The Sickly Beautiful Girl, Lulu
*cough cough cough*
Lulu's Sunday stream had begun — except the thing filling that Sunday stream from start to finish was none other than the sound of Lulu coughing.
*cough cough cough*
She kept hacking away, and everyone listening knew at a glance that this was the cough of someone who was genuinely sick.
"Hello… my little sacrifices… snff… your succubus… Lulu here…"
Whether it was the cold or just Lulu not paying attention to her lines, even her usual delivery felt subtly off.
"I'm fiiine… snff…."
Even as she snuffled up a runny nose and insisted she was fine, she was clearly anything but.
"I dunno… maybe I ate too much ice cream…? Or left the AC on in the living room without a blanket…?"
Both of those were fatally effective ways to get sick.
"I'm usually healthy, though… why is this happening… I… I haven't had a cold in almost two years… snff…."
At that pitiful, wronged little protest, the chat stopped needling her and switched straight into full headpat mode.
"Thank you, everyone… but… you need me healthy to bully me…?"
*snffff…*
A voice a little raspier than usual, low and stuffy through a blocked nose, the intermittent snuffling and the mushy consonants — she really was in bad shape today.
Even that was cute, sure. But cute was cute, and worry was still worry.
By the time I came back to myself, I was already sending Lulu a donation message.
I knew full well that donating under my name would draw aggro. I'd become something of a named figure among Korean clippers, and most of the Lulu Army already knew I was one of the hardcore diehards.
And yet I didn't send it anonymously… well. Honestly, I wanted Lulu to say my name. That much greed, at least, I was willing to indulge.
At the same time, some contradictory part of me still hoped the chat wouldn't pile on me — and the fact that I knew that contradiction and did it anyway only proved how badly I wanted to hear her call my handle.
In other words: yeah. I was an attention junkie too.
Meanwhile Lulu snuffled one more time and thanked me for the donation.
"Mangjjonku… thank you for the ten-thousand-won donation… Jjonku… you've gotta make the clips, right…? snff…"
One of the reasons I'd gotten famous was that four or five relatively high-quality short clips always went up within a few hours of a stream ending. Lulu clearly knew that too — she even tossed out a "you've gotta make the clips" from her side.
Hearing that made me feel grateful and guilty all at once.
Thankfully, even with her calling me out directly, her cold looked so rough that none of the usual aggro came my way. If anything, the chat mostly just agreed with me.
Maybe because she really did look awful, even the aggro that would normally have swung my way had turned into worry for Lulu instead. She must have felt it too — she let out a dopey little laugh.
"Heheheheh… thank youuu… heheh…."
Hearing that goofy laugh only made my chest hurt more. What was a stream even worth, that she'd push through sick like this?
The chat's "Rest!" and Lulu's "I'm streaming!" collided and squabbled for a while, but in the end the real owner of this stream was Lulu.
"Today… I'll just play a little bit and then go… snff…."
She stubbornly insisted she'd only play for a bit and managed to talk us down, and eventually we struck a dramatic compromise: she had to end the stream at ten.
For reference, it was currently nine. In other words — one hour of streaming, then off.
Whether Lulu decided pushing any harder would be a bad idea, or whether she had some other reason, I couldn't say, but she agreed to end at ten.
And so the game she'd prepared for today was Endless Return, which she'd played before.
Normally when Lulu queued into Endless Return, the whole point was her catastrophic mechanics and the way she screamed through every unfair situation. Today's Lulu was nothing like that.
Maybe she just didn't have the energy — none of her usual bright, tomboyish chaos was coming through at all.
"Hnnngh…."
"Cough cough… why are you doing this to meee…."
"Aaaaaah, nooooo…."
She kept trying, in little bursts, to push her energy up, but with a cold she couldn't really yell, and her stuffy nasal voice made the whole thing land more like unintentional aegyo than her usual screaming.
Not that she meant it that way at all.
The chat, for their part, found this Lulu adorable and stayed locked in headpat mode the whole time — totally different from a normal day.
Even in situations where they normally would have ground her into dust, they just kept coddling her.
This was closer to the mainstream VTuber stream vibe — when a VTuber messes up or gets hit with terrible luck, the chat comforts them. Lulu's streams were usually nothing like that. She volunteered as the punching bag herself, the impact of that punching bag was on another level, and she knew full well how cute she was when she got bullied, so she quietly steered the mood that way on purpose.
So this atmosphere was a long way from her usual — but today was very much the exception.
Watching her keep streaming through cough after cough was impressive, and at the same time my editor's brain was already spinning.
Today's stream was short on runtime, but if I stitched together the bits where she messed up and got upset with the bits where the chat headpatted her, I could probably pull a whole video out of it under a concept like "a completely different kind of streamer."
Seeing a Lulu so different from the one I knew… I guess you could call it a kind of gap moe?
The cuteness was the same in nature, but the flavor was totally different. That felt like the right way to put it.
"Aaaaaaaaaah…! Why did I diiiiie! Why! Why did I diiiiiie! Cough cough!"
And then there she was again, screaming through another unfair death, and she was unbearably cute.
Anyway — watching her, I found myself quietly turning over how I should cut the edit.
Before I knew it, Lulu's stream was over. Exactly one hour of gaming, then she ended it. All told, maybe an hour of talk and an hour of game.
I downloaded the VOD and started editing right away. Where to cut and how was completely obvious.
Trim the cuts, drop in subtitles, layer effects and sound effects, lay down a comedic BGM track, slot in reaction source clips timed to the beats…
By the time every last edit was done, I was finished way earlier than usual.
One in the morning — an hour when, on a normal night, Lulu's stream would only just be starting to wind down.
My work-life balance had become, in a word, perfect. And it had been a while since a long-form went up, so the viewers would be happy.
Shorts were still the trend these days, but I worked in this industry, so I could feel the shift. Shorts attention was cooling a little, and long-form was coming back around.
Long-form still carried a surprising amount of the viewership and recommendation weight. Trends just circled like that, I figured.
Personally, even as a viewer, long-form felt like it took more care and more often had something actually worth watching. When I went looking for something, it was almost always long-form, and my own content diet tilted that way too — even though I made shorts for a living.
I uploaded the video, slapped #GetWellSoonLulu into the description tags, and went straight to sleep.
And the next day, when I woke up and went to school, I planned to bring over the video file I'd finished the day before yesterday and go over it with my project group.
Except a small problem had cropped up.
"…… Rua, are you okay?"
"Yeah… I'm fine…."
Rua, who normally showed up looking perfectly put-together, had appeared in a mask, looking thoroughly wrecked.
This… was a pretty big change of pace.