Bang-sel, Done Swiftly
November 9th, Wednesday.
Day after day, the streaming scene was pure legend material.
I got up early and checked the Candy count from yesterday's donations first thing.
154,789.
An astonishing haul — better than I'd even hoped. At this rate, money wouldn't be a problem for a while.
If I could cash out right away, it'd be smart to buy more Pangea TV stock…
Unfortunately, filing an exchange request now meant the money wouldn't hit until next week. By then the stock price would be dropping again, so I should take profits on what I already held instead.
I put in the Candy cash-out request right away so I wouldn't forget, then started browsing the communities.
So — what was the public reaction to the donation-farming move I'd pulled yesterday?
FM Community had cleared it without much fuss. Maybe the buildup where I'd mentioned concert costs in advance had done its job. Plenty of people said it was actually fun, and there was no shortage of praise for the Bang-sel quality either.
But FM Community is so full of people playing dress-up that it's hard to get a real read. The true bottom-line sentiment lives in the gallery…
Unlike the real-name-verified, tightly regulated FM Community, the gallery guaranteed anonymity — so people held nothing back when they spoke their minds.
So how was Pan-beo-gal rating Streamer Seo-a?
Look at that clean money-collection move. Is this what Virtual Emperor material looks like?
A concert that clean? I'll gladly throw money at it
She keeps begging for a small wedding though… ugh. What am I supposed to do?
"What the hell. This guy. Haven't seen him in ages. So he was already active back then."
The author of the last post looked familiar. Fixed nickname: V-Chairman. A gallery regular I'd run into constantly on Pan-beo-gal before the regression. Claimed to hold the chairman seat for half a dozen virtual streamers, didn't he? Whenever anyone asked him to prove it, he'd bolt — which got him branded as a pathological-liar concept account and made him famous. I used to leave roasting comments on his posts and have a good time with it.
Now it was just a bittersweet leftover memory.
Public opinion's better than expected, donation results are great — overall, nice.
I still had work left: writing nicknames on the single-cut Bang-sels, drafting handwritten letters, and shipping them out. But with two off-stream days coming up for the first time in a while, I could just batch it all then.
I'd taken the money, so the work had to be done fast. Of all the things I could put off, Bang-sel-related work was the one thing I absolutely could not delay.
Huh? Why?
Before the regression, there were a handful of issues that made the entire Pan-beo-gal gallery unite as one to roast virtual streamers — and the single most frequent one was Bang-sel problems.
A month late past the promised delivery date was routine. Two months behind wasn't uncommon either. The really bad cases stretched past four months and sometimes hit half a year.
It sounds like you could just go ask for it and be done…
It wasn't that simple. The streamer side was clearly in the wrong — they'd taken the money and broken a promise. In real life, you'd file a claim with the business or demand a refund. Against a streamer, though, that was hard to do.
Buying a Bang-sel means you basically already like that streamer.
Pressuring someone you have a soft spot for was never easy. Bringing it up in chat mid-stream risked killing the broadcast flow, and sending a private message carried the stigma of being a toxic pest or a troll, so people hesitated even more. In the end, gallery users who couldn't say a word and just stewed in private started treating the gallery like a bamboo forest for venting.
Just don't buy them
Find a hair in their food, just pick it out and keep eating
Get the wrong delivery order, can't say anything, just eat it anyway
That's literally me T_T
Had a collab content promise with someone, they suddenly flipped and said they weren't doing it
Commissioned an avatar outfit, paid the deposit, then the artist suddenly changed terms and blew past the deadline
…said the guy who's four months overdue on Bang-sels, getting mad about it, and that was genuinely absurd
Bang-sel protests like these were a daily quest that never stopped repeating. Having watched that Pan-beo-gal landscape constantly before the regression, I was determined to manage Bang-sels with absolute thoroughness, at the very least.
Is it about meeting time?
I'd prioritized the Bang-sel stream out of urgent wallet needs and pushed everything else back, but the crew situation was a major issue I couldn't take lightly either. So we'd agreed to hold a meeting starting this morning. Now that we were officially a crew, it was time to talk things through with a fresh mindset. And with Mayo tacked on as a side addition that hadn't even been in the original plan, there was even more to discuss.
I did make that call unilaterally without consulting anyone, after all.
I'd given her the ambiguous title of intern, but Miho and Lucy had every right to feel sour about a decision made without a single word of discussion. After the stream ended last night it had gotten too late, so I'd left an apology message on Discord. Still, if I had any sense, I needed to bring it up again today. Human relationships had a way of cracking over exactly these kinds of small things.
By the way, I had no idea Mayo wasn't going to school. Since she wasn't my main focus before, I never got into details that fine…
I'd learned that from a Discord message Miho left. After I'd entrusted Mayo to her, the two of them had apparently had something like a counseling session yesterday. Beyond that, Miho said she hadn't dug any further — it would've meant prying too deep into personal matters.
Hmm. Tricky.
This was the kind of territory you couldn't just barge into. Even as crew members, we weren't blood family — personal lives deserved real respect.
As long as it doesn't cause problems for crew work, hands-off is the default. Still, not a bad thing. If she's not in school, morning streams won't be an issue either.
A crew was a team and a collection of individuals at the same time. Before the regression, I'd watched more than a few people build crews on nothing but personal friendship and crash hard. Looking at that type always made me sigh.
When you're working, you lead with reason, not emotion. If you're going to build a crew, you have to consider member composition and a whole pile of other conditions.
As I'd mentioned during the crew interview stream, non-overlapping individual images were the bare minimum. Personalities had to mesh too. How many crews had blown up from members fighting each other? And every member needed their own appeal. A structure where one person thrived and everyone else just sat around collecting runoff like scarecrows could never be healthy.
Crew direction matters too. And more than anything, the leader needs real authority.
Equal relationships. An equal crew. It sounded wonderful. But anyone who'd done real social living knew the truth: a group only functioned properly when someone took the lead and drove it. A collective where every member was equal? Everyone would get irresponsible and the whole thing would fall apart fast. People would chase whatever was convenient for themselves and hope someone else handled the hard work. The opposite problem was just as bad — too many people with strong responsibility or self-awareness. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Without a strong leader, that kind of conflict was inevitable.
The reason V-mellodi had managed to limp along before the regression despite all its buried problems was ultimately thanks to Blueby — a strong leader.
Hate to admit it.
The thought that Blueby would be debuting on Pangea TV soon left a bitter taste. She had a knack for finding the perfect place to land, and I wanted to block her future entry into Rena World no matter what.
Ding, ding—!
A Discord call request chimed at the perfect moment. Checking it, the call was from Miho. Meeting time had arrived before I knew it.
Fine. Blueby or whoever — go ahead and try.
Come to think of it, three of the members who'd once been with Blueby were over here now. Which meant Blueby's future couldn't possibly play out the same way it had before the regression. Confidence surged through me all at once, like some golden boy who'd just pulled off a successful NTR.
It was the crew's first meeting.