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The story
A streamer who built a following on YouTube under the persona “Despair Factory Worker” — claiming to be a single factory worker earning just ¥2.4 million a year (about $16,000) — announced on September 28, 2026 via Twitter (under the handle ZANIO) that he had gotten married and had a child. On 5channel’s livestream-chat board, backlash erupted over the fact that he kept posting “marriage-hunting” videos trading on his single-and-searching image even after going public, and users argued over whether the timeline of his old videos actually lined up with when the marriage and pregnancy happened. Given the scale of his view counts, some commenters are also questioning whether the whole “despair” persona was exaggerated to begin with.
What people said
He's apparently said his real income is close to ¥20 million anyway.
Anyone running a grift like that is just scum, honestly.
Yeah… that part's pretty bad. Not okay, honestly.
But going by the timeline, he was apparently already married with a pregnant partner by then — is the marriage-hunting act really fine with that? It's disrespectful to his actual partner too.
Did he actually publish that kind of timeline?
Looked it up — seems he posted a marriage-hunting video back in March 2026, and that clearly overlaps.
No, he'd been doing the marriage-hunting thing for a good while before that.
Yeah, being a regular salaried employee really beats being a YouTuber. The guys who constantly whine on NanJ (5ch's Nandemo Jikkyo discussion board) that YouTubers are low-status nobodies making no real money are probably just old geezers who never caught up with the times. They probably genuinely think a YouTuber pulling these view counts is only making like ¥10,000 a month.
Sure, maybe early on — but by March 2026, even if it was a shotgun marriage, he was already dating her. And he's out there joking about a 'second date,' come on. That's massively disrespectful both to the woman in his video and to the woman he actually married.
Did you even watch that video? Wasn't it the one where he's reporting his marriage-hunting was going well?
Probably both, but I'd bet it's mostly guys.
Check the ZANIO Twitter account — he tweeted on September 28, 2026 that he got married and had a baby. Working backward from that, his partner was already pregnant at the start of 2026, so there's no way a 'second date' happened in March 2026.
That's a different video than the one I meant. Mine's from winter, so it wouldn't be weird if he met his actual wife sometime after that one.
Well, for guys he's probably more recognizable than some female-audience YouTuber with a million subs. Feels aimed more at internet-otaku types.
Guys like Hikaru, Hajime Shacho, Tokai Onair — none of those ever even show up in my YouTube recommendations.
It was obviously fake from the jump — people just didn't notice, which is exactly how they got taken in.
Yeah fair, keeping a dog in company housing really isn't allowed, lol.
Background and key points of this story
YouTube series like “Despair Factory Worker” that lean on factory work or low income are a well-known genre for drawing viewer sympathy. The core of this controversy is the suspicion that he kept running a “marriage-hunting” series premised on being single even after the fact came out — and most of the thread comments pointing out contradictions in posting dates are really just speculation from users cross-checking his old videos and social media themselves. As of this thread, there’s been no official explanation or confirmed timeline from the man himself, and his claimed income hasn’t been verified either. The dollar amount itself isn’t the direct cause of the backlash — what’s easy to miss from the article alone is that the real target of the anger is the possibility he kept up a “single” persona while already in a relationship and getting married.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Bad News] ‘Despair Factory Worker’ Channel Guy (Claimed ¥2.4 Million Annual Income) Exposed as Married With Kids — Causes Huge Uproar.”
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