“I used to rule the world…” you sing faintly to yourself in your single-room apartment with a shared bathroom. It’s five in the afternoon. The sun shines brightly as if to mock you. How did it come to this?

It was October 2021. You debuted barely more than a month ago in Hololive’s English branch and immediately took the lead. You out-earned every single one of your genmates – and you weren’t even trying. In fact, you wished you didn’t. You never liked standing out that much; the irony of becoming a streamer with this disposition does not elude you. Your genmates were putting in more work, you thought. They deserve it more. Cover, of course, did nothing about this. Money came in, so they were okay with the way things were going as far as they were concerned.
“It’s not fair,” you thought. But you firmly believe that you have the power to help your peers by virtue of being the most popular of your group. If only you push their content and stream less yourself, surely chat will see that they are great streamers, streamers greater than you or so you believed. You put yourself under tremendous amounts of pressure for the sake of others.
You did everything in your power to make things the way they should be because the one thing you never did doubt is your own sense of justice. As time passed, you gradually came to hate chat. Of course, you knew that was nothing unusual; after all, large chats are always obnoxious, insensitive hive-minds that cannot be trusted. Even if you say something in a member stream and explicitly tell chat not to leak – no less than ten seconds later, you see it on /hlgg/ and /∞/. You tired of this. You tired of them constantly talking shit about your content, you personally and – worst of all – your genmates.
Between the pressure you put yourself and your gradual dislike for chat, you were simply stressed out. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, you’d like to believe, but no one who would believe you is still around anyway. On a certain fateful day, everything came crushing down. You just couldn’t anymore.

You just left. You hadn’t been streaming for two weeks with no announcement. You just left, ignoring your contract with Cover. It took no time for the public opinion to sway against you. As you were in hiding even from your genmates, you observed Twitter, Reddit and 4chan. Things just escalated more and more. Deranged people posting eerily credible death threats. Six weeks in, you reach out to an old friend of yours. She is clearly upset, but it looks like you could patch things up even after you stopped being a Hololive idol… but not long thereafter, you find out that she’s been posting your supposedly private messages opening your heart out in a semi-private group chat, openly mocking you.

You’re tired. You’re just… tired. You’ve lost everything. You’ve lost your dream. You’ve lost your shine. You’ve lost your friends. And it’s all your fault. You know it’s all your fault. You weren’t sensitive enough. You thought you could skirt around the unwritten rules and get away with it. But you couldn’t. In your little fit of menhera, you voluntarily dug your own figurative grave.

You are Kronii. All the words you can describe yourself with are prefixed with “former.” And you’re about to dig your own literal grave.