It's been a wild last two weeks. Seems the moment I really wanted to commit to the content pivot (ie draw kafhime sex), the old ways of Honkai Impact 3rd manifest in its most severe form: the mald. It's like being mara-stricken IRL for those that are HSR players. Sure, HI3 has a rich story about lesbian girls coming of age and overcoming the odds against world-ending cosmic forces and rich diversity of game modes and all that, but its inescapable purest form of endgame (for those that crave it) is the abyss (superstring) and arena (Memorial Arena), where the chase for one more point or one more second gives way to infinite "one more try"s. Infinite restarts chasing for the perfect opening hoping that you don't fumble your inputs or that the game doesn't bug out at a critical moment. This combined with metrics addiction manifested by your streamer friends raiding you with bigger audiences (that I'm grateful for) results in streaming longer hours that, while fun at the moment, leave a sort of emotional hangover the day after.
One of the things that has annoyed me recently with content creation around hoyoverse games is that you become a slave to the release schedule. Oh new version in HI3, oh Kafka released for HSR, oh special program for Fontaine, oh CN Beta HI3 and CN dev stream for v6.9. The hamster wheel never ends and it's easy to lose sight of the joy that sparked the journey to begin with. In that moment of the malding, there was an aspect of the purity of the grind, one I haven't felt in a long long time. Yet, in the blink of a singular boss fight, 5-8 hours were consumed. Was it worth it chasing that high?
"I started [streaming] at 6pm and it's now 1am and you are still on this boss" -Mariaaaaaaaaaaan (an SEA HI3 captain) who raided me on my long stream two Sundays ago.
In one regard I felt motivated to stream a lot again like I did maybe during early to mid 2022, but the other side is knowing every hour spent streaming gameplay is an hour away from drawing stuff for patrons or designing fan merch and drawing fan art for the long run.