Someone's Deepening Worries
On the twenty-third, Pocotin and Freeca's Christmas carol videos went up.
The view counts climbed as fast as everyone had hoped. Freeca's video, in particular, was drawing eyes from every corner of the internet.
From the start, Freeca had written off the domestic market and thrown everything at YouTube. That choice had earned them quiet resentment from more than a few fandoms — the accusation that they were putting on airs, acting like they were above everyone else. And ever since the Wooga-dol audition, Ssa-yo's slip-ups and half-baked damage control had left Freeca with a healthy crop of antis.
Fine. Let's see how far you get on YouTube.
Cold scopes trained on Freeca. They didn't hesitate to bare their malice, hammering the dislike button on every Freeca YouTube upload without a second thought.
This is why idol work is a fandom war.
Whether the video was good or bad didn't matter. Fans defended it no matter what. Antis hated it on pure instinct.
By 2025 that kind of tribalism would be unthinkable — but in the early days of Pangea TV's virtual scene, the climate was very real.
It's all because the crew fandom wars and the Gald Cup got too big. The fights that belong in the dark corners of the internet should have stayed there.
Virtual culture itself leaned heavily underground, so the fans tended that way too, and they naturally clustered in the seedier communities. On FM Community, the real-name system at least forced people to play at wearing a mask. In the galleries, there was no such restraint. Father insults and every flavor of sexual harassment were baseline, and outright attempts at manufacturing public opinion weren't rare either. Looking at the completely ungovernable virtual galleries, you could find fandoms splitting into camps and brawling all day long — it was ordinary.
The funny part is that which community a fanbase mainly lives in depends on the streamer's own vibe.
Freeca was something of an exception — they ran an active fan café and kept a tight leash on community activity — but the rest of the crews followed the pattern.
First up: Pocotin. Their leader had been a pick of the Rabbit TV streamer gallery from the beginning, so the fans carried that same energy. When the Pangea TV virtual galleries spun up, those fans poured in en masse wearing masks. There was a stretch when people said that if you opened the gallery, you were guaranteed to run into four or five hardcore Pocotin fans right there.
The old Rena Universe crowd was cut from similar cloth. The difference was sheer numbers — so many members that only certain streamers' fans really dominated. People like Yume and Nyapas.
Decrescendo, on the other hand, was the odd one out: their activity skewed toward FM Community rather than the galleries. It wasn't that they had zero gallery rats among the fans, just that the count was low relative to their weight class. The reason became clear once you looked at how the crew was born. Unlike the first two crews, who had dragged their existing fans and the leftover streamer-gallery crowd with them when they transferred from Rabbit TV, Decrescendo had been born in the afterglow of the Wooga-dol audition. So instead of pure, fully blackened virtual addicts, they had a lot of light fans who'd only just discovered virtual streaming — and naturally, most of those people hung out on FM Community. To Pangea TV's native viewers, the galleries ranked somewhere between a sewer and a dumpster.
Hmm. Then where do our fans hang out, I wonder…
Honestly, I'd come out of the galleries myself — but the mental image of my fans sitting in a dark room, lights off, grinning creepily while they gallery-posted made my skin crawl. Maybe it was a kind of self-loathing. Double standard or not, I just wanted our fans to stick to the fan café and leave the gallery garbage alone.
Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap was deep in his secret hobby again today.
He used to range all over, but ever since settling on streamer Seo-a's broadcasts, he'd mostly lived in Pan-beo-gal, only lurking the other Pangea TV virtual galleries now and then.
She was eating so I ate too in front of my monitor
We even chatted mid-stream and she kept smiling at me the whole time. That's a meal date, right?
Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap smiled with quiet satisfaction as he read the gallery rats' replies. Wasn't this the ultimate proof of I control the comments?
Of course, it wasn't pure joy all the way down. Sometimes he'd be snickering along and then catch his own reflection in the dark monitor and hit a wall of existential dread.
What the hell am I even doing right now?
He hadn't ground through all those long years for this.
Given the social standing and the fortune Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap actually held, the hobby was hard to explain. And yet he couldn't quit. Real life was always tight, always ringed with rules and norms. If he didn't vent somewhere like this, the pressure would crush him. The pleasure of playing the refined, old-money gentleman in public while doing something this base behind closed doors — that gap was exactly what pulled him deeper into the hobby.
Honestly, plenty of people fall into booze, women, gambling, drugs. This is wholesome by comparison. Right?
Even as the self-loathing hit, he privately congratulated himself. At least watching virtual streams and gallery-posting wasn't the kind of thing that caused a public scandal. That had to count as safe, somehow. And he kept his gallery work relatively clean, too. He'd never joined a Gald Cup, never badmouthed a specific streamer, never tried to manufacture opinion or stir up a mob. He even dropped hamburger and chicken gift cards now and then — so if anything, he was a welcome presence around here.
Lately, though, one worry had started to grow.
While lurking Pan-bang-gal — short for the Pangea TV Broadcast Gallery, a board that covered any streamer on the platform, not just virtuals — he'd run into a current that didn't sit right. The big-name streamers' fans still lived in the StarCraft galleries, so this one mostly handled LoL streamers and whatever virtual streamers were currently blowing up.
Ugly as hell so they stream behind a panel and still act this loud?
At this rate every dog and cow is gonna hide their face and start streaming lmao
Especially any tournament with prize money or a CK — boot them on sight!
How are you supposed to trust no-cam panel-faces?
Isn't virtual streaming just optimized for multi-boxing and proxies?
[Video] Seo-a vs Mist 1v1
Even if it's Minecraft, a former pro gamer losing a 1v1? Bullshit lmao. Just look at the LoL tiers — pro vs hardstuck Plat
"Haa…"
Pangea TV's long-standing no-cam blacklist culture. The mass migration of Dullahan streamers over to Rabbit TV had partly been driven by exactly this climate. In major tournaments and the mainstream scene, no-cam streamers simply weren't allowed in the door.
He could understand it, honestly. When serious money was on the line, a no-cam streamer could cheat and be nearly impossible to catch. And it had actually happened more than once in the past. That was how the no-cam blacklist had set in stone — because real cases had existed.
Then the virtuals had arrived like a comet. At first the natives had gone uh, wait? and reluctantly made room. But the old residents, back from announcing the end of the StarCraft era, had been watching for their opening ever since — a chance to land one clean hit on the virties who'd been running wild all over Pangea TV.
And the best way to do that was to snipe the streamer who could stand for the whole scene. Naturally, streamer Seo-a had landed in the natives' crosshairs. High weight class among virtual streamers, name recognition, and heat to match — the perfect prey.
Posts about streamer Seo-a were multiplying in Pan-bang-gal by the day.
"……"
What do I do about this?
Should I at least tip Seo-a off with a note?
Seo-a-ui-bin-ji-gap's worries only deepened.