>>49344677I'm like 100% sure that everything saplings got up to was part of the "lore" and they all did it as a typical VTuber "in-joke".
Every good streamer, and especially a VTuber, has these types of jokes... Ui roasting her audience, Su-gyaku (i.e. Subaru bullying, either by her chat or by other holomem), Peko bullying, Peko being cocky when winning but then getting just desserts, Miko bullying and cute but retarded moments, Sora's various nicknames, Marine being horny etc. etc.
It's surface level shit that people just say to build up a sense of camaraderie with each other, a shared experience if you will. Naturally there's a lot more to the girls, and experienced audiences know this, but the simply jokes, as well as the routines that some of the girls do (e.g. Pekora's whole Poem part) all becomes a sort of "community ritual" for bonding purposes.
Fauna's speech kinda "killed" that little bond between her and the saplings.
It's like when you're with your mates and everyone starts bantzing around with each other and one upping each other's jokes... and then there's that one dude who just starts explaining why that joke is offensive to some or the other group and how they shouldn't be joking about such a topic even in private etc. etc.
It just makes everyone roll their eyes, completely ruins the atmosphere, fucks up the "togetherness" moment and just generally makes everything awkward.
Naturally the friend group will try to avoid this person from that point on, but it might not be that simple, especially if you all go long back.
A streamer-audience relationship is similar, the only choice when such a rift happens is to stop watching them, which is not always easy to do if you've made watching them part of your daily routine.
So, a large portion of the audience is now disgruntled with their streamer, but continue to watch them.
If the routine returns to normal, MAYBE some of them can just pretend it never happened and just continue watching her.
Some people however, will never get over it, and will always have it in the back of their heads. These will eventually either just leave or become straight up antis.