The Power of the Crew
November 13th, Sunday.
Pangea TV’s streaming scene was writing a brand-new page of history every single day.
That wasn’t empty talk.
The big-name streamers who had stepped out of the StarCraft golden age were each preparing their own new stages. Ssa-yo was running himself ragged trying to make Freeca a success, while on the opposite side Yu Seona was hyping V-topia on stream every single day, fanning the flames higher and higher.
And that was only the beginning.
Rena Universe was suffering through internal strife, yet its individual members were still thriving. Decrescendo and Pocotin were steadily expanding their influence.
Then there was Ddoonnyang’s Thief Bitches Crew—snatched of potential recruits by the sudden flood of new crews, yet still impossible to ignore. What a brilliantly original name. Apparently they planned to become the thief bitches who stole every viewer’s heart.
“I never thought there’d be someone with worse naming sense than our leader.”
“Shut up!”
On top of everything else, the number of virtual streamers transferring platforms kept climbing without pause. Right in the middle of all that chaos stood our own V-Live crew.
Pan-beo-gal was just as chaotic. People hoped the streams and crews they supported would succeed while casting wary glances at the competition. At least Ju-ttak was actively managing the fights between gallery users, so everyone was still watching their mouths.
Yeah, we’re definitely a bit lacking.
As of today our café membership sat at 1,017. We had finally cracked four digits, yet we were still only half of Decrescendo and two-thirds of Pocotin. If someone was my fan, I could understand them being disappointed by those numbers. Looking at pure individual strength, I had actually held a slight edge over both Park Na-na and Ori-koong. They would naturally assume I had simply chosen the wrong crew members.
But as a regressor, I found the whole thing laughable. I already knew the futures of both crews—one would explode in spectacular fashion, the other would slowly wither and die. Compared to them, V-mellodi had survived under Blueby’s dictatorship all the way to 2025.
Surviving is proof of strength.
I decided to temporarily forget that Lucy had chosen to leave the company around then. That would never happen this time.
Still, it’s about time I showed some real action. In the end, viewers want to see their main streamer looking cool and dominating.
I had basically thrown this entire week away taking care of the crew. Even when I turned the stream on it had been nothing but café tours and quiet chatting. What viewers ultimately craved was dopamine—the fun only a stream could deliver. Especially if their main streamer managed to break into Pangea TV’s mainstream, fans would have nothing left to wish for.
If we’re talking mainstream, it’s gotta be League of Legends. I’ve been grinding hard for this exact moment, and the timing isn’t bad at all.
To get into the LoL scene you needed enough ranked games under your belt for people to judge your skill. Matches were almost always played for money, so teams had to be as fair as possible. That was why I had been quietly filling my game count off-stream all this time—so that one day I could force my way into Pangea TV’s main stage.
Some fans will hate LoL content, but it can’t be helped. On Pangea TV you need at least one flagship game.
If you split viewers into those who loved games versus those who hated them, the ratio was roughly 8:2. You couldn’t abandon the eight just because of the two. That was exactly why every big-name streamer kept one foot in the LoL scene. For people like Kim Hak-do or Lee Seong-ho, LoL was their main content entirely. That was how special the LoL stage was on Pangea TV.
People call Battlegrounds, FIFA, StarCraft, and LoL the four major games, but the most popular by far is still LoL. FIFA lags behind the rest.
StarCraft had become almost impossible for virtual streamers to touch because of the proxy-streaming scandals—if you didn’t turn on a camera you simply weren’t allowed in. Battlegrounds was already a deep game, and between indiscriminate streamer sniping and the constant hack issues its popularity kept sliding. Knowing that future, I had no choice but to grab onto League of Legends.
“Alright, so… ah! Here it is.”
Perfect timing—there was a LoL CK scheduled for this evening. The one hosted by big-name streamer Park Bong-sik, better known as Mu-CK.
Applying was simple. You just left a comment under Park Bong-sik’s post with your main role, tier, and LoL ID. Applying was easy; getting picked was not. At this point Park Bong-sik was basically the president of Pangea TV. He casually pulled over thirty thousand viewers on a normal day and forty or fifty thousand whenever he ran content. A CK with that man? The application comments were flooded with streamers twisting themselves into pretzels just for a single moment of spotlight.
There were two ways to get selected. First was personal connection with Park Bong-sik. Blood is thicker than water—when a CK like this came up he always prioritized streamers he was already friendly with. But a CK needed ten players total, and connections alone could never fill every slot. Some of his friends didn’t play LoL, some were on break, some ran daytime streams and simply couldn’t make the schedule. In those cases the remaining spots were filled strictly by upvote order from the application comments.
With zero personal connections, I had no choice but to rely on the second method. That meant moving fast.
First, the application comment…
Jungle Main / Platinum 4 / TheCourageToBeDisliked
I slammed the comment out, then immediately posted a notice on my own channel. The message was simple: I had applied for tonight’s Mu-CK, so please smash that upvote button.
Next stop: the V-Live fan café. Finally it was time to feel the power of a crew for the first time.
V-Live crew fans, gather your strength!
The moment I posted the link and asked for upvotes, the response came flooding back. Anyone who had gone as far as joining a fan café was already far more dedicated than a casual viewer. They were at least willing to put up with a little inconvenience, click the link, and drop an upvote on my comment.
Yes. This is the power of a crew.
Alone I would have topped out around three or four hundred. With the crew’s help we smashed past five hundred. And the wind kept blowing.
The virtual fans who lived on the Pangea TV board of FM Community. Someone had grabbed my notice post and uploaded it there. At the time there was an unspoken rule among virtual fans: whenever a big content opportunity appeared and virtual streamers applied, you ignored crew rivalries and just upvoted. They wanted to see a virtual streamer shine on the big stage. That solidarity was something the scattered human-streamer fandoms could never match.
In an instant over 1,700 upvotes piled up, seizing first place by more than double the second-place count. With a gap that large, Park Bong-sik would have no choice but to pick me first if he cared about public opinion at all.
It became a massive topic on FM Community as well. Even though the virtual boom had been heating up recently, a big-name streamer and a virtual streamer had never actually crossed paths before. Every eye was now locked on the same stage.