Metropolitan Special Status
She'd been lucky. Heaven itself had lent a hand — and Jeon Gyeoul believed it with all her heart.
Märchen's merch drop was set for Friday, September 8th, at three in the afternoon. For any student still stuck at school, it was a merciless hour.
But that day was her school's founding anniversary. A holiday — which meant the cruel weekday afternoon that would have shackled anyone else simply did not bind Gyeoul.
And so she resolved, for the first time in her life, to attempt something like a ticket war: a dress rehearsal for the bloodsport of course registration. She was not foolish enough to punt heaven's favor into the stands as if it were nothing.
Having already drawn next year's birthday present early as an advance on her allowance, merch money in hand, Gyeoul checked the time.
2:30 p.m. Thirty minutes until the sale.
"We've been slamming the merch in the eyecatch every single day, so it'll all sell, right? If it doesn't, I think I'd actually be sad..."
"No — it's because we quietly prepared a pretty generous amount of stock."
About ten minutes had passed since Märchen went live.
A surprise broadcast, switched on far earlier than usual, with not a single announcement beforehand. And yet nobody was surprised. Most people had expected her to show up early, and Gyeoul had half-expected it herself.
The reason was simple.
Five hundred thousand subscribers was truly right around the corner.
The subscriber count, blown up huge in one corner of the broadcast, laid Märchen's resolve bare: this time, she was not going to miss it.
A tenfold jump in subscribers in a hundred and ten days. Growth so steep it was hard to believe she had been a nobody streamer for an entire year.
Gyeoul was watching the very person behind that growth — on her phone. If she opened the stream on her computer and the machine lagged, she might fail to buy the merch, and she refused to let that happen.
Wasn't this overkill?
She couldn't help it. At her core, Gyeoul was a diligent person, and this was simply where that diligence showed.
"Judging by how fast the subs are climbing, we'll probably hit five hundred thousand right around when the merch sale starts. Last time, the three hundred thousand milestone overlapped with the music video drop, and I never imagined it would line up again. ...Is something actually going on?"
Gyeoul, who had been watching the whole time, turned the stream off for a moment. She needed to focus on buying merch.
The look on her face just then bore a striking resemblance to the grim resolve Märchen had shown while waiting on Raider.
2:55 p.m. Gyeoul's eyes never left the second hand.
And then — 3:00 p.m.
For an instant the store seized up and lagged, but somehow, barely, the site held. The unstable page set Gyeoul's heart hammering. A pounding heart was a pounding heart, though, and buying merch was buying merch. Her hands did not stop.
Without hesitation she dropped the items she'd already had her eye on into the cart, then moved straight to checkout.
Or rather, she tried to.
If that message hadn't appeared on the screen—
"...Huh?"
Her brain stalled for a second at the sudden turn. Her hands were faster: she yanked the sold-out Medongbu tee out of the cart and tried to pay again. Only once the full situation sank in did she clasp both hands tight and pray, desperately, that the page wouldn't kick her out.
Thankfully, no second sold-out window popped up.
"...I got it!"
The joy of a successful checkout lasted only a moment. Regret over failing to buy the one piece she'd wanted most came flooding in and shoved the happiness aside.
She let out a long sigh, returned to the storefront, and what she saw was—
"...Whoa."
Sold-out tags plastered across nearly everything.
So I was lucky to get all but one.... The words slipped out of her before she knew it.
Eleven minutes after the sale opened, every piece of prepared merch was gone.
"...If I hadn't put a purchase limit on, that could've been a disaster."
To think it would sell out this fast. Fretting, right up until a moment ago, about what to do if it sold poorly now felt downright stupid.
So this is the power of an eternal seventeen-year-old girl streamer...?
A shiver ran through me at the hidden potential I had apparently been carrying all along, and I went on about what I was feeling.
Which is to say: I gave one full-body shudder, and then kept talking.
"Honestly, it's a relief the merch sold out — but it's just as much a relief the site didn't crash."
Selling out this fast meant people had swarmed the page. And if, in the middle of that, the server had blown and nobody could get in? An incident. A fairly large one.
For Märchen — a true broadcaster of this age, carrying on a spotless stream without a single controversy or accident — for something like that to happen? The mere thought was a humiliation too vile to bear. Aye. And how.
So when the site had slowed, my heart had genuinely been in my throat.
But a major corporation was, as expected, a major corporation.
The site that held firm to the very end was incredibleee!
A server explosion for the five-hundred-thousand celebration would've been an impact you never forgot for the rest of your life. Thinking that, I closed the Märchen merch page where the sold-out frenzy had erupted, then enlarged the YouTube subscriber counter that had been tucked into one corner of the broadcast.
"The timing is unreal."
It looked like I was going to hit five hundred thousand the moment the merch-sales watch party ended.
Four hundred seventy-eight subscribers to go. And given the current rate of growth, the time it would take to fill those four hundred seventy-eight—
"Märchen's YouTube just hit five hundred thousand subscribers! Thank you so, so much!!!"
It was instantaneous.
"So — shall we talk about what we're doing today to celebrate five hundred thousand?"
"I thought really, really hard about the five-hundred-thousand celebration content right up until I went live, you know? Everyone. When you hear the words 'five hundred thousand,' what's the first thing that comes to mind?"
The moment I said it, all sorts of answers popped up. Unfortunately, not a single chat contained the answer I wanted. ...The question had been a little broad, and difficult, I'll admit. Taking that into account, I decided not to wait around for the right answer and simply give it myself.
So. The answer was—
"The first thing that comes to mind when you say five hundred thousand is metropolitan special status."
"Thank you for the excellent explanation!"
After thanking them, I spread my right hand wide — five fingers for the number five.
"The population cutoff for metropolitan special status is five hundred thousand people! Märchen's YouTube subscriber count is also five hundred thousand people! The moment we gather those subscribers and found the City of Märchen, we qualify for metropolitan special status on the spot!"
...Anyone who had been keeping up with my streams would have a rough idea by now. Of what I was about to do today, that is.
With that, I changed the stream title.