real name, Kang Yura, as her stage name, she was part of BlackStar’s crew and was famous as a streamer who could actually play games well.
Still, as you might expect, a lot of people misunderstood her because of her extremely un-Asian “personality,” but her channel’s real selling point was skill.
And then there was the overwhelming volume.
Among her fans, she was known for those enormous breasts they jokingly called “gaming pockets,” and her style was to reel men in with that and then keep them hooked with pure skill.
These days, the world had changed enough that just being a woman who played games wasn’t enough to bring in viewers and turn passersby into regulars.
In that sense, she was the very picture of a streamer optimized for the job.
Looks, body, skill.
Thanks to that holy trinity, she’d earned her place in BlackStar’s crew through merit and was now active as a member.
She had plenty of regular fans, and while she was chatting with them and waiting for the scheduled collab, she heard something so bizarre she could barely wrap her head around it.
The crew’s leader, BlackStar Kim Joonsoo, had… made a move on a man?
For a second, she wondered if Kim Joonsoo had somehow come out and revealed the taste he’d been hiding all along.
“Ah~ so it was a punishment challenge?”
But after hearing the rest, she understood: So that’s it. Those annoying Byeolsu must’ve been messing with him again.
“So they made him do something like try to get a guy’s number as if he were gay? Give BlackStar a break already. Why do you keep bullying our leader like that?”
With a snort, Kang Yura raised both arms and gathered her hair into a tie.
It was partly deliberate, meant as a bit of fan service, but the chat exploded the moment her huge gaming pockets and her underarms were put on display.
Seeing the chat lose its mind over the sheer weight of her gaming pockets and the way her armpits were emphasized, Kang Yura clicked her tongue inwardly with a thought along the lines of, And men are just men, I guess.
Ever since her school days, when her bust had already been fully developed, she’d suffered through the leering eyes of men. Because of that, and because of everything she’d gone through back then, Kang Yura honestly disliked men.
It wasn’t quite hatred or fear, but more like a deeply physical discomfort—an aversion so strong it made her skin crawl.
Just talking to them or being in the same space was fine, but the moment she even imagined touching a man, she got goosebumps and felt queasy.
So if someone asked how she could make money doing internet broadcasts and putting herself on display in front of men, she’d have a ready answer.
“They’d stare anyway whether I streamed or not, right? Then I might as well stream and get paid for it.”
That was her attitude.
If things were going to be the same either way, she might as well make money.
There was no reason not to use the powerful weapon she’d been born with.
Skin contact made her sick, sure, but she was already used to being looked at.
It was the fate of someone with a chest that was, by Korean standards, completely out of this world.
Anyway, after tying her hair up, accepting donations as fan service, and slowly getting the details of the situation, Kang Yura finally pieced together what had happened.
She’d been streaming late into the night the day before, so she hadn’t really known what was going on. Only later did she learn the story and let out a snicker.
“He tried to get a girl’s number because he looked too pretty?”
Kang Yura was honestly a little indifferent to the whole explanation.
Byeolsu are overreacting again.
That was only natural, because those viewers made a mountain out of a molehill so often it wasn’t even worth counting.
And besides, if you looked at SNS, there were tons of photos of good-looking—no, of men who were carefully made up to look good.
Crossdressing was, after all, the hobby of only the manliest of men, and plenty of people dressed femininely, put on makeup, and posted photos online.
You could find guys so expertly styled—with the help of photography and makeup—that they looked for all the world like beautiful women.
But a real yamada, an otokonoko, and BlackStar getting hooked…
Yes, yes, thank you for the 198th dramatic overreaction.
She thought it was just some slightly delicate-looking person causing a fuss.
As expected, that reaction only made the Byeolsu more frustrated, and they beat their chests in exasperation.
Watching him get ready to strip had made something stand at attention down there.
But the moment she thought of him as a man, it sat back down again, only to almost stand right back up when she actually saw him.
Her brain felt like it was being warped by cognitive dissonance.
Seeing chat after chat piling up with testimonies like that, Kang Yura began to sense that this might actually be serious.
“That good-looking? Where can I watch his video?”
For the sake of keeping up with trends, and for the sake of following the chat’s momentum, she figured she should check for herself.
The viewers told her the replay wasn’t up and there were no clips yet, so she’d have to wait until it got uploaded to YouTube.
“Guest stream?”
“Help with the broadcast? He streams too?”
“Ah.”
So that was it.
Kang Yura, who had never seen Lee Harang in person, simply reacted that way and left it at that.
Just as her answer started to make the viewers sigh in frustration—
A link appeared in chat, supposedly the edited video the Byeolsu had been talking about.
Without thinking, Kang Yura clicked it.
The best way to resist a realm of ♂ is to deploy our own ♂ realm. When both sides unfold their realms at the same time, the better piece of shit will gain the upper hand.
That was her mistake.
The address posted as an “edited video” was actually a link to a reaction-meme video.
“Ha….”
Kang Yura immediately hit back and let out a long sigh.
“Hey, you’re banned. Don’t you know I hate this kind of bait? IP permanent ban. And no, I won’t lift it even for the Christmas amnesty event, so keep that in mind.”
It was childish beyond belief.
This is exactly why I hate men.
She’d found the culprit in an instant and cut him down, feeling a wave of fatigue before the real broadcast had even begun.
One of her loyal viewers told her that, trying to cheer her up with a donation.
And if it was a regular who’d been watching since her hakko days, back when the stream had barely started, then she could believe it.
This time she followed the link herself and went directly to BlackStar’s YouTube channel to check.
Sure enough, the video itself had been uploaded.
Kang Yura played the clip of Kim Joonsoo’s punishment from the night before.
At the start, they’d briefly summarized how he’d ended up in that mess, beginning with his failure to clear the speedrun mission.
Then, after two roulette spins, he’d pulled the insane 0.2 percent punishment twice in a row and been forced to go out and hit on someone.
When she saw his already half-dead face as he started his street stream, Kang Yura snorted.
Since they were in the same crew, she knew exactly what kind of person Kim Joonsoo was, and the whole situation was just too funny.
“I should’ve stayed up last night and just watched BlackStar’s street stream with the rest of you.”
While she and the viewers were talking about that, the video moved on to the moment Kim Joonsoo boldly tried to carry out his punishment on a PC-bang part-timer.
At last, it was time for the so-called embodiment of gender fraud named Lee Harang to appear.
He’s probably just some slightly feminine-looking person wearing a unisex style and everyone’s overreacting.
There had been a time when Kang Yura thought exactly that.
“What—?!”
The instant Lee Harang appeared on the camera Kim Joonsoo was holding, she lost the ability to speak.
“What…? That’s just a girl.”
Kang Yura and a few of the Byeolsu were thrown into full-blown panic.
This made no sense at all.
He wasn’t even crossdressing. He didn’t even look like he was wearing makeup. He was just—no, he was simply a girl.
No, that wasn’t right.
“That’s his bare face and he still looks like that?”
He was even beyond a woman.
Even accounting for the fact that the camera quality was garbage, it was basically the level of insisting a woman was a man just because you felt like arguing.
Honestly, he looked far more feminine than some actual women.
“Look at that body. How can that possibly be a man? Fine, maybe the face could pass—but the waist and hip line aren’t male at all!”
“No, I’m not getting mad….”
Actually, yes, she was.
If she thought about all the effort she put into refining her own looks—her very weapon—to make the most of the beauty she’d been born with, then it was impossible not to get angry at a creature like that.
Man.
Bare face.
Which meant he wasn’t even maintaining himself, and he still had that face and that body?
As amusing as it was, Kang Yura found herself feeling the same kind of crushing defeat she used to feel around the girls who bullied Lee Harang back in school.
“His voice… I guess it’s a little masculine, but honestly there are plenty of women with husky voices like that.”
With his mouth closed or open, from any angle she looked at him, Lee Harang on the screen still looked like nothing but a girl.
Even if he showed his ID, she still wouldn’t believe it, and only when he finally threw off his shirt in anger did she at last accept it.
The video had been edited after a brief commotion, with an NG marker appearing where the trouble occurred.
When the clip resumed, the exhausted-looking Kim Joonsoo was testifying that Lee Harang really was male.
“Look, there’s even an Adam’s apple.”
Lee Harang, looking sulky, tilted his neck back to prove it.
And yet even after that, she still couldn’t believe it.
A man with a face like that.
“That’s so weird.”
Her head understood he was a man, but the feeling of him being a man still didn’t exist.
The Byeolsu and Kang Yura stared at Lee Harang in the video as if spellbound.
What would it feel like to meet him in person?
She suddenly found herself curious whether her male-avoidance reaction would kick in or not.
And then an opportunity came along to answer that question.
“Huh? A special guest?”
An unexpected guest called an otokonoko was being added to the collab.