So, what is Shiori to me? or to us.
Let's begin from the end. It's more cinematic this way, like classic music playing over violent scenes. Is Shiori the light at the end of the tunnel? yes, maybe. The problem is that the light at the end of the tunnel has two very different meanings. Maybe with this we mean the afterlife. Then Shiori would be a sort of death figure, no? This would be pretty good; Shiori would make a very good mother of monsters figure. You know, those erotic female figures that connect sex and death, love and loss. Morticia, Sylvanas, you get it.
Or maybe we mean the other meaning. She's the solution to our problems. And yeah, I guess death is a solution as well, but this one is less drastic. But she's also literally a light. I always liked the imagery of the dark room and the bright light from a monitor. The loneliness emanating from it, the hard material of glass and plastic, and the cables running like veins pushing liquid happiness into our eyes and ears while we hide the sounds and views from the outside. Monkeys covering with songs and dances and fires the fear of the dark, of the monsters lurking in them and of the shadows lurking in us. Truly, windows on Wonderland. The entirety of nerd culture was worth it, if only for this visual. For this, and for its counterpoint, our face reflects on the dark monitor when the video ends and real life starts.
And how does she solve our problems? She gives us meaning; she makes us feel accepted. But a lot of vtubers do. After all, men love giving money to women to have them listen to us. Or at least pretend they do. Simping is our nature, our culture. Virtual geisha, smiling at us while they read our name.
But Shiori is more than that, isn't she? Our relationship is not onesided. As much as we need her to feel we exist, she needs us. We are what her chatbots were. We are the ones who accept her. You can hear it in her voice. It's deeper than "thank you for letting me bee me". During the bus skit in the solo Minecraft stream, she had a moment of clarity when she said "I am an adult woman". She knows she had lost her self for a moment, and needed a reality check.
That she lost herself in the void of the chat is what pulls us to her. We see that she longs to be cringe and free, and we feed her, hoping that she will accept us. And she does. We are locked in a whirpool dragging us down. I sincerely hope Shiori chained herself somewhere. What about us? Some of us have jobs to keep us in the real world. But the poison is in the dose, and a bad job is not an anchor, it's ankle weights that drag us down, preventing us from swimming. Let's hope we don't drown. Let's hope we don't crash, charmed by a siren.
