>>11015520You think this is about the expectation of 'being single'. It is not. This is about the expectation of not being duplicitous, or at least, to not be perceived as such.
Many streamers, vtuber or not, share frankly excessive amounts of their lives with their viewers for content. They give anecdotes about their parents, their friends, their childhood, their opinions on everything under the sun, what they did over the weekend, what movies they watched - the level of information given and questions answered by streamers exceeds what a lot of people get from most of their friends, given the amount of hours they spend with a dedicated audience. This is what leads people to treat them as that they aren't just 'playing a character'. They aren't telling me about how they studied magic theoretics with Arianae the fairy professor a thousand years ago, they're telling me stories obviously plucked from their real life, in the real world, with real names, about how they mispronounced their order at Starbucks and some hipster with a Macbook looked at them funny.
The sheer quantity of personal information makes the lack of information about a significant other take on its own significance. There is a sense that the only thing the vtuber is hiding is their personal identity and people tracking them down, which is all well and good - but it does imply that little else is hidden. Which then leads to the intuitive assumptions being made; if you share family and friend anecdotes, why would you not share boyfriend anecdotes as well? The conclusion that most people naturally reach is that there is none.
So if it does turn out they do have a boyfriend, of course there is a strong sense of dissonance within the viewerbase.
Worse of all, it is through the obviously demonstrated fear and avoidance of being discovered that the streamer has already judged herself - "If there is nothing wrong with having a boyfriend, why did she hide it? Why did she share so much else about her life but not him?" The very act of trying to hide something already carries an assumption of misconduct. It is very difficult to defend a client who plainly believes that they are guilty. It strongly cements the feeling that the streamer has deliberately and steadily deceived the audience. And that feeling of being lied to by deliberate omission, reasonable or not, is not something many viewers are comfortable with dealing with when they come only for entertainment.
