Autumn Reading Has a Dress Code
I think the teacher's a con artist?
Hatred for the phrase boomer pick. The heartlessness and cruelty of time. The necessity of a hypnosis app capable of planting Tomoe's charm in every human being alive.
Astonishingly, every one of those was something I had felt while running the Preparing for Autumn reading special.
And no matter how I turned it over, none of it had the slightest thing to do with reading. I was pretty sure it had all been going fine, at least up through the light novel recommendations....
Keep this up and I'm going to bomb my debut as a literary pretty-girl streamer, aren't I?
Get it together, Lee Hari! Are you seriously about to fumble a title as mouthwatering as literary pretty-girl streamer?! At this rate all you'll walk away with is Tomoe obsessive, and then it's over! Which, okay, isn't even bad!
Hearing Tomoe called a boomer pick had brought my whole world crashing down, but I hauled that wreckage back into place at record speed. I could only do it because I was dead set on claiming literary pretty-girl streamer on top of Gemjalseu pretty-girl streamer.
...First things first. Change the subject. Hard.
And I happened to have a finishing move built for exactly that.
I'm counting on you, eyecatch!
Meruring~!
While the eyecatch played I fixed my posture, and the instant the clip ended I started up the listener-letter radio BGM from the top of the stream all over again.
"So, how was the book recommendation from your quarter-million NewTuber and literary pretty-girl streamer? Feel the urge to read just welling up inside you?"
I watched the chat and, just for a moment, said nothing at all, offering only a small nod so it would feel like we were truly communicating.
I held that communion-silence for about ten seconds, then opened my mouth again.
"I see a few viewers nursing a little dissatisfaction. I understand. Completely. If a stream recommends books and then the reading special just ends, of course you'd feel disappointed. Of course you'd feel cheated."
I had the gentle radio-letter BGM going and everything. I had built a whole atmosphere of look at me, I'm connecting with you~! And the viewers reacted exactly the way they always did.
Yeah. The road to literary pretty-girl streamer is long and brutal. Maybe I should just be happy as a Gemjalseu pretty-girl streamer...?
...No. If I can pull it off, mastering both the pen and the game is obviously way cooler.
So I'm going to try. As hard as I possibly can...!!!
"But if we stop here, the name literary pretty-girl streamer would cry, wouldn't it? So I thought we might talk about something else, too."
First I need to change this BGM. The song's nice, but it's so mellow it's actually making people sleepy.
"Let's say you've received a book recommendation from a literary pretty-girl streamer, and you've bought the book she recommended. Does that mean every preparation for the season of reading is complete?"
I gave my head a light shake, left and right. No.
"No. It isn't over yet. There's still something important left, isn't there?"
The thing you observe when you go to a fine restaurant, or to the opera. Not something the law requires. Etiquette, fixed by social contract.
"You have to follow the autumn reading dress code."
"The purpose of reading is absolutely to nourish the mind. You're right. But that's ordinary reading, isn't it? The purpose of autumn reading is a little different."
What is the purpose of autumn reading?!
To get drunk on the sight of yourself reading a book in the season of reading! To grant yourself a sense of specialness in the Republic of Korea, a country whose national reading rate has hit absolute rock bottom! To work off this weirdly sentimental mood that autumn always drags in!
...In short, autumn reading exists to scratch a terminal poser's itch.
"So autumn reading isn't about reading a book. It's about reading the atmosphere that autumn reading creates! Do you understand?!"
"That's why appearances matter in autumn reading. All right, everyone? Imagine me, dressed exactly like this, reading a book in a proper jacket. What would you think?"
"You'd think, oh, that person's reading comics. Or a light novel. Something like that, right?"
"But what if you saw a long skirt, a braid, and glasses, with a thermos beside her letting off little curls of steam, and a jacketed book open in her hands?"
Anyone who didn't know me would look at that and think, Ah, that person is a literary pretty girl who loves literature...! Someone like that must spend their time in profound contemplation of life and death.
In autumn reading, what matters isn't reading. It's the cool version of me who is reading. Between the first picture and the second, which one belongs more to that cool version of me?
Taste varies, of course. Personally, I still think the latter fits better.
"So if you want to do autumn reading, you need to understand the dress code, right? Okay?"
"I'm on stream right now. If I were actually doing autumn reading, of course I wouldn't be dressed like this."
I had never once in my life done autumn reading, and my entire career as a reader had followed the iron law of the bedroom corner. I simply chose not to mention it.
Even so, I hadn't lied. I had merely refrained from telling the truth.
"Anyway! That's why I prepared something, so I could teach all of you the autumn reading dress code!"
With that, I launched the game I'd set up in advance.
Surely almost everyone watching already knew it.
Honestly, it was the kind of famously embarrassing game everyone swears they've never touched and has still tried at least once.
"Ta-da! It's a dress-up game!"
Vicarious satisfaction is how a human feeds a desire that has slammed into the wall of reality.
There are plenty of examples, but the first one that always comes to mind is the dress-up game.
The hunger to experience dozens, hundreds of fashions and hairstyles gets fed there, if nowhere else. Only inside the game, sure. But it gets fed.
And there are always people who enjoy a game in a way the developer never intended.
Someone, somewhere, might open a dress-up game not to satisfy a craving for fashion coordination, but to use it as visual material for a lecture on the autumn reading dress code.
"The skirt absolutely has to be long. And a braid with enormous glasses is the golden rule, but... the more I think about it, braid plus glasses blows way past the line. Yeah. Better to pick just one of them. You can choose whichever you prefer."
And that someone was me.
...Still. This counts as playing a game like a normal person. Yup. Absolutely.
I talked myself into it and kept explaining.
"Honestly, the school uniform is the peak of this whole field. But uniforms are a student's privilege, so.... Oh, a ribbon could work instead of a scarf! ...Like this. I've explained enough that you get the feeling, right? You know those literary-girl characters who show up all the time in anime. Coordinate until you give off that vibe and you're already halfway there! Okay?"
"Because everyone watching this stream is a hawawa military-veteran high school girl, that's why."
...That line feels weirdly familiar. Have I said it before?
Well, hawawa military-veteran high school girls is such a famous phrase that it would be stranger if I'd never mentioned it on stream. That was the conclusion I reached.
"Now I'll explain the dress code that suits a bob. First——"
I kept explaining, and before I knew it, it was time to end the first half of the stream.
"That's all for the Preparing for Autumn reading special! Which means... there's something I still have to do, right?"
I stood up.
Then I bent at the waist. Far enough that my head touched the desk.
And I shouted.
"Märchen's NewTube channel just hit 250,000 subscribers! Thank you! I'll keep working hard from here on ouuuut!!!"
"Huh? What are you talking about.... Oh. You're actually right?"
...At this rate I'm genuinely going to hit 300,000 the day the music video drops, aren't I?