Twitch streamer and self-proclaimed "virtual girl next door at your fingertips" InvaderVie began today's stream with an apology for the "tone-deaf, insensitive, and stupid" comments she recently made about the financial situation of viewers that can't or don't give her subs. Vie came under fire this weekend when she shamed her non-subs by telling them they're "so irresponsible with [their] money that they can't support the entertainment [they] enjoy."
None of this behavior is out of character for InvaderVie and, despite her attempt to "take ownership" of her comments in today's apology, this type of financial shaming is not at all out of place on Vie's stream. In fact, Invadervie has cultivated a core audience that expects and may even desire this type of abuse from her. In a twisted way, all the push back to Vie's comments has been nothing more than an unwitting kink shame.
InvaderVie Offers A TOS-Approved Girlfriend Experience
InvaderVie certainly wasn't the biggest name on Twitch before all the drama. She is best known for calling her stream the Blanket Fort and the unnatural way she sits to show off the maximum amount of thigh approved by Twitch's Terms of Service.
She speaks eloquently (if not always succinctly) with perfect diction about nerd culture, social science, and gender politics. She's condescendingly adorable, smugly charming, and everything she says is steeped in sexual innuendo. She has a pseudointellectual shtick that compliments her hypersexual persona; Twitch's very own "Slutty Librarian."
In her Twitch intro, InvaderVie writes "Enjoy your stay in The Blanket Fort, even if you can’t keep both hands on the keyboard..." a sentiment she's echoed numerous times on her stream. If the name "thighranosaurus rex" didn't make it obvious enough, her Twitter bio (where the "virtual girl next door at your fingertips" comes from) has a profile picture that makes it abundantly clear Vie knows exactly what you're there for.
Vie's Twitch profile pages mention her relationship status as "I'm seeking the Gomez to my Morticia," communicating to her audience that she's available. Put it all together, and you've got a quirky, flirty, hypersexualized character with a strong personality offering the closest thing you can get to a girlfriend experience on Twitch. Vie's audience is more like her clientele, and she knows exactly what her clientele wants.
Playing Into The Findom Fetish
Vie knows exactly who her audience is, what they do for a living, and how much they make. Listen to her explain in her own words the very specific category of people that support her:
Men, in a relationship, between the ages of 25-42, that work in tech or engineering. Essentially, InvaderVie's biggest financial contributors are men who are older than her with disposable incomes that want to participate in a relationship fantasy with her outside of their real-life marriages. This is extremely fertile ground for a type of fetish called findom, or financial domination.
Erotic humiliation is an exceedingly common fetish that fulfills a power fantasy, often for men of some means and/or success. Findom in its purest form involves a submissive being forced into giving money to the dominant through shaming and humiliation. When it comes to online sex work (Chaturbate, OnlyFans, ect.) it's not only common, it's often practically implicit. Twitch is not a website for sex workers (though there are plenty of sex workers working on Twitch) but, as we've already covered, InvaderVie encourages her audience to look at her as a sex object and participate in a girlfriend-like fantasy relationship.
Vie's bookish girl-next-door persona, whether authentic or carefully crafted, draws these types of guys in like moths to the flame. It's easy to spot, and to think Vie doesn't realize it too would be naive. Here's a clip of fellow streamer Pokimane realizing exactly what Vie's stream is all about:
Poki hit the nail on the head. To an outsider, this looks like abusive language directed at her own audience, but for the core of Vie's audience, the audience that supports her financially, they're getting exactly what they paid for.
Why did Vie make such a formal apology then, if the financial shaming is simply a roleplay between her and her audience? There's a context to the clip that explains how a middle-of-the-pack streamer became enemy #1 on Twitch overnight.
Bad Bunny And The Art Of Drama Farming
If this whole story is giving you déjà vu you're probably remembering BadBunny's nearly identical rant in January. BadBunny went off on her audience for not giving her enough subs, and all of Twitch had a field day mocking her entitled attitude. That recent incident made this week's incident with InvaderVie blow up, which led every major streamer, once again, to weigh:
The clip, without the context of Vie's entire channel, hit critical mass. Had it not gone viral, Vie and her donors would have probably continued on with business as usual in their weird little corner of the internet. They say there's no such thing as bad press, and between the blow-up and today's apology, Vie is definitely getting a ton of attention. A lot of people seem to think InvaderVie said what she said to farm drama and follow in BadBunny's footsteps, but if you look at what Vie's stream is all about, the differences between the two streamers are obvious.
There's an old joke about quickly hiding your anime and opening porn when your parents walk in the room because the porn is easier to explain. I sincerely believe in this case it was easier for Vie to apologize than to out her audience as a bunch of betas that enjoy getting shamed by the sexy streamer.
Now give me $5 you broke bitches.