The Interview
Pangea TV had its share of evergreen hit formats—comfort-food content passed down like a sixty-year-old gukbap house recipe.
First up: the singing contests that big-name streamers ran whenever the mood struck. The format got passed around so freely among the major streamers that, if you timed it right, you could catch three of them in a single month with nothing but the host swapped out. Viewers had taken to calling them not singing contests but peer-flex contests.
Second: the mixer and blind-date content. Honestly, that one wasn't unique to Pangea TV—it thrived just as well on terrestrial TV and YouTube. The moment the calendar hit year-end, or whenever the weather turned cold enough to make a person's side ache with loneliness, the format rolled back in without fail and vacuumed up viewership.
And third—today's star of the show—was the interview broadcast.
Interview streams had evolved into something special almost exclusively on Pangea TV, and the difference came down to platform culture. At its core, Pangea TV had a massively developed floating audience, while Rabbit TV ran strong on a fixed, loyal base. That didn't mean Rabbit TV had no floaters—only that Pangea's floating layer was relatively far larger.
Floaters who switched streams based on the day's mood, with so little distinction between a main channel and a side channel that the line barely existed. Because of that, Pangea TV had inevitably cultivated a crew culture—groups that streamed together, bundled each other up, and funneled help back and forth.
Floaters whose tastes change every day? Don't wander off. Look for today's stream inside our crew first. We've got something for every preference.
A strategy for locking down as many roaming viewers as possible. And the rise of that crew culture had, naturally, fed straight into the popularity of the interview content used to recruit for it.
An interview! What a beautiful ring that had.
You cracked the stream open with a single click, and applicants desperate to get in showed up with videos, PowerPoints, and polished pitches already prepared—putting on a full dog-and-pony show. From a big streamer's perspective, it was content you could devour deliciously just by running your mouth well that day. Fan satisfaction ran high, too. These were people who projected themselves onto their favorite big streamer. Watching interview applicants crawl on their bellies of their own free will—how could that not hit the dopamine button?
For all those reasons, interview content was thriving as hard as ever.
Thirty-five hundred, huh? Not bad.
If I'd run the interview stream solo today, five thousand-plus might have been in reach. The keyword Rena World was that hot right now. And if any of the interviewees had carried serious name value, the numbers would have climbed even higher. Unfortunately, Wang-ko's counter-programming had siphoned off a lot of the floaters.
The fact that we still pulled this many viewers is solid proof that floaters who actually like V-Live Company's Rena World story exist. Yeah. I'll take the win for now.
These were the floaters who'd turned their backs on Wang-ko's interview stream and chosen us instead. That much was certain. Keep delivering performances like this, and things would only get better.
Nothing happens overnight. Don't go thinking it's unfair. The big streamers already spent five-plus years grinding through this exact process to build their fanbases solid.
I steeled myself to run the interview content with a cool head. Fifteen minutes of pre-stream warm-up had already brought the atmosphere to a nice simmer. I told Mayo to call in the first interviewee.
"Mayo shall now introduce the first interviewee-geosida. The first interviewee is Elsia, the forest fairy from Artania-geosida."
"Nice to meet you-me! I'm Elsia, the forest fairy from Artania-me!"
"……."
The first interviewee was Elsia, a streamer who'd recently transferred over from Rabbit TV. A Live2D character with green, water-shimmer hair and a pair of fairy wings that stood out immediately—plus the place name Artania and a forest-fairy RP to match. The interview was off to a rough start right out of the gate.
A big-name streamer would have screened people without a second thought—cutting whoever needed cutting and only accepting applicants who suited their taste. Unfortunately, I didn't have that kind of seniority yet, so I'd lined up interviewees by application order. Which meant a few tricky ones had slipped into the mix.
If I flinched or looked green here, it would only spotlight how underweight I still was as a crew leader compared to the other companies. So I leaned as hard as I could into a cold, T-type demeanor and faced the interview head-on.
"I looked carefully through all the materials you prepared, Elsia."
"Thank you-me~"
The forest fairy fluttered her wings in delight. But from here on, I had no choice but to say things she wouldn't want to hear.
"The preparation itself is good. Unfortunately, there's no real substance."
"Huh? Uh…… that's—"
Caught off guard, Elsia even dropped the distinctive speech tic that was supposed to be her RP. But this was a professional workplace. I didn't cut her any slack—I laid out every point I'd noted while reviewing the PowerPoint she'd brought.
"First of all, Elsia, I think you need some market research. You decided to transfer because you wanted to grow your stream further, right? That was the motivation?"
"Y-yes! That's right…… I mean, that's right-me."
"Then wouldn't analyzing the commercial district where you're about to set up shop be the bare minimum?"
I kept the cold critique coming.
At a fundamental level, Pangea TV rejected otaku culture. There was a reason that culture had flourished on Rabbit TV instead. Back when a wave of streamers fed up with Pangea had mass-migrated to Rabbit, that whole category of streamers and their fanbases had poured over with them. So would a forest-fairy RP and a Live2D avatar with actual wings attached even land on a Pangea TV that already had no appetite for otaku culture?
You think the earlier transfers were idiots? There's a reason every one of them scrambled to get a 3D avatar ready.
The standard was simple. A 3D avatar just felt less "otaku" than Live2D. It might look absurd to people on Rabbit TV, but for Pangea viewers only just dipping their toes into virtual culture, it was a surprisingly big deal. The resistance was already there—and Live2D's aesthetic plus the distinctive RP culture cranked that feeling up to eleven.
How bad was it? Bad enough that later on, Muyo—a former Decrescendo member—poured nearly ten million won into a Live2D avatar on a big swing of resolve, got zero traction, and switched back to her old 3D avatar within days. Cultural gaps didn't close that easily.
Virtual streamers got massively rejected in the early days on Rabbit TV too. Any new culture needs time before it gets accepted.
But the people who had to live through that transition needed to handle it wisely. That was exactly what I was pointing out to Elsia right now. If you'd committed to transferring to Pangea TV, you needed to show up with the resolve and preparation to match. A platform transfer was that serious a decision.
I'm not trying to put everyone down, but among the kids who started streaming young, a lot of them still think young.
It was a shame. She'd clearly done some thinking—but she'd grabbed at the wrong handles and breezed right past the parts that actually mattered.
"I think you need to study a bit more—avatars, RP, and Pangea TV's culture. Of course, if you're planning to stream solo for a while, you can take it slow. But today's seat is an interview to select people who'll join V-Live Company. Unfortunately, I don't think we can wait around for you to adapt to the platform."
"Ah, okay……."
Elsia looked thoroughly rattled. Interview content like this was hard to come by on Rabbit TV, after all. She might well have walked in expecting a breezy ha-ha-ho-ho atmosphere.
Sorry, but I'm not that much of a saint.
Still, I figured I'd at least given her some realistic advice that might actually help a transfer. If she just took it as a slight, then that was all Elsia amounted to. If she sat with it seriously and picked out what she could use, she'd grow from it.
"Thank you for coming today."
"Y-yes. Th-thank you."
The moment Elsia exited the Discord channel with a dazed look on her face, Mayo exploded with excitement.
"Mayo was genuinely shocked-geosida. So this is the personality of those human-butcher junglers-geosida. Truly no blood, no tears, and zero top-lane sensitivity-geosida."
"……."
This brat stayed quiet through the whole interview and the second it ended she stabbed me in the back?
Rookie virtual-watchers who'd only just started tuning in seized the opening and dumped every grievance they'd been bottling up. I got where they were coming from, honestly. Imagine Joseon under its isolation policy finally wrapping its head around Western suits and coffee—and then someone suddenly invokes "body, hair, and skin received from one's parents" and hacks their hair off at the roots. The revulsion would hit hard. That was roughly how Live2D and RP were being received in Pangea TV's virtual scene at the time.
"Whoa, whoa! Everybody cool it. Live2D and RP are fields with people who genuinely love them too. You say it makes your skin crawl, but honestly, people watching virtual streams don't really get to say that. Agree?"
"……."
I'd steered the mood this way myself, but hearing them dunk on my own stream still pissed me off. I put the interviewees on standby and hauled the chat in by the collar for a one-on-one. Give these people an inch and they throw a whole festival.
"……To the Room of Truth."
In place of more interviews, I treated the viewers to a round of personal counseling.