Recently, a certain content creator on YouTube has partnered with a certain French VTuber, and it got me down a deep, unpleasant rabbit hole of thinking and remembering my past ... relationship?... with the latter. it's complicated. The point is I have a long history with them.
If you know who I am talking about, or if you have a pretty good idea who this is reading this... none of what follows is a personal attack. I'm just an old idiot reminiscing, none of what this post contains is a callout or intended to be harmful. Everything I'm going to mention or reference is truthful and accurate to the best my memory allows me to remember.
This is a ... somewhat vent post, somewhat self-actualization post, because if I'm gonna vent about something it better be after I actually learned something and have a story and some thoughts to pass on.
My history with her is so long, it predates Discord's entire lifespan, the entirety of my tabletop RPG's lifespan (official birthdate: feb 10 2011), and it goes all the way back to chatting on MSN Messenger. The actual one, not Escargot.
In short, I've known her, on and off, and then off for years, and then on briefly again since we were both literal teenagers. As of the time of posting, the last time we saw each other was, if my Discord join/leave log is to be believed, from June to August 2018. A brief flash, really, and then she disappeared for good.
Over the years that followed, the friends and acquaintances I had that follow the VTuber sphere eventually saw her rise. I didn't. I'm not into VTubers, but it's for the same reason I'm not into streamers; I have no time to watch their content on time, I don't know how anyone can manage a day job and be present on stream when it happens, and since this sort of thing functions on "be there when it's happening" principle, I always feel left out.
Knowing this, it's incredibly and painfully prophetic.
Seeing the collab between her and that YouTuber, and seeing people discuss her, talk about her, and realizing this is the same person as someone I've been close to and known a whole lot of things - most certainly not always good... my thought process has been thoroughly dismantled for a week.
What followed was several days of near-obsessive, terrible, awful dark thoughts because I genuinely did not know what to make of this person that was once a friend, many times a not-friend/an unpleasant character, once a love interest, and then many more times someone I do not like for all kinds of reasons. Be it personality, things she did, things she said, I have my reasons.
Putting aside the public controversies she's been involved with, I think the worst part about all of this has been how I reacted to someone simply posting a video of that collab. On a whim, I paid for the highest-tier subscription her twitch had to offer, I was on time for a stream (in the middle of a work day, after 4 hours of sleep; in other words, I was risking my fucking livelihood with a ridiculous, stupid decision), and then I spent a week on her server, speaking on the most exclusive channels, getting a feel for the kind of people that make up her community.
I have no problems with anyone in her community. It's typical of any large server; it's loud, it's chaotic, there's a million channels, the only semblance of peace is in the tier 3-only channel because there were like 30 of us.
I did do all of this in the hopes of talking to her again, yes. If that makes me Down Bad™, yeah, sure, let's go with that. But what did I do this for?
The problem is I did all of this without a clear objective. It's obvious that I was thinking about her A Lot and it was bugging the fuck out of me that some ghost from my past just reappeared and now she's this... internet-famous entity making collabs with people I know about because they're YT subscriptions, not because I know them personally.
She'd crossed into the other side years ago and it was bugging the fuck out of me far beyond the normal levels of bugging the fuck out of me. But what was it?
Was I jealous? No, not really. She doesn't have anything that I want. She's... not and never really has been what I'd consider good company to me. Getting close to her again would probably mean getting the parts of her that drove me up the wall.
Was I angry? Not really either... Whatever motivated me to do what I did, it wasn't anger.
Did I want someone I once knew as a friend, back into my life? I guess yes, to an extent, but I remembered the good times. And the... let's call them moments of intimacy. In a very, "we were both dumb horny teenagers with webcams" kind of way.
When discussing with a friend about the subject, she asked me if what I wanted was closure. It'd taken me a week, but I think that was it. Closure is what I needed the most.
When she reappeared on my Discord in 2018, this was after years of not seeing or talking to each other. I'd assumed she went her own way and I went mine. Her reappearing was proof she did remember me at some point, and her presence there was not negative; it was just at a time in my life when my life rhythm was more like surviving, being constantly sleep deprived, and having little to look forward to.
When she left, she drifted apart with no explanation again. But this time it'd be for good. Removed from the friends list, no further words, nothing.
People drifting apart from your life with no explanation sucks, especially when it's someone you've known for any length of time. With most people, you at least have the reprieve of forgetting about it eventually.
Not so when the person in question has hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitch and your friends and acquaintances occasionally and casually, talk about her.
In the end, I never had closure with her. I never spoke again with her. I still think about her every so often, but I remember only the small, unimportant parts, like when she played my TTRPG and when we chatted about characters. Everything else I have to willfully eject out of my mind.
I realized many things.
- I was attached to the idealized memories of her. Not what she is. Between what I'd known of her when we were both much younger, and the controversies she was publicly involved with during her life as a VTuber, I have always had plenty of reasons not to like her or to at least think she might not be a good person to keep close. Besides, I don't want to be friends with someone who uses the R-slur publicly and casually.
- Fame terrifies me. I don't want to become famous. I don't want to build a massive 10,000-member Discord community. Being close to anybody famous makes me nervous because I am the sort of sensitive person that massive, negative attention from hundreds or thousands of strangers would hurt, a lot. I realized that if I had my wildest dreams come true during that week-long moment of brainworms, that meant being part of her circles again. And the risk of that happening.
- I realized that if I did end up talking to her, I did not know what I would talk to her about. I wanted closure, but I didn't know what it looked like. Hey, look, it's the idealistic part of my brain again; it thought I could make everything good and proper again if I just reached out to someone who hasn't talked to me in 5+ years!
- Genuinely and sincerely, I am also not the person I once was. The memories might remain, but I'm no longer the teenager I was when we played my TTRPG. I'm even very different from the person I was in 2018, when we saw each other again on Discord. If she ever was in the same position I was, the versions of me she remembers are outdated, too.
In the end, maybe it's a good thing she is now this famous person, inaccessible, effectively unreachable for me and the rest of the public, even with Super Exclusive VIP Access™ on her server. It prevented me from doing things I know, for absolute certain, I would have regretted: I would have said things I didn't mean because I was under the brainworms.
Today... I still think about her every so often, but I've settled on acceptance. I accept that we will probably never talk or be friends again. I accept that too much time has passed. Whether I like or dislike her doesn't matter so I don't put a label on what I think of her.
As a good friend put it, "there's a reason you no longer talk."
What the reason is, I don't know. She up and went one day. She probably had her reasons. I never got my closure, but I gave myself the time to say, it's okay. She's probably never gonna find this blog post either. And it's okay too.
I'm beyond blessed there were people I could talk to about this and I'm beyond blessed to have people who care about me to begin with. This matters infinitely more to me than building a brand or a community.
The cost of realizing all of this and accepting the person I once knew several years ago isn't there anymore was a week and $19.99. It's honestly a pretty cheap deal. I've spent far more time and money on bigger regrets in my life, and it took me far longer to get over those.
If the day ever comes and we can talk again, as remote as it is, I'd be happy to, but on the condition that we have an actual reason to speak to one another
If she wanted to rekindle a friendship or just chat with me again, I'd be open to it. But if it ever happens, there will be no brainworms. As I said earlier, I'm not the person I was in 2018 or before. There have been many difficult years of growing up, and I won't compromise all of that. If the chat isn't fruitful, if I end up reinviting someone toxic to my life, they'll be thrown out.
But the most likely ending to this story is nothing is going to happen. In which case, this past week and what it taught me will remain as a little life lesson: Don't get attached to things and people that no longer exist. Cherish the memories, but remember; they are only that, memories.
