>>71948069This post made me have a sort of epiphany that I think I already knew but never really put into words before.
The thread has had the "is lore important/should you have lore" conversation a dozen times over this year alone and the conclusion is always "Nobody's going to read your Holocouncil lore bible so shut up" but the exception to that is in characterization and fan interaction with the character. I don't mean that as interaction with the puppeteer while piloting the character (though that can happen if you lean into roleplay streams like corpos are fond of doing) but with the character specifically. Because your viewers, especially for female viewers this is very important, they cannot literally be in the room with the character, they find other ways to self-insert, interact, and share those feelings. That's why yumes and non-yumes alike tend to produce so much fanfiction, fan art (literally, not skebbed "fan art"), and so on. They want ways to interact with their favorites when they're not interacting with their favorites. However, that becomes very difficult if the only clay they have to work with is what amounts to a stick figure on a blank canvas. They can like the look and voice of your character, but how much creative canvas are you giving them without additional details? Things that can help with this are:
- a just chatting "room" or several where your character can just be with chat and talk. Stylize the room with furniture, colors and objects that give depth and insight into your character without necessarily needing to say them out loud. This can also give insight into whatever it is that your character presumably does when they're not making silly tier lists about food or playing minecraft for 12 hours every day.
- expanding on the "what do they do when stream isn't live" thing, that's also very important for characterization and important for viewers who want a very involved fan experience. Even if you trim away most of the fat from the most bulky lore, Ame is a time traveler, Gura is a shark from Atlantis, Mori is a reaper but also basically the entire concept of death. Even subtle details beyond "is robot" "is wolf" "is cat" can make the fan appreciation more flavorful and give more to work with without being lore heavy or cumbersome.
tl:dr - a little lore beyond being a face with a shape on a screen can be red meat to the sort of female viewers who value creative fan interaction
