1. Friendship. Kyouka and Bingtang first met in 2020 through a mutual friend, Paryi. They quickly grew close until one night, Kyouka unexpectedly sent Bingtang a picture of himself in underwear captioned 'Don't I have big balls?' She thought this was an odd pick-up line but chalked it up to him being a foreigner who wasn't good at Chinese. This was the beginning of their relationship.
At the time, Bingtang thought they were soulmates. She was more popular than he was, so she was happy to help him however she could - she let him use her Chinese phone number to make accounts, introduced him to her friends in the community, and even lent him money for on-stream gacha pulls. She would also translate work-related documents for him. When he decided it was more profitable to be categorized as a 'domestic' vtuber instead of a 'Japanese' vtuber, she wrote his entire application for him because he wouldn't be able to prove he was fluent otherwise.
2. Turning Point (October 2021). Originally, Kyouka had a female vtuber model. He decided to create a male version of his avatar and encouraged her to design a matching JK avatar for a project he called 'Outeridea.' When he submitted these designs to investors, though, he surreptitiously removed her name from the application.
His new male avatar brought him the attention of female yumejo fans. Originally, both Kyouka and Bingtang were comedy vtubers with a casual, weeb audience. Kyouka recognized that yumejos were an untapped market and started pandering to them. Bingtang was horrified to find he'd repurpose their phone sex conversations into yumejo role-play streams. When she brought up her discomfort, he told her that it was his 'responsibility as an idol to create a good dream for fans' and that 'a good girlfriend should be supportive, no matter what.'
3. Weibo Incident (November 2021). One constant source of conflict between them was that Bingtang wanted to make their relationship public, but Kyouka didn't want to lose his newfound yumejo audience. Once, he said something that made her think he'd changed his mind and so she happily made a post on Weibo hinting at a popular ship coming true. The backlash from his fans was enormous. Kyouka blamed her for making him 'clean up after her childish mistakes' and released a video where he said 'I'm fucking single, okay?' and said that his fans needed to stop being so parasocial and trust him. As a result, he lost some of his craziest fans, but other fans thought that he meant that Bingtang was some parasocial yumejo who'd deluded herself into thinking she was dating him and harassed her even more.
When she mentioned this to Paryi, he bluntly responded that 'Kyouka's success is built on the corpses of others. Don't be his next victim.' It was only then that she learned Paryi and Kyouka had had a falling-out. Later, Paryi drew her an outfit and Kyouka threw a fit over that, saying things like 'I love you so much, why are you talking to my enemies?' He also developed a habit of trash-talking his 'enemies' to her and sliding into other female vtubers' DMs so he could gossip about their breast sizes or cosplay pictures to her. When she got mad at him, he'd get defensive and say that he was just talking to friends and that she was being 'some weird yandere who gets mad at her boyfriend talking to other girls.'
4. Second Honeymoon (January to March 2022). Their relationship was cold for a while until Bingtang hit 1m subscribers. Then, Kyouka suddenly called her up while acting unusually sweet and clingy, even calling her his 'mom' and himself her 'dog.' He would also encourage her to cater to male gachikoi fans, saying that he'd recently gotten into NTR and that he got aroused from seeing male fans simping for her. He would also send her porn and tell her to watch it so she'd understand him better.
5. NijiEN Leeching (March to May 2022). Suddenly, NijiEN - particularly Luxiem - exploded in popularity in China. Kyouka saw a niche for himself as a 'foreign' streamer who spoke English but also streamed on a China-accessible platform and developed a plan to capitalize on their fandom. He would first start mentioning NijiEN casually and reacting to their videos on stream. Someone would inevitably clip these moments and memes and bring him to the attention of NijiEN fans. When he gained enough new viewers, he would solidify his grasp on them by toning down mentions of NijiEN since his fans would police themselves (i.e. etiquette is you don't talk about other streamers unless they're mentioned). He complained to Bingtang about why he'd even bothered to learn Chinese when Chinese fans wanted to hear English instead.
NijiEN also brought in fans who were new to vtubers, especially particularly intense idol fans. There was an influx of overbearing 'mommy' fans and numberfags. Kyouka confided in Bingtang that he found these fans disgusting, saying that he 'had to mute himself so he wouldn't throw up on stream,' and worried that he'd get doxxed. She would tell him to chill out and stabilize his fan base first, but he only wanted more money and more viewers. He even described the very purpose of Overidea as 'a scheme to get rich.' Eventually, the two of them spent less and less time calling each other.
6. Separation of Body and Soul (June 2022). Because Kyouka lives in Tokyo and there are COVID entry restrictions, they had not met for a long time. One day, Kyouka called her and said, 'I think it's best to keep emotions and bodily needs separate. Of course, I love you the most with both my body and soul. But right now I'm stressed and I'll die if I can't relieve that stress. Since I can't fuck you, I want to go to a brothel. When I'm done, I'm sure I'll love you even more.'
So he went to a brothel, and when he got back, he regaled her with all the details of what exactly they'd done and even sent her a picture of the girl he'd paid for. She confirmed that this store did exist and that the girl did indeed work there.
7-9. Birthday (July 2022). Bingtang's birthday is July 15. Suddenly, Kyouka decided he wanted a birthday celebration too and scheduled his for July 10. During this time, some of his fans noticed that Bingtang's JK outfit used the 'Outeridea' logo (see point 2) and started sending her death threats for 'plagiarism.' Since her name had been removed from the design manifest, she couldn't defend herself so she asked him to deal with his fans. They started arguing about who was responsible and finally, he blocked her on social media. He only unblocked her a few days before his birthday to ask if she could be a guest on his birthday celebration.
During his birthday celebration, she commented that she should send him a superchat as a present and asked him 'how much?' He said, '100k' ($13k USD). Since they were live on air, she felt coerced into doing it or his fans would flame her; however, she got flamed anyways for 'ruining' his celebration with her superchat. One thing lead to another, and somehow his fans started turning on him instead. He was very upset about this and called her multiple times to complain about how his 'ATM machines' were misbehaving and how frustrated he was with his insane fans. Some of Bingtang's fans also started complaining about how Kyouka couldn't manage his fans and had betrayed his friends.
Kyouka realized that the situation had blown out of his control and hired a former male idol group manager to do PR for him. She passed some of the blame onto Kyouka's most parasocial fans and reframed the conflict as a battle between his old fans and shipper fans, using sockpuppet accounts and planned leaks to spin the narrative away from Kyouka. Apparently, one issue is that fans don't listen to their oshi, but they will listen to the 'big name fans,' so the manager simply set herself up as a 'big name fan' by releasing lots of art and sending in lots of superchats.
At this point, Bingtang also realized that the situation was out of her control. She wanted to end the relationship, but if she came forward and told the truth, she knew the PR manager would find some way to make her look like the villain. Frustrated, she confided in one of her fans, who accidentally leaked the conversation. As expected, when the news came out, it was spun to make her seem like the mastermind who'd sabotaged Kyouka's success. The fan who leaked the conversation attempted suicide out of guilt.
10. The End (July to August 2022). By this point, the relationship was basically over. After half a month of radio silence, Kyouka called her and confessed that he'd lied to her about going to a brothel, then said that he'd come to see her next month. She thought this was strange, since he'd told her about going to a brothel in great detail - but then she realized that going to a brothel was a crime and he was recording the conversation to prove his innocence in case she came forward with the accusation. When she confronted him about it, all he could say was 'Sorry...'
11. Epilogue. She addresses three people here: Kyouka's mother, who he made believe that Bingtang was a crazy girl with a one-sided crush; his fans, who she hopes will do the right thing and abandon him; and Kyouka himself, who she says she wants to take down at any cost. Then, she mentions one last thing.
Kyouka has always made a big deal of being Japanese. In that case, why did he write an article as a kid in the People's Daily saying he was Chinese and proud of it?
