Ssa-yo the Walking Disaster
October 19th, Wednesday.
At last, the day of my personal interview with Ssa-yo had arrived.
He had announced the broadcast would start at five, so I had more than enough time to spare. I washed up quickly, stretched, and made myself a proper breakfast.
Half the successful candidates had probably already gone through their interviews yesterday. Curious about the fallout, I logged into the FM Community.
“Hmm, let’s search for ‘Ssa-yo personal interview’…”
Popular posts stacked up in a cascade. Clearly Ssa-yo had uploaded yesterday’s footage. Skimming the contents, most of them were calling out his careless remarks.
The one silver lining was that Ssa-yo had realized public sentiment toward him had soured and hastily turned his stream back on to apologize. His quick response had barely managed to paper things over, but in truth, this was the moment anti-Ssa-yo sentiment first began to take root.
“Even with a regression, some things never change.”
The interview subject who had caused the trouble was none other than Park Na-na.
Park Na-na, the streamer who had rocketed into the spotlight with her “I Declare Myself an Idol” performance on the first stage. During the first-round judging, Ssa-yo had driven home one final point: she must spare no effort in scrubbing away the image of the Flutter Club she had once led.
It was a reasonable demand from someone trying to launch a brand-new virtual idol crew through this audition, and Park Na-na had readily agreed. The problem was that the very same Ssa-yo who had stressed the need to escape that image kept bringing up the Flutter Club—not only during the personal interview, but whenever he so much as spoke with her. It was as if he were deliberately using the Flutter Club’s name recognition to farm aggro.
Ssa-yo’s complete disconnect between words and actions sparked fierce backlash among the VTuber fans. The live chat exploded, and the FM Community board turned into pure chaos. All the karmic debt Ssa-yo had been racking up since the early days of the audition was finally coming due.
Take NewSweet’s fandom, for example. They were furious that Ssa-yo’s criticism of her Bang-sel and full-tracker dance had twisted her image toward the adult side of things. Fans of the smaller streamers who had been harshly judged or unfairly dunked on during the first stage also started raising their voices, carefully watching the room. Ssa-yo’s own fandom, of course, refused to sit still and charged out to defend their streamer.
And so began the FM Community’s traditional mask play in earnest.
Apparently Ssa-yo had been lurking the community after ending his stream, because he fired the broadcast back up and summoned Park Na-na. Then, doing his best to create a warm atmosphere, he offered a formal apology. That lightning-fast response managed to paper over the conflict for the moment—but deep underground, the seeds of real trouble were already sprouting vigorously.
The streaming world is live. No matter how carefully you plan, a single streamer can’t control everything.
Ssa-yo had gotten too greedy.
Originally he had intended to eliminate Park Na-na. Her first-stage performance had been so legendary that the plan had to be rewritten on the spot. That revision had even pulled the borderline Baiyo through with a Super Pass, and the resulting story heat had made the Wooga-dol audition explode in popularity.
Fine—up to that point, great. The problem was that the very story which had driven the boom had also given Park Na-na, Baiyo, and others powerful fandoms of their own. And it didn’t stop with those two. As Wooga-dol progressed, more and more contestants with formidable fanbases began to appear: NewSweet, Elsa, Yun Seo-a, Dorongcha, and so on.
The contestants who never made the final cut had carved out far too large a slice of the Wooga-dol pie. In short, the popular picks of the audition. When the eliminated contestants ended up bigger in stature than the final five who actually passed, how could anyone not find it ridiculous?
At the time, everyone on the FM Community was too deep into mask play to show it openly, but the galleries were in absolute uproar. Criticism that Ssa-yo had mismanaged the whole thing from the start continued long after the audition ended.
Compared to the idol audition shows that air on television, it really was pretty amateurish.
That was exactly where Ssa-yo’s mistake lay: he had failed to craft proper stories for the successful candidates. If he couldn’t do that, he at least should have reduced the spotlight the eliminated contestants received. Instead he ran the audition in a half-baked middle ground, and once the final five were selected, all of it came roaring back as karmic debt. A powerful wave of defections hit the Wooga-dol fandom.
They needed to stick together as one solid unit just to survive, yet the whole thing had been grinding and screeching from the very beginning. And the misfortune didn’t end there. When one of the finalists got caught up in controversy, the brand-new virtual idol crew lost a huge amount of growth momentum right out of the gate.
When you think about it, it’s almost uncanny. He picked five people, two of them turned into problems, and even the later additional member ended up the same way.
Maybe Ssa-yo’s hands were a pair of disaster magnets—the Minus Hands that summoned catastrophe. His bizarre remarks throughout the audition had also kept lighting fires, so “disaster mouth” would have been just as fair a title.
Anyway, none of it had much to do with me. If people were going to trash someone, they would trash Ssa-yo. It wasn’t anything that touched me directly.
Or so I had believed—right up until the personal interview with Ssa-yo began.
“Honestly speaking, I’m really interested in you, Seo-a. If someone asked me right now who I’d most want to pick as a final member, you’d be the first person who comes to mind.”
“……Excuse me?”
Ssa-yo’s disaster mouth had struck again.
What is the single greatest taboo in an audition program?
I would answer: any act that damages “fairness.”
Why did those audition shows that once monopolized network television ratings eventually collapse? Because they abandoned the core principle of fair competition and selection. Pre-selecting certain members as winners in exchange for money was the absolute worst crime imaginable in a format that lives or dies by viewer immersion.
The Wooga-dol audition was no different.
It was true that right now I was one of the top popular picks alongside Park Na-na and Baiyo. Plenty of people were already insisting I absolutely had to be among the finalists. But that had to remain the viewers’ opinion. The moment Ssa-yo—the judge with enormous authority—said it out loud, “fairness” came under suspicion. Viewer immersion started to crack.
WEEEE-OOOO!
Sirens blared inside my head.
Ssa-yo had the stature to weather the hate. I did not. There was a real risk I would become public enemy number one among the other contestants’ fandoms, complete with conspiracy theories that I had been a pre-arranged finalist colluding with Ssa-yo from the start.
I had to salvage this situation somehow. But I was so flustered that I defaulted to the move I had been using most often on stream lately.
“Huh? What do you mean by that just n—”
“Aigoo, my finger suddenly—! Accident, pure accident.”
My avatar stood there with its middle finger raised straight at Ssa-yo. The chat, which had been murmuring over his earlier remark, instantly flipped into collective howling laughter.
Ahem. That wasn’t the effect I had been going for. Still, it wasn’t bad. Using the now-lightened atmosphere as a springboard, I charged in hard.
“I solemnly declare that the statement just made was entirely the product of Ssa-yo’s own unilateral thoughts and judgment, and has absolutely nothing to do with me.”
“Pardon?”
“Ssa-yo! What kind of careless thing are you saying? A judge who is supposed to be fair saying something like that makes it sound like you’re already hinting that I’m going to be selected.”
“Uh—wait, that wasn’t my intention at all. I just meant I rate you that highly—”
“Shh! Repeat after me: the mouth is the root of all evil.”
“…….”
Ssa-yo looked thoroughly rattled by my sudden aggressive turn. But even a rotten mackerel is still a mackerel—ten years of broadcasting experience meant he was already reading the chat’s mood and matching my energy on the fly.
“The mouth is the root of all evil.”
“That’s right. Remember this: just watching your mouth eliminates about fifty percent of all problems.”
“Uh, so… I just made a verbal slip a moment ago?”
“Absolutely. A massive one. It was dangerous content that could easily make the viewers misunderstand, so first you need to apologize and make clear it wasn’t your true intention. All right, everyone—Ssa-yo’s national apology, coming right up.”
As I kept hammering the earlier remark, Ssa-yo seemed to catch on. Without hesitation he bowed so deeply his crown was fully visible and offered the viewers a formal, polite apology. The chat’s sentiment swung right along with him.
A verbal slip can be given the benefit of the doubt depending on the situation, and more importantly, he hadn’t made excuses or dragged things out—he had apologized immediately. The viewers never even had time to get properly heated.
After that we bantered on the spot, kept the mood light and fun, and somehow muddled our way through the rest of the interview.
Whew. A bomb had gone off out of nowhere and I was still sweating cold.
At least we had managed to clean it up without major damage, so I could finally breathe a sigh of relief. Once my heart settled, though, Ssa-yo’s words floated back up in my mind.
That at this point in time, I was the first person who came to mind as a finalist candidate… It was a remark that made you think about a great many things.
Was he serious? Or was it a fake-out?
Unless you cracked open his skull and looked inside, no one would ever know the truth.
It was turning into a day full of thoughts.