Fan Cafe (1)
A collab.
That was the word for when streamers went live together. For game streamers it usually meant hopping into a co-op multiplayer title, though the definition stretched further than most people assumed — sometimes they even met up in real life.
If you had to name the single most important part of a collab, it would be who you did it with. People were all different, which meant the chemistry between them — that elusive compatibility — mattered enormously. Streamers were no exception. A pairing that clicked could spark real synergy and pull a great result out of the stream; a mismatch could just as easily drag everything down. You couldn't rule that out. Which was why the question of who always came first.
The first streamer who leapt to mind was, of course, Mirua. After all, Lucia — my manager now — had originally been Mirua's video editor and manager. My prediction missed by a mile.
More harm than good?
Mirua was a genuine giant — five hundred fifty thousand followers, closing in on a million subscribers. Collabing with a streamer of that caliber would obviously make headlines. And even so, a collab with her was likely to be a net loss…
Huh? That wasn't it? Then the reason only got murkier. Fortunately, my manager added an explanation and cleared it up at once.
They'd dislike me whether I was entertaining or not? I wasn't sure I believed that — but my manager had said so, so it was probably true.
The name Jjangjjangwang had a faintly childish ring to it. But once you looked at what he'd actually accomplished, there was no dismissing him on the name alone. If anything, he felt like the kind of streamer other streamers idolized.
The numbers alone put him above Mirua. Seven hundred thousand followers. One point three million subscribers. You could fairly say he stood at the highest peak a Korean streamer could reasonably reach. And it wasn't just popularity. The biggest reason Jjangjjangwang commanded such respect was that he'd been broadcasting steadily, for years — long enough that you could call him the progenitor of game streamers.
She was getting more intimidating by the minute. And more impressive. Just how many streamers was Lucia on friendly terms with? I was starting to look at my manager with something like awe when the reply came in.
Was it an elaborate joke, or was she serious? The manager I'd seen so far didn't really seem like the type to tease.
A difference. No matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn't come up with anything except that one was a man and the other a woman. Was gender really such a decisive factor in whether a collab would work? Probably not.
Viewer participation. Shorthand for letting the audience join the stream — easier to think of it as a collab where your partner wasn't another streamer, but a viewer. Why bring that up in the middle of a collab talk?
That was when I roughly grasped what my manager was after. Put simply, I wasn't big enough yet — so instead of a proper collab, I'd be sticking my face in through viewer participation.
Taken point by point, all of it was true. Mega-streamers who ran viewer participation as aggressively as Jjangjjangwang were rare, and there really were people who'd joined as viewers, gotten recognized for their talent, and gone on to stream themselves. There was just one rather large problem.
Right. All of those advantages would be worthless if I couldn't even get in. The frequent sessions, the high quality, the warm audience — those were also exactly what sent the competition through the roof.
The praise felt good, but the moment I tried to actually commit, a wall of blank uncertainty rolled in.
From there I followed my manager's lead and worked through it piece by piece. First up was joining Jjangjjangwang's fan cafe.
My fan cafe nickname was, naturally, Hana-chan. Then I went straight to the viewer-participation application form. The game for this session was one I'd never played — a complete stranger. I'd seen it plenty of times on Jjangjjangwang's YouTube, though, so I knew what it was. Put simply, it was a title whose main draw was wandering a VR virtual world and hanging out talking with other users. Playing it on a regular computer wasn't a problem either.
Sitting down to fill out the form, I couldn't quite shake a prickle of unease. It didn't feel like I was joining out of pure fandom. It looked an awful lot like I was using his stream as a stepping stone for my own growth — and that wasn't even wrong. I couldn't get the feeling out of my head, so I confessed it to my manager, and the reply came back at once.
I was glad I'd said something. The knot in my chest loosened a little, and the application came together quickly after that. I fussed over every line with my manager's help, hit submit — and ran straight into a wall I hadn't seen coming.
This post can only be written by members of Rank 3 or higher.
What that meant was that Jjangjjangwang's fan cafe didn't let just anyone write whatever they wanted. You had to rank up — the kind of membership grind every cafe used — before you even earned the right to submit a viewer-participation application.
So even the manager I'd always thought of as perfect could slip up. Anyway, I hurried to check the rank-up conditions. There were five membership ranks in total. Joining the cafe dropped you in at Rank 5, and you climbed one step at a time from there. The conditions to reach Rank 3 — the rank that let you submit a viewer-participation application — were as follows.
Posts: 50
Comments: 500+
Tighter than I'd expected. The silver lining, if there was one, was that attendance wasn't part of the requirement. From Rank 2 up, they asked for a full month of cumulative check-ins. But my immediate goal was Rank 3, so that was a massive relief.
The viewer session itself was four days away. The application window, however, closed tomorrow. Which meant that by midnight tomorrow, I needed fifty posts and five hundred comments on the cafe. When I reported that, my manager's reply was extremely concise.
Right. Like my manager said, we couldn't afford to stall if we wanted explosive growth. Missing this chance would hurt — I had to throw everything I had at it. Honestly, I'd barely ever participated in a community. If I was being precise, all I'd ever done was lurk on humor sites and a handful of otaku boards, skimming the popular posts.
"Watashi can do this!"
Still, I clung to the confidence that I could pull it off. I went straight to the free board — the one even Rank 5 members could post on — and started writing. And without meaning to, my feverish day of cafe activity kicked up a considerable stir on Jjangjjangwang's stream.