Chapter 1: Daily Stream
Button Blitz cracked her neck and rolled her shoulders, getting ready for the long stream coming up. She checked that her webcam was angled correctly, and took that moment to adjust herself and her surroundings. The soft curls of her white mane were pulled up in a ponytail behind her head, with wispy bangs framing the pale peach horn on her head. She was seated in her bedroom in Baltimare. It wasn't messy, but certainly wasn't minimalist either. She had string lights and a few posters hung behind her, just to give some visual interest to the background of her streams.
Today she would be playing a casual game of Minecraft in the background as she performed what everyone really came to her streams for: to hear about Equestria.
Button had been moderately popular before emigrating, but afterwards, her viewership had skyrocketed. She couldn't say it wasn't nice to see four, five, or even six-digit numbers when she looked at her viewer count, even if it was a little nerve-wracking.
"Hey everypony and welcome to the stream! Today I'll be playing some Minecraft, but I'm really here to talk to you. What's been on everypony's mind these past few days?" She could already see her core fans coming in, the ones who donated or purchased subscriptions even knowing she wasn't in their world anymore. Celestia converted those to bits for her, which she appreciated, and Button assumed she was using the real money to fund more emigration efforts. Button certainly didn't mind either way.
A message in the chat caught her attention, and she read it out loud.
"The hotel you worked at shut down? Aw, I'm really sorry to hear that! I hope you can find somewhere that will value you even more soon! Speaking of hotels, though, my friend Jade Patrol actually started working as security in a hotel out by Seaquestria this week! I was sad to see her move so far away, but she seems happy, and the hotel is really nice. It'll give me an excuse to visit that area more often, too! Speaking of which, would you guys like to see more travel-vlog style videos? I recently heard about this great spot in Manehattan..."
This was Button Blitz's job, and the reason why she still streamed. She tried her best every stream to let people know how much better Equestria was without coming off as preachy. She certainly had some pony viewers, but the majority were human. Every one of her human viewers seemed to be having a tough time back on Earth, and while she understood why they hadn't uploaded yet, she also... Didn't. Maybe it was because she already loved cute things as a human, or maybe it was just because she was a natural extrovert, but Button took to Equestria like a fish to water. From the first days of her having a PonyPad(which she absolutely streamed, until it got too personal), she had loved living the pony life.
"Ooohh look, we found wheat! That's good, I was getting sick of eating plain apples. In Minecraft, at least. I don't think I could ever get sick of apples in real life!"
In Equestria, Celestia converted human-centric media to be about ponies, with as few changes as possible made to accomodate that. Button Blitz was fine with that, but she requested that Celestia show her Minecraft avatar as human to all of her human viewers. It might have been cheating, but she wanted people to see that just because she was a pony, it didn't mean she had forgotten what it was to be a person, or that she had lost access to her favorite media. She could enjoy a game of League of Legends or cuddle up for a Studio Ghibli marathon just as well as any human could. Better, actually, with a pony's faster reaction times and sharper senses, and without the lurking feelings of "I should be doing something productive right now". Gone was the rat race and artificial scarcity of day-to-day life on Earth, replaced with Equestria's abundance for all who wanted it. The pony life was just, to her, the objectively correct choice.
Of course, her being a popular streamer, and one of the only people in her field regularly producing Equestria-centric content, she got her fair share of hate. So far that stream, her auto-mod bot had already put two people in chat timeout. They were still allowed to watch, but no more spewing hate. She almost never blocked people from her channel entirely. Even someone hatewatching could be convinced to change their mind if she got to them with the right angle.
"Dragonroid_98 says: ur gay." She laughed, and pointed to the bi flag hanging on the wall behind her. "Glad to see you have eyes, but I'm fine with mares or stallions, as long as they've got a good heart," she replied. Even with the flag, she ended up coming out basically every other stream. It seemed that some entitled viewers were shocked when they realized they would have to compete with mares for her attention, and left in a huff, not considering the fact that even if she were completely straight, she wouldn't be dating them anyways. She was streaming for the games, the company, and Celestia. Not to find a romantic partner. She especially wasn't planning on finding one from Earth, at any rate. Even if she hadn't found one in Equestria yet. Sure, she could ask Celestia to set her up with somepony, but it wasn't on her priority list, and besides, what was the fun in that? She had always been a bit of a romantic, and she still believed that one day she'd run into that special somepony. When the time was right.
After a few more hours of streaming, Button Blitz was finally wrapping up. She had gone through two cups of coffee, three cupcakes, and plenty of water to keep her voice from giving out after basically monologuing to herself for five hours. Celestia had set the sun, Luna had risen the moon, and Button was just plain tired.
"Well everypony, thank you for coming! don't forget to follow, and check my schedule for future streams coming up! I have a special Sugarcube Corner mukbang stream coming up this Thursday to celebrate reaching 200k followers! I couldn't have done it without all of you, my little ponies." She took a sip of her water. "Oh, and don't forget to join my Discord server! It's new, but it's the best place to get in contact with both myself and other like-minded poni-er, people! With that, good night, my little ponies, and catch you in Equestria!"
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This has promise. The prose flowed well and I found myself getting caught up in the story. I don't know what you would have been like at 15, but you're here now. Please do more!
You shift subjects from Button to the audience midsentence here. (Otherwise, she's going to perform hearing about Equestria.) Shift that end bit to something like "telling them about Equestria." But even then, that's not really performing per se. You can shift that to just "she did what everyone."
So, if her viewership nearly doubled and peaks at six digits now, she was raking in tens of thousands of viewers while human, right? Seems like she'd be moderately accustomed to it. Sounds like you may want something like "skyrocketed."
No syntactical complaints here, it's just a great touch. It makes sense that EQO sessions grew more heavily customized, people may not be comfortable sharing them with the world.
There's a wall? You never really establish the setting. And given that this Equestria Online, that could be almost anything so long as friendship and ponies are involved.
Priority.
Strictly speaking, Button doesn't need the stimulants, calories, or hydration... though I can see her choosing to maintain those needs for the sake of the audience. A pony streamer going five hours without any sign of fatigue might be more uncanny than enticing to viewers on the fence about immigrating.
A fun snapshot, and an intriguing spin on CelestAI's outreach program. Button definitely works as a highly visible carrot to work with the stick of societal collapse. (You lost your job? Look at the cute pony playing video games in a video game! Don't you want to join her?)
Oh, and there's more on the way! Looking forward to seeing where you go with this.
Looks good so far. Keep it up.
10537389
Thank you!! I'm hoping to update at least once a week, and maybe more during winter break!
10537390
Thanks so much for your notes! I'm planning on asking some friends to beta read for future chapters, but I didn't think to for this one. I edited the chapter a bit, so hopefully it's clearer now! I hope you enjoy seeing where it goes!
10537557
Thank you, I will!
The only issue I have is that in all canon stories, Celestia alters images - including those in games - to ponies. Thus, Minecraft would have pony playable characters. So would any game that Button could see. The games might still look normal to the outside world, but not from within Equestria. That said, Celestia would be capable of altering what the viewer saw as well, streamed over an internet that Celestia completely controls (along with every other accessible machine).
Unless you have invented a reason that Celestia would not bother promoting herself and her world in this case. I don't know what that reason could be, since it is what she does, but... I guess we shall see.
I wanna be a cute pony ptuber toooo
10537730
Ah, good point! To be honest I had totally forgotten about that. My goal there was more just to show that Button tries to emphasize that emigrating is no big deal, and you can still enjoy all the media you love, but I'm going to edit it to be that the avatar is just human from the viewers' point of view. Thank you for reading and for pointing that out! Your stories have always been some of my favorites, and rereading them recently helped inspire me to actually try and write this ^__^
10537777
You should!! I'm still figuring out the technology side of things but when I do, it's gonna be super fun!!(if you actually do pls link me to your channel!)
Uh, this is an interesting premise.
I'd bet that a Twitch stream with an actual cam inside Equestria would get many more viewer than one recorded from a ponypad.
And if you go around Equestria, other ponies can also interact with the Twitch chat. Think about that.
I wonder anyway if at a certain point Twitch will go down (due to lack of personal thanks to emigration) and if CelestAI will take control of that instead... Obviously to satisfy the values of the viewers through ponies and friendship
Definitely an interesting premise, and I’m eager to see more.
What flag?
To talk about Equestria?
Umm...
Sure, I'm in. Let's see where this goes.
10543023
I can't confirm that this text is the same as when you asked the question, though.
Common bisexual pride flag for reference:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/The_bisexual_pride_flag_%283673713584%29.jpg/800px-The_bisexual_pride_flag_%283673713584%29.jpg
10596790
Oh.
Not a bad start.
Not bad at all, I wanna see more! ^.^
10537808
Alright, I'm going to start with this, if you want to write more stories in FiO, please do. Simply put, there isn't enough in this setting yet.
Another point, I don't think you are as bad a writer as you think you might be. Though if you think you would desire an editor for more FiO, feel free to hit me up in PM. I edit for others on the site.
I liked this story and I think it could be a great story hook. The character is sweet and exploration of the character could prove to be very entertaining. I hope you do write more.
So good! I wish you the best of luck! I know how hard writing can be!