YouTube (4)
"Hm?"
It was a peculiar answer I hadn't expected in the slightest. Still, asking for a reason wasn't all that strange.
A pretext was just something you tacked on after the fact. The real reason, the fundamental one, was that I wanted to meet Lucia in person.
When I thought about it, it was astonishing. Me — the same person who had always been shut up at home, who had never even considered interacting with other people — wanting to go out and meet a complete stranger first. That could only mean I was changing, and that I trusted my manager.
Then why?
I couldn't be sure, but judging from KakaoTalk alone, my manager seemed reluctant to meet me. Her first reply had been late, and even now there was nothing eager about her tone.
...What if there isn't some special reason? What if she just doesn't want to meet me?
If that were the case, I might get a little hurt. No — I think I'd get hurt a lot. I had gone against my own introverted nature and worked up the courage to suggest it. I never thought I'd be shut down so cleanly.
In the end, my manager never agreed to see me.
Yeah. That was fine. She had to have her reasons.
Consoling myself like that, I sent a message as if nothing were wrong.
After that, Lucia said nothing more.
I stared for a moment at the conversation window, which had ended on such an awkward note, then turned off my phone.
First things first: the YouTube upload.
I uploaded the edit my manager had sent me and set the thumbnail properly, and it didn't lose to any other YouTuber's in the slightest. Only when I went to post it did I realize, belatedly, that I needed a title. I almost asked my manager what to do, then shook my head and decided to choose one myself.
After a long stretch of thinking, I started typing.
The Streamer Who Loved Teemo
"Mm. Perfect!"
The instant I hit upload, a quest window bloomed in midair.
Reach 100,000 views on a YouTube video
Reach 10,000 YouTube subscribers
It felt like I hadn't seen one of these in a while.
More than that, the difficulty this time was considerable. My Twitch follower count was a mere two hundred, and now I was supposed to hit ten thousand subscribers and a hundred thousand views? Clearing it overnight was close to impossible. Still, it wasn't a timed quest, so if I kept streaming hard, I'd clear it someday... right?
Needless to say, the view count did not explode the instant the video went up. With my heart doing little flutters, I refreshed every ten seconds to check — and even after ten minutes, the number was still stuck in the double digits.
"...Hngh."
And considering that views counted duplicates, most of those were probably from me hitting refresh. Knowing that didn't make it any less sad to see with my own eyes.
I wasn't even a frog at the bottom of a well. I was a tadpole in a water cup.
By the stream, a little tadpole wriggles and swims~
"Flippity-flop, now I'm a kaeru~"
I hummed a nursery rhyme until the sting settled. Since I was already here to upload, I might as well kill some time watching YouTube.
First I checked Jjangjjangwang's channel. Unfortunately, the blind-date content I'd guest-appeared on still wasn't up. From the posts in the cafe, it looked like it would drop within a few days. Instead there was the monthly hot-clip video. I'd have to be satisfied with that for today.
But looking closely at the thumbnail, something... felt familiar.
The text plastered huge across the dead center of the thumbnail: All-Time Concept Roleplayer.
The video title was The Legendary Concept Roleplayer Who Showed Up at the Cafe.
Don't tell me.
"Watashi...?"
The video had gone up hours ago, so the views had already sailed past a hundred thousand without breaking a sweat. My own video still hadn't even cracked fifty. Was this what they meant by a difference in class?
Half nervous, half giddy, I clicked.
It was a reel of highlight clips from Jjangjjangwang's streams that month. Some of the scenes I'd watched live; some I hadn't. And in the latter half, at last, the moment I'd been waiting for arrived.
"Hm? What's this?"
Onscreen, Jjangjjangwang muttered to himself as he checked a post while touring the cafe. What followed was content I knew by heart.
I had actually appeared on Jjangjjangwang's YouTube.
Seeing it like this felt strangely new. Even the Discord conversation at the end had been included, however briefly. The runtime was about a minute. That might sound short, but considering this hot-clip video was ten minutes long, I alone accounted for a full tenth of it. Other clips had been trimmed down to around thirty seconds, so the weight of my segment was unmistakable.
And what did that mean?
Thinking back to the thumbnail work I'd just done myself made it easy to understand. A streamer picked the scene viewers would find the most fun, the most interesting, and used it for the title and the thumbnail. In other words, Jjangjjangwang had decided that among this month's mountain of hot clips, the moment he'd talked with me would generate the most buzz.
It was on the thumbnail, it was in the title, and it had the longest runtime — so of course the comment section was packed with talk about me.
Most of the reaction was good. The viewers who'd already seen the blind-date content on the live stream, especially, were busy bragging about me. Reading those comments one by one and hitting like was so much fun I lost track of time doing it.
Then a worry crept in.
Should I leave a comment on the video myself?
Given the buzz in the comments, if I posted one I'd definitely rake in likes and catch people's eyes. But I might also look like an attention-seeker, and in the worst case it could come off as clout-chasing the way it had last time. I'd also only just uploaded my first YouTube video. People were even more likely to read it as self-promo.
What was I supposed to do? What was the right call? Stay quietly put? Or seize the chance before it slipped away?
If I asked my manager, she'd have an answer for me in a second — and yet, for some reason, I had the feeling I shouldn't contact her right now.
Why did I have to bring up meeting in the first place... She's not mad, is she...?
After a brief wrestle with it, I reached a conclusion.
Stay still for now. I could write a comment anytime later. But if I slipped once and caused a problem, fixing it wasn't something that happened just because I wanted it to.
Instead, I decided to write a post in the cafe.
Even after going wild when I'd first joined, I'd been active every day since. Not because I wanted attention, and not for the stream — I just genuinely found it fun. I felt like I was starting to understand, a little, why so many people lived glued to their communities.
As I'd said before, Jjangjjangwang's stream was a little different from other streamers'. He didn't encourage cliquing, but he didn't deny the existence of named viewers either. That had its upsides — guest appearances flourished, and the entertainment got more varied — but it also came with the downside that cliquing could break out at any time. Unless you were a veteran like Jjangjjangwang, with years of experience under your belt, it was an unusual stream atmosphere most people wouldn't dare attempt. I didn't have the confidence to run a broadcast like that either.
Since the last incident, I'd been as careful as I could. If someone mentioned my nickname, or asked me something personal, I tried not to reply no matter what. It was something I'd have to go through someday anyway, and having gone through it early felt like a vaccine. My manager had said as much, telling me to stay calm.
Lying in bed, still browsing the cafe on my phone, my mind kept circling back to earlier.
Why didn't my manager want to meet me?
Would SAX unnie tell me if I asked? Or had I done something wrong without even knowing it?
I didn't know. Turning it over and over only made my head hurt.
After tomorrow's stream, I could talk with her naturally, the way I always did. If my manager acted like nothing had happened, that would be a relief. If not...
I wouldn't be able to just sit still then.