For some reason, I clicked on WPIG again. I only lasted 5 minutes. ALT was watching Phil putting his hand behind his head and flexing his bicep. I get it, it’s funny, but is it really so funny that you have to beat that joke to death and fake-cackle for 5 minutes? Every time I tune into WPIG, the same shit happens: DSP says or does something funny, ALT makes a joke, and then beats that joke for at least 3 minutes while fake-cackling.
On TBS I observed that if the group starts making jokes on a subject, he comes with the lames ones regarding that subject and laughs at them the hardest.
You've gotta remember the ALT lore and it makes all the sense. He's a weeb sperg who socially isolated himself in Japan a la Chibinkodemyx. He lacked any serious social ties to prevent him from disappearing off the face of the Earth and surrounding himself with people who couldn't communicate with him fluently and openly had contempt for him. He comes back years later to his native society and strikes it big hosting a livestream where he's beating the world's easiest pinata. The whiplash must rock the psyche, going from having no one and nobody to having hundreds to thousands of strangers competing to pay money to be his friend, respected livestreamers looking to collaborate, genuine attention and praise he's never felt.
Deep down, he must have serious impostor syndrome out the ass as he knows it's all unearned. He's not talented or charismatic or highly knowledgeable at a-logging DSP, but he's so inoffensive and has enough of that blank slate, french vanilla personality that people can project all the positive aspects of all the other DSP a-logs onto him. He's the perfect e-daddy in this sphere because he never has to have challenging takes or interesting insights, he just has to smile and put the lowest common denominator DSP jokes in the bag. Which he has, for many years.
Fast forward, and this has become a cornerstone of his life. He's no longer going out of his way to do this content, he'd be going out of his way to
stop doing the content. Yet, deep down, he's still that shy introverted guy who ran away to be all alone in Japan; he doesn't feel any deep connections to any of these new viewers outside the bond they made over DSP. It's gotta be scratching away in the back of his mind that one of these streams has to be the last stream, one of these jokes will be the last joke, the last jab at DSP before the worm will turn.
Everyone else is making the next DSP joke to poke fun at pigroach, but for him? It's survival. "Will they still laugh at this bit? Oh God, I need to make a joke now before the moment passes. 'HAHAHAHAH!' Laugh big and loud! It's going to convince them to laugh too, and then this can continue! This will never end, it can't end, it just can't."
But, all things must pass. When it does and he finally decides he's burnt out from the DSP content, that he needs to establish himself and his audience separate from the DSP crutch, and he tries something new, those viewers will follow him... at first. Then, fewer will show up for stream 2, and then even fewer for stream 3; by stream 4, he'll be panicked. Oh God, it really was the DSP content. It really wasn't him as a person, he was never that clever or charming or funny after all. He'll desperately put his tail between his legs and go back to riding Phil's coattails. Back to playing that DSP flexing his bicep clip, laughing his sleep deprived eyes out, knowing he has to get his kids up in 4 hours for school, but he can't stop streaming and risk losing it again. Not again. He's not losing everyone and going back to Japan again. He can't. So, he laughs so loud and so exaggerated at the same clip he's seen 10 times, repeating the same joke he's said for the 20th time, laughing just loud enough to silence that voice going "yeah, but if you didn't have Phil, you'd have none of this."