Dear Vice News and Ana Valens: We Already Knew About VTubers
About a week ago, one of Vice News’s contributors published an article entitled, “Your Mom and Dad Now Know What a VTuber Is Thanks to This Arrest. Maybe. Sorta.” For starters, I’m not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination, but it strikes me as a little slapdash to have an article title that long and that cagey. Secondly, I think it’s only fitting to inform Mister Valens and his employers that dads already know what a VTuber is, even the ones who might be considered ‘normies’. How can I say this?
Because I’m a dad, with children ranged in age from 21 (my oldest) to just turned 2 years of age (six kids total). At 43 years of age myself, I’m in that weird generational middle ground sometimes referred to as ‘Xennial’, though many sociologists have attempted to clarify that someone around my age, if they have older siblings who are firmly Gen X, tend to display attitudes, perceptions and tendencies more closely associated with that generation than with the Millenials. I would, for the most part, consider myself a ‘normie’ as well. I work a regular job, my wife and I own a fairly humble home in the suburbs south of the Twin Cities in Minnesota, I enjoy watching football and hockey and combat sports, I have no post-secondary education, and I am not a notable personality in much of any sphere.
Until a few years ago, I personally found most members of the Millenial cohort to be insufferable. The older they get, though, the more reasonable many of them seem. That’s all besides the point, however.
Valens and the folks at Vice seem to have broadly overlooked the fact that Xers, Xennials and older-and-middle-range cohort Millenials are those very same said Moms and Dads, and guess what? A pretty sizable number of us were already aware of what VTubers are, because a lot of us have been on YouTube since its inception and a little bit after. We are more than familiar with Twitch, with Kick, with various online video sharing and streaming platforms. Not only do we know of them due to our having coexisted with their introduction to the online space, but the folks who work for the companies that build, operate and maintain these platforms and programs, well, they are folks from our very own same said generational cohorts.
Mom and Dad made YouTube, and Myspace, and Facebook, and Twitch (which is owned and operated by Amazon), and Kick, etcetera. Mom and Dad run these platforms and services, you self-aggrandizing twats! And for the last decade or so, folks from Vice and Mr. Valens’s ideological worldview have been trying to turn those platforms and services into echo chambers where dissent from their perspectives on life and socio/geopolitics is not only frowned upon, but actively removed and banished.
Mr. Valens used the article seemingly as an excuse to reference his prior hit pieces aimed at one particular VTuber with whom he takes exception, known as Kirshe Verstahl. Kirshe describes herself frequently as ‘Just an anime fox womban’ ( I love how she emphasizes the non-existent ‘b’ in that word) and even goes so far as to insult her own intelligence playfully, an endearing character trait that goes far to her credit. Lord knows she needs the help, being a Bostonian….
GO SAWKS!
I’d love to see her avatar animated in a short piece cheering on the Red Socks at Fenway next to Peter Griffin. SOMEBODY GET ON MAKING THAT HAPPEN!
Anyway, it is likely around this point that one of Valens’ or Vice’s fans might possibly quirk an eyebrow at me and ask, “Does this Calkins-Treworgy character not realize that Ana Valens is a transwoman, and that he is using the wrong pronouns and honorific when saying ‘he’ and ‘Mr’?” To answer that question, yes, I’m aware that Valens claims to be a transwoman. However, I suspect Kirshe’s closer to the truth of the matter when she has posits the suspicion that what Mr. Valens actually is, is an autogynopheliac.
I haven’t got the patience or bandwidth as a barely functional midwit schizophrenic myself to launch into an exhaustive explanation of what that is. My recommendation, if you want more details about that condition, is to catch one of Kirshe’s livestreams on her Twitch, YouTube or Kick one of these days, and ask her chat or ‘Le Foxu’ herself that question. After her hyper-girlie laughter in the face of being posed this inquiry, she’ll be more than happy to explain not only that condition, but also to go over the Seventh Ring of Hell degeneracy of Valens himself, including that fellow’s history of publishing audio recordings wherein he describes his fantasy of interring ciswomen into ‘breeding camps’ for himself and his fellow transwomen/girls to, quote, “pound that cisgirl pussy” to the point where the women need to be “swapped out”.
I just typed that, and I feel like I need to dip myself in a vat of holy water….
If that leaves any ambiguity, allow me to clarify: yes, I am being consciously insulting toward Ana Valens. I judge him to be a creep, a cretin, and a certifiable liar. He attempted to torpedo a competing VTuber in Kirshe, and for no reason I can perceive of outside of a desire to eliminate any competition who doesn’t ideologically march in lockstep with Valens and his ilk. He claims he was run off the Internet by a harassment campaign, yet fails to mention or acknowledge that Ms Vershtahl actually fled her domicile in order to ensure her own safety thanks to the threats and intimidation leveled at her by Valens’s comrades.
Anyhow, to Vice News and to their resident creep, Moms and Dads didn’t need the read or hear about the arrest of a complete psychotic who inscribed the name of a popular VTuber to find out about the phenomenon. We already knew about them. However, what we didn’t know about previously was the degree of degeneracy and lacking in journalistic ethics that you and yours engage in. I suppose we should say ‘thanks’ for giving us a peek at that.