Back in My Day
A Korean otaku, at some point in life, has no choice but to use a forwarding service—a shipping proxy that ferries over all the things you can't buy directly from overseas.
That used to be my personal doctrine.
Why? Because the holy land of otaku culture, its mecca, sits across the sea. Whether you use a forwarding service or not completely changes the range of goods you can actually get your hands on.
But even that doctrine shifted a little once I arrived in the Otaku Major World.
The amount of merch you could buy in Korea had ballooned to an absurd degree. Ballooned enough that you no longer strictly needed a proxy at all.
And so the old doctrine—that a Korean otaku would, sometime in their life, have no choice but to use a forwarding service—evolved into a new one. Among Korean otakus, anyone otaku enough to hold an officer's seat in the Otaku Heaven-on-Earth Project had no choice but to use one.
Honestly, in a corner of my heart, I still believed you only became a true otaku after you'd clutched your head trying to figure a proxy out, learned you needed a Visa, earnestly begged your mom that you just wanted a debit card that was easy to spend with, had that card issued as a Visa, and then spent the whole day coiled in dread over whether your package would arrive in one piece....
But that felt like boomer brain, so after a voluntary round of self-reflection I scrapped the thought on the spot.
I dressed that story up just enough and told it on stream. The result:
I had become a twenty-two-year-old fossil-boomer pretty girl.
"I am not a twenty-two-year-old fossil-boomer pretty girl. I am an eternally seventeen fossil-boomer pretty girl. Cease the slander!"
"Anyway, using a forwarding service for the first time in a while brought all those old memories rushing back. Back then, buying a single piece of merch made my heart pound like crazy...."
But it didn't pound like that anymore. I'd probably just gotten used to it. And that old thrill had been weathered down by time until all that remained was something faint, shaped like a memory. Calling back a thrill from a moment that would never come again was simply too much like calling back a memory.
"In that spirit, today we're running a special: Back in My Day."
The Back in My Day special was not some ordinary just-chatting segment where I rambled about old memories.
Of course, up until a few hours ago, it had been exactly that. Then the creative genius living inside me declared the whole thing far too plain, tossed out a single idea, and the shape of the content changed on the spot.
So what was the Back in My Day special, you ask—
"Guess what old Märchen must have been like, and write it up on this board! I'll read whatever you post."
It was a viewer-participation segment.
The last one had been the making of the New Outfit, so the cooldown felt nicely refreshed. No particular reason not to run another.
"And as I read, somebody's bound to guess right, yeah? Does that person get a prize? Nope. If I read their post and catch myself saying back in my day—then they get the prize! What do you think? Doesn't it sound secretly fun?"
"If you're moved, then I'm glad too. ...Now everybody go write something, quick!"
With that, I put on some BGM. The kind of track that, if you heard it while eating, would somehow convince you the meal had to be finished in three minutes flat.
Why the sudden life-or-death soundtrack?
"This segment is first come, first served! The second I feel like time's up while I'm reading, I'm declaring the whole thing over! Move, move, moooove!"
Because the situation was, in fact, urgent.
...Saying that, if nobody showed up and first-come-first-served lost all meaning, it might be a little humiliating.
Not that that was going to happen. I'd run viewer-participation segments more than once or twice, so I had a rough sense of how many people would jump in. Besides, the last one had gone out before the music video dropped.
After the MV release, Märchen's stream, as of this very moment, was big enough that nobody could honestly deny it was a major-league broadcast. Live viewers drifted back and forth between four digits and five without so much as breaking a sweat.
"Looks like posts are starting to come in, so shall we head right over?"
And now—the glorious first post, fastest of them all. Could it actually stir the memories inside me...!
So they were going after the food of memory. Fast, and reasonably plausible. But....
"Sadly, I didn't eat cup tteokbokki that often. I liked chicken back then too, same as now. So I ate a lot of those convenience-store corn dogs. Close, but you're out!"
"All right, next!"
"First of all, I am still an eternally seventeen pretty girl who merely possesses the worldly depth of a twenty-two-year-old, okay? Just how far back are you trying to file me!"
"I watched other people do it.... I've just never actually played it with anyone. Back then I wasn't doing cat's cradle. I was playing ddakji—those round folded-paper cards with characters printed on them."
In our neighborhood in those days, the boys' unwritten law wasn't cat's cradle. It was playing with character ddakji. Walk up to the kids flipping cards and suggest a round of string figures? That was no different from begging them to ostracize you.
"Too bad, wrong. Wrong, but.... Ah. I can't hold back a back-in-my-day on this one."
How was I supposed to hold in a ddakji story!
For the record, refusing to be picky about methods had won me quite a few king ddakji. How many, I couldn't remember.... Well, it was ages ago. Forgetting was only natural.
"...Since I don't know how this is going to turn out, shall I put them on the shortlist for now?"
Just in case the number of prize winners turned out absurdly low. Couldn't I simply not hand anything out if there weren't enough winners? That would end on a vaguely gross note. Personally, once you've said you're giving something away, I think it looks much better to spend big.
Anyway, this segment was seriously good for digging up memories.
"All right, next post!"
"Of course I did."
...Couldn't hold this one either. Looked like the first prize winner was about to be born.
"Right? Maybe because I've already done so many back-in-my-day stories about anime on stream?"
Or maybe the viewers had secretly been wanting a wider spread of back-in-my-day talk. Right. The truth was, our viewers weren't merely discharged-vet schoolgirls. They were boomer discharged-vet schoolgirls.
A boomer discharged-vet schoolgirl.... This was going to sell!