Time to Work
Looking back on it now, the private messages really started pouring in after I voluntarily dropped out of the Wooga-dol audition.
And the ones I received came in every flavor imaginable.
First up: the mindless haters.
The people who sent messages like this always had one thing in common: the account was invariably an empty alt with nothing on it. They played at being righteous, at being the enlightened ones — but at their core, they were cowards through and through.
The real problem was that these messages didn't come one or two at a time.
Seeing this kind of thing, you start to understand why streamers' mental health falls apart for no good reason.
Of course, if it were just private messages, you could ignore them and move on. And sure enough, I'd occasionally run into streamers who put on a tough front and insisted this kind of thing didn't bother them at all.
But is the world ever that simple?
It wasn't just the messages. A stream could be tanking and stress you out. Real life could throw problems your way. And once that happened, the malice in those messages you normally brushed off would lodge itself in your throat like a fishbone you couldn't spit out.
In those cases, the viewers' advice was always the same: just close your DMs.
But the problem with closing your DMs was that you couldn't receive contact or inquiries from other streamers at all. Sure, a streamer with actual business could just hop into your broadcast and ask directly — but that interrupted the flow of a stream, so most streamers hated that approach.
That was why streamers signed to MCNs often handed message and email management off to company staff. Problematic messages and emails got filtered out automatically, and only the things worth knowing got passed along.
I had no intention of joining an MCN, and I didn't have anyone I trusted enough to hand my account over to, so for now I just had to deal with it myself.
Closing them because of the scumbags would be a waste — I get a surprising number of useful messages, too.
The scumbags' messages and the timing of everything else lined up almost perfectly. Starting from the moment I dropped out of the Wooga-dol audition, private messages from other streamers had flooded in.
The problem was that the vast majority of the people sending them were hollow, no-substance small-time streamers. Especially from a female streamer's perspective, the kind of people you should never, under any circumstances, get involved with: the hako hangers-on.
Let's be blunt. Female streamers are, at their foundation, in the business of selling thirst. No amount of denial changes that fact.
Ask the viewers about it and they'd deny it with everything they had — like elementary school kids who torment the girl they like. Embarrassed that their real feelings might show, so they rush to tell her to go date someone already. They'd mumble that any guy who took their streamer away must have committed some terrible sin in a past life — but the second she actually started dating, those were the same guys who'd vanish without a trace. They wouldn't admit it out of pride. They'd claim real life got busy, or quietly start cutting back on donations.
That was the reality lurking under the surface.
Even female streamers who weren't particularly good-looking — the comedy and gimmick-concept ones — still ended up with thirst fans.
Getting tangled up with hako hangers-on is just eating away at your own fandom. Sure, every once in a while you run into a rare one who actually knows how to handle themselves — but the odds of that are about the same as finding money on the sidewalk.
So the golden rule for a female streamer was simple: don't get involved with hako hangers-on.
I was a bit of an exception, though — thanks to the future, I could spot the lottery-ticket hangers-on from a mile away.
"Huh. Didn't expect this person to send a message."
I checked the sender of the message that had just arrived.
Oh-ha — a Battle Grounds small-timer who, at this point in time, was completely unknown. She dreamed of success, but the reality was that she was scraping along the bottom like every other Battle Grounds hako.
But I knew her future.
In 2023, she would become one of the most talked-about human streamers alongside Oh Yeong-jun. Well — excluding the big-agency streamers, of course. Those people were in a different league entirely.
On top of that, she'd make Partner Streamer status by 2024. Given how much stricter Pangea TV had gotten about handing out Partner qualifications compared to the old days, Oh-ha's growth was a genuinely remarkable case.
No harm in getting involved. Looking at how she treats Park Na-na, she's definitely someone with loyalty.
When Oh-ha got invited to the 2023 Pangea TV year-end awards and the MC asked her for an acceptance speech, the very first name out of her mouth was virtual streamer Park Na-na — ahead of even the big-agency streamer Wang-ko, who she was actually tied to.
And honestly, looking at the story between the two of them, it made sense. Oh-ha had been bouncing between an average of ten viewers when she got linked up with Park Na-na through the PUBG Kindergarten content and hit a thousand viewers for the first time. Later, when Rena World opened, it was Park Na-na who strongly recommended her to server admin Rena-ttang and got her a spot on the server.
Considering that Rena World at the time was filled exclusively with female virtual streamers, and Oh-ha was the only male streamer allowed in — that was an extraordinary privilege.
Once she settled into Rena World, Oh-ha went on to support Wang-ko when the big-agency streamer joined the server later, grew at breakneck speed, and before long had become a mid-tier streamer averaging two to three thousand viewers.
It's incredible, honestly. From the moment I started watching streams on Pangea TV in 2023, I never saw another human streamer grow the way Oh-ha did.
A genuine human-drama success story.
The side effect, though, was that after Oh-ha's rise, the scramble among small-time streamers to get involved with virtual streamers got even worse — all of them hoping that if they got lucky, they might snag the same kind of opportunity.
Unfortunately, now isn't the time.
Getting involved with Oh-ha wouldn't be a bad thing, but the truth was that PUBG Kindergarten only succeeded because of the synergy with Rena Universe member Dal-da and Park Na-na. There was no guarantee it'd work just because I was in it.
And honestly, the first thought that hit me when I saw the message wasn't about Oh-ha at all.
Maybe — just maybe — I could use PUBG Kindergarten as a bridge to get connected with Park Na-na?
That side of things was the real honey pot. The real cartel. If I could just build some rapport, it would pay dividends for a long, long time. Even if Park Na-na eventually switched over to hobby streaming, the network of connections branching out from her would still be there.
"Alright. Let's test the waters."
I sent polite declines to the other small-timers' messages, then left Oh-ha some room to work with.
Her proposal was exactly what I'd expected: recruiting people for PUBG Kindergarten content.
I turned her down for now. Between crew activities and a schedule I'd already planned out, I simply didn't have the free time. But I didn't shut the door completely, either. Instead, I left a breadcrumb — that I might have time toward the end of the month, so she should reach out again then.
Rena World opened at the start of next month, so the collab between Oh-ha and Park Na-na had probably happened around the end of this one. That was when I planned to quietly slip in and look for an opening.
Petty? Life is a live match, and there's no such thing as petty in a live match. Stick to the high road and get blindsided into the dirt, and that's just being a fool.
Streaming on Pangea TV meant I'd keep getting tangled up with other streamers left and right. You had to judge carefully. People who looked like they were on top right now could get hit with a scandal and freefall into the abyss, while some nobody could catch a break and soar.
Alright. That's Oh-ha handled. Next up…
Today was another packed schedule. First, a short crew meeting with everyone except Lucy. She was currently live, so she had to sit this one out — I'd summarize the meeting contents and pass them along to her separately.
Spreading out our broadcast hours for the crew revolving-door effect was a good call, but yeah, this kind of problem was always going to come up.
We'd set a meeting time and gather, but whoever was streaming at that hour was naturally absent. And if we met in the morning, Miho — who'd been streaming until dawn — would show up with a voice that sounded like she was about to pass out on the spot.
But for now, there was no room to ease up. You had to push hard in the early days if you wanted to actually feel the benefits of forming a crew. Everyone was still unfamiliar with crew activities, but all I could do was hope they'd bear the inconvenience and keep working hard. The foundation we were laying right now would become an asset more precious than anything later on.
"Ugh, I'm dying. Seo-a, everyone's here."
"Got it. On my way."
Time to get to work.