‘Needy Streamer Overload’, The Male Gaze, and Me

Content warning: this article mentions suicide, self-harm, and drug use.

It’s the fall of 2021. I, a 21-year-old girl, browse my anime girl–ridden YouTube homepage looking for new music. An unexpectedly cute music video thumbnail strikes my retinas, depicting a blonde-haired anime girl with DNA-shaped pink-and-blue pigtails. The artwork’s color palette, made up of pastel blues, pinks, and purples, reminds me of Sailor Moon, my first exposure to anime. As I click the video, eurobeat percussion bursts from my speakers, flooding my brain until the DNA-pigtailed girl begins to speak.

“A ray of light, illuminating the chaotic internet of today, bringing happiness to the otaku floating in this electronic sea,” she states. “The Internet Angel has descended.”

As the blaring eurobeat continues, the self-proclaimed Internet Angel dances in a simple yet hypnotic swaying motion while brightly-colored lyrics and emoticons flood the screen. I’m utterly entranced — almost overstimulated.

“Leave your family, leave your relationships, get into a dark room and bathe in the pale light,” she sings, begging the viewer to devote their time only to the Internet, to her. By the end of the video, the Internet Angel feels burned into my retinas, dancing alongside every thought that enters my brain. This is my introduction to the video game Needy Streamer Overload.

Made by Japanese developer Xemono and released overseas in 2022, Needy Streamer Overload is heavily inspired by denpa horror games, denpa being a broad term that describes a sort of asociality or disconnect from reality. Historically speaking, denpa games are visual novels, often of the erotic variety, and carry modern day anime’s typical style of misogyny, in which women are at the center of narratives but also frequently oversexualized and fetishized (erotic Visual Novels in particular have a habit of doing this to children). Since denpa games include a horror angle, female characters with any sort of neurodivergence, stated or implied, are particularly fetishized. I am not disavowing the genre — some of my all-time favorite pieces of media can be classified as denpa horror. It is, however, important to acknowledge the misogynistic tropes embedded within otaku culture. The term “otaku” itself can be generalized simply as an “anime fan,” but in practice, the term carries a pejorative weight when used to describe someone with an unhealthy obsession with anime and manga. A common image of an otaku is a grown man with an office job who spends his evenings fawning over an anime character, more often than not one that’s under eighteen. You may have heard of the man who married fictional pop star Hatsune Miku; I think it’s safe to assign the term “otaku” to someone like him.

On the surface, Needy Streamer Overload checked the box for standard skeezy otaku tropes: it has a cutesy female main character who speaks in an upbeat, high-pitched voice, donning a school uniform–-style outfit. However, this Internet Angel felt different to me; the lyrics of her song were provocative, seemingly poking fun at the audience she sought to attract.

“It is my mission to heal the loneliness of all nerds,” she sings. “Get back in the basement! KYS!” From what I could tell, the game had an aura of self-awareness about its roots in pervy otaku culture and sought to break them — the game’s plot is about the damage the internet causes her, after all. I was incredibly eager to begin.

The game starts on an old-school, pink and blue Windows 95-esque desktop. There is a sense, for a brief moment, that this will be a solitary experience. I feel as though I’m navigating my own personal computer gifted to me by the game itself. Yet as I boot up this in-game “computer,” three tabs are forcibly opened, immediately stealing my sense of control. First, a messaging app — also adorably pink — buzzes: it’s an anonymous message asking me to log in to a stream account. Next, a window showing a webcam feed pops up. A girl sits in her pastel pink bedroom. Her curtains are donned with heart-shaped balloons and decals, and a shelf behind her is flooded with cat plushies and magical-girl anime posters that remind me of Cardcaptor Sakura. The girl dons a jirai-kei style outfit, her chic leather suspenders clashing yet fashionable, with a cutesy white collar that resembles an angel’s wings. Her black hair is up neatly in pigtails, a few stray hairs giving her a fashionably disheveled look. She stares off to the side of the room, lacking any potent emotion. As I look at her, I’m unsure whether I’m supposed to be her or be watching her.

Then, a task manager tab opens. Rather than showing computer activity like a standard task manager would, this tab monitors the status of the girl we see sitting before us. I can see her follower count, stress level, affection level, and “mental darkness” level. Her goal? Reach a million followers in a month, becoming a successful streamer. In her own typed words,

“the internet is truly the festering cesspool of hell born from modern society, but even so, i have nowhere else to turn to. cuz i have trouble getting out of bed in the morning! i dont want to go out! i dont want to get a proper job! adults piss me off! and im stupid! but i still want everyone to fawn over me!”

As I read this message, something about her all-lowercase texting style, overuse of exclamation marks, and contempt for the world displayed in such silly words instantly makes me feel attached to this character. She feels like an online friend I could have made at some point, someone who might take too many Buzzfeed personality quizzes, who hides her struggles behind online sarcasm and memespeak. Under all her fluffed-up typing, she often speaks about difficulty getting out of bed, fear of leaving the house and interacting with others, and an inability to take care of herself, all clear indications of her struggle with her mental health. Perhaps it’s just projection, but something about her feels real, written with care by someone who also spends too much time online. She’ll describe her drive to get subscribers with texts like “need to grind… need to grind… need to grind…” These upbeat and unserious messages hearken to how I talk to my own friends online. Ridiculous as it may seem, I find myself able to identify with the girl, wanting to help uplift her from her state of depression.

Her name is Ame, and she has created a streamer persona named “KAngel,” which she inhabits online so as not to reveal her true identity to the world. She sends me a thank-you text addressed to “P-chan.” I think nothing of this, as this term is commonly used in Japanese idol franchises to denote someone who manages an idol and/or performer. Oh, so I’m her producer? I begin to fall in love with the idea of being Ame’s manager, helping her make the right decisions to succeed as KAngel yet giving her the space she needs to tend to her mental health. After all, even though I barely know this fictional character, I’m inclined to relate to her — her love of cute things, her mixed feelings on and perpetual obsession with the Internet, her struggle with her mental health. I’m brimming with a sense of hope that I can better understand myself and my relationship to the Internet through this anime girl’s story.

Not even five minutes pass before my gut feeling starts to shift. As Ame continues to text me, I realize that I am not only playing as her manager, but also as her romantic partner.

“as you know, im completely useless on my own, so you need to tell me what to do every day!” she says, and the cheeky way in which she degrades herself, which was previously so relatable, is now accompanied by an uncomfortable power dynamic. There’s a sour taste in my mouth as I am thrust into the backseat of what I previously believed to be my own solitary gaming experience. I feel as though I’ve become player two, as though I’ve fallen outside of the game’s target audience — suddenly I’m playing a dating simulator, and I feel like a sleazy male otaku. Here I was thinking that this game was self-aware of its connection to otaku culture and ready to break those tropes and become something better, but now I sit here uncomfortably, forced to watch Ame flirt with me. I skim through the awkward dialogue, trying to will it out of existence.

“i promise you,” she says in another text, “ill become the best streamer… coz if not, i…think i’ll just break and fall apart.” It’s rare that the player is given the chance to choose a written-out response to what Ame says, as I can usually only reply with emoticons. In this moment, the game only offers me one possible response, one I must choose: “Or I could break you myself.”

Dumbfounded, all I can do is stare at my screen as this volatile response stares back at me, desperate to be chosen. I don’t want to say this to Ame. Maybe if I wait, another option will appear? I twiddle my thumbs while waiting for nothing, realizing that the game wants me to be a sleazy boyfriend instead of a caring peer. My hands feel sticky, and for a moment, I find myself wanting to quit the game I’ve hardly started. But I am holding onto my initial hope, this feeling that I can undo the pain I am forced to cause as P-chan. I wait and wait, and of course, no other option presents itself to me. I must threaten to break Ame if I want to continue to experience her story. I wince as I select the abusive response.

“ahaha. yeah, you could.”

Ame’s message drips with a palpable discomfort. I begin to feel as though my experience in this game is controlled by an ill-intentioned man rather than my own sympathetic choices. Ame is not in control, and I now realize I’m not in control either. In order to succeed, we are coerced by what the men watching want to see. Ame, of course, must pay mind to her boyfriend and primarily male audience’s desires. Meanwhile, I feel as though I am not accounted for in the game’s target audience — that I must shift my decision-making to align with that of the unsavory otaku variety.

The dynamic between Ame and her online persona, KAngel, is fascinating and tragically realistic: they are the same person, yes, but the way Ame attracts her audience as KAngel illuminates icky truths about how female influencers are forced to conform to the male gaze in online spaces. Ame’s unspoken strategy in creating KAngel is clearly to attract a male otaku fanbase; KAngel’s outfit is a sailor-style school uniform, and her on-camera personality is vtuber-esque. These elements pander to an audience that fetishizes young girls, innocence, and “purity.” We know KAngel is not her authentic self; on her private Twitter account, Ame refers to her audience as “maleoids” and calls them stupid. She speaks with bluntness and sarcasm, her word choice often expressing her contempt about the world. Meanwhile, KAngel uses her Twitter to post cute, smiley selfies and ask her audience about their days. She speaks to them as though she is naive and childish, frequently using baby-speak such as “uwu,” while acting as a doting mother whose self-stated purpose is to “love and heal all nerds on the Internet.” Her titillated audience must find her cute, innocent, and Mommy all at the same time.

Each day that KAngel streams, P-chan gets to decide what she does on stream: what she talks about, what games she plays, or what zany activity she’ll try. Each stream idea lists the potential changes made to Ame’s stats — for example, a stream where KAngel talks about her favorite TV show will keep her stress relatively low, but her viewers will not increase, implying the activity is too “boring” for large-form growth. These more innocuous and simple streams, such as talking about interests or gaming, will not get Ame anywhere close to reaching the goal of one million followers in a month. My best bet in raising KAngel’s follower count to meet her goal is by degrading Ame — quite literally “breaking her myself,” as the start of the game predicted. Lewd ASMR, “accidentally” having her uniform rip open on camera, having her go live while mentally unstable and under the influence of drugs, and descending into ridiculous conspiracy theories are events that will make KAngel’s follow count skyrocket, but if I choose to make her delve too far into any of these routes, her mental darkness will become inconsolable and she will commit suicide, forcing the game’s premature end.

Each stream has a harsher effect on Ame’s mental health. Do I make her livestream herself riding an exercise ball to arouse a lust-driven misogynistic audience so that her follower count multiplies by five? Or do I let her talk about her fashion interests, sacrificing any sort of channel growth but keeping her stress at bay? With only so many days to reach a million followers, I often find myself feeling forced to make her degrade herself on stream. Each time, the audience is thrilled, and Ame tweets on her private account about how she’s proud of her success.

For a moment, I feel she’s not hurt by what I’ve forced her to do. I expect her to endure and move forward. She goes to sleep and I look forward to a successful next day, yet once the next day begins, she texts me about her lack of will to live, begs me to tell her I love her. In some cases, the game forces me to help her engage in self-harm by making me cut her wrists, or makes me watch her take drugs outside of my control and self-sabotage by going live while high. In these few moments where Ame exercises her own autonomy, she is using it to once again relinquish it, giving up control through unhealthy outlets. I’m helpless, barely even a backseat driver as I watch Ame ruin her life. I can only take so much of the game at a time before I feel like I need to get up and take a shower, cleansing myself of the misogynist’s mindset I was just forced to inhabit.

At the start of the game, Ame says she is grateful that she was “born cute” so that she doesn’t have to get a real job and instead can be fawned over, yet this narrative is quickly contradicted before our eyes. Ame is fawned over as KAngel, yes, but there is a big asterisk when it comes to said fawning: if she reveals she is not single, her audience will feel cucked and abandon her. If she expresses her true thoughts and talks about her mental health to her audience rather than just on her private twitter or to me via text, she will be seen as a public spectacle. She is expected to be innocently sensual, yet cannot be overtly sexual — the moment she crosses that barrier, her fans will become repulsed and her profile will be taken down. However, she will not grow as a streamer if she does not at the very least make reference to her followers’ lewd desires. With each stream or post, we can see endless replies sexualizing her, threatening to reveal her identity, or speculating on her personal life.

The worst part of it all is that as the player, I am made to feel like I’m feeding into the same seedy otaku culture I imagined the game would critique. That I’m complicit. Fascinatingly, the game’s critique of otaku culture comes in the form of making you torture your girlfriend, and I fear that this will not have the effect it should in making misogynistic otakus self-aware of their behavior. While looking into discussion about Ame on Reddit, I found one commenter attributing borderline personality disorder to the character. But rather than express sympathy at the way she is treated in-game in regards to her disorder, they follow up with: “I describe dating a girl with BPD as going to the affection casino. Sometimes you go and get absolutely nothing. Other times, you hit the jackpot. The inconsistency and unpredictability make girls like that literally addictive.” My hands clench into tight, sweaty fists as I read this, as I watch Ame’s struggles reduced to nothing but fetishistic charm points. I want to love Ame, to free her of this birdcage of a narrative, but I am ultimately unable to fix the narrative from its roots in male-gazey otaku culture.

P-chan seems to delight at his girlfriend’s demise. Even in playthroughs where I didn’t force Ame to do NSFW lewd acts in front of a camera, she stresses about her lack of growth. Even if I do nothing but raise her affection until it reaches its full potential of one-hundred “affection points,” it becomes clear how unfamiliar the feeling of affection is to her, and she begins to writhe, a tab repeating “I Love You” over and over again until the game ends and a tab displays the text, “She couldn't handle the overdose of love.” Ame cannot know true joy in the life she has chosen for herself: there is no eternal happiness, love, or safety as a self-proclaimed “internet angel.” I want to talk to her about her struggles, to help her make friends her own age or get a hobby, but when she makes any declarations of emotion, I can only respond with silly emoticons. Despite being her partner, I am ultimately forced to impose on her the same harm that society does. My heart aches as I continue to watch.

I speak critically of Needy Streamer Overload, but it’s not like I dislike the game — I was just shocked to find it so entrenched in this male-gazey perspective. I feel it did not dig deep enough to make a more P-chan-like player reflect on their actions — at the end of the day, Ame is still extremely sexualized, turned into an internet “waifu” within the fan culture surrounding the game. Even if the game’s mission was to display how this community harms women, it revels a bit too much in the “harming women” aspect. Much of the initial discussion I saw regarding Needy Streamer Overload addressed its representation of mental health issues, something that excited me at first glance. I wanted to see something subversive, something overtly critical of the male otaku audience it typically attracts. However, much of what the gameplay has to offer is merely a window to view Ame’s suffering rather than something that has meaningful dialogues surrounding it.

There is one moment that fulfills this desire for me. One of the game’s 27 endings reveals a shocking truth about P-chan, who I initially assumed to be Ame’s basement-dwelling boyfriend. After obtaining all other possible game endings, a secret game file becomes available called “Data 0,” and within this file, Ame does everything all by herself. I can no longer choose what she does throughout the day, instead having to sit back and watch as she streams and succeeds in hyper-speed. A message comes through saying “so i dont need you after all…” and KAngel hits one million followers in a flash. As the tabs begin to close, a .txt file labeled “secret” opens in which Ame describes P-chan as a constructed character whom she will “make better” next time. P-chan is not real, but an imaginary producer and partner Ame has invented to keep herself motivated.

As a fictional character, P-chan becomes more interesting. Ame herself has imposed the ill-intended gaze of her otaku audience onto a personality she crafted to control herself. We can wholly see how the misogynistic norms of online spaces dominate her life as a streamer, how she has developed coping mechanisms to keep pushing through them. Notably, even without P-chan, she still employs otaku-pandering techniques to succeed. However, she at least expresses some more individual autonomy as Ame without P-chan’s looming judgment clouding her desires.

“i realized that this way is way better. theres a side of myself that i dont know yet and i want to get to know her better,” Ame types to herself. Though I still see her forced to partake in this otaku hellscape of an online world, I sigh in relief that I am at least free from the curse of being P-chan. I am relieved to see Ame expressing her own individuality, her desires to know herself better. As if she’s real, I find myself hoping she is able to find a path outside of streaming to find happiness, to truly break free of this dangerous internet.