Clearing Up the Past Is Essential
Gulp.
Just as Kim Jinsu finally managed to swallow the food in his mouth and was about to apologize in a panic,
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. If you keep making such a huge deal out of me being an orphan, I’m the one who’ll get uncomfortable, so just let it go, okay?”
“Ah, uh, haha… yep.”
If human relationships really had a food chain, Lee Harang would definitely be my natural enemy.
That was what Kim Jinsu thought as he silently aged ten years in spirit and picked up his bowl again.
Then, all at once, he realized something.
Lee Harang was casually pushing side dishes his way and looking after him as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“You really do take good care of people.”
“Ah… I guess it just became a habit from looking after the younger kids at the orphanage.”
When he was little, others had looked after him. When he grew up, he had been the one looking after others, and even now that he was out of the orphanage, that habit stuck. He kept caring for people without even meaning to.
And whether he liked it or not, Chu-Harang had no choice but to develop the habits of someone diligent, considerate, and always willing to help others.
With a face that looked like a criminal’s, he needed at least a decent personality, or he’d be completely doomed.
So whenever he ate with other people, he ended up offering the tastier side dishes to them, or reaching for the tongs first whenever there was meat to grill.
Watching that, the Byeolsu were weeping bloody tears of envy toward Kim Jinsu.
For a brief moment, Kim Jinsu felt weirdly smug at the viewers’ reactions, only to sink right back into self-loathing.
No, seriously—why am I feeling superior over a guy…?
Berating himself, Kim Jinsu nodded along.
“Actually, I have a younger sister too. So when I was a kid, I used to look after her a bit, but once we got older, she turned into a first-rate pain in the ass.”
“Ahhh… I get that. I used to dote on the orphanage kid like she was adorable, and then one day I saw her getting off to otokonoko material, and my feelings got very complicated.”
“Pfft—! Cough, cough! Hack, hack!”
Kim Jinsu spat out the soybean paste soup he’d just scooped into his mouth with his spoon.
He desperately managed to keep it from spraying onto the table or Lee Harang, but the floor was another story—he’d ended up blasting doenjang stew all over it like a fountain.
“S-sorry….”
Apologizing, he scrambled to wipe it up.
“It’s okay. Looks like you choked, so drink some water. I’ll clean this up.”
“Y-yes….”
He was completely rattled, like his soul had slipped clean out of his body.
Kim Jinsu wiped his mouth with the very tissue he’d been using to clean the floor and thought dazedly, What the hell did I just hear?
The orphanage kid… getting herself off to what? Otokonoko material?
His head felt like it had been struck dumb, and he ended up rubbing his face with the tissue over and over again.
And the viewers seemed to be in the same state.
Both the audience and Kim Jinsu ended up feeling sympathy and empathy for the orphanage younger sibling Lee Harang had mentioned from his past.
“Well, something like that happened to me too, so I’ve got some experience becoming awkward with a younger sibling.”
Meanwhile, now that the floor had been cleaned up, Lee Harang continued speaking.
“If I had just acted like I knew nothing back then and let it go…. I was young at the time too, and unlike now, I was really sharp because I was insecure about my looks.”
Using this conversation as a trigger, Lee Harang began laying out his dark past one piece at a time.
Since he was going to be active on internet broadcasts in front of people from now on, there wasn’t much risk of his past being exposed in a way that would ruin him. Still, when it came to his history, he decided to just spill it all in advance.
That way, he could head off the kind of spectacular collapse celebrities sometimes suffered when they were riding high and then suddenly came crashing down.
There was also the calculation that pity would make his broadcasts easier to run.
Lee Harang spoke calmly, like it was someone else’s story, about how he’d been bullied since elementary school.
To be fair, it was someone else’s story in a way.
The one who chose suicide after all that bullying had been Cheon-Harang, not the Chu-Harang sitting here now.
Still, because those memories remained in his body, Chu-Harang could empathize with them as though he had lived them himself.
“The worst of it was middle school. They made me strip against my will just to check whether I was really a guy, and they molested me.”
The moment he heard that, Kim Jinsu felt his fist clench before he even realized it.
Those fucking bastards──.
If the perpetrators had been standing right in front of him, Kim Jinsu thought he would’ve beaten the hell out of them. He was angry as if it had happened to him personally.
It wasn’t the same in form, but he’d experienced bullying too.
At least for him, it had been when he was already an adult, back in his pro-gamer days, when management tried to “discipline” him with bullying because he wouldn’t listen.
That had been hard enough as it was. Middle school?
Just imagining it made his teeth ache with fury.
“I even thought about refusing to go to school… but I was an orphan. If I wanted to eat, I had to study hard. School was the one place where I could at least build some qualifications, so I couldn’t afford to ruin that.”
“Ha….”
“Still, I didn’t get beaten up.”
Compared to the other bullied kids who got hit and shaken down for money, that was still relatively tame, and he laughed it off that way. But neither the Byeolsu nor Kim Jinsu could laugh.
“But… the girls I met in high school were the real problem. Unlike the boys, those girls… they hit me.”
“Huh? Girls bullied you? Why would they do that?!”
“I heard later on that they were pissed off because, for a guy, I was prettier than them.”
Some people spent time, money, and effort on skin care, while others, with no money to spare because they were orphans, just slapped on some lotion and somehow still looked smooth and beautiful.
And because it felt like a betrayal that a man could look like that, they got jealous and led the group bullying.
After hearing all that, Kim Jinsu let out a long sigh and asked,
“How did you even endure it?”
“Honestly….”
Lee Harang gave a bitter smile and told the truth.
“I didn’t. It was so hard I just wanted to end everything, so I tried to kill myself… but in the end, I was scared, and at some point I also felt angry about how unfair it was.”
Everything up to now had been true, but from here on, he needed to mix in a little fabrication.
He obviously couldn’t say that he’d taken pills, died, and become the self in a parallel world.
“So I decided I’d live so well it would make everyone stare. Not masculine enough? A face like a girl’s? I thought I’d live like an alpha male who’d date a ton of women and make people envious, even if it meant being called a disgusting jack-of-all-trades trash heap by men even manlier than I was.”
To do that, he’d somehow reworked his naturally timid, withdrawn personality too.
To be honest, even now his forced enthusiasm could be hard to maintain sometimes.
That was Chu-Harang, carefully giving a reason for why his personality had changed so that nobody who happened to know the old Cheon-Harang would find it strange.
“Ah….”
Kim Jinsu, listening quietly like a priest hearing a confession, nodded.
A person who had once seriously considered suicide had stood at death’s doorstep and come back with renewed determination.
There was no way he couldn’t support that.
“Though it’s a pain that guys keep getting attached to me.”
Sensing the mood was getting a little too heavy, Lee Harang said it lightly.
Honestly, it wasn’t really the sort of thing to talk about over a meal.
Still, if he didn’t say it now, he didn’t think he’d have another chance to get the timing right, and he was satisfied with how light and unburdened he felt after saying everything.
“Thanks for the support. I’ve already gotten past it. Now I’ve just decided to accept and enjoy this beauty that makes women jealous.”
That one line was one hundred percent sincere.
“And with that in mind.”
Smack.
Lee Harang blew a kiss toward the camera.
“You all should lighten up and enjoy it too.”
The coquettish gesture practically knocked the Byeolsu flat.
His brain was overheating because he had no idea how he was supposed to respond.
He’d just heard a story that absolutely couldn’t be told without tears, and then the guy had thrown in a blown kiss on top of it.
Was he supposed to laugh warmly and think, He’s overcome it enough to do that now? Or get flustered because the gesture was simply too charming? Or feel sorry for him, assuming he must still be crying inside?
He honestly couldn’t tell.
But there was one thing he knew for sure.
“This is a little embarrassing to say, but… thank you for surviving.”
It was hard to explain exactly what he meant by that, but when he watched campaigns against suicide, he’d seen that even a small sentence like that could become a huge source of strength for someone who had once seriously entertained the thought.
So when he forced down his awkwardness and said it,
“Huh?!”
Kim Jinsu was startled out of his mind when he saw Lee Harang shed a single tear.
“Thank you.”
That one tear that fell now was the outpouring of the emotions Cheon-Harang had left behind when he departed.
Lee Harang wiped it away with a finger and smiled.
It was such a beautiful sight that even Kim Jinsu and the Byeolsu couldn’t help but marvel at it.
And so, after that, the meal came to an end.
As Kim Jinsu kept helping him finish setting everything up, he started teaching Lee Harang the things that were worth checking whenever something went wrong during a broadcast.
“It’s best to keep these settings as your default and then build your own broadcast setup little by little. Everyone’s streaming environment is different, so the settings that work best will be different too.”
“Ah, so I really do need to study hard.”
“Well, don’t overthink it. As they say, where there’s a will, there’s a way. In the end, you just poke around the internet and figure things out one by one.”
Kim Jinsu gave advice while reminiscing about when he’d first started streaming.
“Then let’s do a test broadcast. Have you opened your channel?”
“Yes, I already did.”
“The channel name is….”
When Kim Jinsu saw the Twinkle channel name Lee Harang had created, he had no choice but to suck in a breath.
MaleCamRoom.
I get the sentiment, but this is not it.
As you can tell from the other Twinkle streamers, channel names are usually the streamer’s activity name, but… the stage name being MaleCamRoom?
After a desperate struggle, Kim Jinsu managed to persuade him to just let the viewers help choose a better one instead.
“MaleCamRoom… doesn’t that sound perfect?”
I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you.
Ignoring the complaining voice, Kim Jinsu prepared a roulette based on the viewers’ suggestions.
And thus, Lee Harang’s streamer name was born—
“What do you mean it’s not ManlyMan but AngelGirl? No, I’m not doing it! I’m either going with ManlyMan or MaleCamRoom!”
It was decided to be AngelGirl.
Of course, Lee Harang complained that he hated it, but
“I’ll do it. Thanks for picking my nickname for me. From today on, I’m your AngelGirl.”
That little tantrum was instantly crushed by a high-value donation.