Meeting Hiroko Yui, the Japanese Reviewer
The Daegu-haeng review uploaded by Hiroko Yui, the Japanese reviewer, refused to lose steam even after a full week, buoyed by a tidal wave of national pride. In the end, it achieved the astonishing feat of breaking twenty million views in just seven days. Crossing that threshold with an audience made up almost entirely of Koreans was an accomplishment that deserved every bit of praise it got.
She keeps the balance well.
Watching it all unfold, I smiled. And I had good reason to — the YouTuber known as Hiroko Yui knew exactly where to draw the line.
National pride.
It was a keyword loaded with enormous potential. Push it too far, though, and people started to recoil. Hiroko Yui seemed to understand this instinctively, and she modulated it with a careful hand.
The title and thumbnail are charging at the front of the patriotism parade, but the content itself isn't.
Her reviews laid out nothing but verified facts, and watching them produced none of that visceral cringe you usually got from the chest-thumping nationalist channels.
Her clumsy Korean had somehow become an advantage, and viewers were eating it up.
And so, one week after Hiroko Yui's video went up, Daegu-haeng surpassed eight million admissions.
Ah. This is nice.
Watching the numbers climb, I smiled. At this pace, a ten-million-viewer film was a lock — and if the wind kept blowing this way, even fifteen million wasn't out of reach.
Convinced something had happened to their channel owner's health, Neoguri's subscribers flooded the comments.
53,222 comments
The comment section was spiraling fast enough that I hurried to put out a statement.
The explanation went up, and the panic finally started to settle. That was when my subscribers opened a new front entirely: a full-blown debate over why I hadn't posted a Daegu-haeng review in the first place.
The "she was too sick to post" hypothesis was hereby discarded.
Sharp.
A cold sweat prickled down my back as I watched subscribers who had, at some point, mapped out my tastes with unsettling accuracy.
Thank god I don't have any weird ones.
If I'd been the type to stan something as polarizing as The Quintessential Quintuplets, my dark history would already have been bronzed and mounted on YouTube for all eternity.
It was 2016. The phrase "hidden ads" did not exist yet. Most people had no idea that YouTubers were taking money to make videos and then simply... not labeling them as ads. Even among those who noticed, the ones who understood that it was actually wrong were a vanishingly small minority.
But in this moment, the Neoguri channel was packed with people ready to explain exactly why posting an ad without an ad label was a problem.
Thanks to a handful of brave souls, people who used YouTube learned that taking money to make a video and then skipping the sponsorship label was wrong. And thanks to that, the word hidden ads — a term that shouldn't have existed until 2020 — was born in 2016.
The word had barely been coined before people started hunting down every YouTuber who'd run a hidden ad — and they were in for a shock. Of course they were. Every famous YouTuber had been doing it.
And just like that, Korean YouTube — already running at a 2018-from-my-past-life level of activity, despite it being 2016 — underwent a massive shift.
"?"
Daegu-haeng carried its momentum straight through the second week of release. There were plenty of reasons it held on, but if you had to pick the three biggest: Hiroko Yui's review was past twenty million views and closing in on twenty-five; Neoguri — the original review YouTuber — had family involved in the film's production; and despite that family connection, she had refused to review it, displaying a conscience so clean it was almost startling.
Those three things stacked on top of each other, and in week two, Daegu-haeng still hadn't broken stride.
Watching the situation unfold, Director Hong Jun-seok turned to his staff and cast.
"Is anyone here a member of Neoguri's family?"
Nobody answered.
Why am I breaking out in a cold sweat?
No. It's just a little hot in here.
I kept my face carefully blank so I wouldn't give myself away.
"Director. We've kept it hidden this whole time — you really think I'd just casually drop that I'm Neoguri's family because you asked like that?"
"Now that you mention it, you're right! It's fine! To the member of Neoguri's family among us! I have absolutely no intention of uncovering your identity, so please rest easy!"
And just like that, I made it through the crisis unscathed.
There was something I hadn't accounted for.
Namely, that the power of an S+ appearance was even greater than I'd expected.
It was her first appearance, so information was almost nonexistent — but people's tenacity was a force of nature. In the end, they managed to dig up a few facts about someone named Lee Yena.
And just like that, a Namuwiki page for Lee Yena was born.
A third-grade elementary school girl who has just turned ten. Born in January 2007, making her birthday quite early in the year. She only recently became a child actress, and Daegu-haeng is her debut work. On top of her acting and looks, her piano playing is also top-tier — Im Seong-deok, a giant of the Korean music world, even praised her as a pianist who would conquer the world. Although Lee Yena is Im Seong-deok's student, he is the kind of person who will bluntly say someone is no good even if they are his own disciple, so there is no room to doubt her talent at the piano. She has been proving it well through her current third-grade year. The evidence: from first through third grade, she has taken grand prizes at competitions, forcing older kids — some three years older, some as much as five — to their knees.
For reference, the Namuwiki page for Neoguri had already been up for a while.
A mysterious high school girl??? Originally, nothing was known about her identity beyond the fact that she was a high school girl, but recently it has been all but confirmed that someone in her family was involved in the production of Daegu-haeng. The prevailing opinion is that there is no other way to explain why Neoguri — dubbed the reincarnation of the Delphic Oracle — would refuse to review Daegu-haeng unless a family member was connected to the film. There is one more reason this theory has gained traction: Neoguri's editing skill is beyond imagination. For those wondering why that matters — Neoguri's editing is not at a level you can reach through self-study. Even professionals who make a living from editing are left speechless; her skill far surpasses that of ordinary pros. Given this, the prevailing theory is that someone in Neoguri's family works in editing.
"I'm self-taught, though....?"
I'd just been editing in the style I'd absorbed from watching videos in 2030. I never imagined it would get this kind of praise.
I pulled up my system window.
Of course my editing was bound to stand above everyone else's. The system's baseline was 2030 — and an A-rank against that framework meant you were, for all practical purposes, the best in the field.
S-rank means you have almost no rivals even on the world stage.
Even A-rank meant that, within Korea, nobody could beat me at editing.
Huh. My acting went up.
After months of filming, spending every day practicing the role I'd been given, it must have climbed on its own.
"And now, let's welcome the cast!"
I was waiting below the stage, about to meet the fans of Daegu-haeng.
"Please welcome child actress Lee Yena, who played Lee Ha-neul!"
I climbed onto the stage, sat through that cringeworthy introduction, and a moment later the questions started coming. A handful of them came and went before someone threw one my way.
"Would it be possible to eat a meal together...!"
"?"
I turned my head to see who had the guts to ask a ten-year-old girl out to dinner — and at the end of that turn, I found myself looking at Hiroko Yui, the Japanese reviewer with one million subscribers.