Among Those Who Like Me, There Are No Bad People
‘The last person standing in the OX quiz gets to be my phone-date partner!’
Perhaps it was because I’d chosen a method with such clear criteria — and one that left so little room for complaint. The Nia OX Quiz, designed to select a phone-date partner, had ultimately become a cold structure of survival of the fittest: the vast majority of viewers were eliminated, and only a vanishingly small handful remained. And yet, remarkably, most of those viewers seemed largely unbothered by the unfortunate fate that awaited the majority of them.
Under ordinary circumstances, that would have been hard to imagine. Even over the smallest things, a little jealousy is the natural human response when someone else gains something you didn’t. And when the prize in question was a phone-call fan meeting — an opportunity that might never come around again — jealousy toward the winner, so long as it stayed within bounds, was hardly strange for a fan.
So why, then, could the viewers accept this situation so calmly, without any real complaint?
The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple.
They simply acknowledged that the person who became that final survivor had earned the right to be there.
“Question eleven. The total number of Ooparts revealed on Nia’s channel so far is ‘eighty-two types.’ …The answer is ‘O.’”
The chat split into joy and despair as the answer to a fairly difficult question was revealed. Far more people had been half-guessing than actually knowing the answer for certain, so the O-to-X ratio sat at roughly 52:48. That near-even golden split carried enough force to wipe out nearly half the remaining survivors in a single stroke.
But then again — this was the Nia OX Quiz, and the prize wasn’t just anything. It was the right to go on a phone date with me, the host of the stream. Once the subject matter tilted toward me, even a somewhat difficult question had more than enough justification for being asked. For longtime viewers, this kind of filtering for “true hardcore fans” was actually a good thing.
Even accounting for the wild card of people who simply guessed correctly, a format like this inevitably favored those who’d been watching for a while over brand-new arrivals. The only real losers in this situation were the fresh newcomers who’d only just started watching my streams… but then again, I was mostly putting out questions that even longtime viewers would struggle to answer offhand. Judging by the real-time screams flooding the chat, nobody had much room left to feel robbed.
Even a hardened veteran would have to stop and think when you zeroed in on some tiny detail they might have casually missed. And if it came down to pure luck, well — it wasn’t as if the odds were completely zero.
…Right?
Apparently, though, “the questions are hard and discriminating” and “I can’t answer them” registered as two completely different things from the audience’s point of view. Something along the lines of: I get that the questions are hard, but it’s weird that there’s a question I can’t answer! Well then how exactly was I supposed to filter one person out of several thousand…?
The silver lining was that before I even had a chance to say anything, a kind of self-policing kicked in on its own in the chat.
…Getting defended this openly always left me a little dazed, even though it happened all the time. These were the same people who’d latched onto my little slip of the tongue at the start of the stream and tormented me over it, right?
Still, their reaction wasn’t completely beyond understanding. My stream had been swept up in all kinds of chaos from the early days, fighting off every sort of bad-faith attack. When the chat started looking like it might boil over, the fans who loved my stream would actively shift the narrative and try to put out the fire.
Normally, if it looked like the viewers were about to start fighting among themselves, I’d step in and tell them not to ruin the mood… but I could tell where those messages were coming from. Maybe I’d just slap on a one-second chat cooldown and leave it at that.
“Alright, alright. Don’t get too heated, everyone. We still have to somehow leave one last person standing, so please understand that I made the difficulty a bit rough. Okay?”
Anyway, once I’d soothed people without getting actively angry myself and settled the mood, nobody seemed inclined to stir up more trouble. From that point on, things moved like clockwork. A question would drop, people would think hard, the answer would be revealed, screams and cheers would split the chat, and the survivors would dwindle. After repeating that process dozens of times over the course of roughly an hour — well, every story has an ending. The viewers who would go on a phone date with me had all been decided.
“Alright, through five rounds of the game, we have a total of five final survivors. I’ll call out each of your nicknames one by one, so if that’s you, please drop a quick chat letting us know you’re still here.”
“Ah, can I read them? Hehe, don’t you worry about that. With our manager’s reaction speed, she’ll catch them instantly without missing a single one. You all know she never lets a single toxic chat slip by in this room, right? Okay then! First up… NiaFanNo42? Mm, you’re here. Yu… Jason? You’re here too.”
Noise could see things beyond human perception, so even if the chats flew by at speed, there was zero risk of her missing them. Well — after working that hard through the OX quiz to become a final survivor, almost nobody would suddenly back out at this stage… but there was no guarantee someone’s computer wouldn’t suddenly die on them either.
After waiting a moment, though, I was relieved to confirm through the chat that every winner from each game was still watching the stream. Thankfully, none of them had wandered off or gotten distracted in the meantime.
Alright, then I’ll write out the link and send it by email… okay.
I sent a link to a temporary call room I’d set up to the email accounts linked to each of the people who’d responded. Suddenly adding them as friends would have felt a bit much, so inviting them into a call room that anyone could enter anonymously with just a link was the best option. Of course, that made it harder to handle if some kind of trouble cropped up… but it was still far better than having an ID leak and getting tangled up in something annoying.
Fortunately, every single one of them seemed to have checked the email, because nicknames I could roughly match to their stream handles began filing into the call room one after another.
Hmm…. so this one is the salvager?
As I casually checked the nicknames of the people coming in, my eyes lingered especially carefully on the one labeled TinaTina. Across the five OX quizzes, I’d quietly slipped in a few questions that only a working salvager would be able to answer — a kind of salvager screening test — and this person had passed it.
Looking back, the positive signals weren’t just one or two. They’d breezed through three or four salvager questions that no ordinary person in the field could have answered, proving they knew the industry cold. At the same time, they’d also cleared the general questions that required a certain level of knowledge about me. In other words, they fit perfectly into the category of “a salvager-industry contact who has more than a passing interest in me.”
Pass. Pass with flying colors!
…Huh. Come to think of it, I feel like I’ve seen this person before — at the hundred-thousand-subscriber event.
What prize had they won back then? Probably the Sherlock Holmes short story collection, which had been the most valuable item at the time. Perfect. If the conversation ran dry during the call, I could always ask how they’d put that prize to use. One more topic in the bag.
“Great. Then shall we try a phone date? Let’s start with NiaFanNo42, the winner of the first game!”
There had been roughly an hour of delay, but at last — the phone dates… were beginning.