Incorruptible and Invisible (5)
Drrk. Drrk. The mouse wheel rasped upward, then down again, trading directions and making a small racket of it. Each time, the screen lurched with it, pacing the same stretch over and over.
"Director Yu, you're making me dizzy. Would you please sit still?"
"...Show a little respect for your superior."
"This counts as a superior?"
A file folder came down on Yu's head with a soft thunk, and Song Su-ah pushed her lips into a pout. Laying hands on one's superior—truly, an act that had taken every last manner, stirred them into the rice, and eaten them, was it not?
"Don't you think that's hardly a line for someone diligently robbing the payroll in the middle of the workday?"
Yu Hyena's grumbling, however, earned nothing in return but a reaction that did not find her funny in the slightest.
"It's not payroll robbery. It's monitoring public opinion online. A scandal blows up in the middle of a sponsored stream, of course the splash hits us. I'm trying to check on it. Is there a problem?"
"If you couldn't talk your way around it..."
No. She could talk. That was the entire reason she occupied that seat as the face of the game. Song Su-ah turned the thought over and let out a small sigh.
"So. This monitoring-whatever of yours. What did the data actually say?"
"Pretty successful. No. Explosive, maybe?"
So saying, Yu Hyena moved the mouse and opened an Etube video. It was yesterday's broadcast from Komori Sae.
Anathema Production, the agency Sae belonged to, followed the same Etube policy as every other VTuber in Japan: no edited uploads, only live replays. Outside of special cases such as cover songs, the channel was in practice used for nothing but livestreams and their archives. Naturally, what Yu had just hit play on was one of those.
"...Holy shit."
Song Su-ah's eyes widened a fraction as the view count registered. Set against the subscriber count on Sae's channel, a two-hour uncut video—a sponsored stream, no less—pulling numbers like these more than earned the word smash. Showing this figure alone might be enough when they reported the promo results upstairs. The thought came to her unbidden.
"...Ah. But looking at it now, the views are piled overwhelmingly at the end."
The moment she checked the Most Replayed graph, Song's brow creased. Thinking about it, that was only natural. Yesterday's incident was the sort of thing to draw interest not only from Anathema viewers who hadn't been watching Mary or Sae, but from other VTubers' audiences as well. People who knew VTubers existed and had never watched one might even have shown up. Nobody who came to confirm that one scene was going to sit through the video from start to finish. They'd find the timestamp in the comments, watch that part, and leave. And sure enough, the shape of the graph proved that watch time was crushed up against the very tail of the video.
Which led to a simple conclusion: the sponsored stream's view count was absurdly high, and the actual promotional effect had probably been modest. Not meaningless, of course—an impression had been left, by one route or another, on people who hadn't even known the game's name. Still, staring at a number that high, she couldn't help clicking her tongue at the waste of it.
"We were aiming at the live in the first place, not the replay, so I suppose the original goal was met..."
"Hm? What are you talking about. This isn't 'met.' This is a complete smash."
"Everyone just watched the ending and left, didn't they?"
"A lot of them, sure. But look at this."
Yu Hyena grinned and dragged the mouse along the graph riding above the progress bar.
"Flat overall, then climbing a little at certain points. See?"
"Doesn't that happen all the time with long videos?"
Some people watched a multi-hour archive all the way through. Others skimmed the highlights and moved on. A video this long always grew a comment that did nothing but list the timestamps of those moments, and since everyone simply clicked whatever time the comment offered, a graph that spiked hard at exactly those spots was extremely common.
"I mean, if you only look at this, yeah... Hang on a second."
Yu Hyena switched over to the watch-history tab and pulled up another video. This one was also from yesterday's broadcast, but the channel it had been uploaded to was Mary Tepes's.
"Huh? The views..."
"High too, right?"
It didn't compare to Komori Sae's channel, of course. Even though both were broadcasts from the same day, the footage of Mary kissing Sister as if she meant to pin her down existed only on that other video. Mary had cut her own stream before she made her move, so that was only natural. Even so, the view count was by no means low. The channel had several videos with higher numbers, but given this one wasn't even a day old, it was clearly performing above average. And again—this was a video that didn't even contain that scene between Mary and Sister.
"Then why...?"
"You still don't get it? Here."
Yu Hyena clicked through the stretches where the audience graph reared up above its neighbors—the parts that, in all likelihood, had been written up in the comments as highlights.
…Mmph?!
…Mmmph!
Hnn—mmph…!
What those scenes shared was Mary instinctively dumping TMI, getting shut down by Sister Zion, and the counter hovering over her avatar ticking upward. Precisely the sort of moment a comment would file away as a motormouth takedown. But after what had happened yesterday, these scenes couldn't mean anything else.
"Courtesy of our lord and savior King-God Mary graciously kissing people for the entire sponsored stream, you see?"
In other words, what a not-insignificant number of people had on their hands was not some ordinary live archive they might have found a little dull, but a yuri kiss compilation running just shy of three hours. It was possible not every one of those moments had truly been shut down mouth-to-mouth. Whatever the actual truth, it was enough that the viewers believed it. Of course the views would come—and evenly, across the whole broadcast at that.
"And even in a video like this, the promo still lands on the people who only came for the highlights. Right before every kiss, Mary's explaining our game's selling points, or the lore, or something."
Whether those timestamps had been chosen by pure chance, or whether the commenter had simply decided the flow was better when a torrent of TMI got stopped cold by a kiss, she couldn't say. As promotion, though, it was hard to call the result anything but a considerable success. There were even clips that had cut those parts out and strung them together. Someone was gathering up the game-related promo scenes and spreading them around, free of charge.
"So as long as no further problems crop up, we've definitely pulled more promo out of this than we paid for the spot."
"As long as no further problems crop up...?"
"What else would the major announcement in this tweet be? They're not even taking yesterday's live down. Just leaving it up. It's obvious."
The right read was that they had no intention of burying it, or of mumbling past it. For the moment, at least. In short, they meant to make the relationship public.
The problem was that no one could be sure how that would land. If sentiment turned ugly enough, there was a real worry they'd pull yesterday's broadcast after all and forbid clipping it besides. The contract with the studio covered the live; the archive had no stipulated terms, which left it entirely at the other side's discretion.
"If it comes to that, I'll tear up the forums myself and drag public opinion back around!"
"With the staff we've got, you think we can actually move a community?"
"Pair the Multi-Shadow Clone Jutsu with a decent gift of gab and one person can demolish a whole board alone."
"Please don't do anything insane, Director...?"
She couldn't even begin to picture the backlash if word got out that a developer had been caught astroturfing a community. Getting caught shielding your own game would be embarrassing, but people would understand. Getting caught shielding a VTuber company you personally liked—she didn't want to imagine the things they'd say.
"Still, I suppose they can't help worrying over there. The VTuber side is already brutal about dating, isn't it? And if what gets caught is an outright same-sex relationship..."
Whether it landed as If they're happy, that's okay! or At least it isn't a man, or curdled into Same-sex is a bit...—you never knew until the lid came off. Of course the people in question would be anxious.
"Huh? It's not dating. It's a marriage."
"...What?"
"...Ah. Right. I never told you. Wasn't really a story to go telling other people in the first place."
Yu Hyena, having let it slip without thinking, twisted her mouth into a bitter smile, the look of someone who had just stepped in it.
"Those two already had the ceremony."
"What?"
"I even got the invitation, last time. Couldn't go, though. Scheduling."
"What the fuck...?"
Song Su-ah—who worked very hard at pretending she was not, even though everyone in the company already knew she was a Mary fan—heard that her oshi had been a married woman for ages and froze where she stood.
"...Happy. If they're happy, it's okay!"
"Good. Looking at the state of you, the Mary fandom's rock solid. I can stop worrying."
"Could you please not use me as your answer sheet...?"
"Ah. We've got work left over anyway, so it looks like a late clock-out today... Want to just book a conference room and watch Mary's announcement stream on the big screen? If we frame it as monitoring the game promo, I think we can talk it through."
"......Deal!"
There were any number of reasons Mary Tepes had been given the nickname Gallju in the game called Barbara Knight—the gallery's uncrowned queen. Put another way, anyone with a connection to Barbara stood a good chance of catching on at least one of that long list of reasons and ending up fond of Mary.
That was the circumstance behind the peculiar spectacle of an entire game studio's development team throwing a watch party together. ...Put yet another way, it also meant that every one of them had failed to leave at a decent hour, remained trapped at the office until now, and only just secured a brief scrap of rest under the pretext of watching Mary's stream.
They would have been watching the live at this hour even if they'd gone home, so it wasn't so different. They decided to take comfort in that, at least.
The staff gathered thus began talking about this and that. The subject that claimed the most air, of course, was how the broadcast about to begin would actually unfold.
"...Huh?"
The conclusion they had reached was, of course, not the right one.
More precisely, there had been a single seer among them—only to be made a Cassandra of it, waved off on the grounds that it couldn't possibly make sense.
No—why is the background a wedding hall.