"Oh."
"So youβve... actually done it.β
βYouβve left me.β
#eimiko hanahaki (except not really) fic, sfw with some suggestive elements, 8.5k words
archiveofourown.org/works/45669592
when we talk about the "fourth person" pronoun what we're actually talking about are "kinds" of participants in dialogue that don't fit into the typical three setups: subject, object, observer...
several ideas have been tossed around about what could be considered like, an atypical fourth type of relation to the dialogue that doesn't really fit, and the most popular is the hivemind "we/us," which is like, usually dismissed as an experiment of science fiction
however, the word "chat" not only invokes the group of "chatters" as a grammatical object, but treats them as a singular hivemind, and not only that, it's--by virtue of a streamer's relationship to their chat--a direct address like the second person plural "you"
not only that, "chat" is often used by a member speaking IN the chat to refer to the collective, sans self. for example, if one twitch viewer types in the chat, "chat is going crazy rn," they're performing like, a half-detachment from the collective to observe-self-estranged
and, of course, because hiveminds in science fiction have to resemble our known rules of language so we can understand it, it just borrows first-person-plural and third-person-object even though it's not really?? like, a group agreeing?? or an insentient object
because of this, "chat" as used by: streamers to refer to not a selection of viewers or the whole of them, but rather like, the ambiguous general nascent spirit behind viewership, as well as "chat" used by viewers of the streamer to refer to themselves--sans them, is unique
and then it just happened and we made a completely intuitive pronoun for it and we just didn't even realize we solved a trivia problem that creative writing professors have been agonizing over for decades
so like, we-us-it/them to refer is used in fiction to represent hiveminds and people do suggest that it's fourth person because it blends the boundary between personal and collective, however obviously since it's not real, it's just kind of like, a stretch