November 14, late night, Daegu time. Sampoong having no concept of what makes a therapist good or not, he decided to book the first tele-therapy appointment he could get that both him and his love interest could attend. They quarrel each other in Korean, and the following is a loose translation.
“Honey, I took the time to book this therapy appointment. I considered your schedule as well as mine, I didn’t want it to interfere with what you care about outside of the relationship!” Sampoong announces to her, a little on edge. “Its time for our therapy session!”
“I’m afraid it might be a little expensive, but I think it’s going to be worth it if we stick through it!” Sampoong’s love interest, Duri, tells him before going.
“Expensive? There are therapists around here who give out discounts provided we book a certain number of sessions all at once, and/or for undesirable timeslots! But you have to ask for it, and it was the only way we could fit couples therapy in our budget!”
Duri starts to vent her frustration at what she perceives as being his obsession over the people he follows on Twitch.
“Who… are they?” Duri points at two specific streamers he watched the most lately, Legnica and Caro, whom she knows only by her Twitch username.
“One of them is one of the best players on Twitch for a game I started playing a little over a week ago, watching her helped me a lot!”
“Can you tell me why is it that you watched them so much?” Duri tells at him.
“Are you implying that I had online flings or affairs with them?” Sampoong asks, on the defensive. “Of course not! One of them seemed obsessed with writing a hockey romance book in a month, or so she claimed, the other also wrote a romance book on air, but a historical romance centered on a harem!”
Legnica went into painstaking lengths to build up what Ottoman nobility was like, what sanjaks and their associated sanjak-beys could do, and they were answerable to the eyalet’s pasha, or beylerbey. How he put the ladies in his harem to work doing household chores in his palace, and how that meant she mixed “why choose” along with forced proximity, Sampoong realizes that he might have been looking at these streamers to get a window on missing gaps in his knowledge.
“Then why do you feel like these two aren’t worth an online fling?”
“The TRPG expert was too fat, and the harem romance writer was implying that her day job was in the health sector! This usually means they have strict limitations on who they can be in relationships with! But really, if you watched Caro, you would realize that she’s just on another intellectual level compared to you!”
And Glitter’s knowledge of relationship failure points… I don’t think it’s appropriate to bring that up with her. I’m not sure it’s appropriate to ask whether she has a MFT license for now, nor Legnica, Sampoong thinks while he keeps hearing about accusations on Duri’s part, while Duri looks at a few clips from Sampoong’s favorite streamers, on the computer they use for this tele-therapy session, before it starts.
“Am I too dumb for you?”
“No, it’s just that Caro makes me feel like being in a relationship with someone as smart as she is not for everyone, and not all rosy”
Although, in romance, breakups are usually temporary, I hope that he’s prepared for the event that the breakup is permanent, if it came to that. However, I hope this therapist he found isn’t simply an attempt to stave off the inevitable, Duri is a little nervous about him having booked a tele-therapy session this late.
When the session begins, as is usual for the intake stage, the couple is bombarded with questions about their situation, and where the issues lie. With their therapist taking notes all over the session.
I hope Duri is willing to give this therapist a chance. I booked this therapist with both the bulk discount and the late night discount, for as many sessions as I believed were necessary to truly determine whether a therapist is effective, Sampoong realizes that he paid for three-fifths of the regular price for a five-session block.
At the end of the session, they think something’s not right with the therapist, but can’t tell what. As they speak to each other in Korean, once again, loosely translated to English here:
“Yeobo!” (Honey) “I am not sure this couples therapist is for us!” Duri scolds him.
“It’s a little early, Duri. Remember what the therapist said at the very beginning: couples therapy doesn’t work overnight! There are no guarantees, and any therapist that would guarantee a diagnosis, or a cure, within a certain timeframe is not worth consulting!” Sampoong argues with her.
“Fine!” Duri fumes and rolls her eyes. “You asked for couples therapy, we must live with its consequences!”
“I’m willing to give another four sessions, all in this timeslot, especially since I obtained both discounts on offer! We will have to go through this phase all over again if we change now!”
“What’s the catch? I think there’s a catch!”
“I had to pay for all five sessions up front! But we got forty percent off! We need to look at what we can free up to get some more intimacy, but at the same time, respect our lives away from each other…”
I wonder what it will take for Duri to understand there is no sex, no romance involved with Caro at all. I work from home, she doesn’t, so I can’t have her run late to work to sort things out because Caro streams when Duri is at work on Fridays, Sampoong, feeling that the streams themselves would not constitute sufficient evidence to his love interest that he’s not having an affair with Caro, or even flings, tries to formulate a solution. Only time will tell whether this is going to be the best KRW450k spent for the couple, or a complete waste.
“Perhaps we could watch Caro together Saturday morning! Then you will understand that I’m not having an online affair with her!”
“Very well, but promise me that we will be in bed at some point this week!”
“Only if you let go of the notion that I’m having an affair with Caro!”
Because, of course, laying the foundation to work on his relationship issues made the two tires, they go to bed and sleep.
However, when he awakens, on Friday morning, Daegu time, Sampoong reads what he could of the new material Caro wrote of her hockey romance book, where Gus and Emma grow closer to each other, but still mostly long for each other since they both have busy schedules. She might have some talent, but not enough for me to anoint her “a natural”. Yet, one thing seems to bug me as I read these new passages, supposedly held before the trade deadline: normally they should have sex by this point, but they do not, he mentally prepares himself to watch Caro’s stream as he goes to work doing backend IT work. After Duri has left their home for work.
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Meanwhile, back in Charlesbourg, where it’s only evening of the 14th, as opposed to the morning of the 15th, Caro brews another cup of coffee, hoping that it will help her see through the stream. And, of course, a bowl of bibimbap, of which Caro cooked several servings, one for eating on air, two for her parents to eat, plus one to take to work the next day.
“Tonight is meal night: with inspiration from one of my faithful followers, Sampoong, I’m eating bibimbap on air!”
And then people on air are shown the signature flowery look of a bibimbap bowl with julienned cucumbers, carrots, pork and rice, topped off with a fried egg. Not many “petals”, and Sampoong is a little disappointed by the bibimbap bowl shown on air.
It's clear that Caro is not very experienced with Korean cuisine. Usually, people cook bibimbap with more than just four ingredients in the “petals”, more like six or eight, Sampoong is left wondering how she is going to eat it. But, as she eats the fried egg before mixing the petals together:
“I spent three nights trying to make the despair show more, and other emotions one would feel about unsatisfactory careers, as well as while studying for tests that could feel make-or-break” Glitter makes an update on what happened since she last watched Caro. “And, obviously, the joy of making a crucial step in a dream come true”
Maridun (tagging Glitter): Now that’s an improvement! It no longer feels like a mere how-to guide
But after Caro eats the bibimbap, because she doesn’t play the game as much as when the battle pass was underway, she just goes in and sends characters on smaller dispatch quests so she can run the infernal gauntlet of the week alongside a few arena matches.
Once that is done, they return to more writing sprints, where Caro finalizes the chapter where they grow closer together before the trade deadline. In the past 3 days, I did only the bare minimum towards the daily par, and sometimes I felt like I needed to add more detail or more actions just to get to it. I might have managed, but I wonder whether 100%ing NaNo is worth the cost in quality. But I will NOT update the word count in NaNo’s system tonight until I wrote to the daily par!
After the sprint ends, Sampoong feels like something is amiss with the late pre-TD arc of Player Masher, and goes in the VC for it:
“Where? Did? The? Sex? Go?” Sampoong, feeling his blood boil, starts lashing out at Caroline.
“Sampoong, there’s good reason for why I didn’t have any sex scenes! Gus is constantly too tired from practices and games to even think of having sex with Emma, much less give anything remotely resembling good sex!” Caro defends herself, while raising her voice.
“So essentially the only thing Gustavs cares about in sex is whether he has enough energy to have it…” Sampoong sighs, in shock because of Caro’s answer. “Normally I would have expected the couple to have sex at some point before a possible third-act breakup, but it seems unsettling for me that you write Player Masher without sex!”
“I knew some readers judged romance books solely, or at least primarily, by how much sex there is, or how good the sex scenes are! The book you recommended to her in the beginning had three-quarters of the development happen under the form of sexual improvements!” Glitter sternly reminds Sampoong.
“I knew Korean porn regulations only allowed consumption for personal use, but not the manufacture or distribution for commercial purposes. However, I have no clue as to how it would apply to books” Lagado asks Sampoong, curious about his book intake.
Damn… Lagado asks a question that makes me want to scream. Like I knew that, in the West, Korean video games were known for their explicit outfits, but Korean developers need to be really cautious about ensuring that it doesn’t legally qualify as porn, Sampoong shakes in his seat while he tries to contain his anger at Lagado.
“Porn law is usually less stringently enforced for book imports; this is why I could get my hands on that book I recced Caro a while ago. Korean books tended to fade to black”
“For a while now, it seems like sex was a key ingredient that determined the potential of a book to succeed on the market, or which audience it could reach. Both Capitolium and Caro, while very heavy on the hockey, write wholesome romance, which has no sex” Glitter comments on the lack of sexual content of both manuscripts.
“Let me guess, there could be some readers who seek spicy or steamy books specifically because they think such books would, in some way, improve their sex?” Capitolium asks the viewer.
“Or are, in some way, unsatisfied with their sexual lives?” Caro asks, without expecting much of an answer. “Yes, I did imply both Emma and Gus are focused on their respective careers and respect such in each other”
It seems that Glitter is more OK with there not being much hockey for the time being. However, I don’t expect her to stick around once the chapter ends, Caro is a little concerned about Glitter’s behavior around hockey in the two writers’ respective manuscripts.
“As with other uses of romance books for wish fulfillment, some people look to romance books to fill a void in their sexual lives, even when they are satisfied in other areas” Glitter furrows a brow upon hearing about other viewers mentioning unmet sexual needs.
I feel that’s what Duri wants out of any trip to the bed together. So why is it that my girlfriend thinks that I am having an affair with Caro? I get that we never got much intimacy in the past few months, but does she feel such ardent need for sex that she nags me for it? Does she think Caro can somehow fill some need that she can’t? Sampoong shakes his head, struggling to think about why Duri could be led to think he had online flings with Caro. Or is it because Caro’s manuscript hits too close to my home? I ought to get to the bottom of the matter before our next appointment with that discount therapist!
“One more thing: just like Caro once claimed that some other romance books are horror in all but name, some people could claim that some romance books are erotica in all but name. I can see the overlap because erotica plots focus on the sexual aspect, like the book I recced her, and you can have erotica without the romance subplot qualifying as a romance book, for example, if they are forced to stop having sex between each other because of a STI, much like you can have a horror book with an unhappy ending” Sampoong explains a core nuance between romance and erotica.
“That was… enriching” Lagado sighs.
“To add on what Sampoong was saying, one of the more disturbing tropes, more than simply love or lust at first sight, is insta-sex, in that they have sex right after seeing each other; often insta-sex kinds of things are mercenary in nature, but don’t last!” Glitter follows up.
Some viewer: Come on, start a new word war!
“I saw the term word war in my chat; how does word warfare differ from a writing sprint?”
Some viewer: Word wars are the same as writing sprints
“Prepare for war!” Caro then lays out the terms of the word war declaration.
Because Caro and her viewers previously discussed the role of sex in romance on the stream, there are several new belligerents in Caro’s stream wanting in on her stream, who also take part in this new word war. And some of them end up following her almost as quickly as they entered her stream.
“Thank you for the follow!” the streamer tells her new followers in the middle of a word war.
Don’t let these new followers distract me! We have a word war to fight! There’s a reason why I didn’t update my word count on NaNo’s system today: we need to show them the new badge! I can’t let Capitolium get away with the lead in this 30-day race without a fight! Caro’s surface thoughts consume her as she continues writing another scene where Gus and Emma are together after longing for each other. She also tries her best to respond to some belligerents’ questions but knows that she must stay focused to win the word war. Or get the most words out of it as possible, anyhow.
Now that I’m done writing the WJC arc, and have my MMC finish it with 6 points in 7 games, with the US being unable to defend its title, I guess, it’s back to the reality of QMJHL life, away from a two-week-long spotlight. Back to the billet family, with the silver medal on hand, Capitolium starts thinking about how he’s going to continue writing The Penalty Box of Passion while he grapples with the need to get as many words as he can get in an attempt to fend off Caroline. Which he does, but the sheer writing speed of the war requires both to use Bengay after the war ends.
“Damn it! I lost! Shout-out to…” Caro then names a newcomer who edged her out in battle by only a few words.
And she then invites the new belligerents to join her Discord server as well as discussing their projects. The one who saw word wars the same as writing sprints wrote a sci-fi dystopia, while another one writes fantasy about a couch potato elf who watches and designs TVs. And yet another one of these new viewers who write a murder mystery.
By the end of the stream, however, she feels like time is a little short, because she was side tracked by the needs of the chat. In the final sprint of the night, she feels the time crunch just to get to the daily par, and also to record the daily word count.
“I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that Capitolium has overtaken me tonight” Caro then updates her word count on NaNo’s system, to 31,850 words. And hence unlocking the eleventh cheevo, a 14-day streak. “The good news is that I unlocked the fourteen-day streak cheevo!”