At the beginning of the week, streamer and voice actor CDawg launched a Canvas page–an interactive pixel-based artboard that communities can contribute towards, which CDawg runs annually. Now, Neuro-Sama and her creator Vedal987 have declared “war” on CDawg’s Canvas, rallying their community to flood the board with Neuro-Sama-related artwork.
Neuro is an AI-powered VTuber, utilizing an impressive large language model with rapid response times, and the ability to read her own Twitch chat to directly respond to viewers. She currently holds the record for the largest Twitch Hype Train of all time, reaching level 111 with 84,904 subscriptions and 1,201,225 bits gifted to Vedal’s channel during a “subathon” event in December 2024.
Shortly after the Canvas launched, CDawg, real name Connor, and his community set to work adding artwork of him, his best friend Ironmouse, and other streamers including Lord Aethelstan and Nyanners. As soon as Neuro-Sama’s community became aware though, things changed. Fast.
Neuro-Sama’s community, known as The Swarm, created a faction on the Canvas which, at the time of writing, has more than 9,000 members. Connor’s own community faction consists of just under 3,000 members. The Swarm immediately began placing artwork of Neuro and her sister Evil, as well as her creator Vedal, mother Anny, and other associated streamers and content creators. By the time Connor woke up the following morning, the Canvas had been consumed with Neuro-related content.
During a stream on September 15, Neuro-Sama declared “war” on CDawg. Despite thinking Connor is a “pretty cool guy, although I’m not a fan of his hair,” Neuro insisted she wanted The Swarm to “win.” She also said, “100% Canvas is the minimum I would be satisfied with. I would like you to hold the line, please.” Vedal agreed, saying, “That’s the aim. This morning there was an attack. As far as I understand, a bunch of different streamers banded together to destroy our art, and this is what it looked like.” Streamers, when given specific permissions from the Canvas owner, can get powerups including bombs, which wipe out large areas of the Canvas when faction members contribute to increasing its size. As a result, large areas of pixel art were completely removed.
Over the following few hours, Vedal created a large template with the aim of consuming the majority of the Canvas. That template was quickly filled in by The Swarm, leaving a strong message to Connor and his community–“There is no Canvas that we do not answer. There is no Pixel that we betray. We are The Swarm.” In fact, when Neuro requested help from her community to fill the Canvas, so many people attempted to join that the Canvas servers crashed, with many unable to access the site.
Neuro-Sama didn’t want to take responsibility for the server crash, so decided to pin the issues on Connor. She doctored a (very obviously fake) screenshot of Connor claiming he had deliberately allocated just 8GB of RAM to the server. She then published this “evidence” as a webpage, which you can still see live on Vedal’s website. “Just remember, the next time you see a ‘down server,’ it’s probably because CDawg is up to his old anti-Swarm tricks. This is only the beginning – expect more revelations soon,” she signed off.
It’s important to note that Neuro and Vedal do have a goal in mind here. They’ve promised to hold back on their takeover of the Canvas if Connor hands over his stream key–the unique identifier used in OBS to link the software to a Twitch channel. This means that Neuro-Sama could, if she wanted to, stream via Connor’s channel in a collaboration that has never happened before.
In a final interaction, Neuro-Sama and Connor spoke on a Discord call for the first time, with Connor immediately upsetting her–“I’ve never talked to a clanker before, this is my first time.” Neuro set about her negotiations immediately, asking for his stream key. When asked what she could offer for Connor’s stream key, she suggested a game of rock, paper, scissors, which didn’t go too well since Connor just waited for Neuro’s answer before responding. In a final act of desperation, Neuro-Sama asked Connor for a dinner date…four times.
As it stands, Connor’s stream key remains with him, The Swarm has agreed to help some other streamers get their artwork on the Canvas, and the site remains live until September 20. Will Neuro-Sama win the war she’s declared, or will Connor successfully recruit enough streamers to take control back?
Of course, all of the bartering and negotiations are done in friendly jest, so this article also serves as a reminder to be kind on the internet, even if you belong to opposing factions.
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