Broadcast Prep
After they'd finished eating and finished setting up the streaming computer, Lee Suho and Song Gaon took their seats at the desk. Beyond the equipment Suho had assembled and arranged himself, Gaon spotted several extra cameras and even a lighting rig, and as he took it all in, it finally sank in just how seriously Suho was taking this.
Everything from the laptop had already been migrated over, and with two hours to go until the announced broadcast time, Gaon was still mulling over what on earth to do next when Suho appeared carrying a suspicious-looking wad of paper.
—Thud.
Song Gaon stared up at him as he set down a stack so thick the desk seemed ready to groan in protest, and asked, "Hey. What is this...? The desk's going to cave in."
"Questions you should expect."
"What?"
'There's no way there'd be this many questions to prepare for...'
...Of course there would be. Having conceded the point without meaning to, Song Gaon looked at Suho, and Suho began running through the questions — each one with an answer already prepared.
"Apologizing comes first, naturally?"
"Right. That's the whole point."
It was an apology stream, after all. He had to deliver the apology, then lay out where things would go from here.
"Doesn't matter what the content is — you've already written it, noona, so..."
"Mmhm..."
Suho knew the apology had already been proofread and polished to the point where it could go up at any moment. He gave a nod and slid the marked section of the stack forward. At the very top of the page, above three hand-drawn stars, was a heading.
"First — the contract stays hidden, obviously."
"Mm... yeah."
What he'd signed was closer to a private arrangement with Suho than anything else, and it could never be made public.
"Instead, the official story will be that you're active as an independent author while signed with Naeil Management."
It was an agency known for bending over backward to accommodate its authors, for actually engaging with readers, and — remarkably, for a company so new — for managing its writers well. From the readers' standpoint, that made it a credible basis for trust.
"And from now on, whenever you actually write, you'll announce that you're turning the cam on and streaming while you do it."
"But the more I think about it... is writing while streaming even possible?"
Having looked up what internet streaming actually looked like, he asked the question with real worry in his voice.
A novel couldn't show its content. Artists, musicians, gamers — they could broadcast their process without a problem, because the finished product and the process were two separate things. But with a novel, the process was the content. Put the writing itself up on screen, and it could do fatal damage to the actual work's view count.
"You won't show the content. You'll simply say you'll share on screen what you're working on — the title, the chapter number, the word count — and write while talking with your readers."
"Uh... kay."
For readers waiting on a particular title, it would be welcome news indeed. They'd be able to gauge, more or less, when the next chapter would drop.
"When you need to concentrate, ask for their understanding, put up a notice on screen saying you're in focus mode, and just mute the mic."
"Mm... right."
"That's the rough shape of the plan going forward..."
Trailing off mid-sentence, Suho flipped a few pages, and out came a sheet bearing the words sexual harassment — a term that seemed awfully far removed from broadcasting. Gaon skimmed its contents out of the corner of his eye, then looked up at Lee Suho, who began to speak.
"Now, let's plan for the sexual harassment."
"Huh? Not profanity...?"
"Profanity gets filtered by default, so that's a non-issue."
"Sexual harassment, on a stream... at a man?"
Song Gaon answered as though Suho had just spoken gibberish. Concluding that some further adjustment was evidently still in order, Suho left the room.
Before long he returned, letting out a small sigh — a small hand mirror in his hand.
'That thing lives on the vanity. Why is he—'
Curious, Gaon glanced over, and Suho thrust the mirror straight up into his face and shouted:
"A maaan~? Meee, a maaan~~??? And yet you answer every single time I call you noona? Why?"
The beautiful girl in the mirror blinked back at Song Gaon, matching him blink for blink.
'Oh. Right...'
There was no thirty-something man named Song Gaon anymore. There was only Song Gaon, a woman who looked to be in her twenties. Only now catching up to reality, he answered sheepishly.
"...No... um. Yeah. A woman."
"See?"
Setting the mirror down on the desk, Suho nudged the stack of memos toward him. "Think it through carefully, noona."
"Uh-huh..."
"Your catalog was already more than half adult content to begin with."
Twenty of his twenty-nine works were adult titles. That wasn't just over half — that was the overwhelming majority.
"Th-that's true, but..."
"And plenty of it was hardcore, wasn't it."
—Nod, nod.
Song Gaon, who had been listening attentively and nodding along, felt his cheeks go red. Lee Suho had read all of it. He had even, for whatever reason, gone to the trouble of having it all bound into volumes. A brief silence fell, so still that Gaon's nervous swallow was faintly audible as he sat there being embarrassed all by himself.
"Yeah... the stuff I wrote early on was mostly all-ages, but..."
"Anyway — think about it. All that content, written by a baby-faced pretty girl like this. What do you suppose happens to the readers who come charging in to tear apart a chronic serial-dropper?"
Gaon shot a sidelong glance at Suho, who kept shoving the mirror at him as though performing some kind of exorcism, and deliberated for a long while before answering.
"......Might they wanna pull one out?"
"Pffht!? Noona!! What are you even saying!!"
For a remark delivered with such an innocent expression, the content was anything but. Suho nodded as he watched him answer from several light-years away, astral-projected — the way people can admit a fact is true without ever imagining it could actually happen to them.
'Yeah. Every last bit of it reads like you, noona.'
Setting aside the question of whether the kind-hearted noona who fussed over her little brother at home was the real her, Lee Suho — now fully satisfied that every published work was indeed her own doing — shook his head and pressed on.
"They'll spam every demeaning remark and sexually harassing chat imaginable. Guaranteed."
He wasn't wrong. Profanity would get filtered, but sexually harassing remarks were precisely the sort of thing that slipped past automatic filters. There'd be harassment dressed up as compliments, and harassment that was all but explicit dirty talk.
"Then how are we supposed to deal with it...?"
"There's not much to 'deal with,' really. Instead, we show them that 'nothing you throw at us counts as damage.'"
"And how exactly do we show that? It's not like you can announce, 'Sexual harassment equals instant ban~.'"
"Look at the back page."
When Suho slid the top sheet on the desk aside, Song Gaon's eyes went huge.
"Hey..!?"
"What? You've pulled this move yourself."
He wasn't wrong. It was unmistakably staging Gaon had used in a few of his own works. But seeing the lines actually written out in front of him made him feel like he'd taken a brick to the skull.
"...And you want me to do this?"
'This isn't some casual chat stream. This is the first broadcast — the one for the apology — and we're doing THIS?'
He'd written plenty of works that went even further than this. He'd taken existing memes and layered whole new content on top for effect. But Song Gaon had never once imagined he'd be the one performing it, and he couldn't force a single word past his lips.
"Shall we have you cover your eyes with your palm right at the start, then?"
"Hey!?"
"And we'll put a red REC up in the top-right corner of the screen."
"You've lost your mind!! Hey!!"
Suho, long past the point where shouting of this caliber could make him cover his ears, simply beamed.
He had watched, from a respectful distance, the sincerity his noona had poured into drafting her apology. He knew she was genuinely remorseful. But her one great weakness was the way she shrank the moment attention landed on her — and to break that, there was no other way. She had to become a talking point, an outright controversy, and take one good, bracing round of abuse right out of the gate. With a track record that flashy already on file, getting flamed no matter what she did was a foregone conclusion.
If it was going to be a pile of crap anyway, better a spectacular pile of crap. That, too, was the goal of the first broadcast. The mere fact that an author who had spent years dodging her readers was starting a stream — and revealing a side like this, no less — would on its own begin wearing down the resentment. Making sure it didn't end as a one-time stunt would require her to actually write in earnest, but that part was simple: Suho would just have to keep pestering Gaon at his side, forever.
Having decided to soothe Song Gaon — already pale-faced, whether from fright or something close to it — Suho said breezily, "What does it matter? You're getting flamed either way, noona. Might as well get flamed cheerfully."
"...Ha... heh heh... haaah..."
Song Gaon let out a hollow laugh and a sigh in equal measure, as though the sheer audacity had knocked the wind out of him, and buried his face in his hands. He knew perfectly well that the things he'd done deserved condemnation. But shouldn't an apology be heartfelt? Wasn't this response a little too much of a gag? Worried, he peeked out over his lowered hands and looked at Suho, blinking.
"Will it really be okay... doing it like this?"
"Yes."
Gaon stared blankly at Suho, who nodded as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, and could only manage a wry smile.
'Well... one way or another, I guess there's no dodging being shoved onto the airwaves.'
"Fine. You'll be right there helping me, though? Right?"
"I'm going to get flamed too, noona."
"So mean."
Song Gaon swallowed hard and shot him a glare, but Suho only laughed with evident relish, flipped ahead a few more pages, skimmed through to the very last sheet, then pulled out his phone and casually checked the time.
Thirty minutes left on the clock.
"They should be running the final feed test right about now, so give that one more read-through."
"Okay."
"We'll have the text up on the screen for you, but reading off a screen and saying it from memory are two different worlds. Memorize as much of it as you can. Got it?"
"Yeah."
After a long while of Gaon drilling the material into his head, Lee Suho tapped him on the shoulder.
"Ten minutes out. Go use the bathroom."
"Yeah."
How it would actually go, they'd only know by doing it. There was no point worrying in advance, and none in hoping, either. All that was left was to move forward, talking with his readers, filling the crater of their disappointment one word at a time.
And so, with worry brimming clear to the top, the hour of Song Gaon's decisive battle arrived.
"Turning on the stream now, noona."
"Okay."