Wake Up
On twitter the other day I saw a video demonstrating 3d tracking on a vtuber. If you don’t know what that is, keep it that way. It was fairly stunning, but of more significance was the fact that she was dressed like a prostitute. No, don’t worry, this won’t be pearl clutching about sexualisation, this is more about why streaming, including youtube, probably warrants concern.
The fact that a growing proportion of the young population is increasingly lonely and is instead turning to proxies for friends and girlfriends/boyfriends on such a large scale cannot be a good thing. It is choosing fantasy over reality, it is self-absorbed and denying yourself what you actually want. The same can be said of the increasingly popular women’s fiction, or ‘booktok’ books, smut that is just as bad as any other kind of porn. Any overconsumption of fantasy is a proxy for actually doing what you want, it is an expression of unmet wants. The reason men and women are flocking to these things as they are is because the fantasy of these is better than the reality – but part of the reason for this is that the fantasy they have become consumed with has no requirements. You don’t have to be attractive, strong, or powerful to enjoy the fantasy, and now having gotten the reward without the work or requirements you no longer have an obligation to work towards making the fantasy a reality, or rather, the elements of the fantasy that you want. That is, if you actually want them, but that’s a matter for another day. So you have an entire generation of men and women who have stopped caring about being social, attractive, and competent, because they are able to get their rewards for being those things without any work. Fantasy doesn’t care what you look like, what you earn, whether you’re a loser: you are whatever it makes you feel.
In this, vtubing and streaming in many ways seems like fantasy. It is a defence against being the kind of person who is worth being friends with, having a relationship with, and having sex with. Not just that, but having those things and them being good.
There seems to me to be a trend of people waking up and realising 10 years into their adult life that they have spent a decade living in a dream where they do not have to be a person to meet their wants, and now the dream is over they are realising they have none of the values to get what they want. So they either go back to fantasy, or they become existentially distraught and end up talking to a psychiatrist and getting a prescription of amphetamines to try and catch up.
Now there are thousands of pre-recorded videos where someone acts out any number of infinite roleplay scenarios for whatever your heart (or genitals) desires. The fantasy of the yandere is not that she’s crazy, it’s that she’s crazy about you. You you you you you. And you are so self-absorbed that you will tolerate any number of psychotic behaviours as long as she cares about you. It doesn’t matter if you’re unattractive, stupid, or a chronic underachiever. Any man who has dated a borderline woman or who has been the friend of a man who dated a borderline woman can tell you that their behaviours are not attractive, what is attractive about them is that they’re obsessed with you.
We used to have a word for caring about someone deeply, but it was lost to history and now only appears in movies or books when a character is about to die. It became a word for things, “I love this song.” “I love that t-shirt.” We need to go back to a world where we say I love you and it isn’t a performance. But that requires men and women to stop fantasising, stop dreaming, and pursuing the genuine and real. It means cleaning up, shaping up, and getting up when you inevitably get hurt.