Interviews Are My Specialty
Sniping, for a streamer, is a lot like the flooding of the Nile.
When the waters swell and come roaring in, it's a nuisance — a few people even die — but without it, the soil loses its strength and the crops fail.
An object of love and hate. An indispensable necessity.
Sniping works the exact same way.
Getting sniped is enough to make your blood boil on its own, and when you run into the kind of sniper who deliberately tanks the game, the problems multiply fast. You see streamers quit games they were good at and migrate to something else over sniping more often than you'd think.
On the flip side, a sniper with great broadcast chemistry who doesn't play dirty can pump real life into a stream. A little back-and-forth in chat, a little WWE-style rage, and the viewers will take it upon themselves to turn that sniper into a household name. Plenty of streamers have ridden that wave into careers of their own — and Sharon Creative has a whole stable of them under its roof.
"Namgung Jooheeee!! You little biitch!!"
The sniper who'd latched onto Gemma lately — Namgung Joohee — fell firmly into the latter category.
Zero toxic play. Barely any chat. And the way she occasionally died poking objectives at completely random timings didn't even look like streamer bait.
And those little jabs she dropped in between? They had real broadcast energy. You didn't even need Gemma — a streamer who'd suffered through countless snipers — to vouch for it. The viewer count did the talking.
Seven thousand. The number stamped in the top-right corner of Gemma's stream. Considering her average sat around four thousand, that was a massive jump. And coincidentally, it lined up exactly with the moment Namgung Joohee showed up — her rage-baiting had become the spicy content source Gemma's stream had been missing. In one stroke, she'd solved Gemma's long-standing problem of live viewership lagging behind her YouTube subscriber count.
"Aaaargh!! I swear I'm turning that dog-Gimus into turtle soup! You dare run Gimus in challenger?!"
Even so, every time Gemma saw Namgung Joohee, her head got hot. It was like dealing with a little nephew who called you a spinster every holiday and then ran off. You didn't hate him — but you desperately wanted to pinch him hard enough to squeeze tears out.
I really want to see what she looks like just once.
Gemma muttered it knowing full well that, face-to-face, it'd probably just be some middle-aged guy with hairy legs. Because right then, Gemma's Yamashita — taunted yet again by Gimus — racked up another death.
"Ah! Seriously! You're diving top at this timing again?"
"Take that old-eyes crap and get out. For real."
Another casualty of bad timing earned a temp ban. On a normal day, Gemma would've laughed that chat off. But with Namgung Joohee having thoroughly scraped every last nerve, there was no chance.
Maybe that was why. Gemma made a string of emotionally charged decisions, and two red characters bloomed across her monitor.
"Haa…."
That made the past week's record twelve wins, twelve losses. Ten of those losses came facing Namgung Joohee on the enemy team. The other two came when they were on the same side. In other words — every single time she ran into Namgung Joohee, she lost.
"Haa…! God. Why does this bastard become an absolute unit on the enemy team? Same team and she's a walking disaster."
"Right?! Every time we're teammates it's like her mouse breaks!"
Namgung Joohee would occasionally throw games with mechanical errors even a Bronze player wouldn't make. The kind of pathetic play that made you finally understand how someone that skilled was stuck eating dirt in Master. If she'd just been consistently good, at least the losses would've felt fair.
"Haa… guys. I'm pausing queue for a bit."
"No, we agreed we'd do announcements! This is forced content!"
As she said it, Gemma pulled up a murderous schedule board with zero days off. Looking at it, you'd wonder when she even slept — and any normal girl-streamer audience would've been flooding chat with our Gemma must be so tired, rest up T_T.
But Gemma's chat had none of that. Because the streamers under Sharon Creative were, by and large, what you'd call toxic. Luller, MonsterHamster, Akappa, Yangganom, Jo Gangyeon — every last one of them carried dozens of controversies and incidents, and half of those were caused by their own viewers. The moment Sharon Entertainment took them in, Gemma's chat turning into this circus was probably a foregone conclusion.
"Ah, whatever whatever. Alright! The Starlight Virtual Streamer Project that Sharon has been ambitiously preparing! Give it a round of applause!"
Regardless, Gemma was a pro streamer who'd solo-climbed to 1.9 million YouTube subscribers. With smooth hosting, she crushed the trolls' protest and pressed on with the Starlight Project announcement.
"For the first generation of the Starlight Project, we're planning to pick four people first. Numbers just work better in sets of four, you know? Like the Four Heavenly Kings."
"Interviews will happen soon. We'll comprehensively check personality, entertainment value, sense, and game skill. Of course, we'll only pick people who have basic self-management down. So you don't need to worry about that part."
"And…."
Click!
Mid-announcement, the sound of a queue accept button clicking. Let me say it again — Gemma was a legendary figure who'd solo-climbed to 1.9 million YouTube subscribers. She was also the CEO who'd built Sharon, the biggest MCN company in the country. For someone like her, dodging snipers was easier than eating cold porridge.
Grinning at the thought of finally queuing without Namgung Joohee or any other snipers, Gemma settled in front of her computer.
"Alright, everyone. Announcement's over! Everybody back to queue mode and take your se—"
The problem was that Namgung Joohee wasn't exactly ordinary either.
A suit for interviews.
These days it seemed fine to show up in casual clothes, but back when I was deep in the job hunt, a suit was the official uniform for interviews. So I put on the one hanging in the closet and headed for Sharon Entertainment.
Being from a rich family, apparently they'd at least had one proper suit tailored. But it didn't take long for me to realize this had been a bad call.
"Kyaa! She's so cute. Is she cosplaying or something?"
"Is she a child model? With looks like that, she'd already be trending on Stargram."
……Being treated like a kid at twenty-nine. When I'd looked in the mirror at home, I'd thought, This is pretty grown-up looking, right? — but other people's eyes clearly disagreed.
Come to think of it, the brain is supposed to process your own face as more handsome or prettier than it is. Looks like mine had already started recognizing Namgung Joohee's body as "me." The fact that "prettier" had been swapped out for "more grown-up" was a little disappointing… but either way, it was something I'd have to adapt to.
Dwelling on the uncertain future of whether I could go back was a lot less wise — and a lot less efficient — than focusing on the life I had right now.
And so, hauling this small body along, I arrived in front of the Sharon Entertainment building. The biggest MCN company in the country, and the one lifeline that would lead me to riches.
Fortunately, the area was packed with women in masks and hats, so I couldn't have come to the wrong place. With COVID long over, masks were being used purely to hide faces — and there weren't many professions that needed face-covering right in the middle of Seoul.
Ugh, that person needs Mongolian spots more than a mask.
"Alright. Time to go."
Looking at the competition, something hot started boiling up from my chest. Interview prep was perfect. I'd thoroughly prepared for every kind of question, and my gift of gab was good enough to pull three hundred viewers out of thin air. On top of that, I'd been sniping Gemma every day and building up rapport — so what was there to fear?
Surely once Gemma realized that the Namgung Joohee who'd been sniping her all this time was me, she'd greet me with a bright smile.
Yeah. That was definitely how it would go.