Everyone Has a Plan That Sounds Good
A ban on Rabbit TV meant an IP block.
You could punch through it with a bypass program, but there was no need for that just yet.
Yeah. This is Lucy from three years ago.
Even three years later she still had that glass mentality and ran a strict chat, but compared to her earliest streams it was a massive improvement. That classic ten-Confucian-scholar, Confucian-girl vibe, you know?
That personality was one of the things that made Lucy’s broadcasts dead boring.
Huh? With that many flaws, why would anyone watch Lucy’s streams?
Ah, finally someone hits the core of it.
Listen up, newbies. I’ll explain this once, so pay attention.
No matter what anyone said, Lucy had the raw material of a superstar.
I’d even written a promo post about it on Pan-beo-gal back in the day.
In the clutch! When it absolutely has to happen she pops off!
At the critical moments—song contests, big stages—she would randomly snatch first place or become the center of the entire conversation. It was like the god of broadcasting itself was pushing her forward.
When that happened, the viewers that day and the whole community would catch fire, praising Lucy to the heavens. Dopamine spiking all the way to the top of your skull. A whole different dimension from regular national pride.
Taste it even once and you get addicted. Then the hope torture begins. Even when her regular stream numbers plummet into the Mariana Trench, you keep believing Lucy will prove herself again.
In crude terms, you end up beating it to the past.
Fuck. If you’re going to be like this, just don’t be good at all.
Newbies who flooded in after watching a contest or a killer stage would bounce right back out the second they hit a boring regular stream. The cycle repeated until only elites like me were left.
“Goddamn. Thinking about it like this just pisses me off.”
Remembering how much heartache I’d gone through whenever Lucy was scraping the bottom of the barrel left a bitter taste in my mouth. This time I needed to fix those flaws. But right now I didn’t even have a way to make contact.
I was deluding myself. This is three years ago. We’re complete strangers now.
The three years that had existed between us had vanished. Overnight I’d gone from a fixture in her broadcast community to just another random floating viewer she’d never even met. Even if I spammed chat or sent emails, there was zero chance Lucy would take my advice.
The earlier she transfers, the bigger the first-mover advantage. More spotlight, and a virtual debut on top of that…
I knew the future of the internet broadcasting industry. Virtual would replace Dullahan, and a massive virtual pie would open up on Pangea TV. Unlike the already-saturated ecosystem on Rabbit TV, this side was pure blue ocean.
If only I could make Lucy clearly understand that fact.
Is there only one way?
In the end it came down to position. Words spat out by some random daytime floating viewer carried no weight. Hard to trust, too. But if those words came from a fellow broadcaster standing in the same position? And if you backed the “statement” up with actual proof? She’d have no choice but to listen.
Yeah. I’ll debut first, show her, and earn her trust. That’s the only way.
Two months left until applications opened for Pangea TV’s first-ever virtual idol audition. There was no time to hesitate.
Two months until the audition applications. The first-round audition date was another two weeks after that. At a glance it looked like plenty of breathing room. But for someone who wasn’t already an established broadcaster, I had to start everything from absolute zero.
Broadcast gear, audio setup, virtual avatar prep, and so on. There would be plenty more to consider. Hardships only broadcasters knew about that viewers never saw.
On top of that, the bar I was aiming for was high. Grabbing some free avatar off a virtual market booth. Opening Notepad and scribbling something that passed for a profile. Newbie behavior where the setup exploded from the very first stream and you kept fumbling the whole broadcast. Absolutely unforgivable.
Some viewers would defend that as “newbie charm,” but that was only a fleeting early-days opinion. A broadcaster had to care about their image. Once a brand got stamped on you, it stuck like a slave’s brand and didn’t come off easy. Chronic lateness, content no-shows, freeloading—those images piled up like karmic debt and eventually grabbed a broadcaster by the ankles.
“I was thinking of making Meru-nim the final interview candidate. Last time I checked, her voice was good and she works hard.”
[ToxicGaller has been forcibly ejected.]
“You’re the one getting cut. Ahem. I’ll check the public opinion a bit more first.”
I’d seen that exact scene countless times over three years. That was why I was going to build it from the start—the image of the broadcaster called “me” as a diligent, professional figure. At first people would treat it like a concept, but once the weight of “time” got added to it, it would become an unshakable image no one could deny.
For a big picture like that, I have to prepare the first stream airtight.
I’d never streamed myself, but for three years I’d dug deep into internet broadcasting. In other words, even if I wasn’t a seller, I had a solid grasp of consumer “needs.” From here on I would build a plan to satisfy them.
The future information I already knew. A tightly structured plan built on top of that foundation.
Just one more thing. There’s still something I need to confirm.
There was a famous Tyson quote.
A quote that delivered a meaningful lesson. Even if you had a plan, without the ability to back it up it was all for nothing. In the end, self-objectification was what mattered.
Before setting a debut and goals as a broadcaster, did I even have the ability for it?
Before, I would have shaken my head immediately. As a sales guy I had a decent way with words, but my looks weren’t outstanding, and my voice and singing were pure average. The only thing I could maybe put forward was game skill that wasn’t bad for a civilian—but in a streaming scene crawling with former pro gamers, that didn’t even get you a business card.
But now?
Right now I wasn’t Seo Minjun. I was Seo Min-ah, a regressor who’d come back three years. Just the three years of information alone already covered half the battle. I knew which content had succeeded and which trends had exploded in the internet broadcasting world during that period. That was a powerful personal weapon that nothing else could match.
But future information didn’t guarantee unconditional success. Broadcasters who lucked into a hit piece of content, rode high for a while, then slumped back down into “named small-fry” status—that was an extremely common case. What mattered was having “my own charm” that could grab the influx during the upswing and turn them into fixed viewers.
I was going to check that right now.
“First, the looks…”
I snuck a glance downward without thinking. A pair of plump, soft masses that made the tops of my feet almost visible flaunted their presence.
“H-holy shiiii— wait, no. Ahem.”
I cooled the excitement and calmly broke it down piece by piece. Height around 163, 164? About average for adult Korean women. Right around there. But the proportions were so good it never looked short. Skin so clear it could’ve been in a cosmetics ad. Delicate, compact features that looked like an anime character had stepped out of the screen—the more I looked, the more I just kept marveling.
This is twenty-three?
A baby face young enough that you could believe she was still in high school, with slightly upturned eye corners that gave off a mischievously playful impression. And finally that body… the fourth letter of the alphabet? Fifth? It was downright lewd. A baby face with a body like this.
“Honestly cam streaming would be better.”
That was my honest feeling after looking myself over carefully. But I couldn’t do that. The condition of the bet I’d made with Ju-ttak was to succeed as a virtual. The path for girl cam streamers was completely different.
“Still… for event stuff it wouldn’t be bad.”
The “red pill”—meaning a virtual’s real appearance—was a lightly taboo culture, yet half-cam still thrived in the unbalanced virtual scene. With looks like these it was an automatic free pass. Even outside of streaming there were plenty of places to use it. In Korea, looks were competitiveness and a weapon no matter what. At the very least, when I met other broadcasters it would generate extra goodwill.
“Alright, looks are settled. Next is…”
Next up was the voice. If you were thinking about a virtual debut, voice was the talent that actually took priority over looks. A virtual’s appearance was the “avatar,” not the “red pill.” But the voice couldn’t be replaced.
“Aaah, aaaaah!”
A proper mic would’ve been nice, but all I had in the room was a headset. No choice. I made a quick recording on the cheap headset mic and played the file back to listen to my own voice.
And a moment later.
“It’s… mid.”
A cold evaluation based on three years of accumulated streaming internal energy. Seo Min-ah’s voice charm score was a 70. Barely scraping average. Dark clouds were already gathering over the first step toward becoming a top virtual streamer.