Seeing the banter about parasocials and meltdowns, something been in my mind lately: would you be into this hobby if you were mentally stable and/or if your life were going on stable rails?
I don't mean to out yourselves but we don't need to lie, the autistic sampling in vtubing is astronomically high, from both parties.
For me, I would probably be less invested, but would always be up in my downtime if schedules match.
I'm in a really good place. Extremely stable job, healthiest I've been as an adult, not much to complain about. I suppose it's true that my location and career doesn't let me meet new people, but it's never bothered me.
But before I watched vtubers, going back to 2017 to 2020 I watched normal streamers, and that was a time when I didn't have a good job yet and was only working 25h a week part time. I don't think that was too messy mentally, so much as easy to get stuck and just not make any progress. And even farther before that, I was huge into gaming and anime, and gaming
actually ruined my life several times, despite also being a social hobby for me.
I personally think
time is the big deciding factor. Like, can you schedule out 3-7 hours of your day to catch a vtuber live? Is it as fun to just put on their vods or do you lose some of the experience? What if it's 5-7 hours of gameplay you have no interest in? Wouldn't it just be easier to jump timestamps, or watch clips? Or just browse a forum for highlights other people bring up? Can you catch up on the toilet at work without watching a video at all?
When I was big into video games I'd literally play 20 hours, sleep 4 hours, and then play 20 more hours. I'd binge watch 48-episode shows. When I got into streamers I could watch someone online half the day and still have time to look for someone else after they went offline. These days, yeah, I like vtubers, but there's absolutely zero chance I can catch someone I like live, or even follow them close enough to know what they're up to... unless their schedule times and stream length exactly matches my free time. And I'm lucky that one of my favorites does have the perfect schedule for me. But yeah, it boils down to time, and I could see myself being pushed out of the hobby entirely if I had one more thing going on.
That's not what you were asking about, but I think viewers like me are actually way more common than people who are... idk how to phrase it, dependent (?) on vtubing?