The life that Ironmouse has... I wouldn't wish it on the worst of my enemies.
CVID, combined variable immunodeficiency... basically means the common cold or less can kill you. Going outside, interacting with normal people, can be a death sentence. She needs constant and expensive treatments, plasma infusions, and drugs that cost a fortune... a prisoner in your own body in your own home requiring constant outside care. Costs easily reaching in the 6 figures or more.
In addition, her body is already damaged, leading to her voice being quite "strange". Her lungs and body don't function like a normal person's, and even with the best available medical care, one bad turn could be the end of it. For a while, she was bedridden, unable to have any level of real mobility. That comes with real psychological costs as well.
So, in many ways, I don't blame her for compromising principles in order to get the bag. She has also worked to donate large sums of money to the CVID foundation for research, and currently AI is making a lot of headway towards better detection and hints at better personalized care.
AI acceptance rates in 2026 are already rising, especially when people are seeing a range of benefits for medicine, cancer vaccines, and new drugs for rare diseases never thought possible before. Especially because the underlying core technology, machine learning, drives these innovations.
Now LLM-based AI agents are parsing through genetic variants at speeds that no human can match. AI is designing custom sequences with accuracy never seen before.
And it's all the same core tech: machine learning and neural networks drive AI art and AI medicine. The main differences are the training data, the loss functions, failure-mode criteria, validation pipelines, and various architectural differences.
So yeah, I'm expecting more people to be accepting of AI once they see their loved ones saved by AI-powered medicine... the controversy of "AI art" ends up feeling quaint when lives are at stake.
and i'm sure at some point ironmouse will come around to being okay with AI, and her audience will follow her no matter what.
Everyone seems to have a price.
Especially if the ground they're standing on is shaky.
Since Ironmouse doesn't mind AI anymore because Fortnite uses SO MUCH AI in their game, and they allegedly gave her so much money... I know she won't care that people are making AI art of her now. Right?
At some point, she is gonna come out and talk about how much she loves AI in the future... especially if AI is able to find a cure for things like CVID. Which is where AI is probably gonna make the largest impact: for rare diseases and rapid medical development.
As I said before. The Anti-AI position has always been shaky at best.
Why does Ironmouse do Subathons all the time?
Well, I think money is definitely a big factor, along with the reality that a large portion of that money will also be donated to the IDF... the Immune Deficiency Foundation.
On top of needing it for her treatments, I think at some point that money will also someday lead to discoveries for better therapeutics. More eyes, more funding in the future, a possible cure someday.
But some of the other stated reasons are just kinda sad. Subathons mean being online for long stretches of time, which is the only time she gets to interact with people, even if it's just through a screen. One of the stated reasons for her starting streaming is because she was deathly lonely.
She has done some pretty shitting things throughout her career as a VTuber and screwed over a lot of people. People aren't purely good or evil, but for someone like her, the contrast is created through sheer desperation.
Will I ever be a "fan" again? Probably not. Not that I was much of one, but I did have more favorable opinions of her in the past. But that doesn't mean that I hate her or that I wish the worst for her.
Being sick, lonely, and trapped doesn't give license to treat people poorly in underhanded ways, but I do genuinely hope that whatever effort she does towards CVID actually ends up helping a lot of people with the same condition.
And if you are still a fan, I don't blame you either. The fandom is toxic and often unhinged, but I also get it. The fans are protecting their "fragile sick queen," but at the same time, that toxic energy gets cringe quickly.
As I said before... It's a life I don't wish even for my worst enemies.