“i am now selling my BATH WATER for all you THIRSTY gamer boys □,” she wrote in the caption, accompanied by a link to her online store. When it pops, it looks like the rest of the sea.Last week, a 19-year-old cosplayer and Instagram model named Belle Delphine posted a photo of herself in the tub, holding a jar and a pastel pink game controller. Not to mention the incalculable, multiplatform industry of content creation and consumption. The systems that give egirl meaning saturate its inside: technology and gender. On the outside, the bubble is delicate, separate, rainbow reflective. The constructed world of egirl, ambiguously a theatrical set and a private bedroom, is much like an ocean bubble. “Because I am in my space and I can wear whatever I want :).” “I don’t get it why do girls always wear that when they game,” they wrote. She’s moving a sponge across a dish and bobbing her head rhythmically.Ī commenter doesn’t get the joke. The camera cuts to a video of her playing a video game on her tricked-out gaming PC. “I know I don’t look like your ‘typical’ gamer, but look,” she says. She’s wearing a plushy pink bra with dangling bunny ears and matching fluffy short-shorts. “Yes, I game,” Caldwell mouths in another TikTok meme. And kids don’t have a monopoly on cute shit. She’s not doing it for men, she says, or anyone else. One particularly enterprising PC builder peddled Belle Delphine bathwater–cooled PCs for $1,500.Ĭaldwell is firm that egirl is empowering. I mean, hey, if it’s something you can market, and you want to market it, like, why not?” In 2019, egirl Belle Delphine posted an image of herself in a bathtub with her pink gaming controller: “i am now selling my BATH WATER for all you THIRSTY gamer boys □.” $30. And, Fawkes says, “it’s sexualized for them. (Sometimes viewers point out to her that her controller isn’t turned on.) We don’t put on a full face of makeup, a wig, and a Darling in the Franxx cosplay to zone out to some Valorant. This isn’t actually how girls play video games, she says. On her OnlyFans, Fawkes posts cosplay-inspired lewds, titties out, in wigs and kitty ears. “It’s one of those fantasy things,” says Rusty Fawkes, an egirl with 1.5 million TikTok followers. They’re queens of the parasocial microcelebrity thing, charging $25 to $35 a month for OnlyFans “gamer girl” lewds or $25 for cosplay photosets. The most well-known egirls are a distributed vision, an internet melt, collectively funded, in part, by fans’ thirst. Plus, she adds, because she streams on Twitch, she wants the best-of-the-best PC. “I’m lucky to have people who are willing to contribute to my goals and help me get the things I want, whether it’s a game or a cosplay,” she says. Hers currently includes a wig from a League of Legends character and a Nintendo Switch controller with kitten ears. So she started posting her Amazon wish lists online. “A lot of my money was going into my aesthetic because I really loved it and it made me feel good,” says Caldwell, who also works full-time. It’s not a joke in that her lifestyle is, in part, subsidized. It’s a joke, Caldwell says, in that she doesn’t talk like a helium-sniffing toddler. This is why the meme is good: “ Can you buy me Cold War?” Egirl is the confluence of two famously expensive hobbies: gaming and beauty. Caldwell says her monthly egirl budget oscillates between a couple hundred to a couple thousand, sometimes a thousand a week. For egirls, that might be on the lower end. On average, Gen Z women spend $240 a year on their appearance-that’s over $1,300 a year. On average, Gen Z spends $92 a month on gaming content, not accounting for hardware. And it is expensive, the kitty-smile collision of two commodity-centric subcultures. It is identifiable in an Amazon wish list, attainable with a credit card.
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