Surprise Guest
Just like when I'd talked it over with my brother, I decided to start watching not only Lulu's streams but Sweet Mare's broadcasts as a whole and making shorts from them.
Of course, with Lulu as the main focus I would still cover her, but whenever her stream times didn't overlap I planned to try making videos of Aris and Mei as well.
To do that, though, it was crucial how well I understood those two's charms.
And on that front, I could say with complete confidence: I might not understand them as thoroughly as Lulu, but I had more than enough of a grasp to make videos.
Speaking of their appeal points, first up was Aris and her overwhelming gaming skill.
From way back, female streamers who were good at games had always been rare among women broadcasters, and they received excellent treatment for it.
Pretty female streamers or ones with good voices were plentiful. But pretty female streamers who were also good at games, or female streamers with good voices who were also good at games—those were uncommon.
Aris fell into the "good at games and has a great voice" category.
Her gaming skill went without saying, and as a VTuber her voice was quite excellent as well. It was huskier and a bit rougher than Lulu's or Mei's, but still distinctly charming. You could almost say it had a bit of an older-sister vibe to it.
An older-sister type who's insanely good at games, and who occasionally lays on the aegyo? Extremely attractive.
So what about Mei's charm, then?
Honestly, compared to Lulu or Aris, Mei's distinctive traits didn't stand out quite as sharply. But her truly overwhelming vocal tone and ASMR ability were talents the other two could never possess.
On top of that, with broadcasting skills that matched her soft, gentle voice, Mei's streams had healing as their main weapon. Plenty of streamers adopted a healing-broadcast concept, but the ones who actually made it big were an extreme minority.
The fact that Mei was one of that tiny handful meant her streams had that much real appeal.
With those two's charm points crammed into my head for the time being, I started watching a collab stream with Lulu, Aris, and Mei.
Today was the last day of the holiday, and on this final day the three of them had decided to stream together.
So what kind of collab was it?
"The game we're playing today is~"
"Mareo Party~!"
"Waaaaah~!"
Mareo Party—a board-game-style multiplayer title based on the famous game Mareo.
You rolled dice to collect gold and trophies on each map, earned extra gold and trophies through mini-games, and sometimes used special spaces to steal from opponents, all while aiming to gather the most trophies and gold. That was the victory condition of this game.
Still, I hadn't expected them to play this one.
Mareo Party was a four-player game, and Sweet Mare only had three members. In other words, they were one person short…
"And for that reason! We have one surprise guest with us today!"
"Yes, please come out~"
"Waaaaaah~"
Mei handling the hosting, Aris assisting, and Lulu cheering. Leaving those three behind…
"Hello~! Nice to meet you all! Fantasy Live's second generation! Leader of Happy Heaven, Elia Sironi!!"
…the second-generation member made her surprise appearance.
Sweet Mare were Fantasy Live's first generation, and they also operated as the group "Sweet Mare." So I'd thought, Won't a second generation show up someday?—and then they actually did. Without a single advertisement or hint of any kind.
The chat started buzzing too.
If someone was going to show up as a guest, I'd been certain it would be the Representative. The last time I'd seen him, his variety sense had been solid, his voice was good, and his hosting ability had been outstanding on top of it.
So when most of the viewers—myself included—heard "special guest," we'd expected the Representative.
Well, there would have been some people uncomfortable with that. Just having a male boss slotted into a group of female VTubers could be enough to put certain viewers off.
They'd probably taken that into account too, and calculated that using this chance to surprise-reveal one of the second-gen members wouldn't be a bad idea.
If that calculation was what put Elia Sironi out there, then it was a perfect hundred out of a hundred. An incredibly lively and cute second-gen member with a completely contrasting personal color had dropped into the middle of the first-gen girls for a surprise appearance.
"Seniors, please take care of me!"
"Ahem! You better impress Lulu!"
"You can just ignore Lulu~"
"Not ignore her completely~ Hmm~ Just be friendly with her, okay?"
"That's so mean!"
"Hehe, Senior. I'll work really hard!"
The four of them bantered back and forth through what seemed like a prepared skit, laughing and chatting together.
A new face had appeared, but what I needed to do hadn't changed. Clipping Lulu, Aris, and Mei and getting a feel for making clips of them—that was the goal.
Setting that goal aside for now, I decided to just watch the collab first. If the collab was fun, clipping would be that much easier.
The four of them jumped straight into the collab.
It was a free-for-all competition among the four, and the winner would earn the right to collab later with whoever they wanted. Even if second-gen Elia Sironi took the win, the same applied—she would gain the right to collab with any of her three first-gen seniors.
But to be honest, I saw through the prize immediately. If any of the three besides Elia Sironi won, they would all choose a collab with Elia no matter who it was. And if Elia herself won, she would just pick whoever she wanted.
In short, they were simply manufacturing a justification for Elia's collabs. Her joining today's Sweet Mare collab already had the "special guest" justification. By chaining that into another justification, the goal seemed to be using Sweet Mare's name recognition as much as possible to accelerate the growth of Elia and the rest of the second generation.
Regardless, the game had already started, and Sweet Mare's stream rolled along as usual.
"Yap! It's a six! …A red space!?"
"Lulu~ You've gotta hand over six coins~"
"Lulu, you scrub~ Losing six coins the second the game starts~"
Lulu's scrub-tier performance, Mei teasing her gently, Aris needling her sharply—this was the delicious Sweet Mare collab flavor we always ate up.
But now a new face… Elia had been added to the mix.
"Lulu-senior…! It's okay…! In the end it's the one with more trophies who wins, after all…!"
"Yeah…! Thanks…!"
Mei, who normally would have been the one petting Lulu's head, had smoothly shifted into the teasing role, and Elia had stepped in to fill the empty spot.
For the record, Elia's model had a very mature saintly vibe—an angelic holy woman. Contrasted against Lulu's loli-bodied succubus character, it only made the whole thing funnier.
A mature angel character calling a loli succubus "Senior" and petting her head—how could you not laugh at that?
As the game went on, it started to flow into an Aris & Mei versus Lulu & Elia kind of dynamic. But Mareo Party had mini-games. And among those mini-games were a few one-versus-three modes.
Yeah—like this one.
Boing-Boing Tag!
Boing-Boing Tag. Put simply, one player rode a cute monster called a "Boing-Boing" and had to catch the other three people who were running away.
In this game, of all people, Elia became the one, and the remaining three had to flee.
"Elia~ Just relax and have fun~ It's only a game~"
"Yeah! If we can't dodge, that just means we suck!"
"Not that we won't be able to dodge~"
Lulu was baiting the same Elia who had just been petting her head a moment ago, and Elia answered the provocation with a bright smile.
"You won't regret this, right?"
With those words as her cue, Elia showed off some extremely clean control.
Wham!
"Mama!?"
First she sent Mei flying…
Whoosh~
"What? How did you turn like that!?"
…and finished Aris off with a surprise attack.
In an instant only Lulu was left, and the moment she saw two people better at games than her get mowed down like autumn leaves, she immediately switched tactics.
"…Elia! I'm your senior! Elia's senior, Lulu!"
Lulu clung straight to her senior authority—utterly pathetic.
Elia answered that Lulu with a sweet, beaming smile.
"Senior! Give me your coins!"
"Aaaaaah! Nooooo! If I lose my coins I'll have nothing left, no! Nooooooo!!"
Boom!
Lulu, as if to show off that scrub-tier control of hers, got caught by Elia, and just like that all three of them were wiped out in a flash.
"…Lulu-senior."
"…Lulu's sulking!"
"…Lulu-senior, there's a real flavor to bullying you, isn't there?"
"Huh…?"
And so, the number of people who beat up Lulu the sandbag had increased by one.
As a side note, Elia won the game, and the VTuber she named for the collab was, of course…
"Lulu-senior, looking forward to our collab."
…Lulu.
Well, the stream ended like that…
……and now I was left wondering how to solve this problem.
What problem, you ask?
Sweet Mare's collabs had one very big problem.
It looked like their banter produced clips left and right, but that wasn't actually true. Lulu—Lulu was the core of every Sweet Mare collab.
Take Lulu out and almost no clips came out of it. The Lulu-dependency was that high.
At this rate, I wouldn't be able to make any clips either…?