>>106780234Sorry for the late reply. I surprised myself with how much I had to say on this topic. Too much for a phonepost. Please bear with me.
Pillow only became my oshi a bit after she got her 2D model, but she was always one of, if not my favorite audio roleplay channel.
Back then there were two main types of audio roleplay youtubers.
it's probably the same now, I'm just not tapped into that scene anymore. Channels that filled scripts posted by users on various subreddits and channels that wrote and voiced their own scripts.
There were some pretty good writers posting quality scripts on reddit, but most of what was posted was unremarkable, to say the least. That meant that you would hear the same good scripts over and over again being filled by all the popular channels, which made them get old fast. For the ladder, you would find some hidden gems here and there, but creators writing their own scripts often meant that the fantasy aspect would eventually be lost, and the channels would start to feel like the girl's creative writing project, which very rarely appealed to me.
What made Pillow different was that all of her audios were improv. Yes, the audio quality was poor and she wasn't great at speaking, but all of that just endeared her to me more. Her videos felt like fanfiction written by a lonely weeb girl obsessed with Future Diary, shit you'd read on AO3. Obviously she was playing a character in all of them, yet they felt so real, so earnest. I couldn't put into words why I liked her videos so much back then, but it was clear to me that she was different from the rest. I remember she would try her best to reply to every single comment on her videos with something sweet even all the way back then, and lonely, attention starved, high school me being so excited when she replied to one of mine where I just thanked her for a new video.
Sometimes I think about how much of a miracle it is that she made it this far without bowing out at some point. There were a handful of channels like her who improv'd their vids and had a similar earnestness. Eventually all of them were deleted or abandoned for one reason or another. I remember there was this one girl I really liked who was forced to delete all her stuff after getting flooded with perverted comments and dms despite her audios being very innocent. So little would've had to gone differently for the same to happen to Pillow. Her entire career basically came out of happenstance and convenience. She never planned on becoming an idol with thousands of adoring fans when she posted her first video while still in high school.
I made sure to tell her in the first M&G how inspiring her story is. I don't she quite understood what I meant. Pillow is still convinced that she's just some unremarkable girl that got lucky. I want to lay it out more eloquently for her eventually. I saw some piwwos discussing writing Christmas letters for her as gifts, maybe that'll be a good opportunity.
