Parasocial Justice
Streaming, Sexism, and Civil War
When COVID destroyed the sci-fi watch party exclusively for AFAB women in STEM that I attended every Saturday night, I never thought that Twitch’s most popular assassination streamer would be how I spent my free time.
Readers of my articles for the webzine Hufflepuff Herstory will know that I used to avoid Twitch because of its association with gamers, a culture primarily known for toxic masculinity and making death threats. Moreover, as described by Thea Talos in her 127-part video essay series The Chauvinist Cheat Code, a vast majority of games feature senseless and alienating violence, usually in favor of a white heterosexual male protagonist. As a prominent diversity consultant for Raytheon — chronicled in my edutainment blog Inclusive Aegis — this homogeneity was not something I could support. However, once I scrolled through some of the most popular personalities, or “streamers,” I realized the platform’s potential.
The online platform and Amazon subsidiary allows users to upload audiovisual content of themselves in real time (“streams”) to audiences that can react with similar simultaneity, most prominently through a live chat that the streamer can both read and address. Consider the remarkable story of the Vodalus twins who were separated at the end of the Yugoslav Wars and consequently developed amnesia from the trauma of displacement. Only when they came across each other during a stream of Super Metroid, a game that they played together, were they able to recover their memories and reconnect. After two decades of living separated by an ocean, the brothers now live within ten minutes of each other in a Chicago suburb.1
In addition to giving donations, users can also subscribe for a recurring monthly payment. Along with exclusive content, subscriptions grant users access to badges and emotes they can display in that streamer’s chat. Streamers often acknowledge and oblige new subscribers, especially if they subscribe for long periods or provide donations. For instance: streamer Poppy Valentine composes lewd limericks that contain the name of any new subscriber, Alexstravert will give them ten free minutes of psychotherapy, and OverEncumbered will fight the challenging Dark Souls boss Ornstein and Smough with whatever weapon they suggest. When streamers perform to and interact with them, subscribers develop parasocial relationships, whereby viewers develop feelings of intimacy with the celebrity but not vice-versa. According to Jonas Hildegrin, these relationships help subscribers with incomplete ego formation cultivate the virtues and convictions that a streamer espouses and that the subscriber may lack.
It's not only speedrunners and professional players who can create these relationships. With the 2016 rise of Donald Trump, men’s rights activists, and viral videos of conservatives burning the “historically revisionist” War and Peace, political streamers saw a great rise in popularity. To quote Hildegrin, “new means of political expression are directly correlated with new uses of technology,” as my colleagues and I regularly discuss on our podcast, What’s New, Pussyhat? One popular Twitch stream that showcases these “new means of political expression” is Skews, a “mock show” where each member combines online reportage into poems. Another is the weekly debate held by the “radical moderate” Article I and the “moderate radical” Anti Loyalist, covering every topic from single-sex women shelters to gender markers on government identification to the so-called “bathroom wars.”
Then, there is the assassin streamer himself, Miles Ultan, who used to stream under the racially charged name The Black Hand before changing it to his current username, the unprovocative Propaganda Tre, or P3. Rather than advertise, debate, and discuss news, he advocates direct action. In 2019, he gave 14.88% of his total donations to Fount of Life, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to married women with at least three children and no criminal record. In 2020 he bused participants to the University of New York to protest the unfair firing of Agia Valeria, the only queer woman among the twelve professors in the Fighting Bands group penalized for a pamphlet entitled Chile’s Unsung Hero: Augusto Pinochet. Since he began his stream, he has also encouraged his viewers to participate in a letter-writing campaign to world-wide freedom fighters, better known as “Adopt a Guerilla.”
P3’s family emigrated to America from the Eastern European nation of Saltascia, a small country that spent most of its history as a client state to whoever ruled the majority of partitioned Poland. Most readers, however, are likely to recognize the country from the GIF of a violinist sitting on a unicycle taken from the country’s 2011 Eurovision song, “The Pelagic Argosy Sights Land.” Memes aside, Saltascia’s centuries-old stability and independence is being undermined by populist demagogues with the support of foreign agitators and lawless dropouts as part of the People’s Liberation Force.
Although the PLF claims they are a socialist group — as did the Nazis — they reveal their antidemocratic and antiprogressive views by calling for the resignation of prime minister Gracia Cyby, who is not only the first female in the role but also the clear favorite of the people with her 93% win in the 2022 election.2 The expectation put on her government to house and feed its large indigent population shows how society enjoins its women to work harder than its men: because the percentage of unemployed citizens has risen drastically during her three terms, the desiderata to remedy these conditions require more effort from Cyby than they did her male predecessors. Similarly, by demanding that Cyby not use dehumanizing language about and celebrate the death of PLF members, the sexist syndicate demonstrates the excessive emotional labor expected from women in the workplace.
When confronted with arguments that Cyby’s control of Saltascia is inhumane or even unsustainable, P3 pointed out that many historic causes, such as the American or Hungarian revolutions, were seen as absurd, reckless, and dangerous, just as I described in my book, Gal and Gall: Women Behaving Badly and Making History, about The Vindication of the Rights of Women, for which its author, Mary Wollstonecraft, was called “shrew,” “harridan,” and “Tallyrand’s truffles.”
P3 has followed the conflict not only by reading news stories but also offering advanced subscription packages whereby viewers can cover the purchase cost of weapons for the government’s anti-misogyny soldiers. Partnering with PAL Fresco, a streamer who offers watercolor and tempera tutorials, he and his viewers had a week-long stream where they designed the insignia — a two-headed eagle clutching a lightning bolt in each talon — he would paint on the bulletproof vests shipped to the Saltascian government.
More recent streams have shown footage of predominantly female paramilitary soldiers in the government’s elite Protection Squadron as they liberate Saltascian towns. This breathtaking footage often features impressive sniper shots from women, many of which break distance or accuracy records previously set by men. P3’s total base of subscribers, known as the Imperium — evidently taken from the tabletop game Warhammer 40,000 — vote on their favorite of these groundbreaking feminist achievements. New subscribers are instantly integrated into the Saltascian government’s anti-authoritarian forces, as P3 greets each by giving them an exclusive “frag,” the name of a PLF bigot recently neutralized by the women in the Protection Squadron.
To celebrate reaching specific donation or subscriber goals, P3 has not only compiled these various feminist achievements but transformed them into multi-media exhibitions. The Imperium regularly vote on musical accompaniment for these monumental episodes: “One-Winged Angel” from the classic Final Fantasy VII and “Hydrogen” from the more recent Hotline Miami being popular choices. He has partnered with the pluralist — they advocate for pan-nationalism — game studio Blut und Eisen to create brief augmented reality sequences (“microgames”) where they both aim the rifle and direct the bullet at PLF forces. As inspiration, he cited Free Corps, where the player must ensure the body of terrorist and enemy of mainstream feminism Rosa Luxemburg sinks to the bottom of the Landwehr Canal, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, that has the player pilot the missile that killed Iranian General Soleimani (here fictionalized as “Ghorbrani”). Regarding both the gleeful contribution and the glamorized detail of the content — the vivid red haze of viscera and blood from headshots has been criticized as “fetishized murder” — P3 bravely declared: “I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians.”
Though critics may argue about this mixture of eroticism and brutality, the alloy has always coated our culture. After Audie Murphy killed enemy soldiers in WWII, he became a movie star inflicting a play-acted version of his heroic and anti-fascist bloodletting. Decades later, we lost the need for play-acting when that fateful junction of grey matter and copper jacket in Dealey Plaza made Abraham Zapruder the biggest amateur filmmaker of all time.
Despite the popularity and ingenuity of that 1963 masterpiece, politically conscious and liberally-minded Americans desire greater agency over and participation in modern kinetic statements: consider the popularity of recontextual fanfiction like Oliver Stone’s JFK, Don DeLillo’s Libra, or Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. The significance and multiculturalism of this violence would make it the antithesis of the exclusionary barbarism so common in AAA games.
No finer example are the assassinations carried out by P3. From a list of the most noxious and bigoted PLF trolls, subscribers vote not only on targets but also the style of rifle, time of day, and method of camouflage that P3 will use. For every assassination he streams from Saltascia, alternating cameras reveal his setup and the area he is monitoring for the target analogous with his own rifle scope.
Within only one month of starting this project, P3’s Imperium has constructed an entire wiki3 cataloguing the critical analysis and overall reception of each documented assassination. “It no longer feels like I’m just sitting around while undermen are polluting the world,” said one member about his proud resistance to patriarchal dominion; “it’s a testament to the Western civilization we’re defending,” said another in reference to the democracy he is helping Cyby uphold. The young men evidence an astonishing level of political consciousness and knowledge of international affairs. “We are not simply watching justice be done to these vermin, we are dispensing it ourselves,” said a P3 subscriber with the strange username of Pepe Speer, likely a reference to the French thriller film Pépé le Moko and Denver mayor Robert W. Speer.
At least two studies have proven that engagement with and contribution to the Saltascian war effort has had a 20% decrease in feelings of major depression, social anxiety, and nihilism reported by members of the Imperium. According to Dr. Ava Winnoc, Twitch subscribers are able to feel “a sense of autonomy in an increasingly faceless society whereby youth are denied resources, community, and ownership over their labor-product.” And after weeks of participation, I felt the same satisfaction and self-actualization that P3 subscribers reported. I wanted my song choice to win the vote to accompany the latest war footage, I wanted P3 to give me my own unique “frag,” and I wanted to see his latest target neutralized.
I also noticed how similar this camaraderie felt to the sisterhood engendered by women’s knitting groups, which I described in my lyric essay Bitchcraft: Sewing and Sassiness. As you might expect, none of these female-born knitters knew about streamers, gamers, or any of the titles mentioned in the piece. Nevertheless, the sexism festering in modern society had robbed them of autonomy no less than their male counterparts. If Hildegard is correct about the correlation between political expression and technological usage, then perhaps a streamer like P3 is who we all need right now.
Editor’s note: since the time of writing, the older Vodalus brother has been deported following an undisclosed number of hate crimes committed against Albanians.
The results and implications of this election are discussed further in What’s New, Pussyhat? episode 473.
An online database, of which Wikipedia is the most popular, that is created and edited collectively and whose entries link to others through the text. We discuss wikis in greater depth in What’s New, Pussyhat? episode 37.5.
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working for raytheon and being against videogames for being "too toxic" is insane