4.
[This thought suddenly occurred to me while I was organizing documents earlier… You know how people like the smell of paper, right? Or the sound of pages turning… What if paper feels that way about us, too? Like, “Oh, this person smells like coffee—judging by that nasty tone, they must’ve gotten chewed out pretty badly—” I think that’d be kind of cute.]
“You still say weird things even after all this time─.”
Good. Very good.
The VTuber I had chosen as my oshi, my absolute favorite, Ayeon, wasn’t all that special as a streamer.
She wasn’t a VTuber who had joined a major company, gotten called a virtual idol, and soared on the back of the corporation’s name value.
Nor did she have such outstanding talent that she could captivate countless people without a company behind her.
Her voice did suit an evening radio show, the kind that was nice to listen to absentmindedly with your eyes closed. But there were plenty of streamers with good voices.
It would’ve been wonderful if she could sing well with that lovely voice… but if she could sing well, she probably wouldn’t have closed the VODs of her singing streams.
Still, the fortunate thing was—no… calling it fortunate feels a little off. Anyway.
Ayeon herself knew that her talent as a streamer wasn’t particularly special, so she didn’t obsess much over the growth of her stream.
She said the reason she started streaming was simply because she hated how lonely it felt when she came home, and she wanted to make a place where she could belong.
Because of that, the things she talked about on stream were far removed from trending games or competitions.
Little things that happened to her, strange thoughts that came to mind while she was working, various issues happening in the world, and so on.
To Ayeon, streaming was literally a hobby and a window for communication.
And because she didn’t have much ambition, she wasn’t easily swayed by what others said.
So both the person streaming and the people listening could watch comfortably.
Well─because of that, the amount of dopamine you could get from her streams was basically nonexistent.
But in the first place, the people who repeatedly come to a secluded little room like this are one of two types.
Hopeless romantics who want to give love to someone who cherishes each viewer precisely because there are so few of them, and receive that love in return.
Or lonely people who can’t fit into a landscape like the dead internet, where the chat is flooded with messages that can’t be read and can’t reach anyone, and have come looking for a neighborhood where people actually live.
Just as there are things that can only be gained from the extraordinary, there is also comfort that can be gained precisely because something is ordinary.
In that sense, Ayeon was undoubtedly a natural-born streamer. Even if she wasn’t flashy, she always filled what the people who came to her were looking for.
Ordinary, yet as you watched an avatar move without showing the reality behind it, you drifted gently away from reality.
[Ah. Come to think of it, they said a new VTuber group is coming out this time, right?]
—Oh, that was kind of interesting lol
—I don’t get what they were thinking, putting out a VTuber group.
—Maybe they’re just doing it for PR?
I was lying on my stomach in bed, half-dozing as I listened to the stream.
Apparently, another new VTuber group was coming out.
Just as internet broadcasting, which had once been treated as something underground, had at some point begun mixing with terrestrial variety shows.
VTubers, too, had grown less and less unfamiliar as time passed.
And as recognition increased, individual VTubers as well as groups large and small continued to appear.
In Korea alone, there were already more than five groups famous enough to show their faces on terrestrial TV.
As a result, a VTuber group debuting was no longer that special of an event.
─What? Looks like everyone knows about it. What kind of group is it?
─Wow, you still don’t know about this?
─It’s not like you just woke up after sleeping for a month
─There’s someone who doesn’t know something even my cat knows
“…I did just wake up after sleeping for a month, though.”
Judging by people’s reactions, it seemed a fairly large company was releasing VTubers this time.
There were more than enough groups that debuted ambitiously, remained nameless for almost a year, and then disappeared.
And this wasn’t even a new generation from a place with an already solid foundation.
For a completely new debuting group to have enough recognition that even a cat would know about it…
…Is Sebyeol Electronics launching one or something?
The moment I decided to look it up, curious as to what kind of VTubers they were and where they were coming from to be this famous already—
─I don’t get why a Guild is releasing VTubers. They should hurry up and handle the dungeons instead lol;
─Maybe they’re coming out to promote Hunters or something.
“Huh? A Guild is releasing VTubers?”
An unexpected chat message caught my eye.
A Guild is releasing VTubers? That Guild, the kind that beats up monsters and handles dungeons?
[Uh, uh. They’re doing their best too, so don’t say things like that. I’m sure they have their reasons. Anyway, if they’re VTubers coming from a Guild, would they be Hunters too?]
─What the heck is a Hunter VTuber lolol
─They’re VTubers, no way. They’re probably just people who introduce the Hunters in the Guild or something.
─But then is there any need to release them as a group?
─That’s true
Given the times, Guilds did things like operate NewTube channels too, but releasing a VTuber group was an entirely different story.
If you compared it to an academy, it would be about the difference between a hobby class and an entrance exam class.
Of course, Guilds were ultimately “companies” that devoted themselves to gate-related industries.
Companies that hired people with special abilities and developed new technologies using materials obtained from gates, including dungeons.
So it wouldn’t be strange for them to use a diversification strategy, such as having VTubers promote their technology or trying to enter the entertainment industry.
…But if they’re going to do that, wouldn’t ordinary internet broadcasting be way better?
If this was part of a marketing campaign to raise awareness for a newly established Guild, then it was a huge success.
Because even I immediately got curious and began searching on a portal site to see which insane Guild was releasing VTubers.
As was clear just from the chat window, it must have become quite the hot topic.
The moment I typed “Guild VTuber” into the search bar, a flood of related search terms, articles, and community posts poured out.
It seemed even internet ghosts accustomed to all kinds of issues couldn’t simply let the news of a Guild releasing a VTuber group pass by.
“…Huh?”
But somehow, the name of the Guild in the articles was extremely familiar. At the same time, I couldn’t understand it.
────「Baegya Guild」
…Why the hell is this name popping up here?
It wasn’t a newly established Guild desperate for immediate recognition, nor was it a Guild built around technology or manufacturing.
Well, Hunters did say they were good at making weapons and armor for dungeon raids.
But that wasn’t exactly technology ordinary people would know about. And it had even less to do with VTubers.
On top of that, the entertainment industry or broadcasting? There was no connection whatsoever.
To the point where everyone knew even their NewTube channel was practically abandoned.
A gate-specialized Guild that had become the most famous in Korea through nothing but overwhelming force and results.
That was the Baegya Guild I belonged to.
Well, as mentioned before, the Baegya Guild was ultimately a company too, so they could reach into other businesses… but why?
Even internet news articles were full of content saying they couldn’t understand why, of all things, it had to be the VTuber business.
Did the Guild Master get completely hooked on VTubers or something?
“I really don’t get it.”
If it had been ordinary internet broadcasting instead, everyone would have accepted it. At the very least, it wouldn’t fail.
If the famous Hunters of the Baegya Guild appeared on stream one by one and showed off their abilities or weapons found in dungeons, how could anyone not watch that?
But with VTubers, that was impossible, wasn’t it?
Technology had improved over the years, making 3D modeling incredibly natural.
But in the end, it couldn’t provide the same emotion and realism as an actual person moving and expressing themselves.
“They even have an official site.”
Ironically, however, because I couldn’t understand it, I became even more curious about the identity of the VTuber group.
What reason did they have to release a VTuber group while directly negating the strengths the Guild possessed?
And what kind of people were debuting like that?
When I entered the official site, what I saw was a bright night sky where a white star, the symbol of the Baegya Guild, shone, and beneath it stood the silhouettes of four people.
Above the silhouettes, along with flashy effects, was the word 「Vigilante」.
“Vigilante?”
Were they starting off with a fully formed concept, like that secret society group next door?
I looked around here and there to see if there was more information on the official site, which was more serious than I’d expected.
Unfortunately, that was all the information on the official site.
The debut date, the names of the debuting members, and their RP introductions were not written yet.
“Come on, how does it make sense that this is all the information there is?”
But─it looked fun.
That meant the mysterious group had succeeded in getting my attention. Even before their debut.
“I’ll set an alert once the debut date comes out. I have to watch it live.”
The streamers I mainly watched, including the one I chose as my oshi, were relatively small channels with few average viewers, but—
-—My Recurring Subscriptions—-
Ayeon_AYEON [30-month subscription]
A O Ne OO_STARSFLOW [12-month subscription]
SiOO ReO_SAKUEN [23-month subscription]
AnO_Celestial Realm [49-month subscription]
PaeOrael / PARALLEL [16-month subscription]
………
………
─That didn’t mean I didn’t watch big corporate VTubers.