YouTube (3)
See that? I didn't even answer, and she just assumes she's right.
Of course, she actually is right, but still...
Everyone's just too much. Is watching me get bullied really that funny? My manager, my thumbnail artist—even my little sister! The people who are supposed to be on my side are a bunch of perverts who get a kick out of watching me suffer!
A deep sense of betrayal and sorrow washed over me.
The thumbnail was going to take a while anyway, so I figured I might as well study. I'd been so buried in streaming lately that I'd shoved my CSAT prep to the back burner, and I had a gut feeling this year's exam was going to be a brutal one.
I sat down at my desk, opened a book, and sank into the work. Maybe my focus was better than I thought? I was actually studying properly, without drifting off into daydreams. Then again, the fact that I was even thinking that probably meant I wasn't studying as well as I imagined.
Today I focused on Korean history. When I got to the Imjin War, something about it felt... a little strange. I'd become Japanese, sure, but that was only the shell. Inside, I was still basically Korean. If I'd woken up as some obviously different race it might have been another story, but we were both East Asian. Standing next to a Korean girl, I barely felt any disconnect at all. If my way of speaking hadn't changed, I probably never would have registered that I'd become Japanese in the first place.
I stayed with it long enough that two hours slipped by before I knew it. A warm little swell of satisfaction followed—I actually studied hard—along with a quiet pride. That said, I had absolutely no desire to keep going. It was exhausting.
Ka-tok!
She finished the whole thing in just two hours?
...She didn't phone it in, did she?
I opened the illustration she'd sent.
And a sound of pure delight slipped out of me before I could stop it.
"Heh, kawaii~"
The composition went like this. It was split into two panels. On the left, I was stroking Teemo while arguing with the viewers who were trash-talking him. On the right, I was bawling my eyes out, clutching a stone-cold dead 0/8/0 Teemo in my arms.
The linework was clean, the colors soft and bright, so the whole thumbnail felt cute and fluffy. And what really snagged the eye, of course, was how pretty she'd drawn my character.
Mm. A single thumbnail, and every last drop of the rage I'd been storing up was purified on the spot.
Ah. Right.
I'd received a drawing this good, so of course I had to pay what it was worth.
Which meant the amount I needed to send was...
100,000 won...
Every last scrap of my happiness evaporated on the spot, and a sigh escaped me before I even noticed.
A hundred thousand won a day. Seven hundred thousand a week. Three million a month...
No, wait.
That math was wrong.
To be precise, it wasn't a hundred thousand a day. It was a hundred thousand per piece. And one piece took her all of two hours.
So it wasn't a hundred thousand a day. It was a hundred thousand for two hours of work!
What in the world...!!!
The truth hit me so late, and so hard, that I couldn't even hide how hollow I felt. How was that possible? All those years I'd spent grinding away at part-time jobs for minimum wage—what had that even been?
Of course, it wasn't a fair comparison. I'd only earned minimum wage because that was what my labor had been worth. SAX unnie had the skill to make a hundred thousand won in two hours, so of course she charged that. And it wasn't as if I hadn't been pulling in donations myself. Considering what I'd already made from streaming, this was a perfectly reasonable investment.
I soothed myself with that logic and checked what was left in my account.
Right.
114,000 minus 100,000 is...?
The answer is 14,000 won.
And how many days until next month's living expenses come in?
Exactly seven days. One week.
Here, through the power of mathematical reasoning, we can calculate how much I'm allowed to spend per day for the week I have left.
14,000 / 7 = 2,000
Two thousand won.
This can't be right! Something's wrong!
Forget everything else—that wasn't even enough for food. That was a starve-to-death budget.
What was I supposed to do?
The first thing that came to mind was the donation money I'd earned from streaming myself. I jumped onto the site and checked the total.
3,425,000 won.
"Whoa..."
I hadn't even been streaming for a full month, and I'd already made this much? That was enough to commission a whole thirty-four thumbnails!
The relief lasted about three seconds. Then I spotted the tiny notice written underneath.
Donations may be withdrawn starting 7 days after the date received.
I had no idea why that condition existed, but I checked the withdrawable amount with my heart in my throat.
"Sonna! Uso! Uso da!!"
I'd definitely been streaming for more than a week, so why—!
The question and the answer arrived at the same time. Those first few miserable days before I met my manager, when I couldn't even crack ten viewers. Obviously nobody had been donating back then.
Still, things were a lot better now. If I could just hang on for a few more days, I'd be able to use the donations sitting there. The problem was that none of that solved the situation staring me in the face.
...I'd just pay the hundred thousand and think about it later.
I opened KakaoTalk and transferred the money to SAX unnie. My fingers trembled so hard it was almost pitiful, but the payment went through.
Use YouTube to learn how to upload a YouTube video.
Was this some kind of satirical jab at just how dependent the world had become on YouTube?
Anyway, I had my thumbnail now, so I figured I should report in to my manager first.
We still needed more?
We had the edited video. We had the thumbnail. Wasn't that everything?
Ohh. As expected, my manager's work ethic was airtight.
But when had the two of them even talked about that? Hearing that they'd handled it without me left a strange taste in my mouth. Then again, they'd known each other before I ever started streaming. My manager was the one who'd introduced me to SAX unnie in the first place.
I trusted my manager, so I handed over the YouTube account without hesitation. It wasn't as if she was going to use it to do anything shady.
Come to think of it... what kind of person was my manager?
SAX, Yewon unnie, I'd already met twice. We'd talked face to face. We'd even wandered into a little personal chatter that had nothing to do with streaming.
Lucia, on the other hand—the person working as both my manager and my editor—I knew almost nothing about. I didn't even know if they were a man or a woman. We talked plenty over KakaoTalk, but we'd never once had a conversation that wasn't about the stream.
I was only now realizing how much I didn't know.
Why had Lucia come to a broadcast nobody was watching, and why were they helping me this carefully? Just because they saw potential in me? Was that really all it was?
I wanted to know. Not as a coworker. Not as a manager. As a person. I wanted to know what kind of person Lucia was.
So I asked before I could stop myself.
The little "1" disappeared. But Lucia didn't answer for a long, long time.