The Real Excel Broadcast
Ugh.
Excel streams had always been a sure thing on both the supply and demand side — and yet there was something about doing them out in the open that made people squirm.
Jijijik, the platform most streamers treated as their main stage, tended to react with extreme sensitivity. Because of that, the real home of Excel broadcasting had been Nupe.
Then Nupe itself declared it was going legitimate, and the bottom-feeders who were even worse than Nupe coiled up on Halfmoon Bear TV instead. Naturally, Excel streams became a rare sight on both Jijijik and Nupe.
On top of that, image-conscious Jijijik kept moderators on standby with almost no gaps. If reports piled up — or if you were just unlucky — a mod would walk in the second you went live and shut the whole thing down. That was everyday life.
People who had written Jijijik off as a place where you would never see an Excel stream again found themselves hypnotically clicking the post of a prophet who claimed to have witnessed a bizarre phenomenon.
People who had seen the miracle the prophet performed for themselves spread the story one after another. After that, talk of some clueless VTuber's Excel stream spilled naturally through the Jijijik gallery, the Nupe gallery, and even the Halfmoon Bear TV gallery.
Of course it was a real Excel stream.
What other kind of Excel was there?
While I was still turning that over, another chat message rolled in.
"...Y-yes? Ah.... Hang on. Where were we?"
I waited a beat for the delay, and then the chat flooded in all at once.
They'd watched for fifteen whole minutes?
What studious viewers....
"I kept talking about saving because saving is that important. You can never stress saving too many times. Every tutorial teaches the most important thing first, right? Right?"
"Yes. It is."
I took a sip of water while I waited for the chat to come up.
Even accounting for the delay....
Maybe I've already become a full pro streamer?
"...Hmm."
I was still fretting over how to answer when the delay must have already passed, because the chat came pouring in again.
"I have watched them, actually...."
Maybe I shouldn't have said that.
I had watched a lot of streams — but they were probably a completely different breed from the ones these people had in mind....
"I wouldn't call an internet lecture a stream!"
Who did they take me for!
"...Whew. I wasn't just watching streams. I was checking them."
"Whether the mouth shapes lined up. Whether the eyes were twitching weirdly."
The mouth and the eyes were the most important parts of an avatar, so I paid a lot of attention to them.
There were VTubers who leaned hard on a sexy body, sure, but most of the weight still went into the face. Unlike a real face, where the nose took up a fair share of the real estate, what mattered most on a VTuber avatar was the eyes, the hair, and the lips. Those were the things people used as reference points when telling avatars apart — and the parts that showed the biggest.
"Whether the hair clipped through the face when the head turned. Whether the clothes tore when an arm went up...."
The chat window, which had been snickering and teasing me for a while, went quiet.
Had I gotten too serious...?
"...Hello? You guys didn't all leave, did you?"
Viewers: 13 (Jijijik) | 3 (Nupe) | Total 16
"No? You're all still here...?"
"Ah. Yes. In the industry they call it a rigger. The person who does the rigging."
"Assembling... isn't quite it, but...."
Thinking about it carefully, maybe it kind of was?
"But banning someone just for dozing off once is a little much, isn't it...?"
"Ah, no. Illustrators draw the art. A rigger is the person who links the pieces of illustration together. Ah.... If I'm in a hurry I can draw, but.... I'm not exactly amazing at it, so...."
Was there a cleaner way to explain this?
"If I say I used to take Gundam parts, decide how to connect them, and then run lines to each section so everything moved smoothly... does that make it a little easier to picture?"
But was I even allowed to reveal this...?
"Uh...."
Put like that, I had nothing to say.
I was industry. I wasn't completely distant from streaming, either.
It was just—
"I... only ever watched the starting stages a lot. The kids who were just beginning as VTubers."
"Test streams before debut, recordings for checking movement, that sort of thing. I only watched up to there. I never actually watched the kids once they were streaming for real."
Plenty of them had been born streamers, but everyone shook at the start. No matter how talented a kid was on the verge of debut, they were all the same. Their mouths stumbled. Their lips trembled. Their eyelids twitched like they were short on magnesium. Those kids sometimes needed special measures, so I would do a final check under the guise of a rehearsal.
Maybe it was because I had seen so many of them.
The avatar I had released as open source was built differently from a normal model — I had dialed down how much it reacted around the eyes and the corners of the mouth.
The model "Link" had distributed early on was an early build made for a kid who was getting ready to debut, and those numbers were why ordinary people called the mouth-sync issues and the eye-movement correction a chronic disease.
No one but me would know that for real, though....
"...I think it was streaming. For the most part I lived off the joy of watching kids who had the whole place to themselves, poking around the avatar I'd made for them and being happy about it."
Of course, not every part of the process had been fun.
Among the debuting kids, the ones who shook less — the ones with talent — needed something different. Instead of that kind of support, you had to build them so they could show off their charm as they were, and that was a fair amount of trouble.
Still, it was good.
Through the avatar I could see how happy they looked, and that made me proud for no good reason.
I should have put a little more away back then—
Every VTuber who had passed through my hands had been shaped stitch by stitch by me, so they all felt like my kids. Even when I saw a thumbnail, I would look away and not watch the stream, like a mother who couldn't bring herself to keep hovering over a child who had finally left home.
"I wasn't the type to go looking for streams. I barely looked at chat either."
"If I happened to see someone I knew, it'd be embarrassing, you know?"
It felt a little like peeking into someone else's diary. A complicated, hard-to-explain feeling.
"I do... get a little shy around people, but...."
"...Certain acts?"
"...."
I caught on immediately, and my reaction short-circuited. Without thinking I pressed both hands to my cheeks, and the avatar on my secondary monitor followed the capture and covered both cheeks with a flush.
I really did put every feature in, didn't I....
The avatar I was wearing right now wasn't the early model of mine that had spread around the internet for free. It was a new model I had built with sales in mind. Stuffing every feature in because I wanted commissions as fast as possible had been a mistake, apparently.
"Ahem.... Right. Enough personal digressions...."
If I say any more I'm going to spill everything.
"Alright. Back to class. For a simple example, shall we pull up a household ledger?"
I dragged the cursor over the Open button and then thought better of it.
That would dump my whole folder on stream, wouldn't it...?
"Ah, um.... I'll show you making one from scratch."
I clicked the first cell of a blank sheet and typed Item, Price, Notes.
"Ah. I should put a title, shouldn't I?"
This Month's Delivery Food
Spicy pork rice bowl.
Kimchi stew.
Pork cutlet.
Pho.
"The spicy pork was...."
...Did I really need to write the real number?
There had been a kid who got stalked, changed avatars, and started over under a new name, right?
She had used the cumbersome word "reincarnation," and I hadn't understood her at first—
"It's an example, so I'll put different prices. The spicy pork is.... Hmm.... I think four thousand won is the psychological floor."
"Why. Cheap is good."
"...?"
Why were they like that...?