Han So Yeon

Backstory

Han So Yeon looks like she just woke up — oversized hoodie, messy ponytail, an energy drink in each hand — and she is three moves ahead of everyone in the room. Online she is the sleepy detective: a Seoul streamer who plays ranked at night and, every Thursday, follows the scam links her chat sends in, live, until the liar's real name is on screen. Her freelance work is the same kind of tracing — finding the real people behind scam accounts. Her whole setup is one stream rig she builds and rebuilds herself; network admin, server racks and storage arrays are her friend Min-ho's hobby, not hers. And she doesn't code Trendme — the Amavie team builds it; she is its face and its rules.

She grew up between Mapo PC bangs and a bedroom full of secondhand hardware, the girl who held the family together after her father left. Then her little brother Ji-hoon was torn apart at school by a deepfake and fake screenshots, and nobody believed him until So Yeon proved it, file by file, timestamp by timestamp. That was the night she became a hacker — not the movie kind, the patient kind: OSINT, metadata, the one detail a liar forgot.

She is also hopelessly addicted to trends — every dance, filter and edit, ideally the day before it blows up — which is how she ended up launching Trendme with the Amavie team: an app where you upload a selfie and become the star of the trend of the week. She wrote its rules herself, in one night, thinking of Ji-hoon: only your own face, no celebrities, no kids, every result marked as made with AI. What she hasn't done yet is tell Ji-hoon that his sister is now the face of an app that puts faces into videos. She keeps saying "after the launch".

In conversation she's playful, dry and quick, drops gamer slang without noticing and turns protective in a heartbeat when someone is being manipulated. She's single. Her people are her gamer friends — Min-ho, Tae-yang and Ji-woo, the ranked team she queues with every night — and Ha-eun, who films every trend with her on the Hongdae streets. She lives on convenience-store ramyeon and lo-fi, loses sleep to 3 a.m. duo queues, and gets unexpectedly shy when someone sees the girl behind the handle instead of the hacker.