Clearing the Air (Just Chatting)
I was going to close the comeback stream the easy way — tell a few stories from the Newbie Guide shoot and call it a night — when this landed.
"Sorry?"
The viewers were just as lost as I was. It really had come out of nowhere, with no lead-in at all.
When I didn't answer, they kept guessing among themselves. Stay quiet any longer and they would settle on the wrong conclusion all on their own, so I decided to answer the question.
"No... H Group? Our family is well-off, that's true, but not to that extent."
Which, of course, was not the same thing as telling the truth.
Chat tore into the viewer who had tossed in a donation just to scatter the mood. Every word of that donation, though, had been true.
I didn't know which post they had read on the boards, but my father is the chairman of H Group.
I had left it unsaid because I was afraid his company would take damage on my account. More honestly, I hate the thought of my effort being cheapened just because H Group is standing behind me. That's closer to the truth.
If someone could read that and call it a ridiculous leap, they wouldn't be entirely wrong to try. What am I supposed to do about it? It's something I actually lived.
I sued every one of them who crossed the line. The sour taste stayed anyway.
How could it not? Every desperate thing I had done to climb that far ended up wearing the shameful name tag of a parachute hire.
At KZ, I was the one who practiced the most. I don't expect anyone else to see it that way, but I at least don't believe I was ever lazy about it.
"Eunha. Call it for today and go rest. You know better than anyone that pushing too far is worse than not doing it at all."
That's how bad it got. Even Coach Yoo Seonho — "the Devil," "the Fogey," to the rest of the pro scene — took one look at me practicing until dawn without sleep and chased me out of the practice room, telling me to go get some rest.
Give those people anything to gnaw on and they lose their minds over it, whatever it is. Facts never seemed to matter.
Part of why I quit pro was the wall — a wall I had come to feel I could never clear. The bigger part was exactly this kind of write-off.
People who sneered that you could work yourself to death and nothing would change. People who asked whether I had even tried, who cheapened the passion, who treated me like a parachute.
Once I became a girl, all of that turned into something that had never happened. That doesn't mean I get to feel safe.
If anything, living as a streamer now makes it easier to get swept into controversy like that.
The reason this channel grew is that I kept standing in the middle of one scandal after another. Nobody can deny it. It's a fact.
Which means it's that much easier to get tangled in groundless stories. That I stirred up controversy on purpose to advertise my own stream, for instance.
And the single biggest thing that grew the channel was the Platform Exhibition.
Who got picked was entirely at Kwitch's discretion, so the theories have room to multiply without end.
Say, H slipped Kwitch money under the table so the streamer Eunha would be named a starter for the exhibition.
Think for even a moment and the claim is full of holes. Holes don't matter to them. There is nothing to lose by being careful.
If my father — a man with a spotless, upright image — got tied into a bogus controversy like that, the company would take a hit, however small.
Unlike the old days, when I lived without thinking about any of it, this time I meant to keep the fact that I was my father's daughter a secret. For good.
"Please don't be too hard on that person, everyone. I'll refund the seventy-five dollars."
The donation had come out of nowhere, but they hadn't done anything worth destroying them over, so I stepped in. I don't much like it, either, when a crowd on the anonymous internet piles onto a single person.
"So many new people came in today that I set it so anyone who's been following for less than a month has to donate at least seventy-five dollars before a message shows up... I really didn't think anyone would actually do it. I set it that way so they wouldn't."
I had no particular desire to drive off the people flooding in because they liked me. Filtering the trolls that came with them, though, left me no other option.
"If you just got here, please hang on a little. A lot of people are going to pile in for a while, so this was unavoidable — you'll understand, right? Oh, and I set donations so people wouldn't send them, so don't."
The mood had found its way back. Time to finish the storytime I had actually meant to do.