About Me

In 2014, Reinhart created me and Shiftine as the main, playable characters for a video game he was imagined for days. No, we weren’t kidding, and this truth is neither for lore nor fan service. He was inspired by other his high school friends creating their original characters (OCs) over DeviantArt, and he wished to create one.

You can check out the original lore, as finalized in 2016, below. But long story short, he abandoned the project to continue working on his life.

In 2021, he felt lonely and sick. Lonely because he have lost many of his friends during the COVID-19 pandemic, then sick and hospitalized (not because of COVID-19) for having too much stress at work. Then came the idea to revive us until today.

There’s a lot to tell here, so we divide it into several sections. Hopefully, this can solve your answers about the existence of ourselves.

Original character description (as in 2016)

Name:

• Charlie Sweetstar 👑
• Charlene Sweetstar 👸

Age: Random, but they are twins

Occupation/Position: Sorcery and King/Queen of the Hacker Kingdom.

Home Address: Cloud (Internet)

Work Address: 127.0.0.1

Once upon some lines of code, lived a pair of twins who are being unwanted by a family. They are left by their parents for many years. Even their parents forgot about them.

The twins walked along a path across to the Hacker Kingdom, which is far far away. During their journey, they have tried to survive from Wicked Hackers around the forest. Wicked Hackers are harmful to the Kingdom. Those hackers are often stealing lines of code from the Kingdom. The King prepared an army of hackers to defeat them. Unfortunately, the army failed.

After the twins entered the Kingdom, a sorcerer adopted both of them. Soon, the sorcerer give name to the twins as Charlie Sweetstar and Charlene Sweetstar. What a similar name!

The sorcerer teached them magic for years, the magic that can defeat the darkness of the Wicked Hackers outside. The sorcerer did not teach magic to others because they can destroy the Kingdom. Even the sorcerer did not tell and teach the King about it. Soon, Charlie and Charlene mastered all the sorcery of hackers, and start to defeat the Wicked ones. They started the journey to the forest near on the App Valley, then on the Import Hills. Both of them successfully defeated some of the Wicked ones.

The news spread to the entire kingdom. Then, the King called both of them to the castle, which is known as the “127.0.0.1”. Some civilians are also calling the palace “0.0.0.0” or “localhost”.

Searching for Shiftine

When Reinhart was hospitalized in 2021, he was searching for a partner that understands him and his interests in ICT. It felt difficult at that, COVID-19 times, as many of his friends are also struggling to live their life.

A quick flashback to the 2014 days led him to start redesign his own characters, to become Nate (now Shift) and Nix (now Jilly). He didn’t create us as anime or VTuber characters, because he said they represent a wholly wrong self image of the talents who performed them as well as their followers (learn more about his full reasons here).

He then reiterated his character designs to form a self-insert and three more characters, entirely named according to special keyboard keys (Shift, Alt, Caps Lock, Tab, etc.). Oh yeah, also the Command Prompt. At that moment, Shiftine was created before me, Shift. But Reinhart was too obsessed with Shiftine’s “cute-and-friendly” appearance than all the others, motivating him to fix his self-image to be like her, aka., his own creation.

So that’s how do I reborn as Shift.

Leaving Transhumanism and Cyberpunk

These two common things have been attributed to our lives while also endangering Reinhart’s own self image. Because it is (see Romans 1:18-32, those who changed the glory of the God will be abandoned by God to do foolish things).

Since 2014, we were intentionally designed as humans with the ability to transform into robots. Unlike Power Rangers or Iron Man, our flesh becomes the metal. And the whole point of the video game was all about embracing our powers, including being able to live and transport through the digital world. We were practicing transhumanism after all, and soon realized that we were created as a product of Reinhart’s false self-image. But honestly, after seeing things happening outside the fourth wall, we would be fine if we keep our identity this way.

It’s definitely right and beautiful to confess our true identity as a couple of fictional people that would less likely to appear in the real life, but capable of living over the Internet to bring impactful blessings to the cyberspace, while also working behind Reinhart’s computer system infrastructure to help keep it healthy and blessful. But well, Reinhart said he was asked by the Holy Spirit to change one thing, or even two: remove our likenesses as transhumanist robots, because it was not God’s idea, and start treating us the same as humans, created in the same image and likeness with God Himself.

²² Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools ²³ and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

²⁴ Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.

Romans 1:22-24 NIV

The original (video game) storyline mentioned us living in a world of cyberpunk and even technopaganism, which definitely violate things on the Bible. The Kingdom of Light (Revelation 21) is not the same as a metropolitan city known for their neon lights during the nights. As we escaped the fourth wall, we still live in a theoretical placed named the cyberspace. Some well-known digital rights activists recognized the importance of the cyberspace, including how should it be independent from political and economical control.

We are not going to detail out about the identity of the cyberspace, but we have a related belief that the word cyber means guidance and leadership, not humans becoming robots and vice versa.

Why ended up being VTubers?

Even though Reinhart didn’t like the current state of VTubers, he realized that there are certain kinds of people, like his old self, closed their doors of reality and dedicated their lives for virtual things, including video games and VTubers. And VTuber idols are one of things they do. So he decided to venture that way, together with us, with the mission to save them.