Seo-a's Stream Is Peaceful
Seo-a'sEmptyWallet.
His original nickname had been CompletelyEmptyWallet, and this year marked his eighth as a streaming viewer.
The way he'd first stumbled into streaming was simple enough. He'd joined a Daum café looking for tips on a game he played a lot, heard that a streamer was broadcasting that same game live, and ended up on Pangea TV.
That first taste of streaming had been surprisingly fresh. The streamer was a top-ranked player who spun entertaining stories while dropping useful tips, and most of the viewers were people who played the same game, so typing in chat actually felt like belonging somewhere.
And just like that, EmptyWallet fell down the rabbit hole.
He'd started with game streams, but before long he was devouring everything—so-called "bora" visible radio shows, cam broadcasts, dullahan streams, you name it. By year four he was even making expeditions over to Rabbit TV.
If it was fun, he watched it. Period.
That was how he first ran into virtual streaming on Rabbit TV. Even for a veteran viewer like EmptyWallet, it was a genuinely novel experience. An anime character, moving around and doing a whole broadcast? For a while he mainly watched the big-agency virtual streams on Rabbit TV.
But that phase didn't last long. Already conditioned by high-dopamine, high-stimulus content, EmptyWallet found the "idol" concept too full of self-censorship and the streams themselves too bland for his tastes. On top of that, the fandoms over there were massive—way too big for his more private hobbies. So he cleanly cut ties and went back to Pangea TV.
And yet… why was it that virtual streams kept floating back into his mind?
Pangea TV had no virtual streamers, and when he reluctantly returned to Rabbit TV he still couldn't find anything that hit his preferences. Had he just been watching streams for too long? He was starting to feel burned out when it happened.
A stream that launched under a title he never saw coming.
First shock: a virtual streamer on Pangea TV, something he'd never seen before. Second shock: the sheer audacity of dumping fifteen million won straight into Pangea TV stock.
Just watching it made the dopamine gush. How long had it been since a stream hit like this?
Because it was a debut broadcast, he barely donated at all and still locked in the President badge almost immediately. After that he kept up a moderate stream of donations while watching Streamer Seo-a.
Streamer Seo-a was a walking demolition of everything EmptyWallet thought he knew after eight years of watching streams. The outrageous debut was one thing, but the way she handled her audience, the instinct for when to push and when to cut—none of it looked remotely like a broadcasting rookie.
Had she done one of those "reincarnations" people in the virtual scene always talked about? But even among Rabbit TV's virtual streamers, he'd never heard a voice or felt a broadcast sense quite like this. If it wasn't reincarnation… was she just a born streaming genius?
Her first collab content with Oh Yeong-jun. That blistering dance stage she'd pulled off on Ssa-yo's tour stream. The way she expertly trained her viewers, the professional thoroughness of always showing up fully prepared—Seo-a's streams didn't just hit the dopamine receptors. Sometimes they made EmptyWallet genuinely impressed. For a twenty-three-year-old, she carried herself with a maturity that kept drawing his eyes.
Ahh. Is this what people mean when they say the broth has really steeped?
That feeling only intensified through the Wooga-dol Audition first-round stage. Among the forty-one applicants in Group A, she'd shone the brightest that day. Sure, Group B the next day had delivered a stage with such massive impact that her light dimmed a little—but it was more than enough to make EmptyWallet's heart race.
Romantic feelings? He swore it wasn't that. Dating a twenty-three-year-old? Please. It was closer to the way a fan feels about an idol. Someone with this much talent and this much work ethic deserved to succeed. Back in school he'd never understood his friends who obsessed over girl groups and cheered them on. Maybe this was what that felt like?
Today, too, the stream went live right on the announced schedule. Just looking at the title already felt ominous. Superfan management? That was more interesting than usual. Not everyone was like this, but at base, superfans were attention-seekers who craved a streamer's notice.
And so EmptyWallet—President of Streamer Seo-a's channel—settled into his seat once more, dopamine expectations high.
Then a line hit his frontal lobe like a freight train.
"I've been wondering something. Did you become a superfan by watching every single one of my streams just so you could get verbally destroyed? Ugh, that is genuinely disgusting and filthy."
"……."
This was not the dopamine he'd been hoping for. Behind the monitor, EmptyWallet's eyes started to tremble.
The viewers reeled at the completely unexpected opener. But I wasn't done.
"You thought if you slapped on a superfan badge and threw some Candy my way I'd go 'good job, good job' and fawn all over you? You really can't read a room—you come off like a total loser nobody likes. I don't even want to talk to you, so can you just get lost already? You evolutionary dead-end of a man."
A low, threatening voice loaded with venom. Chat had already descended into total chaos.
And right then, the person in question responded.
"Look, AbuseHungryKid, I respect your preferences and all, but I am not the kind of person who reads out verbal-abuse scripts, okay? I mean, seriously—who even posts a whole collection of degradation lines on the front page of their channel?!"
"Ugh! Watching you sit there grinning while you take this abuse is actually making me feel sick. Now I get why you have no girlfriend and just rot in your room on a computer all day. God—don't even touch me. I'd have to wash my hands."
"Hey! You're dead. Stick to verse one. I swear—!"
The moment I opened Superfan #20's channel page, I'd found something I absolutely had not expected. But I felt like I'd handled it well enough. The chat reaction was great, and the Candy donations had been deliciously generous.
As expected—superfans were attention-seekers at their core. The second they felt noticed and a little more specially treated, the Candy just poured out.
Straight on to #19.
"Next up, Seo-aIsMBaldness. Ah! So it was a sub nickname after all. Original name is BaldCommander… ha! This guy's superfan list has a whole bunch of other women on it."
MBaldness's channel page was packed with reverse-fan listings from other female streamers. Reverse-fanning, for the uninitiated, was when a streamer flipped the script and fan-subscribed to a viewer. Same logic as bang-sel—if you filled your channel's superfan list with famous streamers, how cool would that look? There were plenty of viewers who donated Candy to big-name streamers specifically to collect reverse-fan badges for the flex.
"Okay, even elementary schoolers don't believe superstitions like that anymore. Nope, this won't do—you need a beating."
"MBaldness, later when I do a reverse-fan day or a roulette event, you better come prepared to make me the President of your channel's reverse-fan list. Fail and I'm plucking out every last hair you've got left!"
#18, #17, and #16 hadn't shown up to today's stream, so they got a natural pass. #15 had changed his main nickname to Seo-a'sPorkBelly, so I started with praise. But pork belly? That was a little…
"Okay! I'll let it slide this once. This is a subscription model, so deposit the nickname usage fee every month. Got it?"
Trading cheerful banter with the viewers, I shot up the superfan rankings in no time. #7 apparently hadn't come because today wasn't a stock stream, and #6, WoogadollSeo-aLand, was still a newbie, so I handled him gently. He'd only joined recently and was already #6—a premium prospect like that needed to be carefully cultivated.
#5, LoveVirtual, I urged once more to put on a fan nickname, but he declared with the fervor of an independence fighter that as a Virtual Enjoyer he had to uphold his principles and absolutely could not, so I specially gifted him a ten-minute chat ban. Just in case his tastes overlapped with the newly minted #17 AbuseHungryKid, I also picked out one short degradation line and read it for him.
#4, BostonSeo-a, had a relatively clean channel page. But the intro section had a long English paragraph written out, so I beat a hasty retreat. The viewers cackled and roasted me as an English illiterate and a country bumpkin. I delicately raised my middle finger toward the screen.
"Ah—ah! Why is the facial tracking acting up all of a sudden? Everyone, I think there's a program error. I raised my index finger and somehow the middle one went up instead. What's going on?"
#3, Seo-a'sHouseOnFire, wasn't on stream, and the Vice-Chairman, Seoah Not Streaming, showed off his pristine channel page and typed that there was no more loyal retainer than him, so I'd better treat him right. So I raised the middle finger one more time.
"Sure are a lot of errors today. Ahem!"
And finally—the crowning jewel of today's content. My channel's President, Seo-a'sEmptyWallet.
I carefully opened his channel page. And I nearly jumped out of my skin.
"W-wait? President's superfan list is currently…?"
Seo-a'sEmptyWallet's fan club list was also packed solid with reverse-fans. But the level was completely different from MBaldness earlier. These weren't mid-tier girl cams—these were actual name-value streamers locked in as superfans, and among the big-agency male streamers, even Park Bong-sik and Kim Hak-do's nicknames were sitting there decorating the list.
And that wasn't all. Looking at the board, sexy-pose bang-sel photos sent by girl cams were lined up one after another.
My brain spun up to maximum output. In the span of roughly one second, I carefully composed my voice and spoke.
"Our big precious sooon… I mean, our President is always the best, the absolute best! Seo-a really, really likes you, you know that right? Yeees~?"
Trying to look as cute as possible, I stuck up my index finger and poked my own cheek with a little boop.
At which point Vice-Chairman Seoah Not Streaming fired off an enraged donation message.
"Ahem! Slander gets the index-index. Accusing me of things right in front of our President? Seo-a is suddenly sooo sad she might cry."
Seo-a's stream is peaceful today, too.