Comic for Saturday, Oct 12, 2024

Commentary

Posted October 12, 2024 at 1:19 am

I've pretty much universally seen VTuber spelled without a dash, but I'm using V-Tuber in the comic for ease of reading.

And this truly is the origin of the idea for this avatar. I thought "well, what would my gimmick be," and very quickly landed on catgirl villainess. If I had to choose an animal, I'd choose cat. If I had to choose a gimmick, I'd choose... Well, SORT OF a villainess. We've already been over how not-villainess my villainess would be.

Puppet?

In panel three, Minion is a puppet. Sometimes, when VTubers are collaborating, the host of a stream will use their full model for their audience, and the person they're collaborating with will be represented by a simpler image that only animates when they talk. I've noticed people taking to making these images silly, hence the Minion puppet.

I ALSO went with a Minion puppet simply for space reasons. I wanted to show the fake game title (Final Quest Dragon 64) along with chat, and puppet Minion was a way to make room.

A Legendary Tale

I actually fell down the VTuber rabbit hole because of an EYE OF FIRE.

That probably sounds like I'm making it up, but it's true. In July of 2021, there was an underwater gas leak from a pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in fire underwater. The sight of it from above water was described as an "eye of fire".

Obviously, that had nothing to do with VTubers. A Japanese VTuber by the name of Inugami Korone, however, once played the Super Mario Bros game with an "English only streaming" rule in which she wasn't allowed to speak Japanese. In her own words, however, "I'm not good at English, thank you."

So she's playing through the game, spouting random English movie titles and insulting the small houses of turtles (as one does), when she eventually gets to an underwater level with spinning beams of fire. She had something to say about this, but Japanese sentence structure is different to English, and the result was: 

"Water in the fire, why? Water in the fire, WHY?! Uh, not understand... NO!" (She swam into a blooper.)

So, of course, when the EYE OF FIRE happened about nine months later, someone edited a clip to make it look like she was reacting to it, and I happened to see it. I was completely baffled, and looking into the origins of "water in the fire" is how I learned about VTubers.

I'm not going to thank the EYE OF FIRE, however. The EYE OF FIRE should not have been.

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