A Nation That Holds Märchen Stands Secure
Back when I was little—little enough that I had not yet set a single foot on the path of the otaku—turning on the TV at dinnertime and eating in front of a variety show was simply what an ordinary day looked like. The celebrities who furnished that ordinary day had a habit of throwing themselves into mission games just for the right to eat.
They say the three great human desires are lust, sleep, and appetite. There is, of course, the counterclaim that this whole “three great desires” business is nothing but a rumor with no academic basis at all. But if a phrase spreads that widely, doesn’t that mean it is at least persuasive enough that people are willing to believe it?
…If you don’t eat and you don’t sleep, you get hungry and drowsy enough to die. Hard for an idea like that to lack persuasive power.
Anyway, in order to satisfy appetite—one of those three great desires—celebrities would hurl themselves at mission games with desperate intensity, and little me laughed a great deal watching the spectacle. Among them, one game in particular made me laugh until my stomach hurt.
It was called Say It With Your Body. A prompt would be given, and you were not allowed to explain it in words. You explained it with your body to the next person, and that person, having understood the bodily explanation, had to pass it on in exactly the same way—body only—to the person after them. Keep the chain going long enough and the explanation eventually reaches the last player. That last player watches the performance and guesses what the prompt was. That was the game.
But Say It With Your Body harbored a fatal flaw. It demanded that you play face-to-face, and it only stayed fun if you had a decent number of people in the room. For someone whose entire mobilizable workforce consisted of Eunha and Yeryeong, it was a game of almost exquisite cruelty. I had wanted, at least once, to really play it, and yet in all my life I never once had. Pitiful. Pathetic.
“The game that fixes those flaws is this one! Telepathy Drawing!”
Why were they reacting like that? Because plenty of streamers had already played this game called Telepathy Drawing, whether as collab content or as a viewer-participation bit. From the perspective of people who had mistakenly diagnosed me as a critical case of hipster Hongdae syndrome, the sight of me bringing out that game could not help but be shocking.
“I hope this thins out the crowd that has me pegged as a hipster Hongdae-syndrome patient. All right! Anyway, from here on we’re playing Telepathy Drawing, and there is no way Märchen—a deserted-island streamer officially certified by Namuwiki—would ever do a collab, right? Obviously this is viewer participation!”
The last time I’d run a viewer-participation game… was that the anime-song guessing custom map on the first day of Raider’s closed beta? That had been about three months ago, so it really had been a while. Maybe that was why the chat was already running hot.
They really shouldn’t be heating up this early, though.
“And this is not just any viewer participation! A festival with nothing to eat would be a letdown, right? Every time the prompt gets guessed correctly, I will give every single participant a whole chicken as a prize! I’m already getting the feeling the competition is going to be incredibly fierce.”
I hadn’t even mentioned the real prize yet. The yolk of the egg.
“All right, then let me explain the actual rules!”
The rules were as follows. Each time we ran the game, we would gather seven people, myself included. There was no special reason it had to be seven. Lucky seven, that was all.
Once the game began, I would provide the prompt. To prevent stream-sniping, the prompt would be covered so it never appeared on the broadcast. In ordinary Telepathy Drawing, everyone in the game writes a prompt, but for the sake of moving quickly, I would be the only one writing one. Everyone else was simply to type Märchen, fighting! and, for that prompt, draw nothing at all—just submit immediately.
The player who saw my prompt would express it as a drawing. It had to be a picture and nothing else. Render it in letters rather than lines, and that counted as cheating, and you were out. The next person would look at the drawing, guess the prompt, and then express their own guess as a drawing for the person after them. The last person only had to look at the drawing made by the player before them and guess the prompt. A certain margin of error would be allowed, and that margin would be decided by me, the host.
In short, Say It With Your Body had become Say It With a Drawing.
“If you succeed at guessing the prompt, post a proof screenshot to the fan cafe along with a screenshot proving you subscribed on YouTube! Then I’ll award you one chicken, plus cheese balls, plus a 1.25-liter cola. Oh, and this time I want as many people as possible to get a shot, so no winning twice, all right?”
As I said it, I typed the rules I’d just explained into a notepad and pinned them to one side of the screen.
“All right! Rules are done, so we’re starting the first game right now!!”
With that, I changed the room title and opened the room at once.
The slots filled in an instant.
Whether they were actually pulling Bitik or not, I couldn’t say. But between a room that had filled in a single second and the state of the chat, I understood perfectly well how tremendous the viewers’ obsession with chicken really was—their hunger for it.
“All right, the participants are DoubleSubbedMarchenYT, MarchensSecretDay, JyaUtdgk, SupremeLeaderMarchenCastsEarthShrink, HypnosisAppOwnerMarchen, and UsagiMaidHeroMarchen…. If I banned every last one of them, don’t you think the toxicity on this stream would drop?”
“Kidding, I’m kidding! All right, then let’s officially begin!”
As I said it, I covered the prompt-entry field clean and neat.
What should the prompt be…? All right. We’ll open with something on the easy side.
For the sake of the stream’s entertainment, a sacrifice of this magnitude… is something I can make! Like someone handing down a decision to save the nation, I drew in a long breath, squeezed my eyes shut, and entered the prompt.
The words left my hands, and a different prompt arrived in front of me.
“The problem is, this leaves you with time where you just have to wait for other people to draw. Dead time, right? I’d been wondering what to do with that dead time…. And wouldn’t you know it, a post like this went up on the fan cafe just yesterday. Somebody made an Ideal Type World Cup out of Märchen’s YouTube videos.”
A look back over old memories, in honor of hitting a hundred thousand subscribers? I cannot resist that, all right? And this was the sort of thing where pausing the main bit for a minute in the middle caused no problems whatsoever. How perfect could a piece of dead-time content be?
…Right. This was how an Ideal Type World Cup was meant to be used in the first place. Side content, for filling dead air. Past me, who tried to force side content into the main slot—reflect on yourself!
“Then shall we jump right in?”