I'm Going to Sue (Just Chatting)
A weekend evening, the same as any other.
Viewers who watched Eunha often had been waiting on her stream with growing impatience, and unfortunately, today they weren't going to get it.
Eunha had a reputation as the most diligent streamer in the scene, on the air seven days a week without missing a single one. Today happened to be one of her rare days off.
One line. Not even three. At a glance it looked like a notice dashed off without a scrap of effort, but people didn't particularly mind. When it came to showing up, Eunha was second to none, and she was seventeen. A high schooler that age was bound to have things of her own she wanted to do. Think about the hours she streamed and it was easy enough to realize she was a dropout who didn't go to school at all, but that was hardly the point.
The conclusion was simple. She streamed harder than any other broadcaster you could set beside her, so even if she took a day off without a proper notice, her viewers were inclined to understand.
A tip that Eunha had been spotted at PCK Park on her day off also told them exactly what she was doing with the time. So instead of waiting on a stream that wasn't coming, they were watching someone else, or just spending the evening however they liked, when an alarm none of them had seen coming went off.
She had clearly said today was a rest stream. The moment the notification hit that she had gone live anyway, viewers were thrown. Had she turned the broadcast on by mistake again? Was this another on-air accident? No. It couldn't be.
Unlike that other time, when the screen had held no text at all, this one carried a clear notice. She was making a major announcement.
A major announcement. What could she possibly have to say, to reach for words like that? They didn't know. What they did have was the gut feeling that something fairly large was on its way, and with that they hurried into her stream.
Chat shot upward the instant they arrived. More than a few of them were dying to know what the announcement was, and most of the window cared less that the stream was on than about what she was about to say.
"Ah— hello?"
How long had they waited? As if the warm-up were finally done, the star of the broadcast appeared: the streamer everyone had been waiting on. Eunha.
"I said I was taking today off, but the reason I suddenly went live is that I have something to tell you."
Something to tell them. Viewers stacked guess on guess and fantasy on fantasy, and then Eunha, as if to say those guesses had only ever been fantasies, brought out something serious.
"Lately a lot of strange people have been raiding my email."
What she said next was more than enough to stun the room.
Dozens of emails had landed without my even noticing.
Most of them were from Han Seongun's fans, and most of them asked me to break up with him. We aren't even dating. I have no idea why they're sending me this garbage. Plenty of people have the wrong idea about what Seongun and I are, sure. If all they wanted was for us to break up, I could have tried to let it go.
What did I even do, to have to sit here and take mail this full of spite? I'd been cursed at by plenty of people back when I was a pro. Getting torn apart for a reason this absurd was a first, and it threw me.
So... what was I supposed to do with it?
I'm not usually the type to come down on people who badmouth me. Take legal action and people like that still don't come to their senses. Drag in the family situation, plead hardship, beg for leniency — sue them and they still don't. Someone could ask what made Cries different. He did it out in the open, to me, while I was live, so I took it to the law. If it hadn't been on stream, I would have ignored him and moved on.
At first I couldn't forgive the people cursing me either. With help from the KZ staff, I answered by suing them one by one. Then I watched how my mother handled it — an actress praised for a face that comes along once in a hundred years, and hated in equal measure for it — and I changed.
"Why? People like that — shouldn't you wreck their whole life so they never do it again... I mean, shouldn't you stamp them flat for good?"
"What malicious commenters want, in the end, is attention. They tend to believe that leaving a hateful comment lets them get under the other person's skin. And they're right. It does."
"The best medicine for people like that is to show them they have no effect on you at all. Answer with total indifference."
"Then what about the ones who still don't get it and cross the line?"
"Then..."
"Pick the worst of them and make an example. It doesn't have to be only one. Sue the people you decide have crossed a certain line."
A line. Right. A line.
Everyone draws it somewhere different. Mine is whether I can understand the person or not — the kind of sympathy that says, if I were them, I could see myself thinking that. When I was a pro, for instance, I never sued anyone for criticizing my play. People who dumped insults that had nothing to do with the play, I sued now and then.
But this.
Don't go ruining a player with a bright future. Stick to your clown act lol
If Seongun fails to promote to the first division, you'd better know it's because of you.
You fucking bitch, acting all pure makes me sick. Can't you just die?
No matter how I turned it over, I could not understand them. Seongun and I are just friends. I had announced that more than once, and I had asked people not to twist the two of us into something else, and they still sent mail like this. It had gone past annoying. It was foul.
Fine. These ones could be the example.
"Hello?"
"Yeah, oppa. I've got someone I need to sue."
"...Who."
And with that, legal action against the haters was complete. One phone call.
Suing them was one thing. The reason any of it had happened was the rumor that Seongun and I were that kind of pair, no matter how many times I had said we were only friends.
"I'll say it again, while we're here. Han Seongun and I are just friends."
People say you're free to think what you want. So long as you don't say it out loud, your head is your own.
"I've said it over and over, and people still keep forcing us together. What's even more shocking is that some of them are in my own chat."
The problem was that they insisted on saying it. The two of us weren't even thinking that way.
"I'm really asking you. Please stop shipping us. I can say it isn't true all I want, and the people who ship us anyway just make it awkward every time we meet."
Seongun was basically my only friend. I didn't want to drift away from him over something like this — and even less if the problem wasn't between us at all, but other people's eyes.
"This is the last time I'm saying it out loud. From today on, anyone who ships me with Seongun gets dealt with. Everyone understands, right?"
Hmm. The mood had gotten heavy.
I don't usually stop viewers, no matter what they do, but this time I'd brought the switch down hard enough that the stream had gone quite dark. I did know how to air a room like this back out.
"Um... this is actually what I came on to say. But since we're already live, want to just do a light Just Chatting stream?"
Honestly. A few minutes ago they were sulking because I'd told them off, and now look at them. You can see exactly what these people are thinking, and that's what makes them cute.