Creating your own problems – on Self-Fulfilling prophecies

So, not too long ago, I’ve encountered a viral tweet (Yes, I still occasionally use the bird site) by a VTuber who ranted about her experience as a content creator who wanted to try and make friends but was “mostly met with hate, drama, lies” and people only being nice to her “to get into her pants”.

Her tweet was a cry for help in a way, asking for people in the same sorta spot to join her discord server and become “actual friends”. They ended their tweet with “do you want to join my server and play games sometime? I really need some company”.

Hence, I joined the server and some stuff happened that made me uncomfortable, so I left. End of story. Kind of…

I thought about this a bunch and realised that I wanna talk about it and share some thoughts on what I’ve encountered. I think that this could be insightful for others possibly and maybe discourse could happen on this type of behaviour that I’ll talk about. In a way, this will be a bit of a rant but I won’t mention the person’s name nor any other things that might identify them, so it’s not like I want to create drama simply because of that person being iffy. I just think there is some conversation to be had there.

With all that said, please don’t try to harass anyone. Don’t try to figure out who the person in question is or create any harm through this. Don’t be cringe, essentially.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

First of all, my intention here isn’t to blame the person for what happened to them. It’s horrible that people (according to her) only get to know her for the sake of starting a romantic or sexual relationship with her. It’s sadly something that is very common in the wider gaming community and I find that very atrocious.

That said, I was inside a voice channel for a few hours and noticed several instances of questionable behaviour in the wake of the aforementioned tweet.

For starters, throughout the call, the tone of the conversation was just off.

The person in question, obviously still in the dumps, was talking down on themselves, only to get validated excessively by the many male participants in the call who’d shower her with compliments on things that they didn’t know anything about. There were times when they’d also compliment her voice and body, apparently pictures were exchanged.

One person just got sent real life pictures of that VTuber by her. She said she “trusts him”. He was confused since he was barely there for an hour. I found it odd since she herself said that she “trusts people too easily” but then engages in behaviour that could possibly dox her.

Some male participants moved very close to the microphone and tried to talk in a very deep tone, which made me uncomfortable. She said that it didn’t work on her, people kept trying though and there weren’t any clear boundaries set about it. Someone who is very good at singing randomly started doing so.

It all felt like “mating behaviour” but rather than shutting it down or saying anything, she encouraged it by sending pictures, making compliments about their appearance, and behaving in a way that I’d see as “flirting”. Sending “signals” basically. It’s just not on the level of what constitutes “friendships”.

Now, none of this is problematic in any way, of course, but I feel like by behaving this way you essentially create the conditions for situations to arise again where people interpret it as flirting and then reciprocate it only for you to rant about it afterwards.

If there are ill intentions, it comes across as attention seeking and if there’s none, then I genuinely believe that the person should reflect on whether or not they are creating their own problems, hence “self-fulling prophecy” – like Oedipus Rex who ran away from Corinth to not kill his father and marry his mother, eventually however doing exactly as the prophecy foretold, precisely because he left Corinth and went to Thebes.

Especially after the rant that she published, I do think that it’s weird to engage in such behaviour with strangers on the internet. It made me uncomfortable so I just left at some point. On its own, everyone can do whatever they want, of course, but with the tweet in mind where she called out this sorta behaviour of people being excessively flirty, never having pure intentions, and only expecting her to send pictures and stuff, the behaviour in that call seemed disingenuous and just weird.

Hypocrisy

The other point I wanted to talk about was the whole claim about “mostly being met with hate, drama, and lies”. I get that there’s a lot of that in the streaming space and VTuber spaces but I don’t know that person’s circumstances or any drama or whatever she’s involved in.

As it stands, VTubers (especially women in the space) get a lot of hate simply for existing. It’s a situation where women are wrong no matter whether they go right or left. If you’re playing a competitive shooter, you’ll end up being flamed for talking, being flamed for being quiet, being flamed for playing badly, being flamed for playing well. There’s nothing women in the space can do that would ever not have them met with hateful and toxic behaviour like that. In the streaming space, it’s the same, really, and it’s atrocious.

But this VTuber who complained in the tweet and in the voice call about two-facedness and people talking behind her back about her ended up doing just that. The moment someone left the voice chat, she’d talk badly about them to the people that remained in the voice channel in a way that felt very mean and spiteful.

One person had some weird thing in their profile, along the lines of “I don’t need your love, I just need your money”, and the streamer talked about it in a very weird way, belittled the person, made fun of their voice, and others kind of laughed at it but it didn’t seem comfortable at all.

Again, I don’t know this person. Maybe they aren’t this way all the way and it was just a lapse in behaviour, an error of sorts, but… again… especially with the tweet up there in mind, it felt odd to participate in this behaviour.

I just saw a cry for help and a call for company – a need for genuine friendships -, so I decided that maybe I’ll make some friends in that space… but instead, I ended up just being in this voice call with a dozen “orbiters” trying to woo the streamer while she’s talking badly about someone who just left.

Free Minors

Unrelated to the initial tweet, I wanted to talk about the way in which the discord server was structured.

As it stands, upon joining, you can select whether or not you’re a minor and you’ll receive a role accordingly. I’d imagine that the nsfw channels present on the server are locked when you don’t have the 18+ role… but since there is no age verification system in place, any minor could just gain access to that.

That said, since minors are on the server, I don’t think there should be an nsfw channel in the first place, precisely because of the risk that an underage person could be exposed to content not meant for children.

More importantly, though, minors being branded as such means that they’ve got a huge target on their backs. Any person that has bad intentions involving minors will just need to join this public discord server and they find before themselves an all-you-can-eat buffet of potential victims. It’s terrifying.

And again, the aforementioned tweet (that also included a discord invite link) went viral. According to Twitter, it got 69.2K views. There were 61 retweets, 1.4k likes, and 221 bookmarks. A lot of people saw it. The discord also received a huge amount of new members and hence it’s impossible to vet each individual person there.

I don’t think it’s feasible for a mod team and a streamer to vet each person or to create age verification or moderate all of the going-ons of the server and private messages and the like… but perhaps it’s precisely because of that that we should do our utmost to protect the vulnerable group of *checks notes* children.

I’ve fallen prey to creeps, male and female, as a child in online spaces and hence very much believe that there is no sure-fire way to create safe spaces for minors online, especially since the responsibility should fall onto children’s parents and not some stranger online… but it’s because of that, that we perhaps shouldn’t make it easy for adults to come in contact with minors, especially when you cannot vet all the adults in these spaces.

It’s because it’s not feasible to vet every person and protect children that I don’t allow children onto my Discord server or my stream, for instance.

But this is just some criticism I have of this. Ultimately, it’s the parents that need to protect their children, obviously, and some might even argue that just because you can assign an “underage” role to yourself, that doesn’t mean that you’re actually underage. Heck, perhaps all the minors in that discord server were actually just adults trying to bait each other into doing harmful things to definitely-not-minors. Who knows?

Conclusion

I don’t want that person to get any hate or anything of the like. They have it hard enough, I believe them in that regard… but if you describe yourself as someone who “trusts people too much“, then perhaps it’s time that you stop doing that. The person literally said in the voice call that they do this all the time, trusting people they don’t know and revealing information that could dox them and whatnot. Like, they literally complained about it and in the same breathe sent a picture of themselves to some guy that joined their discord server three hours ago who himself said that he hasn’t even been there for three hours… and then he complimented her figure.

If you are upset about people only getting close to you for the wrong reasons, then maybe don’t make excessive compliments and innuendo, and perhaps shut down any attempts at flirting right then and there. Especially when you’re vulnerable and down in the dumps, you make an easy target of yourself if you surround yourself with strangers rather than people close to you.

Of course, it’s their choice to do whatever they want to do but I think that creating the very conditions for the behaviour that you literally just complained about is pretty darn toxic and unhealthy.

Overall, I just wanted to vent about these thoughts a little bit. I’m fully aware that some of it may sound a bit problematic but since I’m not sharing any screenshots, direct quotes or mentioning any names, I don’t think anyone should get harmed by this.

More than anything, I hope that my talking about this might provoke some discourse on the matter of creating breeding grounds for unwanted behaviour and how to combat such things.

Setting boundaries is very important but if there are no boundaries at all and you really lay yourself bare, it makes sense that people might interpret your eagerness to “trust” them and your willingness to send pictures, share compliments, and exchange innuendo as signals of sorts. If you never set boundaries of any kind and don’t shut down very obvious “flirting” from people, then you just end up in the same situations as before where people might think that you’re interested romantically because of the flirty behaviour if that makes sense.

And the whole thing with minors being branded as such is just weird and dangerous. Don’t do that.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

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