Between the popularization of streaming and the start of vtubing, I spent the better part of 10 years desperately searching for cute japanese female voice to put in my ears.
And I don't know if it's because I was retarded or if it was actually rare or if I was just never satisfied but I spent a LOT of energy scouring every place I could think of to find more of what I wanted.
>half finished nico nico playthroughs>incomplete reuploaded stream archives>random twitcasts>non-jp but weeb adjacent stuff (nyanners, etc)>utaites streaming pubg on openrec.tv or whatever shady livestream site happened to be in vogue>bottom of twitch directoriesI never even cared all that much about who those people were or what they were talking about. I did not care that this or that random pubg stream happened to include males or that the japanese woman that I was hearing for the first time in some 10 viewers twitcast at 4 AM was talking about her boyfriend. It did not even cross my mind to try and find out if Reol was single or not when I was listening to her pikachu impressions on some half broken website. I just wanted to listen to cute girls talk. To have japanese voices in my ears every waking and sleeping hour of every single day. It was the only way I had to trick my need for intimacy into feeling somewhat assuaged (It still is).
So you can imagine how I immediately latched onto hololive as soon as it entered my notice.
But hololive was different. There was so much of it. 15+ girls each with so much new content coming out basically every single day. It was absolute night and day compared to following dozens and dozens of dead or mostly dead accounts accross dozens of websites and hoping against hope that something new had come out every time I checked.
And so over the years I started getting more and more personally invested in those girls and I started yearning to see more and more of some of them. I wanted all of their attention to be focused on me (the generic faceless viewer) and started resenting everything that went against that. I started loving ASMR and fan interaction and hating relationships and male collabs. And then I started in turn hating anything that I perceived as normalizing or inciting those things directly or inderictly. I didn't want any male collabing girl giving my oshi any ideas or anything to that effect.
But now... Now things have changed again. I no longer care that deeply about any one girl (for reasons) and, while I am nostalgic for the old hololive that brought me so much of that fake intimacy, my life is in a much better place and I no longer need as much artificial comforting through soothing cute girl audio as I used to. Not constantly at least.
So I'll just stop caring. I will go back to how I used to be in the times of yore. I won't go around hounding for scraps like a beggar but I will watch any ASMR I fancy even if it comes from a whore. I will enjoy Ayame's giggles even when there's some male laughing along with her in VC. I will not torture myself over whether or not he's railing her every night and is about to whisk her away for good because even if that happens, she will be swiftly replaced with any other girl that strikes my fancy until such a time as she decides to come back, if such a time there ever is.
I will miss some streams and not feel bad. I will miss some merch and not feel bad. I will not have a kamioshi.
still shan't watch ERB tho lemao
