Button Blitz cracked her neck and rolled her shoulders, getting ready for the long stream coming up. She checked that her webcam was angled correctly, and took that moment to adjust herself and her surroundings. The soft curls of her white mane were pulled up in a ponytail behind her head, with wispy bangs framing the pale peach horn on her head. She was seated in her bedroom in Baltimare. It wasn't messy, but certainly wasn't minimalist either. She had string lights and a few posters hung behind her, just to give some visual interest to the background of her streams.
Today she would be playing a casual game of Minecraft in the background as she performed what everyone really came to her streams for: to hear about Equestria.
Button had been moderately popular before emigrating, but afterwards, her viewership had skyrocketed. She couldn't say it wasn't nice to see four, five, or even six-digit numbers when she looked at her viewer count, even if it was a little nerve-wracking.
"Hey everypony and welcome to the stream! Today I'll be playing some Minecraft, but I'm really here to talk to you. What's been on everypony's mind these past few days?" She could already see her core fans coming in, the ones who donated or purchased subscriptions even knowing she wasn't in their world anymore. Celestia converted those to bits for her, which she appreciated, and Button assumed she was using the real money to fund more emigration efforts. Button certainly didn't mind either way.
A message in the chat caught her attention, and she read it out loud.
"The hotel you worked at shut down? Aw, I'm really sorry to hear that! I hope you can find somewhere that will value you even more soon! Speaking of hotels, though, my friend Jade Patrol actually started working as security in a hotel out by Seaquestria this week! I was sad to see her move so far away, but she seems happy, and the hotel is really nice. It'll give me an excuse to visit that area more often, too! Speaking of which, would you guys like to see more travel-vlog style videos? I recently heard about this great spot in Manehattan..."
This was Button Blitz's job, and the reason why she still streamed. She tried her best every stream to let people know how much better Equestria was without coming off as preachy. She certainly had some pony viewers, but the majority were human. Every one of her human viewers seemed to be having a tough time back on Earth, and while she understood why they hadn't uploaded yet, she also... Didn't. Maybe it was because she already loved cute things as a human, or maybe it was just because she was a natural extrovert, but Button took to Equestria like a fish to water. From the first days of her having a PonyPad(which she absolutely streamed, until it got too personal), she had loved living the pony life.
"Ooohh look, we found wheat! That's good, I was getting sick of eating plain apples. In Minecraft, at least. I don't think I could ever get sick of apples in real life!"
In Equestria, Celestia converted human-centric media to be about ponies, with as few changes as possible made to accomodate that. Button Blitz was fine with that, but she requested that Celestia show her Minecraft avatar as human to all of her human viewers. It might have been cheating, but she wanted people to see that just because she was a pony, it didn't mean she had forgotten what it was to be a person, or that she had lost access to her favorite media. She could enjoy a game of League of Legends or cuddle up for a Studio Ghibli marathon just as well as any human could. Better, actually, with a pony's faster reaction times and sharper senses, and without the lurking feelings of "I should be doing something productive right now". Gone was the rat race and artificial scarcity of day-to-day life on Earth, replaced with Equestria's abundance for all who wanted it. The pony life was just, to her, the objectively correct choice.
Of course, her being a popular streamer, and one of the only people in her field regularly producing Equestria-centric content, she got her fair share of hate. So far that stream, her auto-mod bot had already put two people in chat timeout. They were still allowed to watch, but no more spewing hate. She almost never blocked people from her channel entirely. Even someone hatewatching could be convinced to change their mind if she got to them with the right angle.
"Dragonroid_98 says: ur gay." She laughed, and pointed to the bi flag hanging on the wall behind her. "Glad to see you have eyes, but I'm fine with mares or stallions, as long as they've got a good heart," she replied. Even with the flag, she ended up coming out basically every other stream. It seemed that some entitled viewers were shocked when they realized they would have to compete with mares for her attention, and left in a huff, not considering the fact that even if she were completely straight, she wouldn't be dating them anyways. She was streaming for the games, the company, and Celestia. Not to find a romantic partner. She especially wasn't planning on finding one from Earth, at any rate. Even if she hadn't found one in Equestria yet. Sure, she could ask Celestia to set her up with somepony, but it wasn't on her priority list, and besides, what was the fun in that? She had always been a bit of a romantic, and she still believed that one day she'd run into that special somepony. When the time was right.
After a few more hours of streaming, Button Blitz was finally wrapping up. She had gone through two cups of coffee, three cupcakes, and plenty of water to keep her voice from giving out after basically monologuing to herself for five hours. Celestia had set the sun, Luna had risen the moon, and Button was just plain tired.
"Well everypony, thank you for coming! don't forget to follow, and check my schedule for future streams coming up! I have a special Sugarcube Corner mukbang stream coming up this Thursday to celebrate reaching 200k followers! I couldn't have done it without all of you, my little ponies." She took a sip of her water. "Oh, and don't forget to join my Discord server! It's new, but it's the best place to get in contact with both myself and other like-minded poni-er, people! With that, good night, my little ponies, and catch you in Equestria!"
Author's Note
Hiya everypony! I've wanted to write a Friendship is Optimal story since I first read them in, like, 2016. Unfortunately I was 15 and a pretty bad writer. More unfortunately, I still am :P. This is an exercise in fiction writing for the first time in years for me, and if it goes well, there are actually a lot more Optimalverse stories I'd love to tell! I'm also actually going to start vtubing with a pony avatar soon, and roleplaying it as if she's actually being broadcast from equestria, so this is a little bit of an exercise in that too. The twitch account is going to be called Pop Equestria, and the character is Gummy Pop. I'm super bad with technology, but once I get it figured out, I think it's going to be really fun! She's not from the optimalverse, just a regular pony with really strong wifi lol, but the core vibes are there. Anyways this got off track so... Thank you for reading! Feel free to comment your thoughts, or any grammatical errors you caught. I'll print out the nice messages and pin on the wall above my desk. :3
