a simp(le) love story ◇ bain/doyum (just b)

1/1

At first, Doyum's dream was to become an idol. Performing in a big scenario and making people happy was his objective in life. Inspire them, enlighten their paths to follow their dreams such as Doyum did, to never give up on whatever they wanted to do and hold on it like their lives depended on it, because everything would sort out, and they would succeed with a little bit of hope. He even remembered all the hours he spent training, dancing so hard his feet would hurt the whole week, and he would also sing until he couldn't cover any other song because he did everything. But, in the middle of all of it, Doyum had a change of heart.

He loved to perform, of course. He spent all his life doing exactly that, but he no longer saw the idol life as appealing as before. And that's when he started looking in forums, reading other people's thoughts in the entertainment industry. He found a lot of people saying that streaming was a funny thing to do, and it was a more casual way of being an influencer and still conserve some of his humanity.

Doyum realised that being a streamer still could change people's lives if he really tried hard enough. So that's what he did.

He paid special attention to what he could do to attract the public at the same time that he could enjoy his journey on Twitch. He really put a lot of thought into it, considering just making In Real Life¹ content, but then he realised that he loved to play games, and why not do it while streaming? He was good at a lot of them (since online multiplayer games were his guilty pleasure in between idol training), so it wasn't really that hard to start streaming, playing League Of Legends² regularly. He even remembered the date of his first stream ever: February 9th, 2018. He didn't even have a camera that day.

Even if the date felt close to him, the reality was that he spent three years streaming and he knew he got really lucky kind of fast, since he saw a lot of people who spent their whole life streaming never winning over the platform.

Not much time after he got the camera, T1 JSeo (a gamer guy that was more known for being the face of the SKT T1³'s content creator group) made a raid⁴ in his channel, just in the moment in which Doyum first reached Grandmaster⁵ on League of Legends. He literally said that he and his chat were watching him play his last game before reaching Grandmaster and he was impressed by his skills, so in between all of his options, T1 JSeo literally started Doyum's real career with that simple raid.

That season Doyum almost reached Challenger, but he had to stop playing a lot because he had to still do side-jobs until he could be sure that he could live just by streaming. His Twitch community was growing everyday and he kept appearing as a relatively big streamer in between the League of Legends' players, so living of that didn't look like a stupid dream of a delusional boy. Doyum was even excited to see his hard work going somewhere. He was proud of himself.

He started talking with JSeo on Discord⁶ a lot, and he ended up playing a League tourney with Junseo's whole team (since they needed a Mid Laner⁷ and Junseo thought he was wasting his talent not playing professionally nor making it to tournaments). They won that one as 1THE9, every one of them having the tag before their usernames for quite a long time after that time, because it was one of the funniest and exciting times of their short lives. Also because of the next tournaments they were part of and the attachment Riot Games⁸ had with SKT T1 in general (y'all know, Faker⁹), the staff of Riot contacted him and Doyum got his first contract ever. They just paid him for playing League of Legends and promoting some of Riot's original products, nothing of another world, until they called him to be in a photoshoot of new official clothes, which was... something else. Wholesome.

He was known as 1THE9 Doyummy for quite a while. The whole gang still played together from time to time, but they started taking different paths. He heard that Jinsung switched from League Of Legends to Apex Legends¹⁰. Doyum read on some articles (because the dumbass wouldn't tell him anything even if he begged for it) that Jinsung played Apex Legends kind of regularly since its launch, but to please his viewers he kept playing League. Nowadays, he was a star in Apex, and Doyum wouldn't doubt that since he was a Predator¹¹ every season and high as Heaven in the rankings (he was in the Top 10 in the season 4 and 5¹²!), some teams were about to catch him to play professionally or he would end up making a competitive team by himself.