Audition Round 2 Group Assignments
I've always been the kind of person who loves making plans.
If you go by MBTI, that would make me an INTJ?
So even going into this audition, I'd already mapped out a few strategies.
The absolute best-case scenario: pass the audition and get Ssa-yo to overhaul the crew's operating strategy.
I'd seen the future, so I already knew.
Ssa-yo's strategy was going to fail completely.
What was that strategy, exactly?
First: stick rigidly to the idol concept.
Second: pull in outside traffic through YouTube.
Those two pillars.
No matter how I looked at it, the first one seemed like something he'd cribbed from the big virtual agencies over on Rabbit TV — and it was a total miscalculation.
Those guys had WooWakGood as a rock-solid backer, and the platform culture itself was the kind that coddled its streamers. That's what made it work over there.
Ssa-yo simply didn't have the weight to push his graduates the way WooWakGood could.
And then there was the platform culture problem.
Pangea TV was, at its core, a domestic market. It lived off its own internal economy.
Just look at the Candy revenue that exploded every single month.
That alone was enough to keep everyone fat and warm — so why bother chasing outside traffic through YouTube?
From the other direction, YouTube users found Pangea TV an awkward platform to deal with, too.
When you lined up Pangea TV, Rabbit TV, and YouTube side by side, Pangea was the one that sat furthest away in terms of age demographic.
On top of that, Pangea TV's public image wasn't great. If someone had to pick a platform, ninety percent of them would lean toward Rabbit TV.
He got his eyes way too high looking at the virtual idols next door.
In the end, Ssa-yo would confess failure and wash his hands of the graduates entirely.
The Wooga-dol graduate crew would still stubbornly carry on its history after that, sure — but measured against the expectations people had when they first appeared, it was hard not to feel disappointed.
Honestly, if he just fixed those two strategies, this would be the greatest opportunity imaginable.
Just thinking about it made me swallow hard.
WooWakGood's position was broken-tier, sure — but if Ssa-yo actually used what he had properly, he could produce results that weren't far behind.
His personal weight class was lacking, but Ssa-yo had an advantage WooWakGood didn't.
Namely: the most well-connected social network on all of Pangea TV.
Unlike WooWakGood, who built his own ecosystem on Rabbit TV and broadcast from a remote island of his own making, Ssa-yo was one of Pangea TV's ultimate connectors.
The big-agency streamers, the mid-tier veterans — pretty much everyone fell inside his circle.
In practice, whenever the Wooga-dol crew dropped a song or a YouTube video, he'd collab with the major streamers and push the promo.
The problem was that it stopped right there.
He'd go out and promote himself, but he kept the crew members locked into the most extreme remote-island broadcasting imaginable.
All to protect the idol concept.
So of course the promotional effect got cut in half.
Right when the crew should have been riding its early momentum and growing, he slammed the isolation policy shut. Casual viewers turned away, and growth flatlined on the spot.
Meanwhile, over on Pangea TV, a once-in-a-generation content event called Rena World was about to drop — virtual streamers pulling ten thousand concurrent viewers left and right — and the crew would blow every last scrap of that precious opportunity.
People don't change easily, they say. But if Ssa-yo just shifted his thinking, this would genuinely be the best option available.
Since the odds of that best-case scenario weren't high, I'd prepared a backup plan.
Suck every last drop of hype out of Wooga-dol all the way to the final stage, then withdraw.
With the weight class I'd gain through Wooga-dol, I could dominate the virtual scene for a while.
Ride that wave, then casually slide into Rena World when the time came.
From that point on I'd be staring at a mountain of new options and have to start grinding through hard decisions all over again — but still.
Two plans for now. Will the future actually change?
The things Ssa-yo had said during our recent meeting...
Maybe the existence of an irregular like me had already shifted something.
For now, I'd keep watching.
Today was group assignment day for the second gate of Wooga-dol.
Yes — shockingly, Round 2 wasn't an individual evaluation. It was a team mission.
Ugh. Just thinking about group projects from college was giving me PTSD.
The villain who, when assigned research, just Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V'd a bunch of internet garbage into a pile. The one who stopped answering calls and went completely dark. The absolute legend who volunteered to present and then no-showed on the day of.
Truly the peak of university life.
How will the groups shake out? Same as the past?
Because of the irregular known as me, three of the Round 1 passers had been swapped out.
I didn't know exactly who those three were.
I hadn't watched the Wooga-dol audition live back then — I'd only picked up info on the popular picks after the fact.
Which made me even more curious.
How much had those three swapped seats changed the group assignments?
If I end up in the same group as Lucy, that'd be ideal.
That would be best, but it wouldn't matter if it didn't happen.
Honestly, the elimination criteria for this second audition had almost no real discriminating power.
Whether you performed well or bombed, the people who got cut were the ones who hadn't drawn attention in Round 1 or who didn't have much of a following on their personal streams. They'd drop in droves.
Make a mistake, bring out boring content for your presentation — if you were a popular pick, you still survived.
So even if I landed in a different group from Lucy, I wasn't particularly worried.
Lucy had drawn serious praise and attention on her Round 1 stage, after all.
On top of that, her personal streams were doing just fine.
I'd been continuously showing her goodwill ever since our collab, so she was quietly catching some of the runoff traffic from me.
Factor all that in, and there was no reason for her to fall.
So I settled in with a relaxed heart to watch Ssa-yo's group assignment stream.
"Before we get properly started, I have some unfortunate news to share. Sadly, Ano has decided to withdraw from the audition."
The chat window went up in flames.
Ssa-yo looked briefly flustered, then cleared his throat and reclaimed the viewers' attention.
"Ano said they'll address the details directly on their own stream, so please drop the related talk. If this keeps burning, I can't even get to the group assignments."
Even after Ssa-yo's call for order, a few people still dropped related messages without reading the room — but once the managers started swinging the ban hammer, everyone quickly put their masks back on and sat down nicely.
"Alright, everyone — you see this board here? This is a cutting-edge draw system that only works in VRC."
Ssa-yo's VRC avatar pointed at what looked like a rectangular chalkboard, divided by evenly spaced horizontal lines into zones labeled Group A through Group G.
"Thirty-eight Round 1 passers. Two of them have withdrawn, so we're at thirty-six. Each group will be five people, but since one person is left over, Group A will take six. And look over here."
To the right of the board.
At Ssa-yo's fingertips sat a button, with the words Random Draw written above it.
"Alright, let's hit it a few times as a test. So — who gets the lucky first slot?!"
Click—!
The moment he pressed the button, a rectangular ID-photo-style image appeared — and the face on it was unmistakable at a glance.
A black-haired, red-eyed beauty.
In small letters across the top of the photo, readable if you looked carefully: Seo-a.
"Seo-a came up. Since this is a test, let's spin it a few more times."
He ran about ten test draws. No photo came up twice.
Having established the draw system's reliability, Ssa-yo moved on to explaining how the group assignments would work.
"The method is simple. We'll fill Groups A through G one person at a time, in the order they come up. First draw goes to Group A, second to Group B, third to Group C, and so on."
Ssa-yo demonstrated by sticking photos onto the board himself, and the viewers — already fully understanding — started spamming for him to hurry up and start.
Before the draws, Ssa-yo had stated the Round 2 passing criteria: no group would make it through with every member intact.
That only cranked the tension higher.
It meant there would be inter-group competition and internal evaluation within each group.
While every viewer prayed in chat that their number-one pick would dodge the strong contenders, Ssa-yo's first real draw began.
Click—!
"Here we go. The first contestant drawn is Rio! Rio takes the first slot in Group A. So who comes up next? Stay tuned — opening right now!"
Dopamine-pumping draw time had arrived.