HOT TAKE: A lot of the issues in streamer culture are due to people who have made being online the totality of how they live their life… Usually starting at a young age… And a lot of it is “psuedo adults”, rejecting the idea of growing up and recapturing a childhood due to trauma of some kind. Peter Pan syndrome comes up a lot because Peter Pan was always a metaphor for rejecting adulthood and reality. The reason the adults are all pirates, is an allegory. Adults “only care about money” and don’t have fun anymore. The desire to be a “lost boy” is the embrace of eternal summers, endless fun and running away from responsibility and a rejection of adulthood and the end of fun and innocence. All this to say is that you can look at it through this lens and see that the sad reality is a lot of the problems in the community come from not acting as a reasonable adult would, and acting juvenile in the manner a high schooler or middle schooler would. And the average online persona is to act in that manner and largely to appeal to a child or teenage audience or young adult audience (high school to college age). With the majority starting their viewership and hero worship of streamers in their teenage years… Meanwhile the streamers they watch, often started streaming as teenagers or young adults but are now in their 20s-30s… Which often means the streamers themselves are captured by an audience that is younger and less mature than them… And also continues to attract a younger audience cohort even as time goes by, as people age into content and platforms their older counterparts made popular. As time goes on the streamer has a choice to either move on to content and an online persona that would match their age (unappealing option as this is generally less popular or they would lose a lot of the audience they built) or fight to stay youthful and relevant doing the same content they have always done, which might at that point have become a real part of their personality and not a persona they portray for fans. The performance becomes their identity and not just a part of their life, but their life. They forget or never discover how to be anything else (reference Hook where Peter Banning is 40 and believes he’s once again Peter Pan, a child who doesn’t want to grow up). *I’m not trying to generalize all streamers but this is a meta commentary on the prevailing culture among the largest streamers and their viewers and why all the drama and trauma happens. The point is, when you have a cohort of adults that act as overgrown children, for the sake of entertaining both overgrown children and actual children… It means everything is typically handled in the worst way possible. Serious situations that should involve authorities are either swept under the rug for fear of people losing popularity and money, instead of confronted and treated seriously with accountability and justice being the most important thing to happen. Much like children who don’t want to tell the adults or admit to doing something wrong, to avoid anyone getting in trouble and trying to handle it themselves. 🤦🏾‍♂️ Or toxic and abusive relationships continuing to not lose friends or be unpopular or make others uncomfortable… 🤦🏾‍♂️ Then there is also the prevalence of situationships and private relationships where false availability is a means of extracting a parasocial relationship with fans… again a very high school, or juvenile approach for the sake of retaining attention. 🤦🏾‍♂️ It seems that if streamers did in fact act their age, that the entire meta among the largest streamers would collapse due to viewer disinterest. The drama and juvenile delinquency and all the collateral damage is a feature… not a bug. It’s this generations Jerry Springer and Soap Operas.