Debunking the Pikamee Delusion
The beloved vtuber Amano Pikamee just wanted to have a fun happy stream of the game Hogwarts Legacy, and as a response an evil hate mob harassed her so badly she chose to retire from the platform!
Even some big YouTubers are confirming it, it must be true!
Ah, I’m so angry, I need to go to Twitter right now and harass anyone who I think is involved to get revenge for my beloved oshi!
…or maybe, just maybe, before I become a keyboard warrior fighting for some random social justice cause I see on Twitter, I should do some research and figure out if this actually happened.
Did She Leave Due to Harassment?
The simple version of the narratives goes like this: she was harassed by people angry over her playing Hogwarts Legacy, and then she announced her retirement, and therefore she was harassed into retiring.
Let’s start by assuming the premises are true, that she was indeed harassed horribly. Even if we take the premise at face value, the conclusion still makes little sense.
First, it is a fallacy to claim that because one event comes after another, it must have been caused by the previous event. You need more evidence to establish cause and effect.
Second, the timeline doesn’t even align. All these videos talk about Pikamee using language such as “quit” or “retired” as if she has already done so, when in reality she only announced her retirement, meaning she is not actually retiring until March 31st. She is currently still regularly happily streaming and posting on her channel.
This drama started back in early February. This tweet below was archived on reddit on Feburary 7th and is often used as proof of the horrible harassment as Pikamee cancelled a stream after she received some tweets criticizing her for her game choice.
Again, this is the narrative we’re supposed to believe. Apparently, Pikamee was harassed so badly she is going to retire from the platform… almost 2 months later?
Finally, again, even assuming she was severely harassed, GYARI, a representative from VOMS (her own agency she works for), stated explicitly that the recent current drama has nothing at all to do with her retirement and this was already something agreed upon a long time ago.
In reality, none of the evidence we have actually makes sense or aligns at all with the narrative that some huge wave of harassment drove her off the platform.
Some, desperate to cling to this narrative, have just resorted to claiming her own agency is a liar, that they are trying to “cover it up” in a conspiracy.
Note that Pikamee never at any point gave a reason for her retirement. The claim the two events are related is just vague internet speculation. Please be aware that if you are calling her agency a liar, your only evidence is your personal vague speculation.
Was She Even Significantly Harassed At All?
It is important to note that one of the reasons people claimed the harassment drove her into retirement is a form of “evidence” to the significance of the harassment. Surely, the harassment must have been rather significant — and by this I do not just mean one or two loose trolls — to cause someone to quit streaming entirely.
The fact the two are, in reality, unrelated, should cause anyone who is skeptical to stop and question if there even was significant harassment at all. So that is the next object of our investigation: how significant, really, was this harassment?
This video below claims that Pikamee has been receiving death threats on a “daily basis,” a daily basis! That’s a pretty extraordinary claim! So what evidence do you think is provided in that video? I will give you a hint: literally not a single iota, not a single screenshot of any threatening DMs or replies or anything.
Some videos and articles exaggerate the significance of the harassment more than others, but all of them consistently seem to fail to actually show any examples. You know what they say, “the internet never forgets.” So, supposedly, we should have at least one screenshot somewhere, right?
One claim I have seen is to insist that all the harassment was confined to just one single Tweet or stream Pikamee made, and after deleting the Tweet and/or stream, all the evidence is now gone. So it happened, but the evidence is erased now.
The problem with this narrative is that it contradicts with the timeline. Pikamee’s deleted tweet and cancelled stream were almost two months before her retirement. If literally all mean comments were confined to one tweet and one stream and are now deleted and no one is harassing her anymore, then why would this cause her to quit two months later? It would only make sense if this harassment was continual meaning we should still have evidence for it today.
The other problem with this narrative is that all replies to tweets are not deleted when the tweet is deleted. It should still be possible for someone to dig up these “death threat” replies and quote tweets. It also seems rather dubious that if there was some massive wave of harassment on her stream, that literally no one took a single screenshot. Apparently, “the internet never forgets” has become “the internet has conveniently forgotten everything relevant to my case.”
The Great Harassment Collage
Of course, this was not going to stop my investigation, I kept pressing further, searching, scouring the internet trying to find some evidence somewhere as well as challenging people who push this narrative to compile some evidence for me to evaluate. It seems some people took what I said to heart, as not long after I began questioning the narrative and demanding evidence, people did start to try and compile lists of this supposed “harassment.”
So, let’s take a nose dive into their lists. I am trying my best here to steel man their arguments, so I will post their entire lists for you to evaluate yourself. Below is the largest “collage” type list I can currently find, and seems to be the most common shared around Twitter (as well as a second variation which is just the same as this one but with less tweets on it).
This list, despite its size, is largely filler. For example, almost none of these tweets actually “@” Pikamee in any way. If you have not used Twitter before, you have to use the “@” symbol followed by the person’s username for the message to actually be sent to them. Otherwise, they will likely never see the message, unless someone else sends it to them, or they just happen to stumble across it in the Twitter search feature, which is rather difficult unless they are using specific easily searchable keywords in their Tweet.
If we look at these tweets, there are 22 here. However, 2 of them are repeats, they literally just included the same tweet from “CyniVtuber” and “Therealnewdeal” twice. One of them is literally a Discord message which was likely taken from some private Discord, which obviously leaking someone’s private messages and calling that harassment is absurd.
Of the 20 tweets left, the one from “Therealnewdeal” is clearly just an opinion. Personally disagreeing with someone’s game choice is not harassment. While it does look like he is quote tweeting her, you can see there is a difference in color in the background of what is being referenced and his actual tweet, meaning he is posting a screenshot and not actually quote tweeting intentionally to avoid “@”-ing her to avoid this message being seen by her. He is intentionally trying not to annoy her and just giving an opinion. This is apparently such a great example of harassment they included it twice!
The one from “Varnas_Raven” is literally a compliment, praising her for deciding to not play the game after criticism. Apparently, complimenting Pikamee is “harassment” now? She does still criticize a different streamer, Silvervale, but again does not “@” either of these streamers.
Take a look at the one from “NotarinWeeb” on the top-right. Why is this included as “harassment”? Simply because she says she doubts the harassment is real? Precisely, this is a common tactic pushed by these people claiming Pikamee has been significantly harassed. They will claim anyone — including myself — who does not believe their claims at face value and demands evidence must be harasser themselves!
I have repeatedly been accused of being a “bully” or a “harasser” simply for asking for evidence of these people’s narrative. If you repeat anything I have said here in this article, you will likely experience it yourself. It’s a simple crybully tactic: harass people supposedly “on behalf of Pikamee,” and when you question their justification, they can then turn around and claim your very act of questioning their narrative proves you’re part of the “harassers” and “bullies,” and therefore deserve more harassment!
Look at user “VandomVA” included on this list. Again, how is this “harassment”? They are asking people not to harass others, but this is harassment? How? Genuinely, how? Even if this was sent to Pikamee in a direct message, it still would not qualify in the slightest as harassment. This is probably the biggest stretch on the entire list!
Of all of these tweets, only 3 include an “@” from Pikamee, meaning only 3 of them were actually sent to her and not just posted on someone’s personal page. Again, I would think, you know, for something to qualify as “harassment,” it would actually need to be sent to the person being harassed. Apparently, if I write about how I personally do not like a streamer on my own personal blog, I am harassing that streamer now!
Furthermore, of these 3 tweets which do include an “@” and were sent to Pikamee, every single one of them on this list is from the same person! In fact, this “greensludgepool” user is included 6 times on this list! It does not support your case for some massive wave of harassers — which implies many individual people are involved — to include the same harasser many many times on that list, as a single person could in theory post hundreds, if not thousands of tweets.
Only one person on this entire list could plausibly qualify as “harassment,” and so let’s take a look at their account, we will see that it is a burner account with 0 followers and is following 0 people. I have scrolled through dozens of their tweets and every single one is attacking some random content creator, flinging insults and whatnot.
This account was obviously created very specifically to harass content creators. Every single major streamer, from time to time, gets some mean comments from troll accounts like this. It’s not somehow a big revelation, some proof giant waves of harassment, that an account that does nothing to troll dozens of random content creators posted some troll comments on a content creator.
You know, it could probably be reported and removed if it was not for Twitter’s recent changes. Being toxic on the platform is not inherently against the rules any longer. So if it angers you this one troll account exists… blame Elon Musk.
So far, from the collage of “harassment” Pikamee supposedly received, only one account arguably qualifies as harassment, and it is a burner account that obviously just exists to troll everybody. This is really the strongest bit of “proof” there is for this narrative of incessant harassment.
Despite one of the videos referenced before claiming she was receiving “daily death threats,” literally none of these Tweets even contain a death threat. The worst offender is “muppet_vt” who encourages death threats by saying they’re “deserved.” While such a tweet is obviously abhorrent, you would think if death threats are supposedly being sent “daily,” you would be able to find an example of a single one that is clearly and unambiguously a death threat.
Again, I repeat, Pikamee has not retired. She is still streaming and still posting to Twitter. If she is supposedly under a constant barrage of harassment, then you should be able to find something actually addressed to her, anything. The only mean posts people have managed to dig up they had to use the Twitter search feature to specifically go out of their way to find, because they weren’t even sent to her.
You can see how this collage of Tweets is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. It is common tactic when people want to push a narrative to compile a seemingly large list of “evidence” which, upon further inspection, is hardly “evidence” at all. The reason this tactic is common is because most people will not perform the “further inspection” step but will simply see the large list and assume the evidence must be overwhelming.
This collage contains a lot of Tweets so people immediately assume it must be proof of some significant harassment, without inspecting the Tweets and noticing that basically none of them are actually being sent to her, many are just opinions, one even compliments her, and many of the tweets are literally repeated multiple times to pad out the list.
The Great Google Doc
Given how weak the collage is, people have started to share a Google Doc instead. This doc, like the collage, is shared by people using the same strategy, to overwhelm people with so many bits of evidence that they assume the evidence must be strong and therefore do not look into it themselves.
If you are sent this doc, the first thing you will notice that it is quite long at 29 pages, and given the title of “Hogwarts Legacy Archives,” many people assume it must be 29 pages of “proof” of Pikamee harassment. Yet, it is not, it says right here at the top of the document.
IMPORTANT SMALL NOTE!
Not all of this is about harassment. This is an entire timeline from the very start to the current day. I see some people misconstrued what I said on the tweet sharing it, so I am making the clarification here.
Meaning, this document is not documenting “harassment,” but it is really just a random assortment of tweets by someone who claims they have a “nearly uncontrollable urge” of an “archiving habit.” The people who share it hope you are so overwhelmed by its size you won’t even read the first few paragraphs and realize it is not even a list of harassing tweets!
Most of it is not even about Pikamee, but Pikamee-related tweets are relegated to a smaller section of the document. If we look under the Pikamee section, what do we find?
You can see that this tweet from the Pikamee section is literally defending Pikamee. The doc is, again, not a doc of “harassment” against Pikamee but just some random tweets. Let’s look at another one.
This is also in the document. It is arguing that people shouldn’t harass others. Is being against harassment suddenly pro-harassment now? Let’s look at yet another one.
This is a person who is just repeating the narrative that Pikamee was harassed into leaving. It is not evidence that she was harassed into leaving, only evidence that people believe this narrative.
Again, the document doesn’t even claim to be a compilation of harassment, but people who share it hope you will not notice that. In fact, one tweet in the document I found is even simply of a person disparaging trans people and repeating an alt-right conspiracy theory about them. Apparently, attacking trans people is now evidence of trans people harassing streamers!
As you can see, despite the document being large, it does not even pretend to be evidence for the claim. Please, just because something is large, do not immediately assume the evidence must be overwhelming. If you have limited time, read through the beginning of it and randomly skip over the rest of it to get a small sample. If you just believe things at face value, you will be incredibly easy to manipulate.
The “Pedo” Alligations
Many will claim that even if it is not sent directly to Pikamee, propagadating the idea even in your own personal twitter page that she is a “pedo” is a form of “slander” and therefore basically just as a condemnable as harassing her.
The problem with this claim is that it is just a reflection of someone is terminally online. Nearly every single normal person in the real world would consider the sexualization of children to be pedophilia, even in fictional form.
There has been a consistent effort by members of 4chan as well as the vtuber community to normalize the sexualization of children in fictional form. They claim that being attracted to sexual drawings of five year olds or nine years old is not pedophilia and anyone who calls them that is “slandering” them and there is, apparently, nothing weird about it.
Pikamee has openly stated she enjoys sexual depictions of 9 year old children, which for her is the “perfect age,” and has stated she even has a sub account she created explicitly to follow any “artist” on Twitter who makes this kind of “art” as well as buying manga in this variety.
I’m sorry if it hurts your feelings, but if you told that to 99.9% of people who are not terminally online, they would call that person a pedophile. You can try to claim “🤓 well technically in my opinion we should define pedophilia and lolicon differently blah blah blah” no one cares about your definition, touch grass. It is not slander for people to use words in the way they are generally understood. Get over it.
If a person was constantly “@”-ing Pikamee and constantly calling her a pedo, if a person was constantly DM’ing her about it, you could have some argument to make that it could be considered harassment. But if a person just states they think she is a pedo on their personal page based on the general understanding of the term because she is openly into drawings of 9 year old kids, it is not harassment. Get over yourself, and for the love of god, please stop trying to normalize the sexualization of children.
Happily posting on the internet about how you love drawn porn of 9 year olds and how that it’s “the best,” how 9 year old kids are the “perfect age” for that kind of stuff because 12 year olds are “too mature,” and then crying “harassment” when someone says they think you are a pedo, that is just the most pathetic thing I have ever witnessed. Funnily enough, it is, again, not even Pikamee crying “harassment,” but people who are supposedly her “fans.” She has never once complained about these alligations.
I repeat and you should get this through your skull: if a person says they enjoy sexual depictions of minors, and another person says they think that person is a pedo, you crying “harassment” because “muh lolicon not technically pedophilia” is absolute brain rot. Go outside and talk to some normal people, make some normal friends and stop spending all day cooped up in your room fapping to pornographic drawings of children!
How about you stop being a creep and harassing anyone who isn’t comfortable with sexualizing kids? It appalls me I even have to say this, but this is the world we live in now. If you disagree and think “lolicon” is perfectly acceptable and normal… that’s like, your opinion man, it’s not “slander” for someone to disagree, and if you go attack someone for stating that opinion on their personal Twitter timeline without “@”-ing anyone, you are the harasser.
They did this same thing to Nyanners, people still attack her for wanting to distance herself from “lolicon” finding it gross. People act like this is some great outrage and anyone who expresses their dislike for such a thing is a bad person, a “harasser,” even though this is a normal opinion that most people in the world share. Just, please, go outside, talk to normal people.
It was 4chan, Again
Where did this ridiculous narrative that apparently Pikamee was bullied off the internet for playing a video game even originate? Why do so many people believe such a thing without any evidence? Plenty of streamers have gotten criticism beforehand for playing Hogwarts Legacy, yet did not leave the platform, so why would people even immediately jump to the conclusion that this is why they left the platform?
Just like many other keyboard warior crusades, it involves 4chan. Basically, an anonymous user on 4chan posted a “greentext” where they decided to psychoanalyze Pikamee. In their psychoanalysis, they pretty much argue that Pikamee is suffering from PTSD from childhood trauma, and that the “harassment” from the “deranged trannys” triggered this PTSD and is what lead her to quit.
This 4chan greentext was shared on Twitter where it has so far almost received 1 million views, and for awhile showed up as the “top” result when searching for “pikamee” on the website.
This is quite literally entirely vague speculation into her internal psyche and trying to make judgements about her mental state. I mean, we have already established that the evidence is overwhlemingly on the side that her retirement had nothing to do with the Hogwarts Legacy drama. Even if we lacked evidence of such a thing, it is still entirely speculative to claim that you know her mental state and how certain tweets are affecting her psyche and how these are motivating her decisions.
This is not only armchair psychology but posted literally to 4chan by someone who is entirely anonymous!
Why do I even bother bringing up this tweet? It is not just the view count, but the fact that this narrative has, since this tweet, seeped its way into the common discourse. For example, at the top of this page, I cited an Asmongold video. In the Asmongold video, he tries to report on the “news” of what is happening to Pikamee from reddit where he just reads random reddit posts he thinks are accurate as well as adding in his own corrections for things he thinks are inaccurate.
“She was bullied in Japan growing up thinks, westerners are nicer tries, to appeal to them gets death threats sent by the trans community for a wizard game she didn’t even play.” I will say that it’s probably not even the trans community that’s sending this kind of stuff, a lot of times it’s people who think that they are quote allies and the way their allies for people is by attacking other people now, don’t put this completely on trans people.
In the video, he repeats the same 4chan narrative, and only pushes back on the idea that “deranged trannys” are to blame, but does not push back on the idea that armchair psychology should not be taken seriously in the first place.
I also referenced another YouTube video by the user Attillee. In this video, the person repeats the same 4chan psychoanalysis narrative while passing it off as their own thoughts they came up with themselves.
Pikamee didn’t have the best time during her education, she has informed in the past that she used to be harassed and bullied, and the thing is that I think with that in the past — I think this harassment might have affected her even more than most.
We have, of course, seen streamers complain in the past about getting criticism for playing Hogwarts Legacy, but they have never quit because of it. This bit of armchair psychology thus serves two purposes. First, it creates a reason for why the alleged “harassment” would make her quit. Second, it creates an emotional narrative, making Pikamee’s story seem so horrible and tragic that you ought to get out your keyboards and go fight for her on the internet!
Yet, again, it is just entirely speculative. We do not actually know what is going on in Pikamee’s psyche. Pikamee has never stated once that this is the reason she is leaving. If you decide to become a keyboard warrior because of a 4chan greentext, please understand that you are not fighting on behalf of your beloved oshi, you are fighting on behalf of vague speculation and, at this point, a mass delusion.
