He Called Me Ugly Until I Turned Off The Filter Chapter 06
Same face. If anything, without any smoothing at all, my features looked sharper.
Chat imploded.
Oh my god, Raw Cam is even better.
Sis, are you here to raise the bar for the whole channel? With that face she could be on billboards and she’s still self-conscious?
Ethan doesn’t deserve to look at her. Look at their faces — they’re WRECKED.
Tara’s smile finally cracked.
She bit her lip. “If you’re that pretty, why hide for three whole years? You weren’t… saving your face as a trump card for when Ethan got famous, were you?”
Ethan sat up straight like she’d handed him a script.
“Yeah. Willow, I know you’re broke. But there’s no need to piggyback on my clout. You didn’t fight the breakup. Now I’m famous, and your very first stream just happens to match with mine? Convenient.”
His old fans woke back up. Right, how does a random match land on the ex? She probably paid off the platform. Pretty face doesn’t excuse leeching. Ethan, don’t fall for it.
I looked at him and felt something quiet in my chest.
He would always be like this.
I let him build his channel off my scripts — my choice.
I stayed up with him for three years — my fault.
He hit it big and got embarrassed of me — “cutting his losses.”
Now my face wasn’t the punchline he needed — so I was a clout chaser.
I didn’t argue.
I opened my phone, pulled screenshots from my creator dashboard, and dropped them on stream.
“Rippl’s Live Battles auto-pair streamers in the same category by viewer count. When the algorithm matched us, I’d been live for five minutes with twelve viewers. Ethan and I were both under a hundred. The algorithm did the rest.”
I paused. “If you don’t believe me, ask the platform. Or ask V.”
Chat froze.
V dropped one line into chat.
⟢ Platform — please make the match log public. ⟣
Within a minute, someone dropped a screenshot into chat. @RipplSupport had just posted on X:
“Confirmed. This Live Battle was algorithm-generated. No manual override. No creator intervention.”
Ethan’s face went ashen.
Tara opened her mouth. I turned to her first.
“You asked me why I never showed my face. Let me ask you something.”
“Why does your makeup use my photo as a reference?”
Her expression locked.
“Hon, what are you talking about?”
I didn’t explain. I pulled up an old picture.
A half-face selfie I’d sent Ethan three years ago. Grandma had insisted I photograph well and made me take it. I’d been too shy to show my whole face — cropped it to eyes, nose bridge, one corner of the mouth.
Ethan had raved about it for weeks. “Willow, your eyes are so distinct. When I make it, I’m going to have my girlfriend do her liner just like this.”
I’d thought he meant me.
Then he announced Tara. Her breakout video had used a look almost identical to that photo.
Upward liner. Cool contour. Bitten stain on the lips. Even the way a strand of hair fell against her cheek — copy-pasted.
I put the two images side by side.
One second of silence. Then chaos.