If You're Up for It, You Should Try It
"If you're up for it, you should really give it a try———ah."
I want to quit.
Ryu Chae-in had a job at AY Entertainment that anyone would have envied, and still, every morning when she opened her eyes, that was the thought waiting for her.
AY Entertainment hadn't always been her workplace. She had started at AY Creator Company, the MCN subsidiary under the AY Entertainment umbrella, and she had worked herself raw there—hard enough that people called her a workaholic. Promising rookie, a colleague who got things done, the company's ace: praise like that she took in as regularly as meals. Her relationships weren't bad, either, and a promotion was already in the pipeline.
And what had any of it gotten her? AY Creator Company went under.
Fortunately, when AY Entertainment dismantled the subsidiary, she scraped through. If she hadn't spent all that time proving how diligent and capable she was, it never would have happened. In any case, she survived.
Her hardships did not end there.
That she wasn't sacred-bone elite, brought in through open recruitment, but true-bone stock transferred in from a subsidiary? That she lacked connections? None of that even qualified as hardship.
The greatest hardship was this.
"...This isn't fun."
The work was boring as hell.
The only reason she had ever worked hard enough to be called a workaholic was that the work at an MCN had suited her. Put simply, she loved managing Newtubers. She couldn't do that anymore. She was no longer an employee of an MCN. She was one minuscule cog inside a major agency.
"I want to quit..."
And so she agonized over it every day. Should she turn in her notice and go looking for work?
But every time, what wavered in front of her eyes was her parents—fretting right alongside her at the news that her company was collapsing, then sobbing buckets of joy when they heard she had gotten into AY Entertainment. So even though she wanted to quit, she couldn't bring herself to leave. Ryu Chae-in became the sort of person who drifted along like a half-corpse, neither quite living nor quite dead, doing just enough and collecting a paycheck.
No. She almost did.
If a miracle hadn't come for her, that is exactly what she would have become. But the miracle arrived in the form of an assignment: manager in charge of an internet broadcaster signed to AY Entertainment.
"This is my chance.... Get it together...."
And the one who delivered that miracle was a monster.
Kim Mina.
A talent people had said, from her first days at the company, was guaranteed to climb all the way to department head. A monster of results, who had dug dozens of raw gems out of the wild and cut every last one of them into jewels. After she discovered the raw-gem mine known as Loe and locked down exclusive rights, she was sacred bone among sacred bone, a smooth, well-paved career stretching out ahead of her.
Of course, a few people knew the truth: that Loe was a bomb that laid golden eggs—a bomb that had become a super-client with all the leverage—and that Kim Mina was the only person who could manage that bomb, and had volunteered to do it. To those few, her company life looked less like a paved road and more like a circus tightrope. Ryu Chae-in was not among them.
Anyway, she was going to work under someone that extraordinary. This was the break. If a career was going to come unstuck, this was it coming unstuck properly.
She didn't mean that things had opened up simply because she was working under Kim Mina. The internet broadcaster assigned to her was one Kim Mina herself had closed the deal on and brought into AY Entertainment. Which meant the odds were extremely high that this was a goose that laid results. What made Chae-in happiest of all, of course, was that she could do MCN work again without ever having resigned.
The broadcaster she was to manage went by the name Märchen. If she had caught that Kim Mina's eye, then this internet broadcaster called Märchen was very likely a music creator.
"If she's a music creator.... A collab with someone in the music industry would be fine. And for ads, I should pull in as many game-cover deals as I can...."
Thinking that, she searched Newtube for the word Märchen, so she could find out exactly who this broadcaster was. Then she began carefully looking over the thumbnails uploaded to Märchen's channel.
"...Hm."
Exactly thirteen seconds later, Ryu Chae-in scrapped every plan she had just been making.
What kind of person was good to work with, from Ryu Chae-in's point of view?
A broadcaster who stayed out of trouble and streamed nicely? That mattered a great deal, of course. The moment a single scandal blew up, so did her gut and her blood pressure. She wasn't joking—back at AY Creator Company, every time a controversy erupted around one of their broadcasters, it felt like a year came off her life.
But for Ryu Chae-in, a workaholic by her own admission and everyone else's, there was something just as important.
Ambition.
Yes. Ambition. She wanted someone who refused to settle for where they were. Someone who hungered endlessly for success. In the end, an MCN never did more than support an internet broadcaster. If the person themselves wouldn't try anything or put in the effort, there was less and less for the MCN to do. She didn't want that. Ryu Chae-in was the sort of person who worked with a sense of calling.
Fortunately, Märchen still had her passion. In the way she kept inventing all kinds of content, a measure of ambition showed through as well. Passion, and ambition.
"...She's a tricky one."
Even so, the conclusion was that she was difficult.
The main content Märchen showed on Newtube was, in the end, games. She had been trying all sorts of things lately, but her current image was that of an all-around gaming broadcaster who mostly played otaku games. With all-around game streams, riding trends and the current mattered enormously. The number of drop-in viewers a trend could drag in was a figure you simply could not ignore. And Märchen ignored that unignorable figure anyway. The proof was right there: a broadcaster whose bread and butter was otaku games had never once touched the otaku games popular with streamers, like Ichikami or Azure Archives.
That didn't mean her whole concept was to swim against the current, either. When Up and Up was at the height of its craze, she had touched Up and Up too. The ideal-type brackets everyone else was doing? She did them. Telepathy Drawing, which everyone else was doing? She did that too. Of course, the times she ignored the trend entirely and just showed up with whatever she felt like doing were far more numerous.
"I can't get a read on her."
And Chae-in condensed all of it into those words. Yes—you could clearly glimpse passion and ambition in Märchen. But that passion and ambition were hidden behind a figure you couldn't pin down. She flung her notebook and pen onto the desk.
Her goal was to build a win-win between Märchen and AY Entertainment, then grow it. That, in turn, would become her results. To that end, she had to persuade Märchen to borrow AY Entertainment's strength and try all kinds of projects. You didn't get results unless you actually did something, sink or swim. So she kept watching Märchen's Newtube, scratching away in her notebook with the pen, turning it over and over... and she still had no feel at all for how to approach this.
But she couldn't push it any further. It was time for the meeting.
Contrary to what she had worried, the meeting between Märchen and her assigned manager, Ryu Chae-in, went well enough. How often to run ads, and what kind. The future direction of the Newtube channel. The second original MV to be produced under AY Entertainment's hand, and the first single release. A merch plan tied to that release. Cover songs. Across topic after topic, Märchen actively said what she thought. She was extremely cautious about advertising. After the second original MV went up, she intended to keep her distance from singing for a while. And when she heard the merch plan Chae-in carefully broached, she accepted it without hesitation.
At that level, she was easily one of the five easiest broadcasters Chae-in had ever worked with. The meeting seemed ready to end on that good note.
"I was thinking we might wrap the meeting up soon.... Oh, right. I heard you're very interested in a mobile game that's about to launch. We were thinking of putting out a light feeler from our side.... The name of that game, exactly, was...."
"Oh, it's Raider."
"Raider. ...Is it fun?"
If Chae-in hadn't said that out of mere courtesy, it would have ended there.
"Of course!! Raider is a brand-new game that came out just a few days ago, and it's insanely hot—hitting number one in popularity on both major app markets in Korea and Japan wasn't even enough, it took number one in revenue too, you know? The graphics are genuinely the top of the industry, and that's no exaggeration; there are plenty of characters that hit otaku right in the heart; the open-world feel is really well done; the optimization is solid; it is genuinely no exaggeration to say a game has dropped that will shake this whole scene to its foundations. And since it's a Korean game, you don't even have to worry about the translation! The voice actors' performances are the absolute finishing touch. This is the kind of game I could honestly set at the very peak of my entire life as an otaku!! Manager, if you're up for it, you should really give it a try———ah."
After the meeting, while she and Märchen exchanged numbers, Ryu Chae-in made up her mind: in front of Märchen, she would keep talk of Raider to an absolute minimum.