They're So Easy, These Otaku Who Watch VTubers!
With White Day over, every event at school had come to an end. Only one thing remained: spring break, the last stretch before I became a second-year.
It felt strangely unreal that a whole year had already passed since I entered high school. Of every school life I'd lived, this one seemed to have flown by the fastest, and the reason was obvious. I'd joined Stars Flow and started working as a VTuber.
Looking back, up until summer break—before the VTuber work had properly begun—my days had been exactly the same as always. But once I started streaming, talking with the members and the Iztomo, I changed, little by little. If I had to put a word to it, growth would do.
So even when spring break ended, second year began, and new connections came my way, I would no longer tremble with fear.
Who am I?
Kayano Mina. An owner-VTuber with 182,000 subscribers, who cleared both Arcana Shooter: Purgatory and ST on attitude alone.
Come at me, new classmates of second year. The me who has grown does not fear you...!
"Then I'll see you all in two weeks!"
I wanted to say that. But at our high school the class you start in as a first-year carries all the way through third year, so moving up a grade doesn't mean the class changes.
What a relief, not getting crushed under new relationships....
What? Wouldn't a new class mean I might actually make friends?
What kind of nonsense is that? Even if the class changed, there was no way everyone in it would be a stranger. A few would end up together anyway, and the rest would be filled in with new classmates. For me, that would be the worst of all—I'd have to start awkwardly rebuilding my place in the room from scratch. I wasn't close enough to lean on the classmates I'd already had, and I wouldn't know the new ones at all, so there'd be nothing I could do. Friendless as I was, I'd be quietly cut out of the class's web of relationships.
If I'd been isolated from the start, I could just go on the way I always did. Let it creep forward like that, though, and I'd be the only one in pain. Some social butterfly at the very top of the school caste would announce that a new class ought to bond, everyone should get together—and I, unable to join that gathering, would be left further and further out....
I had no desire to live through those rotten first-year events all over again.
How would I know? Couldn't it turn out different?
Not a chance. It had been like that all through middle school. Did anyone think I'd attempted a high-school debut for nothing?
But if the class never changed, I wouldn't have to suffer those pointless events a second time. I could just keep living alone, the way I always had.
How wonderful. My school is the best!
"S-so, um. There's something I've been wondering about...."
I'd never really sat down and thought about it before. But once spring break started and it hit me that I was becoming a second-year, the curiosity was more than I could stand.
"If I... if I graduate, what happens to my RP...?"
"N-no, not gr-graduation like that.... I mean graduating from h-high school."
I tried to explain, but chat had already turned into a scene of pure frenzy and was burning. I should have explained it properly from the start. In the VTuber industry, graduation is a word you must never casually drop in front of viewers, and forgetting that was my own fault.
Still, seeing the Iztomo cling to me like that... it felt kind of nice. But I couldn't move the conversation forward this way, so first I had to calm everyone down.
"E-everyone...! Th-that's not the graduation I mean...! I'm talking about h-high school...!"
"Yeah. I-I'm a second-year now.... Unless I get held back, I'll gr-graduate in two years...."
Honestly, this wasn't a topic I needed to bring up at all. It touched my RP directly, so some people might find it uncomfortable to hear. Which was why I'd turned the stream on as members-only in the first place.
"True. Y-you're right."
And just as they said, it really didn't matter all that much. In the VTuber world, an age that never moves is perfectly ordinary, isn't it? There are idol VTubers who've been eighteen for over four years, and ages with a decimal point in them are hardly rare. Above all, plenty of VTubers had run a high-school-student concept like mine, and not pointing this part out was an unspoken rule.
But I'd been curious about it in a corner of my heart ever since I was a viewer myself, and I couldn't hold it in.
"Then... m-maybe the setting is that from third year on, I just k-keep getting held back...."
And so I decided to grant myself a perfectly legitimate setting.
"...Y-yeah, that too."
To begin with, I'm fairly smart. Applying to a highly selective private high school hadn't been a stretch at all, and I'd just scored quite well on the third-term exams. Someone like me, held back over and over from third year on? Now that I thought about it, that was weird. More than anything, my lore is that the Water Avatar attends high school on a whim, so graduating someday wouldn't be a problem in the slightest.
Once my thoughts reached that far, I decided it didn't matter either way.
"Hmm.... I'll th-think about this again later, then.... M-maybe I should read some Mycarong?"
Lately I'd been focused on playing ST, so I hadn't read Mycarong in quite a while. Chatting while reading them for the first time in ages would be fine.
"O-okay, I'll turn it back on in a little bit, so I'll see you then. Bye-bye, everyone...."
Since when had it been—the weight lifting off streams where I just talked like this?
Of course I still burned out and grew tired in an instant once the chatting started. But it was no longer so frightening that I wanted to avoid it entirely, the way I once had. That was surely proud proof that I had grown.
In other words—
—a Mycarong like this, I could breeze right past.
"S-signing a marriage registration? I'm an a-active JK—a high school girl, right now—so if some otaku old man like you pulls that, it's a c-crime.... So give it up."
"No, no. It a-absolutely is a problem...? A-age matters more than you'd think...."
Marrying a man, of all things. No matter how I turned it over, that was impossible, wasn't it? The Earth would end long before something like that ever happened. No—even if the Earth did end, it would still be impossible.
"O-okay, then, n-next...."
"A-as if!"
"I-I'm absolutely not doing it."
If someone asked me to name the worst game of my life, past life included, I could pick Dawn Never Breaks first without a second's hesitation. That isn't a game. It's an instrument of torture.
"I-if my subscribers hit five hundred billion, I'll th-think about it...."
"If you want to m-make me play that game, that's the level of r-resolve you need...."
Of course, meeting the Iztomo's needs mattered. But I had the right to choose, too. And the day I chose that game of my own free will would never come.
Even so, chat was still filling with messages asking whether I couldn't just play it one more time. To the Iztomo—so many of them in the abuse faction—Dawn was a tool that could make me cry, and they could never let it go.
Brushing it off lightly would have worked in a moment like this, but that would only leave an ember that might flare back to life someday. Now that I'd grown skilled at streaming, I knew a far better method. All I had to do was use Dawn as a pretext and toss them a new topic. One the Iztomo would die of happiness over.
"Oh, right. Talking about th-that game reminded me.... Back then I did an offline collab with K-Koga, remember? B-because of that, Koga ended up knowing our h-home address. And recently, on White Day, I got h-home and Koga was w-waiting for me out front."
Success.
The thought lifted the corners of my mouth on their own, but I held the smile back as best I could and went on.
"No. On V-Valentine's we didn't give each other anything. But I told you I got f-friendship chocolate at school, right? Because of that, I-I made macarons myself, and she found out, came to our house, and t-took them."
Originally I'd meant to save this story for this weekend's Shiroki no Umi collab. I never thought I'd end up spending it here.
"A-and I got homemade brownies from Koga...."
"They were r-really good. Koga's girl power is p-pretty high, you know.... My macarons were a t-total mess. Hehe...."
But thanks to that, my plan had succeeded perfectly. Every mention of Dawn had vanished from chat.
"Even so, I never thought she'd come all the way to my h-house. Doesn't Koga l-like me a little too much...?"
Viewers who watch VTubers are, by and large, otaku who love yuri fanservice. Of course they know the two of us aren't sincere—that it's business—and yet the moment an episode like this appears, they come running, delighted. Homemade cookies gifted back and forth, no less. A story soaked in high girl power, so it would land even better with them.
Because I used to be exactly the same.
How easy you are, otaku!