mikemessage

Mike-chan, i heard a few times in this last members only stream about your wish to talk with and maybe try to understand what's the point of view of you overseas unicorn fanbase
and why they feel so frustrated/disappointed right now.
I consider myself one of them and i hang out with many others online in multiple platforms.
Taking in account that they basically decided to just go silent and leave this time, including 2 of the top long-time donators, i feel that you may deserve some explanation about it and i may be qualified enough to try to summarize them for you.

Even as i feel kinda depressed and a bit betrayed right now, i still respect you, appreciate my time with you and love you so i'm going to do my best to write this in the most neutral way possible without insults or condescending language.
We had, as a part of the fanbase, some unfortunate cases of very intense idiots that couldn't express themselves and ended up insulting and overreacting and although none of them were me (i prefer to stay on the side) i sincerely and from my heart apologize for all of them.
I'm not thinking for now to reply back to any comment to this (nor i could really do it since it would be mess translating between different languages), so feel free to say whatever you want about it.

The thing i'm asking you if it's not too greedy for me to ask, it's to read this calmly, taking your time and trying to put yourself in our shoes. I also apologize for this text being way too damn overly long, but i'm writing in a bit of a whim and i'm a bit scared that trying to make it shorter would make it sound more rude when you put it throught DeepL machine translation.
First of all, generally we the overseas fanbase are in a bit of a pickle.

Many of us don't really understand japanese well enough to follow streams completely.
This is specially the case for twitcasts since they lack any translation, you speak quickly and change the topic often so even for the one of us with some japanese knowledge it eventually gets frustrating trying to keep up (this is a normal thing for any person studying a language).
Also for twitcasts since most of them are done guerilla style is easy for us to miss a lot of them in different time-zones.
If we come after the twitcast has finished since you don't leave the VOD (archive) up, as we respect your wishes to not reupload your content we basically have no way of ever knowing what did you say in them.
If we're just late with the twitcast still going the only way we could keep up is by listening from the start which would make us lose whatever you're saying in the moment.
Even if we listen to them, we miss a lot of the meaning what you say and that's particularly frustrating if it's some important topic in a member only twitcast.
In some platforms like 4chan they consider doing actual live-translation as leaking membership content (as you got mad over this in the past) and even more of a sin if it's done after the twitcast is done since that information could get into the hand of antis, so it's not done or really discouraged and even some of the most dedicated fans are left in the dark some of the times if they're not in some discord server.
So the twitcast experience for us is kinda frustrating and tiring to follow for us. I remember you wondering in the past why the overseas fanbase seemed to skip many twitcasts, this is why.

In the same way that it's pretty difficult for us to actually understand all the things you want to say, it's also very difficult for us to actually communicate to you whatever we're thinking about something you want to know our opinion of.
Trying to keep up and talk in a full speed japanese chat using the translator (and sometimes not even understanding well what you reply to it) is very daunting so we just give up on it.
Sorry to reveal this now but the vast majority of the time you're "consulting with the overseas audience" you're basically talking in japanese to your japanese audience that are going to reply to you with whatever information they heard in second-hand fashion; sometimes from 5chan antis pretending to be overseas viewers. Same as when you're asking for games to play or streaming ideas.
Very very rarely you pick up something from an overseas fan in that regard.
The summary to all of this is that there's is a huge language/communication barrier between us and you and that's part of the frustration.
Whenever some incident happens that causes a conflict between the two parts, we never feel we can really communicate with you and solve it satisfactorily.
We also feel that due to this huge language barrier you tend to misunderstand and overreact to our comments, not really getting our point of view, and we would prefer to not make you really angry even if we're mad at something that happened since we understand you're under lots of different sources of stress, you are regularly attacked by many different antis and have multiple mental conditions due to that experiences in the past.

With that out of the way, hoping you can understand us a bit more, let's get to main point of contention this time.
I think the main issue really could be a difference or misunderstanding of values. We the overseas fans think that a good relationship like the one we think we have with you are hold on trust and that trust only exist so far as people involved doesn't give signs of breaking it.
We love you deeply and you have shown us the same feeling to us so we take things like promises really seriously, not as something that could change over time like an opinion but something that shows us what we are comfortable with and what is our red line for things we're not comfortable with.
We value highly being genuine and straightforward, so we took to heart the many times you promised you would never collab with men and kept refusing all the people trying to push you in that direction.
Breaking this in what seemed to be an overnight decision to us felt like either a breach of trust or a lack of respect to the things we take seriously.
Apart from the fact that we're very uncomfortable with the collab situation, it's just hard for us to ever believe in you if you break our trust and change your convictions so quickly.
It's like we can't never know what you actually believe in as a person.
By the way, i heard you saying that since this is some tournament competition it doesn't really count as male collab. But we still see you spending potentially tens of hours playing APEX on voice chat with 3 seemingly random dudes. It feels like you're moving the goalposts.

We understand that this situation may feel sometimes very restrictive but for us in the other hand we don't really get why would you promise it so often if you weren't comfortable with it and we valued this promise higher because the effort to not do this (in comparison to many other female vtubers) meant a lot in our mind for your commitment to us.
We remember the accident of February 2022, how almost everyone put you to the side and made your life hell but you still keep pushing on and never backed up over the idea of not having intimate relationships with men. This bravery, this commitment to trying to be happy together is what we liked about you in that moment, what we have been supporting ever since and the reason we have been defending you over many antis and critics for the past years.
Furthermore, this is not the first time really you had done something similar in the past on a complete whim and we have been willing to forgive you over it when you apologized, but there's a moment for many when there's too many second chances.

Lastly, about APEX in particular, we have been following your new chapter in life for over a year and a half already and we have been starting to notice really weird things that are annoying or weirded us out by themselves regardless of male collabs.
For starters, this is not that popular of a game overseas and regardless of anything else like being in solo ranking some of us are really damn bored with it. We would really really prefer you playing anything else and this extends to most of the people watching you because you are getting some of your lowest viewed streams in comparison with any other stream whether it's in Twitch, Youtube or Twitcast.

By the way, the ones that seemed to cheer you on and encouraged you the most (to the point of coming to troll us to our platforms) to play APEX were the 5chan antis.
They seem to think for all of these reasons that you playing APEX is hilarious and they're happy to pair you with every possible men that you ever play APEX with and tell us about the supposed reputation in Japan of APEX as a "dating app".
They also like to remind us that in their words, despite you having enough time to do things like this apex tournament and all the other apex streams your promise ASMR stream never seems to come. And while it's perfectly understandable that your equipment may break and that you may not feel like it some times, it still kinda stings a bit considering the last one you did was like almost 2 years ago and it seems that it never will happen despite all the jokey ASMR twitcasts and all the times you were saying that everything was ready to do it.

Coming back to APEX, althrough there surely must be many other situations happening at the time, we noticed that your Nazuna channel starting to decline significantly in viewership the moment you started to do many APEX streams in a row.
In some of these streams you seemed to be in a really bad mood and sometimes a bit manic which made us feel a bit worried about you and it didn't felt at all like you were enjoying the game, more like you felt a compulsion to keep playing it.
Everytime you seemed to pick up APEX again it's like you couldn't put it down for over a month. You also, honestly, aren't that good or really improving that much despite playing so often; so we're kinda baffled why you keep playing it so insistently.
So this overnight decision over finally breaking officially the male collab ban just to play some random APEX tournament if anything else feels like, once again, you're choosing APEX over some of your loyal fans.