Welcome to Gaia! ::

Berlin Tempest, pretty, clever, and rich, sits slightly off-center in his frame. Slouching back in his sparkly ergonomic chair, he sports his usual cat-ear space-buns hairstyle. A bubblegum pink headset-and-mic set matches them, with decorations on the headband also shaped like cat ears. With a wild grin on his face, he holds a black gaming controller, whose cord lazily extends out of the frame where, beyond the view of his streaming camera, it connects to his computer.

In the lower right-hand corner, partially obscuring Berlin’s hands and chair, sits a large view of the game he’s playing: Dragon Age: Inquisition, specifically its story DLC, The Descent. Currently, Berlin’s Inquisitor Lavellan—a slightly tanned elf of visually indeterminate gender with long, fire-red hair—traverses the Deep Roads, a series of underground caverns, with his party: Dorian Pavus, Cole, and Solas. The last of these choices deeply amuses several people in the chat, if the recurring messages like lmao yesssss make that stupid egg face what he did and are you feeling it, solas? uncomfortable, i mean are anything to judge by.

As he plays, Berlin’s posture provides his viewers with a solid view of two things. First, Berlin’s cropped, hot pink t-shirt and the screenprinted fanart on it. The art, a bust shot of Sabrina Carpenter on a baby blue background, exists somewhere at the intersection of Archie comics, vintage American pin-up girl art, and 90’s shoujo anime. Grinning, she winks at the viewer. Her one visible hand holds a paper travel cup for coffee while simultaneously making a finger-gun. Stylized cursive text splashed across the shirt, angled so only part of it overlaps with the art, reads That’s That “Me” Espresso!

Second, enabled by both the height of his shirt’s hem and the low resting place of his sweatpants, Berlin’s waist. The pale skin of his exposed midriff surprises no one, but recurring messages in the chat speculate openly about Berlin’s body and his weight, about whether or not he looks thinner. Which, after a few minutes of nonsense, makes Berlin openly roll his eyes.

“Hey, mods? Can we get a rate limit on the guy who’s being really annoying about my body?” Thankfully, the mods for Berlin’s stream chat work quickly. The nerve of some people, honestly. He always wants to project a bright smile during his streams, but sometimes, bastards like this make it hard.

“Listen, I don’t owe you guys or anybody answers to any of the questions that guy was acting. Like, it’s super invasive and rude to get all entitled about streamers’ bodies that way? I mean, I could prove that he’s wrong about me losing any weight recently, but I’d rather play the game? Unless the chat really wants me to prove it, let’s get back to this femboy Solavellan run and making our dread boyfriend Fen’harel really uncomfortable.”

A sound idea in theory—bless the people behind the bisexual Solas mod for making it possible, too—but over the next few minutes, more and more people in the chat start asking for proof. One sends a superchat for ten dollars with their request, and then another two, each of them for fifteen. Thanking them comes out of Berlin’s mouth naturally, a long-practiced response to any kind of monetary donation from his fans.

But on the inside, he can’t help but boggle at the idea of people throwing him their money for, like, what? To watch him prove how completely right he is when he refuses to describe himself as “skinny”? Slim, okay, Berlin will accept that adjective, but he has never in his life been skinny. Not the way he sees things.

Worse, some of the commenters are longtime viewers, their names familiar from the times before he dropped the old V-Tube avatar and revealed his face, from before he actually bothered to take care of himself. They should know better than to speculate about this kind of stuff on Berlin’s streams. But—whatever. Maybe he can ignore them. Or, like, give them enough to satisfy without ending up in some uncomfortable position himself.

Between discussing people’s different headcanons—as he intended to do in this stream—Berlin tries satisfying the vultures by showing the chat some recent outfit of the day selfies from his Instagram, but that only makes more requests come in, specifically asking for Berlin to show them proof right now. To stand up and let them see how he looks right now, today. Offering him money in exchange for a better view of his body. ******** weird behavior, but also, the money complicates things.

Not that Berlin needs the money—he knows he doesn’t—but not making good on what they’re asking for would seriously disrespect his viewers.

The thirteenth superchat request comes in. xx_sucks_eggs_xx, the viewer responsible, sent Berlin three hundred dollars. Prior to this, the highest anybody went was sixty. Totalling up all the superchats would probably make Berlin’s head spin. Part of him wants to nudge one of his chat moderators to do that for him, but he knows he saw one for fifty dollars and at least a few that came in for twenty-five or ********, he can’t avoid this issue anymore. All he can do is bite back on the impulse to sigh.

Shrugging, Berlin pauses his game. As he stands up, then repositions himself in the camera’s view, he shakes his head, but mostly for the sake of swishing his hair around. Posing, he twists into various angles to let people see what he’s working with, he lets slip several sarcastic oooh!s and aaah!s. When he turns to a profile view and slouches, deliberately overemphasizing his stomach—not properly chubby, but definitely soft and totally lacking visible abs, more convex than he considers “skinny”—Berlin tries to sell some fantasy of thinking that he’s any kind of top model.

More accurately, he hams it up, presenting a cheap satire of what a ridiculous FromSoft fanboy thinks a top model might be like. Mocking all the contorted posing of haute couture modeling because, in so many ways, that world wasn’t made for him. Besides, the people in chat asked for a show, so he’d better give them that.

As though it proves literally anything—or, really, without regard for whether it does or not—Berlin draws in a deep, dramatic breath. Pulls his stomach muscles as taut as he can. While the slight softness of his stomach becomes somewhat less apparent, his profile does not end up looking perfectly flat, much less concave. When he turns back to a frontal view, he flaunts a midriff that looks marginally less soft but definitely not muscular or toned. Not “skinny,” either. Slender, sure……in a way that suggests Berlin works out but doesn’t overdo it and probably minds his diet somewhat but wouldn’t say a phrase like “cheat day” over letting himself eat cake.

Yet, even the illusion of reduced softness dissipates when he releases how tightly he has held his abdominal muscles. Overall, refusing to suck in his stomach like that doesn’t really make him look less slender. It only allows the softness around his waistline to exist in its natural state, without trying to hide it from anybody.

“Yeah, see,” Berlin drawls, prodding at his tummy, just to show how the flesh yields to that touch so easily. Despite knowing that he doesn’t have that much to pinch up, he makes an effort. Squeezes his fingers around whatever he can find. “It’s Girl Scout Cookie season, so your boy definitely has not been on a diet. And I’ve only been working out a little more often than usual. So, whatever you all thought you saw? It was probably just a trick of the light or something.”

Berlin tries to sound playful about all of this, laughing as he retakes his seat. Internally, though, he’s writhing, his nerves all ablaze with tension and disquiet. He makes himself grin like everything is normal, like it’s fine and cool and none of this has bothered him for real. But as he picks up his controller again, as he unpauses the game and resumes his hunt for Darkspawn in the Deep Roads, he feels the ghosts of Mother’s fingers prodding and squeezing at his stomach. Hears old memories of her voice criticizing how he looked, or telling him that going on a diet would’ve done him some good.

“Your sisters don’t have any trouble staying nice and slender,” she was telling him when he was as young as ten or eleven, with her sharp fingertips gripping the chub around his waistline like a vise. “I really can’t understand why you find it so difficult, Camden.… Maybe your father and I need to lock you out of the kitchen until you slim down a little. Keep you from getting any between-meal snacks.”

“Camden, I know you feel like we’re attacking you when we say you’re getting far too fat, but we only want to help you,” she sneered at him all through high school, pinching up sizable rolls of belly-fat and firmly shaking them, making her son’s entire torso jiggle. “Besides, the only inaccurate part of that statement is that you’re getting anything. Putting on weight again? Yes, obviously, and everyone can see it. But you can’t really be getting too fat, can you? We all know that you have been too fat for years, at this point.”

“You’re still being careful to watch your weight, aren’t you, Camden,” she drawled at him just last week, swirling her third glass of wine before they’d even sat down for family dinner. Berlin stood before her as slender as he is now. Softer around the middle than anybody could call “skinny,” but only about a hundred-and-fifty pounds—down a solid eighty pounds from his highest weight—and wearing a waist-cincher underneath his shirt on top of it (albeit more to shape his silhouette than to please his mother or anything else). “I don’t care that your doctor says your weight is doing fine. You’re looking thicker in the waist and hips since Christmas, and you let yourself get fat so easily if you don’t stay on top of yourself. Somebody should remind you of that since Charlotte and Chelsea refuse to do it.”

—Honestly, he can’t blame his viewers for not thinking about all that.

He can’t blame them because they don’t know anything like that ever happened in Berlin’s life.

Even the longest standing members of his little community, they wouldn’t know because he never admitted as much. When he did his first face-reveal at age 19, he was still in his chubby, scrungly gamer boy era. There’s a screenshot from that stream on his Wikitubia page, along with several newer pics. There used to be one on his TV Tropes page until some Troper from Destiny City snapped a pic of him at a local convention last fall, dolled up in cosplay as Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower. He went through the process while actively online, so it’s not like it’s a secret that Berlin used to be much heavier until, a few years back, he started losing weight.

As he moves his joysticks, leading his Inquisitor and party through the Deep Roads, Berlin remembers the first time he ever let himself wear a crop-top. He did it on stream, a little present to himself to celebrate losing thirty pounds. To celebrate getting under two-hundred for the first time since eighth grade and staying there for two weeks so he could feel certain that seeing a 1 as the first digit in his weight was not some kind of crazy fluke. Even still flaunting a belly, Berlin had been feeling himself enough to admit exactly how much he’d weighed that morning (197.5 pounds) and to answer several questions from chat about his diet. He’d never made any kind of secret about losing weight.

But as far as anybody online knows, Berlin didn’t have anybody pressuring him to do that. As far as the Internet knows—as far as they ever need to know—he only did that for himself and of his own volition. On top of that, it was a secondary concern to his search for gender euphoria and trying to take better care of himself in general.

“Hey, chat, come on,” he says brightly, making himself smile despite the heavy chill settling into his chest. “It’s a headcanon sharing stream today, remember? Can we get some headcanons going to discuss in here?”

That doesn’t dispel the Bad Feelings, but Berlin’s on stream and he isn’t drunk. He can’t afford to let those show.

Still, he can’t help thinking, Maybe I should work to tone up a little. Sure, my weight is fine, but I could stand to lose some of the extra chub around my waist and thighs.…… Bet I could knock a couple inches off my measurements in a few months if I really took it seriously. Plus, if I got more active about patrolling for energy and starseeds, that could help me log so much more workout time and be good for the Negaverse. It’s a perfect plan.……