A Real-Life Dating Sim
The stream notice that went up today read: [Today’s broadcast will feature an extremely, extremely, extremely important announcement!][You might be so shocked you’ll have a heart attack!! If you’re elderly or have any heart conditions, today’s stream might be too much for you.][Uniz, please prepare yourselves mentally and wait for the broadcast. See you tonight~~!!]
I already had Twitch open and was waiting five minutes before the stream even started.
“What on earth could she be hyping up this much?”
Yuni had always been a bit of a habitual exaggerator. She tended to dramatize even the smallest things, but she rarely went this overboard. Still, if she’d built it up this much, it probably wasn’t nothing. I’d probably get annoyed if it turned out to be a joke. I needed to figure out whether she was being serious or not. She pulled all kinds of weird pranks on stream to rile up viewers, so I found myself doubting everything.
[Major Announcement. Drumroll!]
While I waited, wondering what it could be, the stream went live. The title alone was already getting on my nerves.
[Hello, everyone.]
Yuni’s voice came through after she cleared her throat. The moment the stream started, viewers flooded in and the chat exploded as usual.
[I’ll be making a major announcement today. I’ll just wait until a few more people show up~.]
That made sense. It was hard to drop big news right at the start. Even if she couldn’t tell everyone, it was better for a streamer to wait until the numbers were decent.
Donations started flying in at the same time.
Even the donation message sounded like some hyper kid. It was oddly satisfying. Yuni started reacting to each donation as they came in.
As the chat grew louder with demands for answers, a representative 10,000-won donation appeared.
Yuni burst out laughing, probably remembering her own notice.
I was dying to know too. Yuni started explaining to calm the burning chat.
She had a point. Viewers always spammed the same questions every five or ten minutes. It wore everyone out.
The chat seemed to understand her point.
After some more rambling, once around a thousand viewers—her average—had gathered, Yuni cleared her throat again.
She trailed off dramatically. Ah! Stop building suspense. Please. I couldn’t stand the tension. If it weren’t for this, I probably wouldn’t have even wiped the tteokbokki sauce off someone else’s mouth without thinking.
Yuni took another deep breath. Ah. Please just say it already.
Ah. This pre-roll ad is actually pissing me off. The chat erupted again with even more anticipation.
Finally, one viewer couldn’t take the suspense anymore and dropped a 10,000-won donation.
That’s exactly how I feel. Fellow viewers bonding over shared suffering. This was why a common enemy was important.
Yuni really knew how to squeeze money out of people in the weirdest ways. Just earn it properly!
Clap clap clap clap. Yuni clapped for herself in excitement.
All kinds of pro player names started popping up. Oh. She’d mentioned something about doing one recently. So Yuni was finally starting to do external activities. She wasn’t the type to stream for long hours, so collabs or outside events were rare. School probably made scheduling difficult too.
Usually, high-tier players in League streamer tournaments ruined the balance. Or they stood out too much while everyone else looked like filler. Most tournaments focused on Gold-Platinum streamers. That’s why Yuni hadn’t been able to participate before.
That wouldn’t be easy. Not that it had anything to do with me. I just had to sit back and enjoy the show if she participated.
Haju? Was she talking about that guy? The Challenger jungler? The former pro who played romantically on Lee Sin, known for flashy but empty plays and flashy-but-substance-free lectures. He was popular with viewers because his games looked fun.
I was already looking forward to it, even though it hadn’t started yet. Just the team formation alone had me salivating. Hopefully it wasn’t during exam season. Otherwise I’d have to give up on studying with tears in my eyes.
I could already picture it—Yuni sitting silently while everyone else chatted lively in voice comms, the teammates worrying about her, and her feeling burdened by their concern. Ah. I can’t watch this. What was I supposed to do? Those rare glimpses of her bandaged-mummy side always made me feel a strange sense of kinship.
After all that talking, Yuni took a sip of water.
When viewers started joking around, Yuni laughed and tidied up the mood.
What game was that? Then an upbeat, cheerful BGM started playing. The loading screen showed a convenience store and three smiling girls.
Ah. That one. A dating sim that had been popular a few years ago. All the DLC was out now, and other streamers had already played it to death. Yuni had barely touched dating sims before. Probably because they took too long. Once you started, you had to commit for a really long time, and her streams were pretty short.
Sua was the short-haired junior part-timer character. Looking at her design, I somehow thought of Yuna’s face. …They were a little similar, maybe?
That day, as I looked at the game characters and thought of Yuna……
……
I nearly dropped my phone when I checked the message that had arrived.
— Lee Yuna
What the hell is going on? Because an even more dating-sim-like development had just unfolded in my reality.