Seeing Mei-chan This Excited Makes Me Happy Too
Suzuha — The member whose outside and inside match the most, so you can't help but like her.
Yukari — If I'm dating a StarsFlow member, it's Izumi. No question.
Ayaka — Cute girls are treasures of humanity. Therefore, Izumi is a treasure of humanity.
Nekoto — If this were a game, she'd be the heroine I routed first. No contest.
I went back through everything the second generation has said about Izumi after hearing Nekoto on yesterday's Nekoto–Izumi collab, and seriously — what even is this girl, walking around with everybody spellbound?
Demonic Woman isn't a meme. It's real.
Stories about the communication-disorder kid's past life still crop up now and then, but it's already all but confirmed there isn't one.
Even so, people figure there's no way she had zero community presence, so the digging continues — and so far, nothing solid has turned up at all.
Which is why there's a little bit of a take going around that all the hype from the people around her is just a concept, and she's actually an ordinary red pill.
Me, though — no matter how I look at it, everything the members say sounds sincere. I think the blue pill is real.
"Mmm..."
Figures. Of course I thought it would, too. Lately, though, I'd also landed on something closer to just letting it be.
A VTuber is a job that needs attention. Being so afraid of that attention that I threw away a whole kind of stream was as good as nonsense.
That was the last of it. I turned the phone off and stared at the ceiling.
I'd said it on stream more than once: I like to draw. Drawing settles me, enough that when something hard comes along, picking up a pen is simply part of the routine. Wanting a drawing stream was only natural.
"Hoo..."
I'll be found out soon. Probably the moment I start, and there won't be anything I can do about it. That was exactly why I'd hated the idea at first, piling up excuse after excuse to keep putting the stream off. But it was all right now. Even if something did go wrong, I had peers around me I could lean on. And anyway — there wasn't even anything here that could go wrong in the first place!
"Haa..."
Tablet and everything else a drawing stream needed, all set. I let out a quiet breath. The moment I framed it as starting something new, a little tension came creeping in, and there was nothing to be done about that. My skill, at least, I trusted without question, and I'd already decided what I was going to draw today. Before I knew it, it was ten seconds to five in the afternoon. I counted, easing my breath out slow, and the instant the clock on the computer pointed at five on the dot—
"Konzumi...! I-I'm the atmosphere maker, Izumi..."
I started the stream the way I always did.
"O-oh, today, like I said ahead of time on Nater, it's a drawing stream."
The broadcast screen was already showing the default UI of Photo Studio, the program I used to draw.
"Th-the reason I put it off? Umm, it's just a p-personal thing..."
It was a story that would be fine if it got out. Even so, I didn't want to say it myself. I had no intention of showing off, and it would still come out sounding like a brag. If they wanted to find it, they could find it on their own.
"Wh-what I'm drawing today is... Uncle's t-true heroine, Charlotte."
"...No matter what happens, Uncle's true heroine is Charlotte! Luna and Serena can be perfectly happy as subs."
"Just because someone's a sub heroine doesn't mean you can erase her character arc entirely. I'm a supporter of the true heroine, Charlotte, so I'm not going to get angry over something that small."
Charlotte being Uncle's true heroine was as obvious as the fact that I was a pretty girl. Once that was settled, I could forgive a sub heroine or two. I was broad-minded.
"Anyway, what I'm drawing today is Charlotte praying."
Charlotte's first appearance in Uncle is the slave-market episode. She sits there with eyes like someone who has given up on everything, Satoru sees her and saves her, and that is where the two of them begin. After incident upon incident, Charlotte comes to like Uncle Satoru, and the scene where she realizes that feeling had been pure emotion itself.
Charlotte uses healing magic in the story, and because of that the epithet she earns as the work goes on is the Praying Saint.
"Obviously the Blue Flame episode! That last scene, where she won't stop praying even while she's crying, just to save Uncle Satoru as he's dying — I really think that's the greatest scene in the whole series."
The person she loves is dying in front of her. Everyone else has already given up, saying it's over, and she never does — eyes closed, nothing but tears, the prayer going on. Who could possibly dislike that? The way the story draws Charlotte's inner conflict, the wish to open her eyes that very instant and burn her beloved's last moments into them, set against the refusal to give up until the very end, was genuinely insane. God exists, and right now He is serializing Uncle....
"...Sh-shut up."
I left the chatter behind and slowly set the tablet pen in motion. The latest display tablet Aunt Sia had given me — how was I supposed to put it? Even the feel of moving the pen was different. Smoother. Cleaner. It was my first drawing stream, so I was still a little nervous, but that tension seemed to be what let my hand move all the more smoothly.
A good drawing was going to come of this. That was what I thought.