Broadcast Angle
Four in the afternoon.
I went live earlier than the time I'd arranged with Ssa-yo.
As far as I'm concerned, if you've got content lined up, you need to open the stream ahead of schedule, chat with the viewers a little, and set the right mood. That part is essential.
Content starts at five, and you flip the stream on at four-fifty, scrambling around, fraying your own nerves and the audience's right along with them.
That kind of thing should be avoided as much as possible.
That's just my personal opinion.
Fun content pulls in casuals. What builds regulars is conversation.
Even a short one… even something simple and trivial is fine.
In a society stuffed full of indifference and coldness toward one another, a single warm word offered to someone worn down by all of that sinks deep into the chest.
That was why I'd fallen for Lucy's streams, too.
At first it was the singing and the voice that drew me in, but further down the line it was the warmth — like a friend, or even like family — that I got lost in.
The people on Pan-beo-gal called this process "brewing the broth," but whatever you named it, for a female streamer it was a skill you absolutely had to pick up.
"SeoAIsAnAngel, there's something I'd like to say. May I?"
"Why is the nickname I see right now different from your channel name? Don't tell me that's a sub nickname? In my room you're SeoAIsAnAngel, and in other female streamers' rooms you're under their names?"
On Pangea TV, subscribing unlocked a sub-nickname service you could use in that streamer's room.
I needled him about it, pretending to be sulky, and the chat exploded.
"You're a bunch of lifelong singles cosplaying like you've ever even had a girlfriend. Nope. Nope. The Seo-a Corps and their theatrics, I swear."
I was building rapport with the fans through all that noise when a cuckoo flew in.
"Cuckooing" meant reporting what was going on in other streams. Sometimes it was useful; other times someone would dump something nobody cared about with zero sense of timing and kill the flow, so opinions on it were split.
"Ssa-yo? Oh, I know him. The variety-games guy, right?"
Pangea TV let you run up to three streams at once by default, so viewers who heard the cuckoo and opened Ssa-yo's broadcast were reacting in some very strange ways.
"Hmm? What's with everyone? Is Ssa-yo doing something weird? Let me just…"
I slipped into Ssa-yo's stream and put the feed up on my own broadcast.
"Hi. I'm Yojjang, a virtual streamer who debuted today. Being alone is boring, so I'm looking for friends to hang out with. What's your name?"
"Uh… ah, hello. I'm NewSweet."
"Pfft! No way, how is a person's name NewSweet?! Look at me — Yojjang. Now that's a cool name."
"Ahaha."
Ssa-yo was overacting hard, trying to lock in a broadcast angle.
But NewSweet, the one being toured, clearly wasn't used to this kind of skit-flavored talk — she just laughed awkwardly.
Avatar's not bad. Makes sense if she's someone who already had virtual streaming experience.
The eyes and face shape were a little off, and the facial tracking was weak, but for 2022 standards this was a perfectly decent ttu-tta.
Hm? What's a ttu-tta?
Originally it meant cracking open a computer case to mod the hardware — "popping the lid." The virtual scene borrowed the term, and it came to mean customizing an avatar.
The process was simple enough. You grabbed a base avatar from a booth and rebuilt it into something with your own charm and features.
The results, though, varied wildly depending on the artist's skill.
So when the real virtual boom hit, good artists had commission queues stacked nearly half a year out — you could want to hire them and still have no shot. People ended up crying and hiring unknowns out of necessity, and sometimes the finished product was so bad the streamer's mental health tanked while the fans got cooked alive on the forums.
Sigh… Lucy had been one of those cases.
Looking back now, it was a pretty bitter memory.
Between the buzz around virtual streamers and the fact that a popular streamer like Ssa-yo was involved, the viewer count was sitting at nine thousand.
But with numbers that high compared to usual, the toxic casuals came with them, and chat moderation looked rough.
Ssa-yo caught on through the donation voice alerts and, to flip the mood, asked NewSweet to do the dance that was supposedly her specialty.
"O-okay, I'll try."
It took a little time, but she got into VRChat without much trouble. While that was happening, someone must have cuckooed in her chat, because NewSweet — very aware of those nine thousand pairs of eyes — looked frozen stiff.
Back on Rabbit TV her average had been around thirty or forty, right?
Of course she was nervous.
A familiar track started playing.
The Zero Two dance — the one that owned all of 2021.
Under the viewers' expectant stares, NewSweet's avatar began to move.
Both arms wrapped behind her neck, her waist swaying smoothly left and right in time with the song.
An addictive melody and a looping motion.
The reactions were all over the place.
Some people, who'd only ever seen human streamers do Zero Two, found a virtual avatar's version novel and interesting.
Others had more or less adjusted to the avatar itself, only to frown the second the dancing started — something about it just felt off compared to a real person.
Honestly, even that much was generous.
I'd confess that the first time Lucy streamed in a virtual avatar, I'd given her some pretty harsh feedback myself.
Uncanny valley, I guess?
It resembled a person just poorly enough to feel worse.
Well… knowing Lucy was the one inside it, I toughed it out, and eventually I adapted.
I'd been there myself, so I understood the discomfort.
But expressing it with violence was freeloading I couldn't tolerate.
Fortunately, when it came to that kind of thing, Ssa-yo — overflowing with broadcast experience — was a manager you could trust.
In an instant, the packs that had been spamming toxic chat got swept out of the stream.
"Hah… hah! W-was that okay?"
In the meantime NewSweet had finished the Zero Two dance and spoke to Ssa-yo, a little short of breath.
Ssa-yo cranked his energy all the way up, cheering and clapping.
It was the absolute limit of thrashing around to keep a stream's atmosphere alive.
When the host put on that kind of desperate one-man circus, about half the viewers — the ones you could call Ssa-yo's fandom — played along and typed praise into chat.
But I could see it.
They were only typing because of Ssa-yo. There was no soul in those messages.
The reason was simple.
Sure, part of it was that virtual dancing still felt unfamiliar — but more than anything…
"That's not how you do Zero Two."
My chat went completely feral all of a sudden.
The moment I saw it, I realized I'd screwed up.
Damn it. I'd meant to keep that as an inner thought, and it had slipped right out of my mouth.
Maybe twenty seconds passed?
Before I could even salvage the mood, Ssa-yo's voice came looking for me out of nowhere.
Someone hadn't even lasted that long — the cuckoo had already flown.
Whether he was exhausted from doing a one-man circus alone or not, Ssa-yo's voice carried the iron will of a man who was not about to let this opportunity go.
In the end, for the sake of a smooth broadcast, me, Ssa-yo, and NewSweet all gathered on Discord.
After a short greeting, Ssa-yo checked whether what the cuckoo had delivered was true.
"…I heard something. Is it true?"
It was already too late to hide it.
Just the viewers in my room who'd heard the line directly numbered around five hundred.
A clip might already be up on the forums.
But just rolling over wouldn't be any fun.
To keep the broadcast angle alive, I deliberately put on a slightly over-the-top voice.
"Honestly, it was aggro."
"Sorry? What do you mean…"
"But what are you gonna do about it. What can you even do, huh?"
"Uh— uh?"
"All you can do is swarm over here like a bunch of losers and ask if it's tr—"
"Would you like to end your stream?"
"I'm sorry. Preparing Zero Two immediately."
The broadcast angle had hit hard.