Confession: I have never been into livestreaming. This always felt like a form of content that was for younger people. Also, something about the group chat distracted me too much.

But recently, I’ve been really obsessing over Ironmouse. She is a VTuber (animated livestreamer) who plays videogames and does live reactions. She’s also friends with CDawgVA otherwise known as Connor who makes a lot of livestreaming content and videos about Japan. He’s also known for the Trashtaste podcast.

My opinion of Streamers before him wasn’t that great. Usually, I only heard about them if there was some sort of scandal going on. But getting into Ironmouses lives (and Connor’s by default), I’ve been watching more livestreams.

One thing that consistently comes up is that they do a lot of livestreams for Charity. Ironmouse in particular focuses on raising money for plasma charities because of her health. It’s one of the reasons she does VTubing as well.

The thing that I’ve learned is that there are a lot of livestreamers, it doesn’t matter how big, that do things specifically for charities. Which proves that even if you are a celebrity, there are ways to be active without having to be present in say, protests. Or making baseless posts that don’t actually do anything.

I’ve also recently seen people like Olivia Rodrigo and Renee Rap do things like have proceeds from their albums or concerts go to places like Doctor’s Without Borders or Pedro Pascal who has links to different charities in his link tree.

Or Christian Bale who randomly decided to make homes for orphans.

Which shows that there are ways to show that you care about things going on no matter how big your platform is.

I bring this up to say that I want to see less brand deals from celebrities and more of them being involved with things that are actually important to people. There’s money there to fund things like libraries or parks or getting rid of people’s debt.

By the nature of their work, it won’t change their standing. In fact, I bet people could actually make raising money work for them too (not in scam way just in making people like them more).

Livestreamer’s with small followers trying to raise money for charity really proves that.

I’ve also learned that SZA donates a lot to TAZO Tree Crops and is a mental health advocate which automatically makes me like her more.

If you are going to be part of the culture, I want to have a reason to say, “Yeah, I’m a fan,” beyond just liking the persons music (although that’s still fine too). I want to know that if I spend money on a thing, at least it’s not going to someone who is completely apathetic.

But we are living in a world that is increasingly aware of how economics makes the world function so where our money goes matters. Which means I want to see less of people doing things like, spending ungodly amounts of money on stuff that doesn’t matter, and trying to make the hellscape we’re in better.

With love,

Diana Crescent