Thoughts About Lolcow Live

Okay, this version of my visual novel has been out for a while, and I've had the chance to interact with the Lolcow Live community as a member. I've also been dealing with some pretty crippling depression and a lack of motivation to really do much of anything. I'm still hard stuck at around 300 images for Pet Foxes 3, and I started a new game called Big Mama Bear And Small Fox Boy that I've also kinda lost motivation to continue. It's just dark stuff going on in my head and I'm really struggling to motivate myself to break those barriers for myself.

Anyways, let's talk about Lolcow Live and how they're never going to play my game. :(

Hosts - Wings is a terrible host for this show mainly because he barely even tries to be a good host and he doesn't get called out enough for his bad takes the way he does on his own streams. If you don't watch Wings on his streams, or watch Breaking Banquet, you should know that Wings is often miserable by the end of them because he'll perform badly at the game, explain why he performed badly, get called out for essentially making silly excuses instead of acknowledging that he's usually bad at the games he plays, and then get depressed and banning people.

On Lolcow Live things are different. Keem and Boogie do most of the work while Wings gets to sit back, relax, and be a chill bro while chat and the Discord absolutely glaze him, even though his behaviour on the show is similar to his streams, with him offering up explanations that seem more logical because he's calmer, but which don't hold up to scrutiny. Tone is very important because most people listening to others speak actually focus more on tone than the words being said, similarly to how people watch movies. I really wish that Keem would apply just a little more pressure onto Wings, or kick him off the show and replace him with someone more interesting. In the White Guys For Harris stunt, Wings pretty much just sat in the vehicle for a lot of it while Boogie did most of the work, and I think that's pretty embarrassing for Wings. Imagine how it would feel to be lazier than Boogie2988?

Keemstar is genuinely the best host on the show, and he puts up with a lot of crap which makes me feel sorry for him to an extent. The main issue is that he doesn't really have good chemistry with the other hosts except when he's berating them or trying to calm them down. The man is at his best when he's screaming at Boogie or being like "It's fine, Boogie, calm down," using a gentle voice. The problem is that he can't make a casual conversation with Wings and Boogie interesting, so something needs to be happening that he can react to and push the other hosts to react to.

Boogie2988 is dead weight unless he's been questioned or punished. He either can't push the conversations in new directions or he won't. If you listen closely you'll see that he finds things said by other hosts and guests then latches onto them, kind of like what Rags does on EFAP.

For instance, Mutahar brought up moving to a farm, and a short time later Boogie claimed that he and his girlfriend had talked about moving to a farm earlier that day. Wow! What a coincidence!

Boogie seems like a guy who never had to grow up. What I mean is that for most adults we have that moment where we realise how immature we are. Perhaps we'll go to an adult party where everyone is drinking alcoholic drinks in a nice home and playing Monopoly. They chat about their kids, their plans for the future, have a discussion about the latest House Of The Dragon episode, the stuff you might have seen your parents do with their friends when you were younger. Then, you think "These people are so lame," and make a gross joke about necrophilia thinking that they'll think you're so much cooler than them. Then, they give you a weird look, there's an awkward silence, and you realise that you're basically still a teenager even though you're 30. They're not the uncool ones, you are, and you need to change.

Boogie might have had that experience, but his audience has always been young people, and his girlfriends have always been young. He doesn't want to date a girl even close to his own age because he's a loser in the eyes of pretty much any woman over 40, but to a 20-year-old girl he's totally cool, funny, and relatable, plus he can hook her up with legal weed and alcohol.

Of course, if you're even a little bit aware of who Boogie really is, at least to the extent that you recognise that he basically acts like a spoiled little kid would act, it's very uncomfortable watching his impassioned speeches and his temper tantrums on the show. I once said that Boogie's appearance on SomeOrdinaryPodcast resulted in an unwatchable episode, and I stand by that statement.

Community - The community kinda sucks on the Discord and the Youtube chat. The problem is mainly that the main hosts are too easy to criticise, so everyone wants their chance to say "Boogie sucks," and suggest punishments. The free users, or peasants, are unironically pretty cool since they just want to spout memes like TIPPLES and seem pretty casual in their viewing of the show, only really showing up in large numbers during punishments and stunts while not showing up (mostly because they aren't notified) to normal episodes where the hosts simply chat with members.

Members and pay pigs are weird. They definitely want clout, like I did, but Keemstar, Boogie, and Wings mostly don't respond to chat, only donations and super chats (often only reading out the super chats, nothing else). They do select members to voice chat with them, but I was literally waiting in the waiting room for 2 hours and never got called on, so... money well-spent, lol.

Anyways, the people who spend money to basically guarantee they get acknowledged by the show hosts are either insufferably smug, or desperate/disabled people who will basically either glaze or shout at the hosts, usually Boogie. You don't tend to get 'normal' people paying to get Boogie to acknowledge them. The closest I saw was Oregano, who I got the impression was acting too hard to come across as normal, as in he'd get on and not talk about anything related to lolcows and be like "Hey, bros, what do you think of the new game that came out recently?" There's also a disabled person that I feel really bad for that is a pay pig for the show.

My takeaway is that for most streamers you want to root for them to succeed at whatever they're doing. You want to see them do well in multiplayer games, chat with them while they engage with a puzzle game, laugh with them as they play with their buddies. With Lolcow Live, the hosts have already succeeded by being paid well to do the show, and they don't really do many interesting things on the show unless they're being humiliated. I don't even think the hosts of the show even like each other, so it always feels a little awkward and tense.

The thing is, I think that the weirdness of the show makes people twist their perception of it to make it entertaining for them. In their minds, Wings is the hero going on a redemption arc getting more respect every show, Boogie is the flawed but lovable manchild getting punished for his misdeeds but becoming a better person as a result, and Keemstar is the money-grubbing businessman who makes a lot of money from the show but is still kind and protective of the community and the hosts. The reality seems to be different, with Keemstar seeming to mostly consider this a side-project that takes up too much of his time due to other Youtuber friends giving him crap for doing it as well as Wings and Boogie apparently being nightmares to work with behind-the-scenes, while Boogie and Wings don't seem to care about the show much at all beyond the money they make from it, not even seeming to enjoy interacting with the community.

My Game - I spent 3 days censoring it mainly because, at the time I based the character designs of the later characters as primitives who would go naked if it were allowed. I came up with the idea from the She-Ra cartoon, which was targeted at a young audience of pre-teens (I assume) and featured characters often showing a decent amount of skin, especially the male characters, with it even being a running joke that Bow is often revealing a lot of his upper body, and with He-Man in the 80s cartoon wearing pretty much just a loincloth.

So, I had to censor the nipples (probably unnecessary due to Boogie being literally naked from the waist up on streams) just to be safe on Youtube. I considered re-writing it, but I decided that it was too much work for a project that Keemstar wouldn't even acknowledge and I'd already spent a lot of time on it. The only bit of re-writing I did was fix a single grammatical error.

I remembered the game having far fewer images and I was genuinely surprised seeing that I think I had close to 1000 or possibly a bit over 1000 images. It was kind of nice going through my images again and thinking about writing the story, the hours spent scripting, posing, and planning. Good times.

If I could go back and do something differently, I would have had Yello's Father play a bigger role in the story. Otherwise, aside from typos, spelling, and grammar issues, I think I did a good job with this project. Someday, I'd like to get a list of all of the grammar mistakes and spend an evening or two fixing all of them, then re-posting it.

Anyways, thanks for reading this, I hope you found it interesting. When I overcome my depression and get motivated again I hope to continue doing what I love, posting weird visual novels.

With Love,

Weird420XL