Consoling Her
It had been a solid twenty minutes of trying to calm Lee Yebin down, and the crybaby finally seemed to be settling.
"Crybaby. You done?"
"…Yeah."
Lee Yebin gave a tiny nod, the rims of her eyes still completely red. I headed to the kitchen and came back with a mug of cocoa for her.
"Here. Drink this."
"Okay…"
She took the cocoa in both hands and started sipping, looking miserable from every possible angle.
"Why are you the one crying so hard?"
"But… because of me… your name…"
For a streamer, a real-world legal name can matter a lot — or, depending on the person, not that much at all. Case by case, I guess.
From the perspective of someone like me who doesn't show their face on stream, personal information leaking — face included — is a real risk, so keeping your name under wraps is generally the smart play. Especially with a name like mine. Do Gyeong. A rare surname and a single-character given name. Once people start digging, classmates I barely talked to in school, or anyone I've ever crossed paths with, can start floating all kinds of details. Which school I went to. Personal stuff. Worst-case scenario — and I didn't think it would go that far — a stalker could latch on.
Yebin knew all of that perfectly well, which was exactly why she'd gone so quiet and defeated.
"Hey. I'm the one whose life just got complicated. Why are you crying?"
"Because… it's my fault it got complicated…"
"Ugh."
Moments like this really did prove how soft-hearted she was. And honestly, her mistake wasn't even that hard to understand. I'd woken her up in the middle of the night with some ridiculous scare tactic — of course she was going to call out my name.
"Hey."
"Yeah…"
"Want to go rest for a bit? Yeon-i's room, or your place — either one's fine."
"Is that… okay…?"
"Yeah. Cool your head for a while. You're running hotter than usual."
"Okay… I will…"
After a moment of hesitation, Yebin nodded and shuffled off toward Yeon-i's room, where she promptly collapsed onto the bed. I watched her go, then flopped onto my own bed myself.
I'd put on a decent show of being cool about it and done my best to talk her down, but from where I was sitting, the situation had twisted into something way messier than I'd expected. Originally, I'd planned to push any personal reveals — face, real name, all of it — as far back as possible, or never do them at all. Thanks to Yebin, though, my name was out there now, half by choice and half not. At this rate, my face would start circulating on community boards before long. A name this unusual practically guaranteed it.
"How the hell am I supposed to fix this…"
Whether it was even fixable in the first place was the real question, and the whole thing felt hopelessly murky. I pulled up Tree Wiki.
Seeing Dodo sitting at number one on the real-time search rankings made me realize I'd gotten more popular lately than I'd given myself credit for. Well — starting the fake marriage stream with Yebin had sent my subscriber count climbing, and my YouTube views and live viewer numbers had jumped hard.
I clicked into the Dodo entry, which redirected me to Dodo (Internet Streamer), and checked my own page. Next to my real name — Do Gyeong — some completely unnecessary TMI footnote had already been added: Revealed half-willingly, half-unwillingly; Dodo himself later told viewers to write it in.
Do Gyeong
* Revealed half by choice, half by force — Dodo himself later told viewers to write it in.
"…Man. I have no idea what to do."
No countermeasures came to mind at all. Maybe it was the all-nighter, but my brain felt stiffer than usual. Three hours. Just three hours of sleep, then I'd get up and think it through again. Who knew — maybe something useful would surface once I'd rested a little. So just a short nap. Exactly three hours.
I set an alarm with that plan in mind, closed my eyes, and—
When I woke up, Lee Yebin was sitting right next to me, wearing the face of someone who'd committed a crime.
"…What are you doing."
"Sorry…"
"I told you to stop saying sorry."
Even after hearing that, Yebin still looked thoroughly dejected. Seriously — this girl was too soft for her own good. The water was already spilled. She could've just owned it and moved on.
I sat up and asked her outright.
"If you're so sorry, what exactly can you do about it?"
"Huh…?"
"I'm asking. What can you actually do if you're sorry?"
"…Nothing."
"Right? So quit apologizing. Instead, try thinking of some other stream we can run to cover for the one we just wrecked."
Watching her give a small nod, I decided to just float the idea that had popped into my head a second ago.
"I think just doing a face reveal might be fine."
"A face reveal…?"
"You know this, right? When a streamer finally shows their face, even people who never watched them show up out of curiosity."
"But are you actually going to do it…? You always hated that kind of thing."
She wasn't wrong. I'd never been a fan of face reveals. The agency had already floated the idea before, and I'd turned them down.
"I still don't like it. But the second my name got out, it was only a matter of time before my face started showing up everywhere anyway."
"I don't know if it'd go that far…"
"Search the name Do Gyeong. Surname Do, given name Gyeong. There are basically none of us."
"Okay, but still…"
"If even one attention-seeking idiot among my old classmates decides to post something, it's out. And once that starts, there's no stopping it."
More than anything, I had zero interest in dragging legal action into this over something like that. Going after some guy who just wanted a little spotlight would be a loss for both of us — the only people who'd come out ahead were the lawyers collecting fees and the government skimming taxes off the top. So better to just throw the first punch myself and reveal it on my own terms. That was the call.
"…Should I reveal mine too?"
"Why would you? Feeling guilty or something?"
Yebin clamped her mouth shut again. She really did have a talent for feeling responsible in all the wrong places and apologizing for things that didn't need apologizing.
Bonk.
"Ow."
I gave her forehead a light flick, and she rubbed at it with a pained little whine. Looking at her like that, there was really only one thing left to say.
"Stop apologizing. And don't start getting weird ideas because of this either. It was just an accident, okay?"
"Okay… I got it…"
How many times had I heard "I got it" by now? Unbelievable. To lighten the mood even a little, I fell back on the usual mean-spirited teasing.
"And look at you. Viewers come in all excited for a face reveal and find a pig sitting there — half of them are bouncing immediately."
"I am not that bad…"
"Oh, no, you're right. You're exactly that bad."
"You little—"
Yebin puffed out her cheeks, looking even more annoyed, but she still seemed in better shape than before.
"I'm starving. Let's order something. What do you want?"
"…I'll pay."
"Nah. You made breakfast. Lunch is on me."
I picked up my phone to order whatever, and found a surprising number of messages waiting. My stream manager, my editor hyung, Marty hyung, plus a handful of other streamers I was close with. Every single one of them had texted to ask if I was okay. I replied to each of them that I was fine while trying to decide what to eat. Yebin sat there quietly, glancing at me with awkward little looks, clearly reading the room.
I figured I should at least get her moving, so I tossed out something that wasn't quite a scolding.
"Hey. Aren't you going to change? That can't be comfortable. Go put on something loose."
"Ah… uh… okay… I will…"
She got up with a sluggish shuffle and headed toward her place. Watching her go, I decided to order something she liked. Which, of course, meant something absurdly greasy. I put in an order for chicken feet — her favorite — and kept turning things over in my head. Whether to do the face reveal. How to make up for the disaster of last night's collab on the next one. All of it.
In the middle of that, another message from Marty hyung came through.
An outdoor stream with Yebin face-covered and on half-cam…
…Yeah, no. That didn't feel right. She'd just set off a small accident — putting her on an outdoor stream, where the odds of something going wrong were even higher, seemed like a bad call. I texted Marty hyung back that it probably wasn't going to work, then kept staring at my phone, hunting for a decent idea.
Everything I came up with was just the same games we always played.
"What the hell are we even supposed to do…"
I was still grinding through it when Yebin came back in fresh clothes and dropped a new idea of her own.
"Hey, Gyeong."
"Yeah?"
"…Would you maybe want to do regular half-cam collabs with me? Like, on a schedule?"
I really hadn't seen her being the one to bring up half-cam collabs first.