War
A few days ago, I received an anonymous note.
It was clearly sent from a secondary account.
I skimmed it at first, figuring it was the usual virtual-streamer hate mail—but I quickly sat up straight and read it properly. The contents were anything but ordinary.
The sender was reporting posts from a toxic gallery. Most of the slander and curses aimed at me had been carefully mosaicked out, and the note summarized only the parts needed to grasp the situation.
In that moment, I understood. I didn't know who this person was, but they were my fan. There was no other reason someone would go to the trouble of mosaicking out every insult and condemnation just to protect my mental state.
If it's content like this… it's probably the Broadcast Gallery, isn't it?
Even with the mosaics, reading the surrounding context made it clear that plenty of the posts involved family insults and sexual harassment. There were a few galleries this poorly moderated and this far gone, but if you narrowed it down to ones with high activity, the Broadcast Gallery was the prime candidate.
The fan who'd sent the note had already summarized things for me, but I still wanted to see it with my own eyes before I believed it. The curses and family insults were infuriating, sure—but I'd once lived the gallery-addict life myself. A gallery rat through and through. Something like this wasn't going to shake my mental state.
"Hmm. I see…"
I thought I understood why the fan had sent a note like that. The growing hatred toward virtual streamers in the Broadcast Gallery. That hatred had been aimed at me—the one who, through recent dazzling performances, had come to be seen as the face of virtual streamers.
From manufactured public opinion against me to every kind of smear campaign, the concept posts were plastered with them. For example: the photo I'd shown during Seoyunbeop had been stolen off the internet. Or that I was a pig weighing nearly ninety kilograms. As "evidence," they'd dug up a clip from one of Ssa-yo's old contents where I'd sung and danced at the same time—and they were laughing at me for getting winded, saying of course a pig would tire out that fast.
Are you kidding me? Do they have any idea how hard it is to sing and dance at the same time?
Anyway, internet rampagers were a pain to deal with—they just mindlessly pushed their own logic and nothing else. Best to just ignore them.
But as I kept reading the Broadcast Gallery posts, I realized that wasn't going to be possible. Looking at the public opinion in those posts, you could feel the malice—the determination to find any flaw, or even "fabricate" evidence, just to hurt me.
Why did they hate me this much? They had no legitimate reason. They'd simply lived this way out of habit for so long, and with virtual streamers increasingly showing their faces on the streaming scene, I'd been singled out as the representative target.
This is the most upvoted post.
Looking at the content, it was a post casting suspicion that I'd used a "proxy" during my first Purge Day match against Mist—and the conclusion was that it didn't really matter either way. If it was proven I really used a proxy, jackpot. And even if not, they could demand cam verification, and if my real face turned out ugly, they could just push the narrative that virtual streamers were usually this trashy and stoke more virtual-streamer hate.
Despite the genuinely spine-chilling content, it had over a hundred upvotes, and most of the comments were praising it as a great idea.
Wait—do these people actually think I'm a pig?
I'd deleted the VOD of the half-cam stream I'd done while having lunch with Lucy, but I knew plenty of clips had already been made and spread around. Even now, a casual Google search still turned up a few leftover videos. There was clear evidence like that, but in a gallery where fabrication was the baseline, even that didn't seem to land.
Anyway, once I realized there were snipers targeting me, I became twice as careful with my words and actions as before.
Hmm? You're asking if shaking people down, running pyramid schemes, and dropping them into traps counts as being careful?
No—didn't you watch the stream? I do all of that for the content angle, okay?!
And so, on December 24th—Christmas Eve—I faced the second Purge Day with a slight edge of tension. The main sniping method the toxic gallery rats had been advertising was claiming that the skill I'd shown on Purge Day was a "proxy."
But even after Purge Day ended, there was no sign of anything like that. So I thought to myself: Ugh. Toxic gallery rats. They talk a big game hyped up in their own gallery, but the moment they try to manipulate public opinion on FM Community, they just get crushed, huh?
With FM Community quiet, I figured that was that. Usually, when gallery scum snipes a streamer, the basic play is to put on a mask and post an exposé on FM Community.
I was just breathing a sigh of relief when the incident exploded from a direction I never saw coming.
"You're a proxy, aren't you? Someone else played for you, right?"
For a moment, Mist's voice and the posts from the Broadcast Gallery seemed to overlap in a kind of hallucination. What… was going on right now? I was so stunned I couldn't even process it, and my words caught in my throat.
Had the toxic gallery rats flooded Mist's stream and manipulated the chat? And it had worked, so this guy was spouting this absurd nonsense right now?
When I didn't answer, Mist seemed to take my silence as a guilty conscience, and his momentum surged.
"I thought something was off ever since last week's Purge Day."
"Come on, Mist. Even if I'm good, it's not proxy-level good. Flattering me that much won't get your gear back for free, you know—you'll still have to pay for it."
I got that he was in a bad mental state—call it a state of mental and physical frailty—and that in that shaken condition, the suspicious opinion-manipulation in chat had made him snap. In other words, his pride as a former pro gamer had backfired in the worst possible way.
Still, I tried to give him one last chance. I knew exactly what kind of people the toxic gallery rats pushing Mist from behind really were. So I tried to spin it—to reframe Mist's use of the word "proxy" as a form of praise, so he could still salvage the situation.
When you do game streams, if someone pulls off an unbelievable skill play, people sometimes say things like "Someone else just played that for you, right?" or "Come out from under the desk, XX!" as a compliment.
But Mist rejected even that final mercy of mine.
"You're telling me a woman who can barely hit Platinum beat me in a 1v1 without a proxy? Huh?"
A rough voice, matching his towering pride. In an instant, the atmosphere around us went past cold and froze solid. Now it wasn't just me—the other streamers nearby had heard it loud and clear too.
Chat exploded in an instant.
It was no longer a situation that a few words of apology could fix. Sharp, hostile messages aimed at the opposing streamer were flooding both of our stream chats in real time.
So that's how it is. You threw away even my last consideration?
Taking in the chat and Mist's attitude, rather than getting heated, I was growing cold and calm. I'd always been like this. Mild irritation was fine—but when I got truly angry, emotion got pushed to the back and reason took the seat.
After a short but intense deliberation, the first words out of my mouth were as cold as ice in my hand. Mist, who'd been worked up into a frenzy, flinched—his voice trembled. Had he felt it too? Had he finally realized the risk if his claim turned out to be wrong?
Well… it didn't matter anymore. Whether he regretted it or not, the water was already spilled, and there was no way to scoop it back up.
"You claimed I was a proxy, didn't you? And very seriously at that. Even after I gave you a chance to walk it back, you doubled down several times. Do you understand what that action means?"
"Stop with the weird talk and just come clean about whether you're a proxy or not—"
BANG—!
"…"
In that moment, I wasn't a twenty-three-year-old female streamer who knew nothing but broadcasting. I was a twenty-nine-year-old who'd completed active-duty military service and survived every ordeal as a mid-level sales manager on the grinding front lines of a shitty little company.
I'd deliberately been using formal speech—then slammed the desk hard and switched to informal speech in an instant. That intensity crushed the momentum of Mist and every streamer around us. If you had to put a word to it, as embarrassing as it was, you'd call it "charisma."
I didn't ease up on the barrage I'd opened.
"If you want to ruin someone, you'd better realize you can get ruined too. That's life, you brat. Fine. If that's what you want, I'll prove it."
I could almost picture Mist's blank, wide eyes behind his Minecraft character. Sure—former pro gamer. Of course he was way better at games than me. But Mist had trusted only in his own skill and trampled all over the sweat and effort my crew and I had poured into Rena World.
So I decided to pay him back in kind.
"What… kind of proof?"
"If you're curious, come into my stream right now and watch."
What I was about to show from this moment on… was war.