Original by beanytuesday
, used with permission
, used with permission "Did you catch that, Dan Nation? That was live, right? That was PREMIUM DAN CONTENT! Only available with the man with the plan — DAN, BABY! Looks like we've got an ad break coming up. So stay tuned for more exclusive DAN CONTENT!"
— Dan (after killing his mother in self-defense), Look Outside
Mainstream media has never been kind to the biggest contemporary figures in entertainment. Writers are portrayed as destitute and pretentious, musicians as self-obsessed drug addicts, and film directors as fascist tyrants. In the latter half of The New '10s, when the viewing public fell in love with a new kind of entertainer, no exception was made. Meet the unholy spawn of the Smarmy Host and the Bad Influencer: the streamer.
Livestreaming is different from most other forms of media in a few significant ways, the most important being that the streamer is constantly engaged with the audience through their chat, which can give them feedback. Because of this, fictional streamers are portrayed as desperate, inauthentic people, constantly putting on a performance for their chat, polling them for their reactions to every little thing, and begging them for donations or follows. If their chat is shown, it will invariably be full of people commenting off-topic nonsense and getting way too personal with the streamer, which they might encourage. (Truth in Television, unfortunately.)
If they see something exciting or unexpected happen, they're sure to overreact, and might even ask their chat to clip it regardless of whether they're live. In fact, they might even reflexively keep this behavior up face-to-face, seemingly unable to turn off their streaming persona, although a lot of fictional streamers just carry their audience everywhere they go via their phone or a recording setup.
If they're very popular, they might try to leverage their internet fame in the real world, usually to their disappointment as nobody recognizes them. Also, since streaming is dominated by gameplay of video games, they're quite likely to be portrayed as a Stereotypical Nerd or Basement Dweller of some persuasion. If they are a gamer, it's common for their game of choice to be a pastiche of a popular streaming game like Fortnite. Lifestyle or true-crime streamers are the other most represented types, and much more likely to be outright evil than video game streamers. In the worst cases, they'll go to criminal extremes to manufacture content for their loyal fans. If anyone calls them out on it, expect them to make a a highly unconvincing public apology in an attempt to save face.
Although these characters are obnoxious, they're not always evil or even antagonistic. Characters who get close to them will often find that they're rather tragic individuals who seek the attention of a viewing audience because they feel neglected. That said, this trope still carries an overtly negative connotation, so No Real Life Examples, Please!
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- The 2018 reboot of GeGeGe no Kitarō opens with an obnoxious streamer called Charatomi (commonly believed to be based on Logan Paul, who'd recently come under fire for similar behaviour while visiting Japan) live-streaming himself holding up traffic on the Shibuya scramble and generally being an Attention Whore. He promptly suffers a Painful Transformation into a tree and gets filmed by onlookers looking for social media clout...which passes the curse on to them too!
- Odd Taxi: Kabasawa is a Glory Seeker streamer who's eager to go viral. To this end, he winds up publicly antagonizing a known violent criminal just to make himself look like a hero, only to fold completely when things don't go to plan.
- Rock Is a Lady's Modesty: Bacchus is a rock band composed of a bunch of rich boys who got into streaming purely for the attention and, up until their Battle of the Bands against Rock Lady, have mostly been skating on their good looks. They plan to suppress the footage in the event Rock Lady outplays them in order to keep their audience. Instead, Rock Lady plays so much better they steal Bacchus's whole fanbase, sending their frontman Naoto into a Villainous Breakdown.
Comic Books
- Gotham City Sirens (2024): Punchline starts a streaming business where she takes baths in a kiddie pool and plays at the same time, and organizes a Hunting the Most Dangerous Game-esque real time video game with real life people. She also has a line of soft drinks called XO PUNCH™ which people can purchase in return for gaining in-game PUNCHBUX.
- Green Arrow: In the "Citizen's Arrest" arc from Green Arrow (2016), a new villain, Citizen, is sick of rich people committing crimes and using their money to escape justice, so he starts kidnapping corrupt rich people and doing a livestream where the viewers vote on whether they live or die.
- Spider-Boy: The villain Killionaire is a wealthy preteen who abuses his Arbitrarily Large Bank Account to broadcast his villainy on stream for attention and validation. His latest scheme involves turning a chunk of the Super-Adaptor into an action figure with the powers of all the Avengers to wreak havoc while having his followers watch the mayhem unfold.
- Spider-Man: Screwball is a recurring supervillain who causes petty crimes (primarily robbery and vandalism) so that she can livestream them and collect followers for her blog.
Films — Live-Action
- The Batman (2022)'s iteration of the Riddler gets the eyes he wants on his terrorist attacks by streaming them live, which is effective enough to convince several of his most dedicated fans to commit copycat crimes and participate in his more involved schemes. When Batman finally finds him in his apartment, his behavior is eerily similar to a regular streamer's, casually chatting with his audience about the remote detonators they helped him plant around the city.
- Benoit Blanc Mysteries:
- Duke Cody from Glass Onion is a parody of figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate: a loudmouthed men's rights activist who hawks All-Natural Snake Oil on his stream and rubs elbows with corrupt billionaires off of it.
- Cy Draven from Wake Up Dead Man is a political hopeful who seeks to amass a following by streaming the charged sermons of the deeply conservative Monsignor Wicks. He demonstrates complete willingness to manipulate his audience by cutting his footage and framing events to serve his message.
- The indie horror film Livescreamers is about a group of streamers working for a Rooster Teeth-esque company called Janus Gaming playing a multiplayer horror game for a livestream that turns out to be The Most Dangerous Video Game. While they present a friendly, clean-cut face for the cameras, behind the scenes Janus Gaming is tearing itself apart, with everybody hating each other, one of them using his fame to groom underage girls, two of them being handsome, straight young men who blatantly queerbait viewers, and their boss refusing to cover their health insurance. The game they're playing knows all of this and exploits it to drive these fractures out into the open so it can kill them more easily.
Literature
- Demon Lord 2099: Justified with the protagonist Veltol, whose magic power is essentially powered by name recognition, which he achieves by working as a retro video game streamer. He's merely average as a player but a brilliant marketer, and often deliberately eggs on flame wars between actual fans and people hate-watching him in order to squeeze every last joule out of his audience.
- VTuber Legend: Inverted regarding Yuki. Posing as a Purity Personified, Winter Royal Lady draws so little attention that, despite being in a well-known Virtual YouTuber agency, her account has so few views that it can't be monetised three months after her debut. It's her drunken unfiltered self that brought her fame and money.
Video Games
- Tyreen and Troy Calypso, the Big Bad Duumvirate of Borderlands 3, are the leaders of an evil Cult that "livescreams" their activities and refers to their followers as "Super Fans". Tyreen in particular combines the mouthy streamer attitude with a goddess complex that makes Handsome Jack's corporate propaganda seem humble.
- Content King is a game centered around Caden Brentley, an aspiring streamer who desires to become the world’s most famous streamer, and has to carry out increasingly depraved acts without shame to climb to the top.
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails beyond the Horizon: Ulrika is a popular streamer who also happens to be an Enforcer for Ouroboros. She tries to keep these aspects of her life separate, but she's not above using her Compelling Voice on her chat to further the organization's goals.
- Camille from Limbus Company is an obnoxious and selfish member of the Cinq Association who's known for livestreaming his work as a Fixer, spending most of his screentime in Canto VII either talking to his chat or bullying the Sinners (especially Don Quixote, who he views as an idiot for following chivalric ideals). He and his sidekick Paula end up getting corroded by Four Hundred Roses, forcing the Sinners to put him down — and it's implied his fans had to watch the whole thing, given that he's still holding his phone after transforming.
- Dan from Look Outside is a guy who comes to the protagonist's door in the middle of an apocalypse because he wants to make friends. He introduces himself as a streamer, and all his battle skills are themed around it, like asking his chat for information on enemies or begging them for money. He comes off as creepy and annoying, but he's ultimately a reliable friend, and completing his Companion-Specific Sidequest will cause him to touch grass and mellow out in the epilogue.
- Iono from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is a famous streamer and massive Attention Whore who frequently makes Freudian slips about how she mostly appreciates her fans for their views and wallets. (Unlike many other examples of this trope, however, she is legitimately famous, as she's also a Gym Leader.)
- Ready or Not: The suspect for "23 Megabytes a Second" is Michael "MilkyToes" Williams, a streamer who allegedly killed his mother and is holding his younger brother Demarcus. While the 911 call turns out to be a swatting, he is revealed to be directly involved with an illegal server farm for mining cryptocurrency and other sketchy shit, has participated in a scam that defrauded his fans, and is a client for illegal pornography, as an optional objective has Judge report the CP on Williams' computer.
- In Spider-Man (PS4), Screwball is a streamer who is trying to use Spider-Man to maximize her number of followers, and she does so by basically encouraging her fans to set up crime sprees around the city (and organizing some herself), including setting bombs and taking hostages, so she can then force Spider-Man to perform challenges on camera for her.
- VA-11 HALL-A: Streaming-chan is a camgirl whose gimmick is keeping her stream active 24/7, even while she's sleeping, bathing, or having sex. She comes to the titular seedy bar in search of raunchy antics to boost her viewing metrics.
- Worms W.M.D: Choosing "Budding Streamer" as a soundbank for your worm team will depict them as failing influencers who are obsessed with getting views, likes, and subscribers, occasionally drop hashtags in their speech, and see their enemies as trolls. This being a game about war means that a lot of the humor comes from the worms keeping up their streamer personas at all times.
Webcomics
- Questionable Content:
- Aurelia Augustus averts or even inverts the trope. She's a nice, non-sleazy (if sexually quite active) middle-aged woman who streams her video game playing entirely as a hobby. However, to judge by their comments, many of her viewers are quite sleazy about it; the fact that her virtual avatar, "MommyMilkers420", has multiple breasts may be something to do with this. She finds the fanfic that sexualizes her image hilarious.
- Marigold Farmer mostly averts the trope, though she might veer close if not managed by other members of the cast. She becomes a very successful video game streamer, but the only really sleazy thing about this is her tendency to explosive, scatological verbal rage at opponents (though that seems to be part of her appeal to her fans). If she hadn't come out of her shell before becoming famous, she might have fitted the "tragic" version of the trope, being a lonely, socially inept Stereotypical Nerd. She doesn't want to carry her fame over into the real world, being fully aware of the risk that some of her fans may be dangerously obsessive.
Web Original
- Chikn Nuggit: One short has Sody Pop get goaded by a Twitch Streamer into donating more and more money to them for a shoutout, culminating in them asking for Sody's home, which the red panda gives him much to his mother's anger.
- Joueur du Grenier: In the RoboCop special, Fred-as-Robocop goes after people behaving badly on the Internet like a kid harassing a camgirl, an influencer shilling junk or a bunch of streamers trying to spread a #BleachDrinking challenge. The accident that caused him to become Robocop was an engineered #TakeOffACarWheelWhileItsMoving challenge.
- MeatCanyon: Tragedy of a Reaction Streamer is an extended caricature of streamer xQc, shown as a Motor Mouth monster literally gathering gold and people's eyes.
- Philosophy Tube: The character Ian N. Drivel is an Australian Fortnite streamer with a horrendously tacky taste in shirts and a propensity to make terrible arguments and lay down internet callouts, mainly to call out long-dead philosophers.
Western Animation
- Family Guy: In "Vat Man and Rob 'Em", Brian gets caught by an amoral streamer who forces him into a dangerous drone stunt for views.
- Miraculous Ladybug: In "Revelator", Marinette and Adrien are targeted by Vincent Secrets, an immoral streamer who professes to be searching for the "truth" about why Adrien quit modeling, his hypothesis being that Marinette seduced Adrien and forced him to quit the business as part of a sinister plan to take over the fashion world. When Alya confronts him while disguised as a fangirl, he admits that he knows his stories are bullshit, but they bring in more followers and thus make him rich, so he doesn't care who gets hurt by his lies.
