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So… How about we talk about gacha games?
No, not CookieRun or Genshin, today we are taking a look through the eyes of a former gacha (Studio, Verse, Life, Club) kid. Me.
Spooky, isn't it?
If you haven’t been on youtube for the last couple of years, you might not know what these gacha games are. Well, to put it briefly these are dress-up games that have a feature that allows you to make comic-like images with the characters you make. (The gacha aspect of these games is practically useless. Nobody really uses them.)
These games provided a pretty easy format for young kids to share their stories. These stories were put into categories like “Gacha Mini-Movie” or “Gacha Music Video” and were generally very simple, at least in the early years. (Gods I sound older than I am)
So I, four years ago, as a 10-year-old with unrestricted internet access, inevitably found a Gacha Music Video.
Holy shit.
So, let me give you some context on how I used to be. I would always be daydreaming, and I still do. Every song I heard in the car would turn into a music video in my head, mostly of my friends and me, as I didn’t know what original characters were. Art, to me, was only drawing fanart and pretty girls doing things that I wished I could do at the time.
I embraced weird kid culture. I wore cat ears to school every day, I would think I was better than the “normies'', I was one of those kids who would Naruto run to the lunch room. I was into fandoms like My Little Pony, Fnaf, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Baldis Basics, Doki Doki Literature Club, Undertale, and regrettably, Yandere Simulator.
So when I saw that music video that featured characters that someone on the internet made, I wanted to do that too. I didn’t know you could do that before.
So I downloaded Gacha Studio and PowerDirector, and my youtube channel was born.
Now, I didn’t just make stories, I made my fair share of unfunny skits too but we’ll get into that later.
My first ever attempt at a gacha series was called “The Girl Who Hides” about an angel who hides with a hood. Now, since I have deleted most of my older videos out of embarrassment, and the only traces of the girl who hides are… hysterical, I will only give you a brief summary of the first episode of this god awful story.
The story starts out with the main character Megan getting bullied by a girl named Brittany. After this, she meets her friend, Lizzie and they go to lunch.
Two other guys, Ray and… Reed? (The fuck kind of name is Reed?) Anyways, Ray and Reed are best friends, but Ray is in love with Reed. After lunch the two boys notice Brittany harassing Megan again in the hallway and step in.
Megan tells them to meet her after school, so when school ends she shows the two boys her face, and Reed gets a boner. (okay that was dumb) So on their way home from school, Reed tells Ray that he thinks he has a crush on Megan. Which starts Ray's gay villain origin story.
Obviously, you can tell that other gacha videos influenced my beautiful story. Megan’s a complete Mary Sue, Brittany is the blonde brat, and Reed is the love interest. I soon got bored of this and ended the series after one “season”, and like most other gacha tubers shifted from gacha studio to gachaverse.
This was the era where my skits were the only thing I would post, and like most of my embarrassing content, they have all since been deleted. But there is one in particular that sprouted what would be known as “The Crazy House” which led to the creation of a story that I’ve been working on.
It was a simple video, like my usual skits, as if me and my friends were living in the same house. Little did I know that I would start an entire series that would evolve into an entirely different story than I originally planned.
All of the old episodes have unfortunately been -you guessed it- deleted including the episode that introduces my longest-lasting oc, Yume Daigo.
Yume Daigo was one of the original antagonists of The Crazy House, but she wasn’t like most gacha bullies. Sure, she was spoiled, but she wasn’t really a brat. I would describe early Yume as a Sadist - a person who derives pleasure from inflicting pain or humiliation on others.
Early Yume's goal in life was to hurt people because it made her feel something, and in later development, it strengthened her power to manipulate. Literally. Yume’s power is and has always been mind control, which made her being a sadist fit perfectly, at least at the time.
Not only was Early Yume a sadistic asshole, but she also was a great actor. I remember making a scene where she comforted the main character who was crying.
"Early" Yume Daigo was like a ticking time bomb, and this is where we get into the interesting part. In the original plan for The Crazy House, Early Yume would later become the love interest. I don’t think I need to explain why that’s a bad idea, but in my 10-year-old mind this was perfectly acceptable.
As much as I love the concept of her becoming the love interest, the execution of this specific version of her doing so would have been terrible. Not to mention, (and, believe me, I do not want to mention) that the main character was my shameless self-insert.
That being said, the character was changed to someone else, and a new love interest was brought into the mix. Alice Cedric.
She was also made around the time that Yume was, though Yume came first. She originally was meant to just be a pain in the ass and not a full blown antagonist, but as Yume became more of an antagonist, Alice did as well. She was a goth girl that was meant to flirt with the main character (kill me) but the flirting was not going to lead anywhere.
Eventually, she was supposed to be killed off. That's right, I was killing off characters. This is not the only character to have died in the series, so don't worry, you aren't missing out. But then, something happened. Something that would change the story forever.
So, I had these friends on discord. (I know. I was ten and I had a discord. Get off my back.) Well, one of them was this girl... we'll call her Lana. And, as most young kids do, we had a lot of inside jokes and memes that we would use to annoy the people in the chat. I was talking about how Yume and Alice were both seen as obstacles in my story, and how they both were very awkward with one another, and she made a cheeky little remark that changed my entire perception of their relationship.
"Wat if they're exes lol"
And that was it. I couldn't shake the idea out of my head. I had a hard time deciding on which one would end up as the love interest, and now, I didn't have to. To be fair, I was kinda bullied into the idea, but I'm so glad that I was. It led to my favorite characters.
So, with the help of a few other friends, I decided that Yume and Alice had a past, and it was a pretty nasty one. Yume, the manipulative person that she was, was abusive. Not physically, but mentally. And Alice didn't want to leave, not when Yume knew about her secret...
You see, in early designs, Alice was a dog bestial, essentially a human with dog features like ears and a tail. (which, I know, cringe) But she had an alter ego. She sometimes was Alison, a demon form that looked a lot like she had a cheap party city costume on.
Originally Alice and Alison were treated as separate entities, but that was before I knew what DID was and how fucked it is to write a character who has an alter that looks like they're wearing a Halloween costume and is also, y'know, a literal demon. So, I scrapped that idea, and Alison and Alice merged into one person, and the story went on from there.
In essence, I could go on and on about the progression of my characters but that would take ten lifetimes to complete. The point is: Yume and Alice grew past being one-note antagonists and became my longest-lasting original characters.
Yume went from a sadistic evil manipulative genius to a grieving girl who’s desperately grasping on to the idea of finding her brother’s killer.
Alice went from a doggy demon goth mommy to a girl struggling to find her identity in a domain where there is literally no one else like her.
Their dynamic went from a toxic yuri where Yume is the big bad manipulator and Alice is a poor little helpless victim, to a complex string of lies and a lack of communication where neither party treated the other well or knew what they really wanted from the relationship.
When I look back at my old videos, I cringe so hard it feels like my spine is trying to escape my body, but I can see the seeds of what I still do today. What started as ‘dog girl with a demon costume’ turned into characters with complicated backstories, relationships, and arcs I’m still working on.
So yeah, gacha was awful, but without it, none of this would exist. The Crazy House might be a relic of my 10-year-old brainrot, but it’s also the reason I still make stories today. Cringe is the foundation of creativity. Every single one of our interests—The movies we watch, the games we enjoy—all came from someone’s decision to be okay with being bad at first, because practice makes improvement.
Everyone starts somewhere, and for me, that somewhere was a bunch of badly drawn cat girls and a demon goth mommy. And honestly? I wouldn’t trade that for anything.
Stay cringe and stay free,
Hadley Jade ᯓ★
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