Growing Pains
A week had passed, and the broadcast was growing without a hitch.
Viewer numbers had crested over Saturday and Sunday in the wake of the joint stream, then slowly eased back down. Fan club sign-ups, though, were cumulative, so they kept stacking higher. By the time Saturday came around again the fan club had hit fifteen hundred, and the Water Balloons were popping at a steady, reliable clip. Watching the points pile up alongside them, I smiled, thoroughly pleased with myself, and started getting ready to go live.
It felt like hoisting sail in a fair wind. But anyone who has spent time out in the working world learns the same lesson sooner or later: the world does not work that simply. Where there is light, there is darkness, and even beneath a bright sun, somewhere the shade is always waiting.
The smear campaign started on the internet broadcast gallery.
Every week the gallery updated Shindaeryuk TV's Water Balloon earnings rankings, and because money is the thing modern society worships above all else, those posts always pulled the highest views on the board. The list ran straight from first place down to one hundredth, and to my own surprise I had landed on it this week — ninety-eighth in Water Balloons earned.
The regulars people were used to seeing weren't the story. A brand-new face had shown up, and the aggro came in heavy. Malicious comments started pouring down.
That particular Korean mean streak kicked in. They say even a cousin buying land makes your stomach ache, and personal broadcasting sat under a quiet, half-conscious assumption that you could rake in serious money without really trying. Young office workers who ground through entire days for two million won a month. Shut-ins who simply enjoyed tearing someone apart. And, fewer in number but no less fierce, fans of other BJs whose concepts overlapped with a powerful newcomer's and who were already getting nervous. Once all of that firepower stacked together, it became a public opinion with real weight.
Suspicions and conspiracy theories burst out one after another.
The first to rise, of course, was the parachute rumor tied to BJ Mia. The Legend of League snipe had been staged from the start, they said, and so had the one-on-one. Then she'd been slotted into the Miracle joint broadcast as a plant, and the whole thing was rigged to grow BJ Hani. A story with logic so flimsy it barely held together.
And even if that baseless claim were true, what exactly was the problem? Viewers aren't idiots. My connection to Mia and the joint broadcast had pulled aggro, sure, but the people still watching a full week later were paying with their time and their money for me. For the person. They insisted the opportunity itself was the issue, but by that standard Bintz and Myamya had been handed the same chance. So had every guest on the countless joint broadcasts still running. Why, out of all of them, was I the one who shone?
In the end it was obvious. The growth I had now belonged mostly to thorough preparation and to my own ability.
The next suspicion was simple, and all the more powerful for it. Looks.
For broadcasters who never turned a cam on and ran a stream on voice alone — the ones people called Dullahans — it was a label that clung on until you were sick of it. And the standard applied to women was far harsher than the one applied to men.
That kind of talk had been around for a long time. Suckers who emptied their wallets because they were smitten with a cam girl's looks got mocked and condemned. But the suckers who threw money at a 2D character propped up in place of a cam, or at a voice and nothing else, were treated as even worse. Put shortly, it was written off as a more niche taste, lumped in with otaku culture and shoved into the shadows.
So how easy a target did that make a broadcast like mine? People whose stomachs genuinely ached piled on. Bored shut-ins piled on. Fans of rival streams joined in and piled on too, until the blowback washed all the way into the live broadcast.
Logic didn't matter to people like that. The answer was already decided. Everything they believed was correct, and they wanted me to give them the reply they'd already chosen.
If I had been some fragile female BJ, I might have frozen, or burst into tears on stream. Their damp, crawling malice could hit a young broadcaster who didn't know any better like a genuine shock.
"Looks like we've got a lot of new people today. I don't know why you're all so angry, but please calm down."
It was the weekend, people were bored, and the worst of the gallery had apparently dropped coordinates and rolled in as a pack. The chat was a wreck. The existing fans pushed back, of course, and a fight broke out. I still hadn't felt any need for a manager to police the chat, which only made it worse.
I let out a long sigh and, for the moment, changed the settings so only viewers who had joined the fan club could type.
"All right, all right, newcomers, settle down. It's a perfectly good weekend and you're furious."
Once the regular fans seized the chat and started tearing into the trolls, an unintended wave of fan club sign-ups came crashing in. And just like that, the chat was a battlefield again.
"Hey — absolutely no comments about anyone's family. And I genuinely don't understand why you're doing this. Is it really such a terrible crime that I haven't revealed my face?"
They had never had a real argument to begin with. All they had been looking for was a target — somewhere to dump the filthy mass of feeling they had packed down, layer by layer, until it was nothing but a trash can. Stress relief, in simpler terms. They spun out one sophistry after another and wallpapered the chat with demands that I show my face. Eventually, maybe because my gentle replies made me look like an easy mark, trolls showed up with sexual harassment and vicious curses.
I endured it anyway, and let it pass in silence.
Because I was a fool? No. If I went down on one knee for a moment, it was only to get a running start.
Thud!
The pointless, dreary back-and-forth had gone on for about thirty minutes. No — not pointless. From the trolls' filthy chat all the way to the material I had been quietly collecting while lurking the internet broadcast gallery, I had gathered every piece into one place and packed it, neat as could be, into a single file. In the meantime the broadcast had stopped completely. The room had become a brawl, and once word spread, spectators crowded in on top of that. The viewer count sat at 357.
I brought my fist down on the desk and dragged every eye to me. Then I said it lightly, almost playfully.
"Dear trolls — you want to see my face that badly, don't you? You do, right? Fine."
They looked triumphant, as if they had won some revolution. In reality they had only swarmed a rookie female BJ who was known to be twenty-four, bared the ugliness underneath, and thrown a fit.
Time to hand them exactly what they had earned. I switched the screen and showed them the computer desktop.
"See the folder on the desktop? Everyone who barged in today burning to see my face. And everyone who, before that, posted insults, sexual harassment, and anything else that could become a problem about me on other sites. I spent a long time thinking very carefully about what I could do for all of you."
The folder's name was simple.
"So I decided to show you my face, just the way you wanted. Let's meet in real life, look each other in the eye, and say hello. The location's going to be a police station, so it might be a little awkward... but it's a good opportunity, isn't it? Broaden your horizons once in a lifetime. Stand there thinking, Ah, so this is what a police station looks like."
The mood in chat flipped in an instant. The regular fans hammered out laughter and settled in to enjoy the trolls' misfortune. The trolls, on the other hand, split apart. One group flipped their stance on the spot and apologized like their lives depended on it. Another insisted that even a report wouldn't catch them, and tried to dodge reality. And one layer past that, a third group was clearly terrified and still bluffing that I should report them all I wanted.
If I had been a twenty-four-year-old woman who had only just graduated and never really lived in the world — or who simply didn't have enough experience yet — I might have taken the apologies and let the whole thing dissolve. But I had seen a lot of people. In the military, and while I was ground down at a black-company job, I had met every kind there was.
How nice it would be if the world were full of nothing but yielding, consideration, and warmth toward one another. It isn't. Look even a little soft, and this society bites. A good boss who treats their subordinates well? The people under them decide you're easy and take you for a ride. A foul-tempered, rigid boss, on the other hand? They curse you behind your back and still snap to whatever you tell them to do.
So I never raised my voice. In the same soft tone as before, I explained reality to that crowd. There had been cases like this. This was how they had been handled. This was what similar court precedents had ruled. This was the punishment that had landed on the people who were sued. I laid it out without a hitch, like a presentation, and even the trolls who had been bluffing ran out of things to say.
There wasn't a single hopeless brick among them, it seemed. After that, every one of them turned to unconditional surrender, like Japan at the end of the Second World War.
"Hmm. I can see some signs of reflection, and I'd like to forgive you. But if I do, it sets a bad precedent. So I'm going to give you conditions."
I wasn't asking for anything large. First, a handwritten letter of reflection. It had to fill at least one full sheet of A4, and to kill any clever shortcuts the font had to be smaller than 11-point. Once it was done, they were to photograph it and send it by email.
Second, join the fan club. That one wasn't for the reason they would assume. I only needed the numbers up so I could clear a mission. On the surface, of course, I dressed it up as proof that they had stopped being antis and come over as fans. I told them a single Water Balloon was enough to join, so they wouldn't have anything to complain about.
And third. I would set the order. One by one, every one of them would take time out of a precious weekend and leave a sincere apology for the viewers who had come to watch this broadcast.
"Thirty-seven of you. Everyone else, please hold the chat. We'll start with the person I call. First up — PleaseFixHanisFace. You're going to start by changing that nickname."
And that was how Saturday's incident got cleaned up.
On Sunday, word must have reached her, because Mia contacted me on Discord. If I needed it, she offered to introduce me to the lawyer who had helped her before. A kind heart. We promised to play Legend of League together later.
And today, the broadcast goes on.