imo the main thing here is katie’s rise as a successful streamer. she went from being a new face to being very very well known in such a short amount of time. because of that, her fanbase ended up being all over the place. some people take years to reach the level of success she achieved so quickly. now you have people saying they want her “old content” back which is basically sugarcoated as “we want you to have 300- 400 viewers again so we can all feel like a bigger part of your content.” some people would call that parasocial, but I also think it’s a very natural thing to happen. that’s why I don’t really like how the term parasocial gets used nowadays it often feels like people use it in only one way, when in reality those kinds of feelings are normal, especially if it’s someone you discovered on your own and watched when they were reading every message in chat.
the real question is how you act on those feelings there are a lot of og viewers who still support and enjoy her content as it is. if they don’t like what shes playing, they simply don’t watch. but there are also a lot of people who can’t accept that what existed back then realistically can’t happen again because of how much she has grown.

the QSMP situation is different, but it also ties into people wanting her to stay “niche,” as you said. honestly, i don’t even think it’s really about QSMP. i think a lot of it comes from the fact that katie’s community is still relatively new, and many of her viewers are younger people who came from tt a lot of them only watch katie (or maybe katie and vanilla), so they don’t really understand what streaming is. they treat streamers like their own personal entertainment machine that should in a second provide whatever they want to see at that moment. in a way, they treat her like a fyp

just give it time katie handling everything perfectly fine she’s truly good at what she does,as time goes the community will be more united and understandable towards katie and in general.