40. Narratives and Emails
Rippa was annoyed that gender activists had started to interpret Buttons as evidence reinforcing their claims.
‘She chose a body and identifies with it, and presents herself as such,’ was their core argument.
In a way, Rippa could see where they were coming from. In fact, wasn’t she herself conforming to the kid’s self-proclaimed identity? So, if Rippa were to remain consistent, she’d also have to do so with the gender-identity people. Logically, it made sense, but this kind of thing was exactly what Buttons had specifically asked people not to do.
‘So they are disrespecting Buttons’ wishes in order to enforce their own demand for respect,’ Rippa tried to summarize, but it was quite a complicated thought to formulate without using a mind map or writing things down. But she was too lazy to do that, so she left it at that. Besides, the TQ+ people, in particular, already hated Rippa for having played the wizard game, so she wasn’t in a hurry to entertain thoughts that were in their favor.
She could, however, see a beautiful irony in all this. Yes, Rippa had played the wizard game to spite online mobs who had been harassing fellow VTubers. That made her a bigot. Half the internet had made that single stream her entire identity. They projected onto her and accused her of advocating the exact things that they wished on dissenters. And by virtue of being Rippa’s friend, Buttons was now a bigot, too. So, for them to suddenly argue that the kid’s existence validated their claims about identity… that was a circus-level flip-flop in narrative framing.
Everyone was doing this. On the other side of the spectrum, the ‘pattern recognition’ crowd, who often had some Greco-Roman sculptures as their profile pictures, were arguing that Goggles and Buttons taking on the appearances of white Europeans was proof of superiority.
‘Same shit, different flavor,’ Rippa thought. It was hilarious because to Buttons and Goggles, everyone was just a chicken.
She then realized she’d been spending a lot of time thinking about Buttons and how the world coped with the kid’s existence. Did she really care that much about Buttons? Somewhat, yes. She wanted to protect the child from all the ugliness of the world. She wanted Buttons to be happy. She liked the sensation of the tiny bones shifting when she squeezed the kid’s little hand. And the cheeks were so squishy, like Japanese mochi…
‘Oh my god, is this baby fever?’ No, no. Rippa shook her head. This kid was a menace. Also very dumb. But extremely intelligent at the same time. Buttons would often say things that were quite unsettling, disturbing even. But she was also simultaneously naive and wise. And the whole cosmic octopus thing… there was something profoundly heart-wrenching about it.
“Why, yes, I do want a grandkid in the near future,” said Mom when Rippa asked her. “So, go touch some grass. Hook up, and get knocked up, will ya?”
“Mom!”
***
Rippa finally decided to deal with the mountain of emails piled up in her inbox. This was a massive task, so she opted to use Gmail’s web interface instead of her phone.
First, she created a filter that automatically labeled any email that contained either ‘Buttons’ or ‘Goggles’ in the message body.
“Buttons, damn it!”
Tons of emails from legit websites and services were flagged because they contained text referring to literal buttons, such as ‘checkout buttons.’ She decided to deal with them manually later.
Using various combinations of appropriate words and filtering by time period, she could isolate the unsolicited emails that had flooded in for the big Q&A stream. Deleting all of them removed about 99% of the unread emails.
Once the junk was gone, Rippa could finally see the emails from DHS, the FBI, the Department of State, the Department of Justice, and even—
“ICE? Why ICE?”
The emails from the Feds were very polite. They were asking her to get in contact with them so they could establish a proper, official channel to Goggles.
‘Meh.’ Rippa just marked them as read and did not respond. For now, she moved them out of the inbox and put them under a separate label, instead of outright deleting them. That cleared up some clutter in the filtered inbox, which was now left with collab requests and sponsor approaches. Now, these two needed some kind of consistent, long-term policy from Rippa’s side.
A collab or a sponsorship email that had Buttons and Goggles in the message body? The first gut reaction would be to dismiss it as, ‘Oh, they just want Buttons, not me.’ However, Rippa could not dismiss the possibility that the email mentioned Buttons in a ‘Hey, great job doing the Q&A with Buttons stream’ way, in which case it’d be rude of Rippa to ignore them. She moved those emails under a separate label for now. Rippa left them as unread since she’d eventually have to go through them one by one.
Then there were emails from the mainstream media. CNN, FOX, BBC, MSNBC, and other big-name TV news networks wanted to invite Goggles. The NYT, the WSJ, the Washington Post, and Bloomberg wanted an interview with Goggles.
‘Yo, why no Buttons?’ Rippa wondered. She decided she wasn’t in a position to decide for Goggles and moved them under a separate label. She’d show the emails to Goggles later.
With Buttons-related emails out of the way, Rippa’s unfiltered inbox was now a whole lot more legible. What remained were emails meant for VTuber Rippin’ Rippa, not Buttons or Goggles. She spent quite an amount of time writing back, apologizing for the late reply and responding to the businesses in question.
As she was doing so, two more emails arrived. One was from a children’s apparel brand, and the other was from a gambling website. Both wanted to know if Rippa had finalized the regular ‘with Buttons’ stream schedule, and, if so, whether she would be interested in taking on a sponsorship.
She rolled her eyes at the gambling website and deleted the email.
The children’s clothing sponsor deal, on the other hand, looked tempting. Scrolling through their homepage, she saw quite a few outfits that Buttons would definitely look cute in. She quietly opened Amazon and found the brand’s store page. At this point, she had long known Buttons’ size by heart, so it wasn’t too difficult to fill up a wish list she had dedicated to the kid.
Free stuff was always tempting, but no, she wasn’t going to take the sponsorship deal. Instead, she would wait for the holiday sales.
Just as she was about to wrap up, her phone buzzed, notifying her of a Discord DM from Buttons.
“Rippa, I’m still banned from your server.”
Rippa thought about it for one-tenth of a second. She replied, “Yeah, I’m not gonna have a certified 11-year-old in my Discord server. Sorry.”