The Problem (2)
I had to stay calm.
After ending the stream, I drew in one slow breath after another and waited for my heart to settle.
A problem had landed in my lap. A big one, too—the kind I had never faced before. And yet it was also true that if I kept my head, I could handle it. The important thing was not to panic and run.
I had been here before, in a way. What happened the first time I met Master felt, looking back, like nothing more than a trivial little episode. But back then my introversion had been close to a full-blown fear of people, and the trauma had sent me into a panic. Instead of solving anything, I had turned my face away and fled.
Thankfully, Master and little Hana had come to me first, and it had all worked out. But what if they hadn't? I might never have grown close to the neighbors who had just moved in next door, and an entirely different future would have unfolded.
Which meant the important thing was to take that old mistake as a lesson and not repeat it this time. And luckily—really, almost unfairly luckily—I had someone in my corner now. A veteran among veterans, someone who had surely weathered this kind of storm more times than she could count.
So if I just did as my manager said, a problem this light would be nothing. I could step over it without even breaking stride.
I was sure of it. I had to be.
My manager walked me back through the plan we had put together.
A rapid-growth strategy. The first thing we had aimed at to make it work was viewer participation: raise my profile by appearing on the stream of Jjangjjangwang, a major so firmly planted among the country's very best that you could count his kind on one hand. That part of the plan had landed beautifully. In no time at all, my viewer count had nearly doubled. Once the footage was cut for YouTube, it would jump again.
The strategy had side effects, though.
Straw. Mosquito. Parasite.
The words sat at different temperatures, but they all pointed at the same thing: riding a major's popularity to scoop up viewers the easy way. You couldn't call the strategy purely bad. It was common enough to see a big-name streamer reach out first and give someone a ride. But there would always be people who looked at everything sideways, and to them this was a juicy scrap to tear into. That was just reality.
Lucia had warned me about that, too. Appearing on Jjangjjangwang's stream or being active in the community cafe was fine. But if I went further—if I talked about nothing but Jjangjjangwang on my own broadcast, or treated my stream like an afterthought trailing behind his—people would start talking. He was such a massive name that his gravity could swallow me whole.
Even so, she said, this was closer to a natural growing pain than a disaster. We were aiming for rapid growth, so a certain amount of ache coming with it was only to be expected. And then she told me how to deal with what had happened.
I read every message through to the last one that had come in.
I went to the kitchen first and knocked back a glass of ice-cold water.
"Kuaaah~!"
The shock of it hitting my throat snapped my head clear. When I checked the clock, I realized that barely ten minutes had passed since I had ended the stream and talked with my manager.
...All right. Time to go live?
My finger found the power button, and at the same time a thought settled into place.
I won't run away anymore.
The moment I started the stream, viewers began filing back in. Some of them, it seemed, had never left the room at all. They had just been sitting there, waiting.
"Gomennasai! I did a nice cold-water splash to get my head together and came back!"
"Ah, actually I only did it to my throat. Poured cold water into a cup and gulped it down. ...Wait. How do you know watashi looks all soft and fresh? Watashi doesn't even turn the cam on...?"
Fortunately, the mood on stream wasn't bad. And yet it also felt as if the people who had been watching me all along were clenching their jaws, acting out the usual atmosphere by force. Even if they pretended nothing was wrong, they had to be worried underneath. Maybe they were suspicious. Maybe they were disappointed.
So I couldn't let the surface of the room fool me into looking away from the problem. If I didn't speak honestly and settle this now, it would rot from the inside out until it grew into something too big to fix.
Saying it wasn't easy. I found the courage anyway, and opened my mouth.
"There was a commotion in chat earlier, wasn't there...? I'm sorry I didn't manage things properly and caused a controversy."
I stood up from my seat and bowed my head, putting my whole sincerity into the gesture. Then, just as my manager had advised, I started talking.
"First, I'll explain why that kind of talk came up. Yesterday, watashi joined Jjangjjangwang-nim's stream as a viewer. And before that, I had appeared on Jjangjjangwang-nim's stream once already."
Judging by the chat, people were actually listening. I kept going.
"A lot of you were kind about it, and that made watashi really happy. When I went live today, there were also a lot of people who had come over after watching Jjangjjangwang-nim's stream yesterday, and that made me happy too."
From there I chose every word with care, trying not to let the nuance twist the wrong way.
"But after what happened today, I realized I need to be a little more careful. So from now on, I plan to keep the stream rules more strictly. Please help me with that."
Lucia had given me the solution in the shortest, simplest terms possible. It was so fundamental, in fact, that it was hard to even call it practical advice.
Just one thing. Being honest mattered.
It was less a tip than a request: refrain from lying on stream as much as you possibly can. Once you start lying, the lies multiply without end, until eventually you forget which lies you even told. And by then, she said, you would have no choice but to wear a shell built for the broadcast—something that was no longer you.
I didn't want to become that. Hadn't I changed my name to Hana-chan in the first place because I wanted to show the person I actually was?
So I decided I would not lie.
I knew that a single sentence could settle the room with ease. The sore spot was whether I had used Jjangjjangwang for the sake of my own success. If I just said that wasn't true, people would accept it. Whether I could accept saying it, though, was a different problem entirely.
Of course there had been real fan feeling toward Jjangjjangwang-nim in the decision to join his stream. But it was also true that I had gone on Lucia's advice, for the sake of growing my own broadcast.
"Except for a few special situations, mentioning other streamers is an instant kick from now on. And if you stir up a fight among viewers for any reason at all, I will ban you. No exceptions."
I said it, then checked the chat.
"The people who came to watch this stream came to see Hana-chan, not Jjangjjangwang-sama, right?"
Huh.
Was I reading this wrong?
The chat pouring in was all warm, all enthusiastic—but that wasn't the problem.
The viewer count was... a little strange.
Viewers: 372
That was the number sitting there now. Barely ten minutes ago, when I had ended the stream, I was sure it had only just crawled past two hundred. It had swollen like this in that tiny stretch of time?
And it wasn't as if the stream was even fun right now. If you hadn't been here for what happened earlier, you wouldn't have understood a word I was saying. The air was frozen enough that most people would have mashed the back button and fled.
Why?
How?
The part I couldn't understand did not stop there.
"Uh... thank you for the 4,000 won donation?"
"Thank you for the donation too, Papepopo-nim..."
I was still blinking through the donation reactions, unable to accept why the viewer count had suddenly ballooned, when—
"...Eh?"
Why did my eyes go to the name first, more than to the absurd amount of 300,000 won? Was I reading this correctly? Or was it an impersonator?
"...Did a whale just spawn?"