Duh. Sakana is maintaining a harem. A broken-saddened girls harem.
I think you mistake Harem for "Containment Vessel". I honestly think he's more trapped in there than they are. Need to cast a line to get the fish out.
Hmm, I feel the opposite. A big streamer shouldn't need donations; they're already successful, and they have multiple avenues to get money if they need it - memberships, merch, sponsors. Whereas for a small streamer it could make the difference between being able to continue or not, and they'll have much less membership/ad income to start with or maybe not even be monetised, the admin work for merch etc. could be daunting (they probably don't have a manager)...
Like, if a busker passes around the hat that's fine, whereas if a proper celeb does it then it's rather trashy IMO.
It's the same effect as giving to smaller charities. You can have more of an impact than the ones that are mostly there to defray taxes for the wealthy.
Something that separates vtubing from other forms of online entertainment is just how aggressively monetised it's been since day one, and I put this down to two factors: the industry's dominated by corpos with business interests rather than hobbyists-turned-professionals, and the 'stigma' associated with monetisation had mostly died before vtubing became mainstream.
The former matters because new vtubers are taking inspiration from the corpo talents they look up to, and audiences expect donating money or gifts in exchange for on-stream shoutouts to be part of the experience; corpos set the path, and new indies simply follow it.
The latter is an especially big factor because the risk of backlash that used to exist for monetisation doesn't exist any more, hell a lot of younger fans would have never experienced a time when a content creator would be shamed for making money off their work. Every form of monetisation, be that Adsense/fan donations/brand deals/Patreon/merch/Twitch bits etc. had its own period where anyone trying it would be accused of selling out or e-begging for a while before the overall population realised they didn't care that much any more, but that's all over now; it's the norm, and it's socially acceptable to run a stream as a business from the start so people are more inclined to think "fuck it, why not?".
A few years ago I'd have probably thought posting donation links while streaming to an audience of five people was cringe, but nowadays after seeing the vtuber community in action and how donations don't really affect the flow of a small stream that much I can't really blame amateur streamers for wanting a bit of extra cash in their pocket.
I remember all of the cycles with the start of Patreon and other monetization stuff. It was so, so stupid. If you're doing content, you're doing that in lieu of other work. Yes, it might be a hobby, but entertainment is an entire industry and people make a living. Even the basic merch was a bit sticking point to what would become the Tumblr > Insane set. They were arguing some purity nonsense when nearly every organization across the planet has merch. It's likely every school you've ever gone to had some merch to sell, at some point, during the year. Heck, my school had t-shirts for every department.
If you're doing business, you have to recognize you're doing business and act as such. That was a lot of the issues of the early Online Videos days. Most early creators never wanted to grow up and get better.
After her crusade against the frogs, Tenma is finally bothering to play the story. Unfortunately it has been so long since she played the story, she has no idea where to go and doesn't know how to read the map. She's not even suppose to be in the Fort until like 2-3 story beats later.
It's fascinating to see the veil finally drop and people have started to recognize how degenerate the FF14 community is. Retail WoW is just the same and it's one of the major reasons why a lot of people flocked back to Classic WoW when it started but that also became overwhelmed with the same type of people. I've pretty much sworn off MMOs altogether largely because like the greater internet community, the online gaming community is flooded with the worst kind of people because people never bothered to gatekeep those freaks out.
I have a friend that is hard anti to FFXIV. I didn't really get the reasoning until I had some interactions with some of the folks coming out of that MMO space. There's so many degenerate hugboxes developed around that game. I don't even want to know what happens on those discord servers. It looks like a solid game that I'd be interested in, but, man, that community is a hard filter.
Playing on the US servers was the worst fucking mistake I made for 14.
"Oh, I'll play with my friends, and it'll be easier to talk to randoms if they're not yelling at me in Polish or German"
Turns out everyone is a fucking troon, extremely easily offended, and aggressively unfunny in that characteristic upper-class American redditor way.
I could've just had racism on EU.
For a fantasy MMO, after a Realm Reborn, it strikes me as being too accessible. As a result, it doesn't filter out those that can't play a game properly, so the appeal is RPing. That's when it all goes down hill.
A funny part of the MMO space is Warframe. What's funny about it is that it's deeply hard to communicate while actually playing the game, and the default location is solo instance of your ship. It's a very "light" MMO, and as a result the community is really good. Because you can't communicate. (I guess language was always the primary human error?)
Of course, the end game there is to make a very pretty look and stand in some of the few communal spaces. As far as end games go for games, there's a lot worse.