Content (Just Chatting)
When the chat first plastered itself wall to wall with demands that I show my face, I couldn't for the life of me understand what had gotten into them.
My broadcast was a no-cam stream, and until now every request to turn a camera on, every mention of a face reveal, had earned an immediate ban.
Viewers who'd been watching me all this time couldn't possibly not know that. Which meant the people spamming the chat now were all newcomers who'd drifted in...
Floaters usually pour in for one of two reasons. Either a major corporate streamer hosts you over, or bait about you starts circulating on the so-called community boards, where viewers from every channel camp out.
No matter how I turned it over, nothing had happened that deserved bait. If I had to name one thing, my showing in the recent exhibition was the biggest piece of it...
But the exhibition had ended a week ago. In a streaming scene that lives and dies by whatever's trending, that bait was already old news.
So I went looking through the boards myself to see why the viewers had swarmed, and I found out exactly why they'd come.
The bait had started with Zzangdol's afterparty story stream.
The Saturday of the dinner, Zzangdol had gone home, turned his broadcast on, and spent about two hours telling the afterparty story. Somewhere in there, for a little over three minutes, he talked about what I actually looked like.
Fortunately, everyone on Youngest and Oldest had agreed to keep quiet about the part where I'd tried to order alcohol, so that side of it wasn't a problem. The server I'd signed for seemed to have left a post as well, but they hadn't said a word about the drinking either.
In the end, the reason they'd swarmed in and set the chat on fire was simple. They were curious about my face.
More precisely, a rumor was going around that I resembled the actress Yoon Hayeon in her younger days, and they wanted to check whether it was true.
"This is really why...?"
"Haa..."
Well. I'd been on the boards long enough to know exactly how floater viewers think.
They don't want the facts confirmed. They just want to thrash around and put a streamer on the spot.
The one problem, this time, was that the bait was actually true.
The actress they kept saying I resembled—Yoon Hayeon—was my mother.
"For now, I'm setting anything to do with a face reveal as a banned word."
"Hey, everyone who just came in? I have no intention of revealing my face."
A one-month follow restriction and a banned-word filter didn't mean the viewers pouring in right now couldn't watch my stream.
They just couldn't type in chat. Watching was still perfectly possible.
"So on my broadcast, please hold off on pushing for a cam stream, or bringing up a face reveal."
When they swarmed in like this, I had to say it plainly, or it wouldn't stick.
The chat had gone messy over nothing but face bait. I understood, of course.
I'd be curious too, about the face of a streamer with a good voice, good at the game, and young besides.
And a third party who'd actually met that streamer had gone and praised the face as pretty? I'd want to see it myself.
Even the viewers who'd been here from the start, not the floaters, were obviously curious about my face. They just didn't show it, because they could tell I hated the subject.
And I wanted to give them what they were asking for. If my viewers are happy, I'm happy.
Besides, I'm confident in how I look. If I revealed my face, I could say with certainty that not a single person in this crowd would be disappointed.
But I couldn't. I had a promise with my father.
Streaming was allowed. Showing my face was not.
And if I did reveal it, my ordinary life—still in high school—would become a problem too.
I already drew too much attention just for how I looked. If it got out that I was the streamer Eunha, that attention would only get bigger.
And that, I could do without.
"Mm... the mood got kind of heavy."
To air out the unsettled chat, I tossed them a piece of bait I knew they'd like.
"Then how about I clear the air and tell a little of the afterparty story?"
Zzangdol had already beaten me to it, but a story stream feels different depending on who's telling it.
"Oh, and I was honestly shocked the first time I met the team. Everyone looked so different from the vibe I'd pictured..."
"Pola."
Honestly, if I had to name the person whose appearance shocked me most, it was Nebula, no contest.
Never mind the image I'd had of him—the simple fact that we'd been going to the same school was enough to take first place by itself.
I couldn't say that on stream, so I went with second place. Pola.
"Mm... if you only hear the voice, he sounds like a bear...? I had this impression he'd be huge and kind of scary. He's gentler-looking than I expected. And he's not big, either."
"And this is something I only found out then, but did you know Pola is twenty?"
It wasn't some hidden fact. Anyone could find it with a search, so I said it on stream.
"Ah, that person? Yes, that's right. They suddenly said they were a fan, so I was a little flustered."
I'd always thought I had no talent for telling stories, and I'd worried the viewers would get bored.
Fortunately, the viewers seemed mostly satisfied.
The viewer count had dropped by nearly four thousand from earlier. Most of that crowd had been floaters to begin with, so it figured.
They'd only come to stir things up. They hadn't come to actually watch my stream.
"Shall we leave it here, then? I don't have more to tell, and if I keep going it'll get loose."
The mood had loosened up nicely, and I was out of things to say. Time to wrap the story.
There wasn't anything left worth squeezing out, anyway.
"Then I'll end the stream around here for today. See you all tomorrow!"
"Hoo..."
I finished a broadcast that had been, in more ways than one, more hectic than usual, stretched out on the bed, and turned my phone on.
Ah—I don't dive onto the bed the way I used to. I hadn't known, but the bed I was lying on apparently cost over a hundred million won.
Once I learned that, I couldn't bring myself to throw my body at it anymore.
More than that...
"Is it really fine to keep going like this..."
Lately I'd picked up a worry.
Whether, from the viewers' side, my stream was starting to feel loose.
For better or worse, my broadcast hadn't changed at all from the early days.
Exactly two formats. I played Project A, or I did Just Chatting.
Since the collab with Geonmo, I hadn't collabed with another streamer even once, and aside from the roulette, I'd never planned any content of my own.
To survive in an internet-broadcast scene that was already a red ocean, you had to keep viewers satisfied with something new.
So these days my head was full of the fear that if I kept on like this, viewers would get bored of my stream and leave for someone else's.
"There was the exhibition recently, at least..."
Before the viewers could get sick of my unchanging pattern, the exhibition had landed as a big event just in time. If it hadn't, they might already have left.
"Ah. Right."
On the day of the afterparty, when we were putting content together, Pola had asked what he was even supposed to do, and Zzangdol had answered that he got his inspiration by watching how other streamers did it on K-tube or Kwitch.
Remembering that, I went straight into the broadcast-platform apps on my phone and started dropping into streams by Project A specialists.
I was checking the streams of people who, from my side of things, were competitors, and circling through the communities where viewers camped out, when—
"I almost missed a piece of content this big."
I'd found a piece of content that looked pretty good. No—one I absolutely could not afford to miss.