Yuki Nagamo Gets Cancelled

"But what am I gonna do next Friday, though?" asked Emma, in the same tone in which a five year old might ask why they had to eat the mashed swede and carrots again.

Her boyfriend, Steve, sighed heavily. Mild disappointment is the fate in life of all men named Steve, as is being someone's boyfriend. For the particularly unfortunate Steves, the two are connected.

"I dunno, Emma - maybe you should just take the evening off. You know, relax a bit. We could watch Netflix or something." He tried to make that option sound as alluring as possible, but didn't entirely succeed. A Steve has his limits and is usually only too painfully aware of them.

Emma put down the notebook she had been furiously scribbling in and sat up on the living room sofa (beige, from Ikea). She looked over at Steve, who was sitting in a chair (brown, uncomfortable, also from Ikea and named, I kid you not, "Gerontius").

"Stop it, Steve! I'm not going to take an evening off streaming! You may not think much of it, but I've got an audience out there and they expect something from me! My streams are part of their lives! I can't just let them down like that!"

Steve sighed again. Since Emma launched her YouTube career six months ago, they had had a number of conversations of this kind and all of them seemed to end in exactly the same way.

"But you've been working so hard lately and you deserve some time off. You never stop. You're locked in the bedroom every evening with a rig on your head and body posing as a Japanese cartoon pigeon girl for the benefit of a few hundred weirdos. You don't know who they are - they could be on early release from jail or be moderators on Reddit or something. And it's not like there aren't a thousand other V-tubers and a million other streamers they could watch instead..."

Now Emma put her notebook on the arm of the sofa and stood up.

"We are not having this argument again, Steve!" she announced, firmly. "Firstly, Yuki Nagamo is a collared dove, not a bloody pigeon! Secondly, the reason I need to stream is exactly because there's a thousand other V-tubers out there. They're called "my competitors"! Princess Lady Miss Madam streams on a Friday!"

The online names of the many V-tubers Emma watched or had even worked with all blurred into one for Steve. "Is she the one your Dad calls "the fallen Madonna with the big boobies"?" he asked.

"Yeah, that's her," replied Emma, bitterly. "Look, I know my audience - one look at those big anime boobs and I've lost them forever! And I can't let that talentless e-girl win! Yuki Nagamo stands for something, you know - grace, class, refinement..."

"...Accepting money from anonymous guys on the internet," Steve muttered, rolling his eyes.

"Oi, I heard that!" snapped Emma. "I've never noticed you turn down anything I bought with that money! Perhaps if you got a job that paid better, I wouldn't be under so much pressure to make it..."

"OK, we're definitely not having that argument again," cut in Steve. "What you bring in barely covers the groceries once a month! You might not think much of computer repair, but the truth is you're still happily living off it!"

"Oh, you're impossible. I'm going to work in the bedroom!" Emma glared at Steve and stalked out of the living room, notebook clutched to her bosom, the Friday slot in her hastily scribbled schedule for next week still unfilled.

It had been a hot summer and the small room was stifling, even after sunset and with the benefit of a deafeningly noisy fan (the kind that blows air, not one of Emma's audience who'd somehow broken in). Emma manoeuvred past her tiny desk. It was piled high with equipment. Monitors, speakers, keyboards, the various parts of her V-tubing rig, a mic that she had a tendency to hit her head on both accidentally and, once she found that her viewers seemed to find this an endless source of amusement, deliberately. She had to admit that, for all he was being difficult just now, she would never have put together all the kit she needed without Steve's help.