“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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