Elira Pendora Spends Hours Paging Through a 500-Page Fan-Made Birthday Book

NIJISANJI — Elira Pendora spent most of a nearly six-hour stream looking through a book of more than 500 pages that fans made for her birthday, and said she would read the rest in a second session. She got through roughly 300 pages, the section covering the games she has played on her own, before deciding to hold the remainder back.

The stream was billed as a post-birthday *zatsudan*, or chat stream, and began as one. Pendora joked that she had already forgotten a spelling bee event she had taken part in earlier that day, said she had spent the day after her birthday mostly lying down and suspected she was coming down with a cold, then spent a long stretch with chat comparing favorite Halloween candy and school memories from Canada and the United States.

“It’s my whole life these past five years in like one space.” — Elira Pendora, thanking the people who made the book

About an hour and eight minutes in, viewers told her the book was ready to read. She said she had not known how large it was, and reacted with surprise on learning it ran to 553 pages. She said she would need to check with her manager before showing it on stream, and went through it page by page, reading out entries and reacting to them.

The book, as she described it, gives each game she has streamed its own page, with summaries and trivia written by fans, along with counts pulled from her broadcasts, such as hours played, saves, deaths and the first song she sang on each stream. She laughed at how often she had opened streams with the same few songs, including Nicki Minaj’s “Starships,” and was surprised to learn she had streamed only about 10 hours of Master Duel against roughly 67 on Steam. Fan art ran alongside the entries. Several of the 12 Super Chats came from people who said they had written entries, and one chat message read, “So many oomfs i recognize writing the summaries.”

Pendora said the project had been in the works since around her anniversary in February, according to what she was told on stream, and thanked the writers, artists and editors. She said she would hold the fan art and banner sections for later, and planned to read them on the evening of Nov. 1, or Nov. 2 if she was not home in time. She said she would take the next day off and make her first attempt at Five Nights at Freddy’s on Tuesday.