If There's a Pest Getting in Your Way, Crushing Them Head-On Feels Better
Among every streamer's fanbase, Menchi's Croquette Squad stood out as especially notorious for its toxicity.
The reason her fandom had filled up with such venomous viewers was surprisingly simple: the moderation in Menchi's chat was extraordinarily lenient.
Mildly over-the-line insults, high-intensity sexual harassment, discriminatory and hateful remarks — as long as it wasn't severe enough for Olive itself to step in and ban the account, Menchi barely paid attention to whatever her viewers typed into chat.
Constantly managing a chat window was a genuine hassle, and besides — she was never the type to be easily swayed by other people's words in the first place.
So when the chat inevitably turned filthy for one reason or another, the first people to suffer were the perfectly decent, good-natured viewers.
Her half-hearted approach to moderation had transformed the chat into a wilderness where you either went toxic or got eaten alive. And the ones who finally settled in for good were the ones who had stewed in that poison long enough to rot through completely.
But tracing it back to the source, Menchi's viewers hadn't always been this rotten.
There had been a time when she was called the Collab Goddess among streamers — actively taking the lead, pulling people together, setting trends. Back then, even without moderators, the decent viewers would swiftly beat down any toxic ones who showed up to ruin the mood, and the chat's self-policing worked beautifully.
But recently her interest in streaming had waned. She'd cut back on external collabs and spent months broadcasting alone, like a solitary island. Fresh blood that should have flowed in from outside took one look at the chat and left, and the empty seats were filled by the same toxic viewers who'd once been beaten and driven out. The vicious cycle repeated itself.
In barely half a year, Menchi's once-bright and adorable Croquette Squad had vanished without a trace — leaving behind only a Hatequette Squad stuffed full of rotten meat.
But the Croquette Squad's backstory was neither here nor there.
What mattered was that those thoroughly blackened, fully corrupted fans had put their heads together and organized a coordinated raid on Nia's stream — the one scheduled for a collab with Menchi.
The regular viewers who'd already taken their seats in chat, waiting for the broadcast to start, were furious beyond measure.
Every kind of baseless rumor and personal attack aimed at Nia, plus wall-to-wall spam of flopped-over emotes as if they were staging a sit-in protest. No matter how you looked at it, their origins were crystal clear — and they were thoroughly poisoning the chat atmosphere before the stream had even begun. Anyone who'd been looking forward to a first collab couldn't help but be irritated.
Some of the Croquette Squad were even faking Parang-dan nicknames, pretending to be sensitive Blue Squad members just to pick fights. Nia's chat had become a battlefield in every sense of the word.
The one silver lining was that Nia's stream had its donation system disabled, so the Croquette Squad's malicious full-scale assault was confined to the chat window alone. If donations had been open the way they were on other streams — with TTS reading out messages alongside the donation amounts — the moment the broadcast went live, a tidal wave of disruption messages timed to the minimum donation threshold would have made streaming impossible.
It's a shame donations are closed, but this is still enough. She said she's only been streaming for about two months, right? This is not an atmosphere a beginner can handle.
So muttered a certain unemployed shut-in, one community site open on the side, diligently commanding the toxic Croquette Squad as he watched the chat devolve into real-time chaos.
Whether you could even declare winners and losers in a trolling war was anyone's guess — but he declared victory with absolute confidence. He simply could not imagine that a brand-new streamer barely two months in could endure an atmosphere that even multi-year veterans would struggle to weather.
This collab is doomed for sure!
The Croquette Squad's worst viewers wore triumphant expressions, as if they'd been cast as commanders in some war movie — the shameless look of people demanding to know why anyone had dared to ruffle their feathers in the first place.
Which raised an obvious question: why were people who claimed to be Menchi's fans so aggressively trying to sabotage a collab she'd finally scheduled after so long?
The answer was genuinely astonishing. They sincerely believed that getting close to a problematic streamer like Nia would have a serious negative impact on Menchi.
A simple viewer drop? That was fine. They could write that off as one of the eccentric bits Menchi occasionally pulled mid-stream and let it slide. But collabing with a fledgling streamer whose subscriber count was vastly lower than Menchi's — no matter how much of a rising star she was?
That was something the toxic Croquette Squad, whose entire sense of self-worth was staked on an 800,000-subscriber major streamer, could never tolerate.
We have to protect Menchi. Menchi shines brightest when she streams solo!
Of course, to any uninvolved third party, this was pure idiocy. Claiming to act for Menchi's sake while trashing a collab she had personally arranged was the equivalent of throwing filth in the face of the very person you claimed to protect. And it was all happening with zero regard for Menchi's own wishes. The only people who gained anything were the handful of toxic Croquette Squad members who genuinely believed they had defended their streamer.
"…Menchi-nim sure has it rough."
"Huh?"
"Nothing. How does it feel?"
"Th-the feel? Um…. Not the absolute best, but just about right?"
But no matter how much they thrashed and rampaged — Nia, triple- and quadruple-checking her stream setup, quickly lost interest in the chat situation. If the broadcast had already been live, she would have felt the need to actively crack down. But the second hand on the stream clock hadn't started moving yet. She felt bad for the regulars already seated and waiting, but right now, reducing potential on-stream trouble mattered more than suppressing the chat.
Outstanding entertainment could shut toxic viewers' mouths. But when technical problems piled on top of existing chaos, that was the exact stage those same toxic viewers thrived on.
"Great. Shall we get started, then? Ah — don't be too nervous. Just think of it as dropping by to play for a bit, and let's have fun."
"Y-yes! Let's have fun!"
"Let's have fun!"
As she spoke, Nia studied Menchi — still glancing restlessly this way and that — as objectively as she could. Her body language was restless and anxious, unable to stay still, swaying in place… but the eyes and the corners of her mouth that held her actual feelings carried the air of someone who already knew exactly what she needed to do.
So this was the true face of the Collab Goddess — the one who'd grown faster than anyone in the generation before Nia. That lethal charisma, the kind that still pulled nearly ten thousand viewers with nothing but casual chat and no external collabs, gave Nia the certainty that Menchi would not make a single mistake.
What? I thought she was nervous. But her eyes already look ready to go play.
Maybe it was contagious. The flicker of anxiety that had briefly settled over Nia from the chaotic chat melted away like snow under the sun.
"Noise. Please."
"N-Noise-nim! Please take care of us!"
"…Mm."
The moment she was certain there was nothing left to prepare, Nia tossed a verb-less request at Noise, who had been sitting at the laptop waiting only for her word. But even that completely vague phrasing was enough — Noise moved her hands as if she'd been waiting for exactly this, and without the slightest hesitation, clicked the Start Broadcast button.
With no separate moderation applied yet, the chat was just as chaotic as it had been moments before the stream went live. Nia's existing viewer pool and Menchi's viewer pool formed a Venn diagram with a breathtakingly empty intersection — so this result was only natural.
As the saying goes, an otaku's worst enemy is another otaku. Looking down on something and dismissing it outright was a far lower psychological hurdle than putting in the effort to understand it. Rejecting the unfamiliar was a phenomenon that transcended era and culture.
But just as gold never loses its value even when you cross an ocean and discover a new continent — there were certain immutable values that could leap clean over those psychological barriers. It could be a song. It could be a dance. And perhaps beauty itself was more than enough to belong among them.
On a vast stage assembled somehow with hundreds of thousands of CP's worth of resources for the stream — right at its center — Menchi and Nia appeared together, each dressed in something that looked stylishly put-together.
Tootle-ree.
Each of them cradling an unfamiliar instrument in their arms.