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“Fingerless gloves? I know it’s the thought that counts, but like, what’s stopping someone with no fingers from just wearing regular gloves?”

Meet Veronica "StumplessQuaddess" Phan, a 25 year old gamer and streamer born without limbs. She's the creation of the awesome 10girls8limbs who has posted an 'interview' with Veronica from a point where she is just starting to really make a name for herself. The subjects are gaming (of course), how she gets by with a limb difference, and why nail clippers are, like, the most terrifying thing ever.

Meet StumplessQuaddess, the Streamer with No LimbsWe caught up with Veronica ‘StumplessQuaddess’ Phan, the limbless Twitch streamer taking the Internet by storm, to talk retro video games, her flourishing streaming career, and living with limb difference.BY ANI HUANGPresented by StreamlineMAY 18, 2023, 10:00 AM“Chat, what do you think? Should I get tattoos on my shoulder nubs? Mommy_Gooseberry, thank you for the five months! Wow, I don’t really know how to feel about that name,” says StumplessQuaddess. She tabs out of her Steam window with a puff of air, turning her attention to the endless scroll of chat messages flooding her second monitor, and bouncing her head to the beat of FIFTY FIFTY’s ‘Cupid’ all the while. “Are we done with FF7? I’m kinda bored. Sekiro? Chat? Is it Sekiro time? ‘Can you even play Souls games with no limbs?’ Of course I can! Okay, now you’re making me feel like I have something to prove.”(Transcribed from StumplessQuaddess’ May 5 2023 stream, “imagine dropping lp to a literal torso LMFAO”)Veronica Phan’s bedroom, which has doubled as her workplace since 2020, is lit entirely by purple LEDs lining the edges of the ceiling. A clean, sweet scent fills the air as I pass through the already-open door. The first sight that greets me is a pair of BLACKPINK posters hanging up on the northern wall, their upper corners curling inwards from age. Dozens of plushies - bunnies, ocean-eyed huskies, Hello Kitties - sit in a hammock suspended over the bed, whose entire upper half also happens to be consumed by the stuffed critters. In most cases, I’d be left to wonder if they leave space for anyone to sleep. For Phan, better known by her Twitch alias StumplessQuaddess, it’s no concern at all. “Custom mattresses are expensive.” she explains. “I’d literally be spending more for less. The twin-sized is too big for me, obviously, so I had a lot of extra space to share.” Her sitting and standing height are one and the same: 89 centimetres, and with not much to her other than her head and torso, the limbless 25 year old looks diminutive in her deluxe gaming chair. It’s not a remark she finds insulting. On the contrary, she’s happy with her unique size, finding it amusing when her viewers affectionately refer to her as “smol” or “bite-sized.”“I am tiny. I prefer that people don’t shy away from being direct about who I am. Like they think they should try and pretend I’m not missing my limbs, or that I’m not a third of the size of a regular person, but then it’s like, they think it’s going to kill me if they so much as mention me being small. And somehow that feels more offensive, actually. Does that make sense?” she asks with a tilt of her head. Lacking the ability to gesture with hands, she is as animated in conversation as her body allows. It’s a sunny Friday morning, and Phan is dressed in a sleeveless, light pink crop top revealing a generous amount of midriff. The empty pant legs of her black tights are tied up around her trim waist. The heart shaped pendant of a twinkling, handcrafted diamond necklace hangs just below her sternum. She’s never been known to wear headphones (though she laments missing out on the kitty ear variety), and today is no exception. The wire of a single earbud hangs from her left ear, getting lost in the tangles of her luscious dark hair. To the awe of thousands of viewers, she’d gotten a blonde balayage last week, adding a stunning amount of dimension to her wavy locks, which reach down past her nonexistent armpits. She tells me she’s “shameless about the egirl aesthetic,” that she’d wear thigh highs or fishnet stockings if she had legs. Her classically beautiful triangular face is well complemented by her large brown eyes, twinkling when she gives a coy smile, and yet her round, thick-framed glasses serve to preserve a sense of girlish innocence. “They’re non-prescription. My eyesight is perfect, despite me having stared at a screen twelve hours a day for the past three years. Yeah, I know. I was blessed with all the best genes,” she says, with not a hint of irony.When I inquire further about the choice of eyewear, it almost feels as though she’d prepared a whole story for the impromptu question - something I notice becoming a trend as our conversation progresses. “I just don’t like the way I look without glasses. Which is like, isn’t it the opposite for most people? I was in fourth grade when I found out. Probably a third of my class needed glasses by then, and some of them wanted to play this game with me where they’d stick their glasses on my head, and it would be up to me to try to remove them. I got good at it, I could get most pairs of glasses off by pushing forward on the tip of the frame with my shoulder nub. Challenging, right? And anyone can play, you don’t have to be limbless. You just have to not use your arms. It took until after I graduated high school for me to remember that this happened and to realize that maybe I was being bullied? But I didn’t see it that way back then. My peers always came across as nice enough. I thought they were just teasing me. Whatever the case, I would see myself in the mirror wearing my classmates’ glasses, and I thought they made me look so much cooler. And that’s basically it. My opinion has since remained largely unchanged,” she says. I watch as she leans over to the left, where, within the cupholder of her gaming chair, there sits a large matcha pearl milk tea. She takes a sip via an extra-long reusable straw. On the strawberry pink desk behind her is an assortment of what I presume to be disability aids - thin plastic arms sticking up from the sides of the desk, all connecting to an assemblage of tiny tubes sitting at mouth level. Taken together, it resembles some kind of makeshift instrument built out of a digital camera. I’m to learn that the device is called a Quadstick, and next to that, the tall, clear cup is filled with mouth sticks and not styluses or magical wands. Otherwise, the desk appears built for your average able-bodied gamer. Behind the intricate setup are her dual monitors, the one on the right playing a livestream by liok0485, and the left showcasing the main window of Streamlabs, Phan’s preferred livestreaming software. She tells me she keeps Streamlabs open morning to night. It’s likely no exaggeration, given her almost daily ten-hour stream schedule. As for the stream she’s been watching, she laughs.“If I’m not streaming myself, I’m watching other streamers. I call it idea farming. I take notes on what I can add to my stream, and how I can be more entertaining while I play. Or, sometimes, like here, I take notes on how to play. She’s really good,” Phan says, smiling as if it’s her own achievements she’s proud of. She’s referring to the Korean League of Legends streamer liok0485, who also happens to be one of the first females to play at the semi-professional level.Longtime viewers will be familiar with Phan’s frequent jokes that she herself is “going pro” whenever she puts out an acceptable performance in any competitive game. But very few of these viewers know who she is outside of the rectangular window of her livestream. She says the obscuration of her identity and private life has been nothing if not fully intentional. Now, for the very first time, Veronica Phan is telling Streamline the story of the woman behind the StumplessQuaddess visage., It’s interesting, because you’re so open on stream, and yet you’re still shrouded in this mysterious allure. So tell me a bit about yourself, about your childhood. Who is Veronica Phan? How did she end up as the person she is today?Oh, this is weird. So I just tell you my life story? I don’t think it’s as exciting as you think. I was born in California, 1998, April 25. Um, my family moved to Vancouver a few months after I was born, and I’ve been living in B.C. ever since. My parents tell me my passion for gaming and art began straight out of the womb. Apparently I would watch my dad playing Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64, except I was too young to remember any of it. My first real sentient memory? It has to be me in the living room, I was laying on the carpet at like four years old with a blue crayon between my lips. Cerulean blue specifically, yeah, because I was trying to draw a steller’s jay that I must’ve seen in some nature documentary… and I had a four year old’s brain, so the drawing didn’t even resemble a bird, and also I remember at the same time there was a Morrowind commercial playing on the TV. I saw so much adventure in those early 2000’s polygons, I asked my parents about that game nonstop for the next two weeks, not knowing we didn’t have an Xbox to play it on. Ah, I think I’m rambling, and I’m not sure I really answered your question?No, this is great. It’s really refreshing to hear and learn about these core memories of yours. I think for most people, the biggest mystery, the question people want answered, surrounds your lack of limbs. I don’t know how much you keep up with all the buzz on social media, but there’s been quite the speculation with people trying to puzzle out whether you’d had limbs and lost them or if you were born without.Is that real? I know people are curious, but I thought it’s way too obvious that I never had limbs. Yeah, I do get the question all the time of “what happened to me,” and like, I’ve always just ignored them. But, just this once, just for you, I’ll explain. I was born without limbs, as a result of tetra-amelia syndrome. And, you probably know, you sound like you’ve done your research, but it’s - I memorized the description - a very rare disorder characterized by the absence of all four limbs. That’s definitely how I get characterized [laughs]. My case is even more rare, because if you’ve seen photos of anyone else with my condition, you’ll know that most of us have vestigial limbs, a little malformed leg or arm or two. I don’t. I’m the only person I know of who’s actually entirely limbless.And is that how you got your name, StumplessQuaddess?It is! I’m honestly surprised you made the right connection. Do you know how many people ask me, “Why do you say you’re stumpless if you’re an amputee?” Like… Am I not allowed to call them stupid? They think being an amputee and having stumps are equivalent. So when I get that question, I just have to stop and take a deep breath and tell them, slowly, that it’s simply because I literally do not have stumps. I’m stumpless. And then they usually realize how stupid they were, and that’s where I get my satisfaction. It sounds like you deal with a lot of ignorance.I guess. It’s nothing I can’t handle. Ooh, speaking of which, you know another crazy thing? There’s also the people who, every now and then, come into my stream and see me using my mouth to game, and you know what they ask? They’re like, “Why don't you use your feet to play?” I have ‘limbless’ and ‘quadamputee’ in my tags, by the way. But apparently that’s not enough, so in addition to my facecam, I had Alex [Phan’s fiancée] attach a ‘pelvis cam’ underneath my desk so people could see for themselves that I didn’t have legs either. It got weird after like two streams, though. I realized I was letting people stare at my crotch the whole day. I’m actually surprised I didn’t get banned for that.Have you got any other favourites? From fans or viewers, or anyone in your life.Oh, I feel like I’ve been waiting for this opportunity to unload. Um, off the top of my head… For some reason, people love asking how I use the washroom. My response is always the same: with my private parts. It’s just kind of boring at this point. “What would you do if someone picked you up and ran?” That’s another one. I say I don’t go outside, so I’ll never know. I’m pretty sure I have these on my FAQ, in my About Me panel, ‘cause I get these questions like three times each, every time I stream. Actually now that I think about it, the FAQ hasn’t helped much because people just don’t read. Oh, and I can’t forget the classic, “Why don’t you wear prosthetics?” “Why don’t you get robot arms?” Like people are literally looking directly at me in my facecam, seeing I have no shoulders, thinking prosthetics are going to do anything for me at all. So all I tell them is I don’t like limbs. There is some truth in that, so it’s not like I’m giving them a bad answer. It’s similar to when people ask me if I wish I had limbs, and this is a question I genuinely appreciate. Because I always tell them no, and they’re always so surprised to hear that. But I never elaborate, I never say why I don’t want limbs. And, I’m sorry, I won’t elaborate to you either. Oh, I guess I can see it now. Is this why everyone thinks I’m mysterious?Partially, yes. It’s fine if you’d rather not share the why, but can you tell me whether or not you always had this attitude? If not, what did it take for you to become accustomed to life without arms and legs? You’re trying to cheat me out of my secrecy, aren’t you? I like how you at least tried to be subtle about it. Did I always have this attitude? I’d say… No. Not at all. The suckiest part about my childhood, I remember, was learning and seeing that all the other kids were doing so many cool things that I had no way of doing. There were swimming lessons for the whole class in first grade, and I was the only one who couldn’t go. Same with phys ed. I basically never got to participate. And there were art projects every Friday. For Thanksgiving, we were taught to use our hands to cut an outline for the wings on a turkey’s back. I… Yeah, I didn’t have hands - still don’t - so I couldn’t do it. When spring came around, we were supposed to crumple up a paper bag into the shape of a bonsai tree. I tried using my mouth and nose and chin to do it, and as you can imagine I didn’t get anywhere close to the desired result. I just flattened the bag a little. That one ended up making me cry. In front of the whole class. It is kind of sad, isn’t it? Back then, I can remember wanting arms really badly, it was almost painful. No, it was painful. I wish I could go back and give six year old Veronica a hug, but, you know, the whole missing-arms thing prevents that from being possible. And, yes, even with all this said, nowadays I still don’t wish I had limbs. Well, now you have to let me ask why, don’t you?You’re allowed to ask! I just won’t answer. What I will say is that my limitations forced me to focus harder on the things I was capable of. I got really into drawing, and I became a good enough reader that most of my schoolwork was never that difficult. And, of course, games were always a part of my life. I learned pretty quickly how to use the Gamecube’s joystick with my lips while pressing the buttons with my nose. That’s how I finished Sonic Adventures 2 by myself when I was seven. By the time I was eight, no one in my family could beat me at Tetris. The only game I ever remember being bad at was Guitar Hero.I’m more surprised you didn’t find a way to use your mouth for the five notes.Yeah, I could’ve, but I’d also need to do the strumming, and that’s like two feet away from the notes on the… I don’t know what that part of the guitar is called. The arm? Oh, speaking of terminology like that? I know about arms and hands and fingers, obviously. On the human body, I mean. But I’ve been slowly learning more and more about the little intricacies that people with limbs have to go through. Have you seen the clip of me and my fiancée from like last month? No? Okay, well, what happened was, I was streaming Don’t Starve Together at the time, and Alex was in the room because she wanted me to teach her the game. Then… Wait, sorry, that’s not relevant. All you need to know is that at some point or another, she got distracted or busy with something, and I think she was just chilling in the background. And then while I was playing, it became night time in the game, and I don’t know if you know, but that’s when all the Lovecraftian horrors would come out and start snarling in the dark. The game has such a cute artstyle, but the horror aspects are seriously terrifying. I was sitting there, like completely tensed up in my chair, and in the backs of my earbuds I started hearing this quiet little clicking. Periodically. Like pincers. Or something out of The Last of Us. And it wouldn’t stop, at times it would get faster and sometimes it would slow down, but it would always be there. It was nearing winter in the game, so the nights would last really long, like probably three or four minutes, which, yeah, doesn’t sound like a lot until you’re actually immersed in that setting with that sound. I got super tunnel-visioned on the screen, waiting for something to pop out at me, and I was muttering to myself, like, “What the fuck is that sound? Is that a Stagehand?” Somehow, by just standing still by my campfire and like silently praying, I ended up surviving. The sun came up, and all the pent up tension in my chest came out in one exhale, ‘cause I had no idea what kind of creature was making that noise! I’d never heard it before, even though I’d played the game for hundreds of hours. But then, even with the sun up, I heard the clicking again. And I was like, “What?” It took a five dollar donation and a TTS message, saying, “Isn’t that a nail clipper?” for me to realize I’d been neglecting chat for like the past five minutes. So I looked, finally, and that’s when I saw a bunch of the same messages essentially shouting at me, “THAT’S A NAIL CLIPPER,” “LOOK BEHIND YOU,” “SCARED OF FINGERNAILS XD,” and so I asked my chat, “What is that? What’s a nail clipper?” I could see Alex in the reflection of my second monitor, crouched down on the floor behind me, and she’d heard what I was saying. She turned to look at me and just belted out this huge laugh. So that clicking sound - it was her cutting her nails all that time?Yes, she was! Wait, can I ask you something first?Shoot.Do you believe me?That this actually happened to you? Well, of course.Okay, thank you! Because, like, some people were really adamant about me faking this. That it was all a skit I put on or set up. There were actually so many people who couldn’t believe that I didn’t know what a fingernail clipper was. But is it really that hard to believe? Like how could I know? I don’t have any nails of my own to deal with, and why would someone ever do their own in my presence? Actually, I asked Alex that afterwards. And then she said to me that phrase, “cut her nails,” and - do you know how disturbing that sounds? Like invasive surgery. And she tried comparing it to “cutting one’s hair”’ and I’m like no, those do not sound the same.You learn something new every day. I’m curious, have you ever heard of something called nail polish?Polish? Do your nails actually get that dirty?Not polish in that sense [laughs]. Nail polish is what we use to paint our nails all sorts of colours. I’ve had mine done in white, see? Wait, so… They weren’t ever white before? What’s normal, then? My dad’s are pink, my mom’s red I think, and Alexandra’s are black. No. Most fingernails are naturally some shade of pink.You’re telling me it’s all paint? No, it’s not funny! No one ever tells me this stuff. “Fingerless gloves? I know it’s the thought that counts, but like, what’s stopping someone with no fingers from just wearing regular gloves?” StumplessQuaddess asks after receiving the item from a PUBG crate. She’s oblivious to the ridicule she’s soon to receive from chat.(Transcribed from StumplessQuaddess’ April 2 2023 stream, “least disabled pub players be like // !quadstick”), Phan’s whimsical, infectious energy, makes it extremely easy to see why so many people tune in to her streams. Her constant flow of witty commentary, full of anecdotes, innuendos, and limb-based wordplay, is as natural on stream as it is in daily conversation. With the way she skips from one topic to the next without a moment’s notice, she gives off the socially versatile, down-to-earth vivacity that makes you feel as though she could be anyone’s friend, could talk at length about any subject. But for years, she had gone largely unnoticed in the world of streaming. She began to apply her talents as a natural entertainer at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, back in April of 2020. Her then girlfriend and now fiancée, Alexandra Morin, introduced her to streaming to help pass the time during the first lockdown. She started out playing anything and everything, from Death Stranding to Teamfight Tactics, from Stardew Valley to Five Nights at Freddy’s. Streaming quickly became her new favourite hobby, an extension of her love of gaming, and a means of showing the world that she was “more than just her disability.”“It is a bit paradoxical. At certain times, in certain contexts, I really don’t want people to define me by my limblessness. At others, I understand that being limbless has coloured every aspect of my life, and that it’s influenced all my life decisions and interests and thought processes. It’s a huge cope if I try to say I’m just like everyone else. I’m not. But if people can see me playing and streaming games totally normally, where my limb difference doesn’t really matter, that’s where I feel most comfortable in my own skin,” she says, leaning her head against the pillowed backrest of her chair. That Phan almost immediately adopted a daily schedule of streaming for over half her waking hours is a testament to her passion. She gave her all to growing her channel and community, keeping a close eye on her stream analytics to find out when her fans were tuning in and dropping out, and calibrating her streaming patterns accordingly to retain as much of her audience as possible. Putting her art skills to good use, she took to designing and drawing emotes for her own channel even before she’d become a Twitch affiliate. Today, her most popular emotes by far, which see use far across Twitch in varying contexts and for varying purposes, are a set of cartoonish disembodied limbs overlaid with a general prohibition sign: NoArmR, NoArmL, NoLegR, and NoLegL. “My regular viewers are so mean,” she jokes. “I’ll make some stupid misplay, like ulting backwards as Xayah, and then I look at chat and it’s spammed full of the NoArms emote. They use the NoLegs ones if, say, I move too slow and end up getting caught by the killers in DBD.”Prior to the pandemic, Phan was working in a call center part time while studying sociology at the University of British Columbia. Afterwards, streaming imposed a major unplanned schedule change that saw her dropping her online summer classes, then her fall, and finally her call center gig. Although Alexandra and Phan’s friends and family were supportive, the transition to full-time streaming was marked with uncertainties. Alexandra was able to keep herself and her girlfriend tentatively afloat with her mechanical engineering apprenticeship, but Phan refused to “freeload off [her] hard work,” and did stock photography modelling on and off over the next two and a half years, in addition to streaming. “They saw me as easy amputee rep. That combined with my face card meant getting hired was easy. And the pay was decent. But I didn’t like the way I was treated a lot of the time. Some of the directors and photographers would just touch me and move me however they wanted without asking me. That was the worst part. Then there was this… I don’t want to call it discrimination or prejudice? Let’s say there was stigma. Because apparently it was wrong for me to exist as a completely limbless person, so they would frame the photos in a way that made it look as though I was only armless, not legless as well. Like sitting me in a mock boardroom, and taking the photo from above the table so everyone’s lower bodies - including mine - were obscured. That left a bad taste in my mouth. The few times they did show me as I really am, they photographed me getting pushed around in a wheelchair in a hospital, sometimes with fake bandages, sometimes not. Maybe it’s hard to believe that someone with my body shape can be seen outside a hospital setting,” she says. She cranes her neck back to scratch her ear with the nub of her collarbone, causing her glasses to droop down off the bridge of her nose. “Oh, do you mind?” she asks. Understanding, I lean forward to readjust her eyewear with hesitant caution. As for taking up streaming, Phan says it was as though she was discovering her true purpose in life. Although she struggled to consistently bring in more than thirty concurrent viewers in her first year of streaming, and it took almost eight months to reach the quadruple digits in followers, she didn’t find her quiet beginnings discouraging by any means.“I knew that this was what I had to do. There’s not that many career options out there for someone with no limbs. I’d finally found something I was good at, something that made me and other people happy. I was going to power through, no matter how long it took to really get going. What helped was telling myself that, if I stayed [at that level of success] for the next decade, that would have been fine with me. Which was true, not cope. I’ve heard that other streamers find the grind draining, but it’s the total opposite for me. Streaming long hours was always the easy part. The way I saw things, it was only ever a matter of getting my big break.”Although that big break wouldn’t come for a long while, Phan exhibited the patience of a true stoic. Only once in the past three years has she taken so much as a three day long break from streaming, and that was when she contracted COVID-19 last August. “I was still pretty sick when I streamed next. Terrible sore throat, super drowsy. But I had nothing better to do. I knew streaming would pass the time, and I and my fans would enjoy it,” she says. It’s not surprising that so many of her colleagues, friends and family attribute her current success to her unwavering perseverance. Until very recently, the StumplessQuaddess livestream could hardly have even been considered a second income. “I was making maybe fifty, a hundred dollars a month from subs and donations. Like, that wasn’t even a twentieth of our rent at the time. Alex got laid off twice, once at the start of COVID and once in the summer of 2021. My stock photo modelling was also really shaky, and, as you know, things were getting pretty cringe over there.” With a precarious financial situation and a streaming career that, to all but Phan, had long seemed to be going nowhere fast, things were looking dire for the future of StumplessQuaddess. In February of 2023, Phan had begun considering returning to a full-time position at the call center she’d worked at years ago. She still planned on streaming in the evenings after work, but such a reduction in streaming hours drastically lowered her chances of making it big in the world of Twitch. It was a couple weeks later when, just as she was updating her resume, her luck turned around at last.It was just as she’d predicted. One little spark was all that was needed for StumplessQuaddess to explode onto the front page of Twitch. She pinpoints the catalyst for her overnight success as a Reddit post made on her behalf by a viewer. On March 4, Reddit user dinAeryTheMaglech posted to the popular subreddit LiveStreamFail a clip from Phan’s stream, titled, “Girl beats Elden Ring with no limbs.” The Reddit post has since received over 8,000 upvotes and 900 comments, while the clip itself has been viewed over 250,000 times on Twitch. “I think people clicked onto that expecting to see a mod that takes the limbs away from your character. But no, it was me, the player, who was limbless, and I beat the Elden Beast right here at my PC, using the Quadstick. Not sponsored, haha. But honestly I’d be down for a partnership. The Quadstick has done a lot for me. There are a lot of games I’d be unable to play, let alone beat, without it. You think their marketing team will read this interview?” she asks with a wink.The subsequent rise to fame was even quicker and more abrupt than Phan anticipated. In an article posted earlier this month, Polygon listed her as the tenth-fastest growing streamer on Twitch. Just this February, she was hovering just under 8,000 followers, with an average of 100 concurrent viewers and 20 to 30 monthly subscribers. Today, she’s skyrocketed to 120,000 followers, while boasting an impressive 4,000 concurrent viewers and 1,600 subscribers. Her eyes light up as she describes her recent milestones. “I had a fan donate two thousand dollars to me last night. How it happened was, first they donated a thousand, and I was super shocked, right? I asked if they could even afford donating that much. Maybe that was rude? I hope not. And then they donated another thousand, saying they have more than enough surplus, and like… My highest donation up till then was something like a hundred fifty, I think. That’s still a lot, of course. It’s just surreal. It’s hard finding the words to describe how grateful I am. But at the same time, I have to wonder, how do people have all this money lying around?” “‘Hey, I lost my dominant hand at work recently, and just this month I found you and your stream. You’re such an inspiration, you’re the reason I’m relearning counter-strike,’” StumplessQuaddess reads the twenty dollar donation message aloud to her chat. “Aw, that’s so sweet! Thank you! And I’m sure you’ll be back and better than ever. CS is playable with no hands, if you’ve still got one I know you’re hitting Global Elite, yeah?” (Transcribed from StumplessQuaddess’ May 8 2023 stream, “missing my shots like im missing my limbs // !faq”), You mentioned earlier some of the growing pains associated with your rise to stardom. How have you been enjoying your recent successes otherwise? Actually, you know what? Everything is making me feel like I was right all along, about everything. Not in the vindictive, proved-the-doubters-wrong sense. I never really had doubters. What I’m trying to say is, I always kept faith that I’d make it, even when my channel had been stagnant for over a year. I’m here now. I did make it, and it’s everything I thought it would be and more. But what’s even bigger than that, to me, is finding out that I really was made for streaming after all. Do you know what I mean? It’s all the experiences and challenges I’ve faced, being limbless all my life, that have equipped me, like… extraordinarily, perfectly well for the demands of this career. You know how there’s this shared sentiment among the big streamers, that we - isn’t it crazy that I can say ‘we’ now? - we start feeling like no one treats us like a normal person anymore. But it’s like nothing’s really changed for me. I’m not trying to take away from the hardships that other streamers face. It's just that I’ve always been treated differently, looked at differently, talked to differently, ever since I was born. And all the weird, insensitive, stupid questions and comments and constant unwanted attention that are associated with fame - I’ve dealt with it all already. I know, yes, that it’s going to come at me in higher and higher volumes from here on out, but I really feel like I’ve been prepared well enough to handle it. After 25 years of being called helpless by complete strangers, kids pointing fingers at the mall, classmates sighing when they had to help me get my pencil from off the floor… My skin is pretty thick by now. A lot of other streamers who made it big didn’t have that, like, protective buffer to start out with. So I’m glad. I’m glad I was born without arms or legs, even if only for these reasons. And that’s the fabled why.Huh?What you alluded to earlier. It’s why you don’t wish you had limbs, right? No, no, don’t try backtracking on me. But like, ah, fuuuuckk… [laughs] I say way too much when I get comfortable with someone. Do you mind, like, not including that bit when you put this out?I can omit it, yes. But are you sure? I think it’s fair to say-No, I’m joking. Include it, include it. Like, it was a minigame to me, of it being my secret to keep, and I had my reasons to do so, but I lost, so now the world should get to know my real answer. Very fair of you. I imagine all your biggest fans will be ecstatic to read up on everything you’re sharing here. Oh, yes. You put it that way, and like… I’ve thought of it from that angle myself from time to time, and it makes me just want to vomit out everything there is to know about me, to my entire stream. But I hold back. I’ve really been holding back. I’ve had to exercise a serious amount of restraint the past few weeks, because I love my fans so much and it hurts that I feel like they barely know anything about me. Because I don’t let them. Why is that? Why? I’ve had a hard time coming up with an answer myself. Maybe it’s because I don’t even know what it means for someone to really know me. I think my family does. Alex does. But… I don’t want what I have with Alex to be the same as what I have with every single one of my viewers, right? And maybe that’ll happen if I start volunteering information about myself on stream. Oh, you know that raccoon poem from DDLC? Sorry, that’s an obscure reference. But it’s like that. If I give them even a little, they’ll want more and more, and I’ll give them more and more until it reaches the point where everyone knows practically everything there is to know about me. So does it feel wrong to be here, volunteering information about yourself here, to me?To you, and to everyone who sees this. Yeah! It’s scary. But I also plan on being a full-time streamer for years, hopefully decades to come, and I have to face reality. Total secrecy is not a feasible option in the long term. It’s for the best that I give up the act now. People have waited long enough, and I do want my fans to eventually, finally know who I am. Even though being a gatekeeper is fun. Even though being mysterious and keeping people wanting is fun. That Elden Ring clip that made your stream blow up so suddenly - why, do you think, was it this that drew people’s attention?It’s so weird, right? I’d already had a few popular clips before that, and those only did a little bit for me in terms of channel growth. Like the ten-second clip of me watching the Endoparasitic intro cutscene, and I’m like, “Wow, he’s just like me for real.” That one got eighty thousand views or something, but my career didn’t take off from that at all. Another clip with thirty thousand-ish views was of me waddling forward to slide out of my chair and walking, on my bottom, out of the room. I had to do that ‘cause Alex wasn’t responding when I was calling out for her. That clip was big, I think, because I guess most people have never seen someone as limbless as me moving with independence. But again, it did nothing for my channel. I’m not sure what people found so special about me beating Elden Ring. It was a hard game, yeah, but I’ve beaten and played tons of hard games before. You said you didn’t know if you’d have been able to beat Elden Ring without the Quadstick. How does that device work, and how does it help you with gaming and streaming?Here! It’s right here. So I use my mouth to control all these little tubes, which are bound to in-game functions, and basically this lets me game with more speed and precision than would ever be possible otherwise. All I have to do is suck and blow, like so… Why’s your face getting red? No, it’s not, I’m fucking with you [laughs]. Sipping and puffing. The family friendly way to say it. So, the best thing about the Quadstick is that it has this joystick also, and for most games that functions as my mouse. Meaning it can take care of either movement or camera control. Whichever it is, it’s super important, because before 2022 when I didn’t have this, I could only play games by holding a single mouth stick, and I’d have to choose between using only my keyboard or only my mouse with it. And for games like League of Legends, that meant I was more or less restricted to onetricking Yuumi, sitting permanently on my strongest carry, and using my mouth stick to manually click on my abilities. It was really bad. I couldn’t get out of Bronze, and it was entirely owing to me having zero limbs. I would tell my chat my brain deserved Diamond, but my body was Iron IV. So I might have lied earlier. Most of the time, I feel I don’t have any want for limbs, but back then I was definitely wishing I had an arm, just so I could play League and other mechanically intensive games. Even a tiny little stump would’ve been nice, so I could maybe get some sort of prosthetic to operate my mouse with. But now I have the Quadstick, and none of that matters anymore. I get to be happy about being limbless again.What rank are you now? In League? Gold I. I will get to Diamond one day, trust. The main thing is that the Quadstick lets me play way more than just Yuumi now. I instantly gravitated towards Miss Fortune, Neeko, and Nami. Nami I have a special connection with, ha. I might try out Elise soon. She has enough limbs for the two of us. And I’m starting to get good at Riven if you can believe it. Zeus needs to take notes.League players are known to be notoriously abusive, aren’t they? Have your past experiences also made you impervious to flame in competitive gaming?One hundred percent yes. Oftentimes, the shit people say to me, I just find really funny. It used to be even funnier, back when I didn’t have the Quadstick. I kept an exact count of how many times I had an ADC who would say anything along the lines of, “My supp has no hands,” “This Yuumi is legit disabled.” I had a jungler ask, “Why botlane no limbs every game?” I told him that it was tetra-amelia syndrome, and he’s like, “What is that, is that what you have?” I’m like, “Yes! It is,” and plugged my channel. Fast forward fourteen months to today, and he’s a tier-3 sub who shows up to every stream. But nowadays, I can play so well that people don’t think I’m disabled anymore. Which is, it’s kind of a shame that they’re wrong, ‘cause I still have no limbs and they’ll never get to know that. The whole thirty or forty minutes, they have it in their heads that they’re playing with a support who has arms and legs. Is that not crazy?It’s impressive you chose to play these fast, complex games that demand a lot of dexterity even before you had the Quadstick. There are plenty of accessible games that you could have played to the fullest with only the use of a mouth stick, but you refused to restrict yourself to only those.Yeah. Minecraft, Stardew Valley, even chess got popular around that time, and that would have been easily playable unless I was playing that one minute timer version. But it would just be way too boring if I played nothing but the easy ones. I need a challenge. What’s the point of gaming otherwise?Is using the Quadstick a challenge in and of itself? You make it sound simple, but it looks fairly complicated to operate. How do you split your focus between it and the screen? The Quadstick looks complicated? I see you people using ten individual fingers all at the same time, in all these crazy combinations for like fifty different keys. No, I swear the Quadstick is so easy to use. I think after three days of using it, it felt like a natural part of my body. An extension of my mouth and lips, if that makes sense. I don’t even split my focus, ‘cause I don’t need to focus at all on what I’m doing with my mouth. I think it’s called muscle memory? Alex taught me that. “No, you’re gapped! You’re literally so gapped,” StumplessQuaddess tells her fiancée after making her second successful bottle flip, having used only her teeth to grip it by the cap. Alexandra skips over the bottles scattered about the room to smother the phone’s lens with a hand, but not before the viewers can see her suppressing a grin. “Saw nothing. I’m still up 3-1,” Alexandra giggles, to which StumplessQuaddess can be overheard replying, “You’re up 4 limbs and down 4 games, how do you feel?” 981,635 channel points are awarded to those who predicted a StumplessQuadless victory. “There’s no way we’re doing this in 2023, by the way. My mom was watching bottle flip compilations last week, that’s how you know this trend is crusty as fuck,” Alexandra complains. “And in case you forgot? Your hula hooping: fucking dreadful. Maybe next time you’ll get further than half a second in.” StumplessQuaddess gasps with no less stupefaction than is reflected in chat.(Transcribed from StumplessQuaddess’ April 15 2023 stream, “PROVING 0 LIMBS >>> 4”) Where do you think you would be right now, had you not found streaming? Honestly, that’s a scary question. Those shitty jobs, modelling and taking calls, were so depressing for me. I didn’t want to feel like that was all I had to offer to the world. I’ve always been decent at art, but I’m nowhere near good enough to pursue it professionally… You’re kind of mean for bringing this up, you know? Everyone who ever knew and cared about me growing up was worried for me. It took me a while to put two and two together, but I think it’s the reason my parents moved us to Canada: for the healthcare, for me. There were all these questions about how I’d manage. How’s the limbless girl gonna get through school? How will she ever support herself, let alone a family? It’s not a stupid thing to be worried about. Alex and I were barely making it when I wasn’t bringing anything in. Disability checks only go so far.But you’re here now.I am here now! I did find streaming - because of Alex, of course - and now it’s like a million doors have been opened, and I can see all the possibilities life was hiding from me.Possibilities - you show such ambition in every facet of your life, in spite of your limitations. What’s next for you? Are you on the lookout for new challenges? There’s so much I want to do. I have so many ideas. I want to do more art streams, for more than just emotes. I want to try setting up some workout streams. I made a list of streamers I wanna DM, just to see if they’re down to collab. They’re all the ones I looked up to when I was just starting out, and it’s so unbelievable to think that I’m basically their equal now. Equal, not lesser. I’m sure that fits in with you having been limbless your whole life.That’s what I was just about to say! Like, it’s more than just making it big as a streamer. Getting good at any game I want, better than people who have two functioning hands… even just having a conversation of any kind with anyone on the Internet. Things like this, where no one gets to overlook me just because I have no limbs. I feel like I’ve been fighting for this recognition my whole life, and never did I think I would actually get to this point. Where it’s like, okay, I’m just as good, if not better than everyone else at everything I want to do. I’m sincerely wondering, what would I ever want arms and legs for? They could come out with the greatest prosthetics ever, indistinguishable from normal limbs, and you know what? I don’t think I’d even try. I’m good. I’m comfortable. I can go the rest of my life with just my head and torso, no limbs needed, and that’s more than enough for me....

After reading Veronica's story I just had to bring her to visual life!

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Description
“Fingerless gloves? I know it’s the thought that counts, but like, what’s stopping someone with no fingers from just wearing regular gloves?”

Meet Veronica "StumplessQuaddess" Phan, a 25 year old gamer and streamer born without limbs. She's the creation of the awesome 10girls8limbs who has posted an 'interview' with Veronica from a point where she is just starting to really make a name for herself. The subjects are gaming (of course), how she gets by with a limb difference, and why nail clippers are, like, the most terrifying thing ever.

Meet StumplessQuaddess, the Streamer with No LimbsWe caught up with Veronica ‘StumplessQuaddess’ Phan, the limbless Twitch streamer taking the Internet by storm, to talk retro video games, her flourishing streaming career, and living with limb difference.BY ANI HUANGPresented by StreamlineMAY 18, 2023, 10:00 AM“Chat, what do you think? Should I get tattoos on my shoulder nubs? Mommy_Gooseberry, thank you for the five months! Wow, I don’t really know how to feel about that name,” says StumplessQuaddess. She tabs out of her Steam window with a puff of air, turning her attention to the endless scroll of chat messages flooding her second monitor, and bouncing her head to the beat of FIFTY FIFTY’s ‘Cupid’ all the while. “Are we done with FF7? I’m kinda bored. Sekiro? Chat? Is it Sekiro time? ‘Can you even play Souls games with no limbs?’ Of course I can! Okay, now you’re making me feel like I have something to prove.”(Transcribed from StumplessQuaddess’ May 5 2023 stream, “imagine dropping lp to a literal torso LMFAO”)Veronica Phan’s bedroom, which has doubled as her workplace since 2020, is lit entirely by purple LEDs lining the edges of the ceiling. A clean, sweet scent fills the air as I pass through the already-open door. The first sight that greets me is a pair of BLACKPINK posters hanging up on the northern wall, their upper corners curling inwards from age. Dozens of plushies - bunnies, ocean-eyed huskies, Hello Kitties - sit in a hammock suspended over the bed, whose entire upper half also happens to be consumed by the stuffed critters. In most cases, I’d be left to wonder if they leave space for anyone to sleep. For Phan, better known by her Twitch alias StumplessQuaddess, it’s no concern at all. “Custom mattresses are expensive.” she explains. “I’d literally be spending more for less. The twin-sized is too big for me, obviously, so I had a lot of extra space to share.” Her sitting and standing height are one and the same: 89 centimetres, and with not much to her other than her head and torso, the limbless 25 year old looks diminutive in her deluxe gaming chair. It’s not a remark she finds insulting. On the contrary, she’s happy with her unique size, finding it amusing when her viewers affectionately refer to her as “smol” or “bite-sized.”“I am tiny. I prefer that people don’t shy away from being direct about who I am. Like they think they should try and pretend I’m not missing my limbs, or that I’m not a third of the size of a regular person, but then it’s like, they think it’s going to kill me if they so much as mention me being small. And somehow that feels more offensive, actually. Does that make sense?” she asks with a tilt of her head. Lacking the ability to gesture with hands, she is as animated in conversation as her body allows. It’s a sunny Friday morning, and Phan is dressed in a sleeveless, light pink crop top revealing a generous amount of midriff. The empty pant legs of her black tights are tied up around her trim waist. The heart shaped pendant of a twinkling, handcrafted diamond necklace hangs just below her sternum. She’s never been known to wear headphones (though she laments missing out on the kitty ear variety), and today is no exception. The wire of a single earbud hangs from her left ear, getting lost in the tangles of her luscious dark hair. To the awe of thousands of viewers, she’d gotten a blonde balayage last week, adding a stunning amount of dimension to her wavy locks, which reach down past her nonexistent armpits. She tells me she’s “shameless about the egirl aesthetic,” that she’d wear thigh highs or fishnet stockings if she had legs. Her classically beautiful triangular face is well complemented by her large brown eyes, twinkling when she gives a coy smile, and yet her round, thick-framed glasses serve to preserve a sense of girlish innocence. “They’re non-prescription. My eyesight is perfect, despite me having stared at a screen twelve hours a day for the past three years. Yeah, I know. I was blessed with all the best genes,” she says, with not a hint of irony.When I inquire further about the choice of eyewear, it almost feels as though she’d prepared a whole story for the impromptu question - something I notice becoming a trend as our conversation progresses. “I just don’t like the way I look without glasses. Which is like, isn’t it the opposite for most people? I was in fourth grade when I found out. Probably a third of my class needed glasses by then, and some of them wanted to play this game with me where they’d stick their glasses on my head, and it would be up to me to try to remove them. I got good at it, I could get most pairs of glasses off by pushing forward on the tip of the frame with my shoulder nub. Challenging, right? And anyone can play, you don’t have to be limbless. You just have to not use your arms. It took until after I graduated high school for me to remember that this happened and to realize that maybe I was being bullied? But I didn’t see it that way back then. My peers always came across as nice enough. I thought they were just teasing me. Whatever the case, I would see myself in the mirror wearing my classmates’ glasses, and I thought they made me look so much cooler. And that’s basically it. My opinion has since remained largely unchanged,” she says. I watch as she leans over to the left, where, within the cupholder of her gaming chair, there sits a large matcha pearl milk tea. She takes a sip via an extra-long reusable straw. On the strawberry pink desk behind her is an assortment of what I presume to be disability aids - thin plastic arms sticking up from the sides of the desk, all connecting to an assemblage of tiny tubes sitting at mouth level. Taken together, it resembles some kind of makeshift instrument built out of a digital camera. I’m to learn that the device is called a Quadstick, and next to that, the tall, clear cup is filled with mouth sticks and not styluses or magical wands. Otherwise, the desk appears built for your average able-bodied gamer. Behind the intricate setup are her dual monitors, the one on the right playing a livestream by liok0485, and the left showcasing the main window of Streamlabs, Phan’s preferred livestreaming software. She tells me she keeps Streamlabs open morning to night. It’s likely no exaggeration, given her almost daily ten-hour stream schedule. As for the stream she’s been watching, she laughs.“If I’m not streaming myself, I’m watching other streamers. I call it idea farming. I take notes on what I can add to my stream, and how I can be more entertaining while I play. Or, sometimes, like here, I take notes on how to play. She’s really good,” Phan says, smiling as if it’s her own achievements she’s proud of. She’s referring to the Korean League of Legends streamer liok0485, who also happens to be one of the first females to play at the semi-professional level.Longtime viewers will be familiar with Phan’s frequent jokes that she herself is “going pro” whenever she puts out an acceptable performance in any competitive game. But very few of these viewers know who she is outside of the rectangular window of her livestream. She says the obscuration of her identity and private life has been nothing if not fully intentional. Now, for the very first time, Veronica Phan is telling Streamline the story of the woman behind the StumplessQuaddess visage., It’s interesting, because you’re so open on stream, and yet you’re still shrouded in this mysterious allure. So tell me a bit about yourself, about your childhood. Who is Veronica Phan? How did she end up as the person she is today?Oh, this is weird. So I just tell you my life story? I don’t think it’s as exciting as you think. I was born in California, 1998, April 25. Um, my family moved to Vancouver a few months after I was born, and I’ve been living in B.C. ever since. My parents tell me my passion for gaming and art began straight out of the womb. Apparently I would watch my dad playing Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64, except I was too young to remember any of it. My first real sentient memory? It has to be me in the living room, I was laying on the carpet at like four years old with a blue crayon between my lips. Cerulean blue specifically, yeah, because I was trying to draw a steller’s jay that I must’ve seen in some nature documentary… and I had a four year old’s brain, so the drawing didn’t even resemble a bird, and also I remember at the same time there was a Morrowind commercial playing on the TV. I saw so much adventure in those early 2000’s polygons, I asked my parents about that game nonstop for the next two weeks, not knowing we didn’t have an Xbox to play it on. Ah, I think I’m rambling, and I’m not sure I really answered your question?No, this is great. It’s really refreshing to hear and learn about these core memories of yours. I think for most people, the biggest mystery, the question people want answered, surrounds your lack of limbs. I don’t know how much you keep up with all the buzz on social media, but there’s been quite the speculation with people trying to puzzle out whether you’d had limbs and lost them or if you were born without.Is that real? I know people are curious, but I thought it’s way too obvious that I never had limbs. Yeah, I do get the question all the time of “what happened to me,” and like, I’ve always just ignored them. But, just this once, just for you, I’ll explain. I was born without limbs, as a result of tetra-amelia syndrome. And, you probably know, you sound like you’ve done your research, but it’s - I memorized the description - a very rare disorder characterized by the absence of all four limbs. That’s definitely how I get characterized [laughs]. My case is even more rare, because if you’ve seen photos of anyone else with my condition, you’ll know that most of us have vestigial limbs, a little malformed leg or arm or two. I don’t. I’m the only person I know of who’s actually entirely limbless.And is that how you got your name, StumplessQuaddess?It is! I’m honestly surprised you made the right connection. Do you know how many people ask me, “Why do you say you’re stumpless if you’re an amputee?” Like… Am I not allowed to call them stupid? They think being an amputee and having stumps are equivalent. So when I get that question, I just have to stop and take a deep breath and tell them, slowly, that it’s simply because I literally do not have stumps. I’m stumpless. And then they usually realize how stupid they were, and that’s where I get my satisfaction. It sounds like you deal with a lot of ignorance.I guess. It’s nothing I can’t handle. Ooh, speaking of which, you know another crazy thing? There’s also the people who, every now and then, come into my stream and see me using my mouth to game, and you know what they ask? They’re like, “Why don't you use your feet to play?” I have ‘limbless’ and ‘quadamputee’ in my tags, by the way. But apparently that’s not enough, so in addition to my facecam, I had Alex [Phan’s fiancée] attach a ‘pelvis cam’ underneath my desk so people could see for themselves that I didn’t have legs either. It got weird after like two streams, though. I realized I was letting people stare at my crotch the whole day. I’m actually surprised I didn’t get banned for that.Have you got any other favourites? From fans or viewers, or anyone in your life.Oh, I feel like I’ve been waiting for this opportunity to unload. Um, off the top of my head… For some reason, people love asking how I use the washroom. My response is always the same: with my private parts. It’s just kind of boring at this point. “What would you do if someone picked you up and ran?” That’s another one. I say I don’t go outside, so I’ll never know. I’m pretty sure I have these on my FAQ, in my About Me panel, ‘cause I get these questions like three times each, every time I stream. Actually now that I think about it, the FAQ hasn’t helped much because people just don’t read. Oh, and I can’t forget the classic, “Why don’t you wear prosthetics?” “Why don’t you get robot arms?” Like people are literally looking directly at me in my facecam, seeing I have no shoulders, thinking prosthetics are going to do anything for me at all. So all I tell them is I don’t like limbs. There is some truth in that, so it’s not like I’m giving them a bad answer. It’s similar to when people ask me if I wish I had limbs, and this is a question I genuinely appreciate. Because I always tell them no, and they’re always so surprised to hear that. But I never elaborate, I never say why I don’t want limbs. And, I’m sorry, I won’t elaborate to you either. Oh, I guess I can see it now. Is this why everyone thinks I’m mysterious?Partially, yes. It’s fine if you’d rather not share the why, but can you tell me whether or not you always had this attitude? If not, what did it take for you to become accustomed to life without arms and legs? You’re trying to cheat me out of my secrecy, aren’t you? I like how you at least tried to be subtle about it. Did I always have this attitude? I’d say… No. Not at all. The suckiest part about my childhood, I remember, was learning and seeing that all the other kids were doing so many cool things that I had no way of doing. There were swimming lessons for the whole class in first grade, and I was the only one who couldn’t go. Same with phys ed. I basically never got to participate. And there were art projects every Friday. For Thanksgiving, we were taught to use our hands to cut an outline for the wings on a turkey’s back. I… Yeah, I didn’t have hands - still don’t - so I couldn’t do it. When spring came around, we were supposed to crumple up a paper bag into the shape of a bonsai tree. I tried using my mouth and nose and chin to do it, and as you can imagine I didn’t get anywhere close to the desired result. I just flattened the bag a little. That one ended up making me cry. In front of the whole class. It is kind of sad, isn’t it? Back then, I can remember wanting arms really badly, it was almost painful. No, it was painful. I wish I could go back and give six year old Veronica a hug, but, you know, the whole missing-arms thing prevents that from being possible. And, yes, even with all this said, nowadays I still don’t wish I had limbs. Well, now you have to let me ask why, don’t you?You’re allowed to ask! I just won’t answer. What I will say is that my limitations forced me to focus harder on the things I was capable of. I got really into drawing, and I became a good enough reader that most of my schoolwork was never that difficult. And, of course, games were always a part of my life. I learned pretty quickly how to use the Gamecube’s joystick with my lips while pressing the buttons with my nose. That’s how I finished Sonic Adventures 2 by myself when I was seven. By the time I was eight, no one in my family could beat me at Tetris. The only game I ever remember being bad at was Guitar Hero.I’m more surprised you didn’t find a way to use your mouth for the five notes.Yeah, I could’ve, but I’d also need to do the strumming, and that’s like two feet away from the notes on the… I don’t know what that part of the guitar is called. The arm? Oh, speaking of terminology like that? I know about arms and hands and fingers, obviously. On the human body, I mean. But I’ve been slowly learning more and more about the little intricacies that people with limbs have to go through. Have you seen the clip of me and my fiancée from like last month? No? Okay, well, what happened was, I was streaming Don’t Starve Together at the time, and Alex was in the room because she wanted me to teach her the game. Then… Wait, sorry, that’s not relevant. All you need to know is that at some point or another, she got distracted or busy with something, and I think she was just chilling in the background. And then while I was playing, it became night time in the game, and I don’t know if you know, but that’s when all the Lovecraftian horrors would come out and start snarling in the dark. The game has such a cute artstyle, but the horror aspects are seriously terrifying. I was sitting there, like completely tensed up in my chair, and in the backs of my earbuds I started hearing this quiet little clicking. Periodically. Like pincers. Or something out of The Last of Us. And it wouldn’t stop, at times it would get faster and sometimes it would slow down, but it would always be there. It was nearing winter in the game, so the nights would last really long, like probably three or four minutes, which, yeah, doesn’t sound like a lot until you’re actually immersed in that setting with that sound. I got super tunnel-visioned on the screen, waiting for something to pop out at me, and I was muttering to myself, like, “What the fuck is that sound? Is that a Stagehand?” Somehow, by just standing still by my campfire and like silently praying, I ended up surviving. The sun came up, and all the pent up tension in my chest came out in one exhale, ‘cause I had no idea what kind of creature was making that noise! I’d never heard it before, even though I’d played the game for hundreds of hours. But then, even with the sun up, I heard the clicking again. And I was like, “What?” It took a five dollar donation and a TTS message, saying, “Isn’t that a nail clipper?” for me to realize I’d been neglecting chat for like the past five minutes. So I looked, finally, and that’s when I saw a bunch of the same messages essentially shouting at me, “THAT’S A NAIL CLIPPER,” “LOOK BEHIND YOU,” “SCARED OF FINGERNAILS XD,” and so I asked my chat, “What is that? What’s a nail clipper?” I could see Alex in the reflection of my second monitor, crouched down on the floor behind me, and she’d heard what I was saying. She turned to look at me and just belted out this huge laugh. So that clicking sound - it was her cutting her nails all that time?Yes, she was! Wait, can I ask you something first?Shoot.Do you believe me?That this actually happened to you? Well, of course.Okay, thank you! Because, like, some people were really adamant about me faking this. That it was all a skit I put on or set up. There were actually so many people who couldn’t believe that I didn’t know what a fingernail clipper was. But is it really that hard to believe? Like how could I know? I don’t have any nails of my own to deal with, and why would someone ever do their own in my presence? Actually, I asked Alex that afterwards. And then she said to me that phrase, “cut her nails,” and - do you know how disturbing that sounds? Like invasive surgery. And she tried comparing it to “cutting one’s hair”’ and I’m like no, those do not sound the same.You learn something new every day. I’m curious, have you ever heard of something called nail polish?Polish? Do your nails actually get that dirty?Not polish in that sense [laughs]. Nail polish is what we use to paint our nails all sorts of colours. I’ve had mine done in white, see? Wait, so… They weren’t ever white before? What’s normal, then? My dad’s are pink, my mom’s red I think, and Alexandra’s are black. No. Most fingernails are naturally some shade of pink.You’re telling me it’s all paint? No, it’s not funny! No one ever tells me this stuff. “Fingerless gloves? I know it’s the thought that counts, but like, what’s stopping someone with no fingers from just wearing regular gloves?” StumplessQuaddess asks after receiving the item from a PUBG crate. She’s oblivious to the ridicule she’s soon to receive from chat.(Transcribed from StumplessQuaddess’ April 2 2023 stream, “least disabled pub players be like // !quadstick”), Phan’s whimsical, infectious energy, makes it extremely easy to see why so many people tune in to her streams. Her constant flow of witty commentary, full of anecdotes, innuendos, and limb-based wordplay, is as natural on stream as it is in daily conversation. With the way she skips from one topic to the next without a moment’s notice, she gives off the socially versatile, down-to-earth vivacity that makes you feel as though she could be anyone’s friend, could talk at length about any subject. But for years, she had gone largely unnoticed in the world of streaming. She began to apply her talents as a natural entertainer at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, back in April of 2020. Her then girlfriend and now fiancée, Alexandra Morin, introduced her to streaming to help pass the time during the first lockdown. She started out playing anything and everything, from Death Stranding to Teamfight Tactics, from Stardew Valley to Five Nights at Freddy’s. Streaming quickly became her new favourite hobby, an extension of her love of gaming, and a means of showing the world that she was “more than just her disability.”“It is a bit paradoxical. At certain times, in certain contexts, I really don’t want people to define me by my limblessness. At others, I understand that being limbless has coloured every aspect of my life, and that it’s influenced all my life decisions and interests and thought processes. It’s a huge cope if I try to say I’m just like everyone else. I’m not. But if people can see me playing and streaming games totally normally, where my limb difference doesn’t really matter, that’s where I feel most comfortable in my own skin,” she says, leaning her head against the pillowed backrest of her chair. That Phan almost immediately adopted a daily schedule of streaming for over half her waking hours is a testament to her passion. She gave her all to growing her channel and community, keeping a close eye on her stream analytics to find out when her fans were tuning in and dropping out, and calibrating her streaming patterns accordingly to retain as much of her audience as possible. Putting her art skills to good use, she took to designing and drawing emotes for her own channel even before she’d become a Twitch affiliate. Today, her most popular emotes by far, which see use far across Twitch in varying contexts and for varying purposes, are a set of cartoonish disembodied limbs overlaid with a general prohibition sign: NoArmR, NoArmL, NoLegR, and NoLegL. “My regular viewers are so mean,” she jokes. “I’ll make some stupid misplay, like ulting backwards as Xayah, and then I look at chat and it’s spammed full of the NoArms emote. They use the NoLegs ones if, say, I move too slow and end up getting caught by the killers in DBD.”Prior to the pandemic, Phan was working in a call center part time while studying sociology at the University of British Columbia. Afterwards, streaming imposed a major unplanned schedule change that saw her dropping her online summer classes, then her fall, and finally her call center gig. Although Alexandra and Phan’s friends and family were supportive, the transition to full-time streaming was marked with uncertainties. Alexandra was able to keep herself and her girlfriend tentatively afloat with her mechanical engineering apprenticeship, but Phan refused to “freeload off [her] hard work,” and did stock photography modelling on and off over the next two and a half years, in addition to streaming. “They saw me as easy amputee rep. That combined with my face card meant getting hired was easy. And the pay was decent. But I didn’t like the way I was treated a lot of the time. Some of the directors and photographers would just touch me and move me however they wanted without asking me. That was the worst part. Then there was this… I don’t want to call it discrimination or prejudice? Let’s say there was stigma. Because apparently it was wrong for me to exist as a completely limbless person, so they would frame the photos in a way that made it look as though I was only armless, not legless as well. Like sitting me in a mock boardroom, and taking the photo from above the table so everyone’s lower bodies - including mine - were obscured. That left a bad taste in my mouth. The few times they did show me as I really am, they photographed me getting pushed around in a wheelchair in a hospital, sometimes with fake bandages, sometimes not. Maybe it’s hard to believe that someone with my body shape can be seen outside a hospital setting,” she says. She cranes her neck back to scratch her ear with the nub of her collarbone, causing her glasses to droop down off the bridge of her nose. “Oh, do you mind?” she asks. Understanding, I lean forward to readjust her eyewear with hesitant caution. As for taking up streaming, Phan says it was as though she was discovering her true purpose in life. Although she struggled to consistently bring in more than thirty concurrent viewers in her first year of streaming, and it took almost eight months to reach the quadruple digits in followers, she didn’t find her quiet beginnings discouraging by any means.“I knew that this was what I had to do. There’s not that many career options out there for someone with no limbs. I’d finally found something I was good at, something that made me and other people happy. I was going to power through, no matter how long it took to really get going. What helped was telling myself that, if I stayed [at that level of success] for the next decade, that would have been fine with me. Which was true, not cope. I’ve heard that other streamers find the grind draining, but it’s the total opposite for me. Streaming long hours was always the easy part. The way I saw things, it was only ever a matter of getting my big break.”Although that big break wouldn’t come for a long while, Phan exhibited the patience of a true stoic. Only once in the past three years has she taken so much as a three day long break from streaming, and that was when she contracted COVID-19 last August. “I was still pretty sick when I streamed next. Terrible sore throat, super drowsy. But I had nothing better to do. I knew streaming would pass the time, and I and my fans would enjoy it,” she says. It’s not surprising that so many of her colleagues, friends and family attribute her current success to her unwavering perseverance. Until very recently, the StumplessQuaddess livestream could hardly have even been considered a second income. “I was making maybe fifty, a hundred dollars a month from subs and donations. Like, that wasn’t even a twentieth of our rent at the time. Alex got laid off twice, once at the start of COVID and once in the summer of 2021. My stock photo modelling was also really shaky, and, as you know, things were getting pretty cringe over there.” With a precarious financial situation and a streaming career that, to all but Phan, had long seemed to be going nowhere fast, things were looking dire for the future of StumplessQuaddess. In February of 2023, Phan had begun considering returning to a full-time position at the call center she’d worked at years ago. She still planned on streaming in the evenings after work, but such a reduction in streaming hours drastically lowered her chances of making it big in the world of Twitch. It was a couple weeks later when, just as she was updating her resume, her luck turned around at last.It was just as she’d predicted. One little spark was all that was needed for StumplessQuaddess to explode onto the front page of Twitch. She pinpoints the catalyst for her overnight success as a Reddit post made on her behalf by a viewer. On March 4, Reddit user dinAeryTheMaglech posted to the popular subreddit LiveStreamFail a clip from Phan’s stream, titled, “Girl beats Elden Ring with no limbs.” The Reddit post has since received over 8,000 upvotes and 900 comments, while the clip itself has been viewed over 250,000 times on Twitch. “I think people clicked onto that expecting to see a mod that takes the limbs away from your character. But no, it was me, the player, who was limbless, and I beat the Elden Beast right here at my PC, using the Quadstick. Not sponsored, haha. But honestly I’d be down for a partnership. The Quadstick has done a lot for me. There are a lot of games I’d be unable to play, let alone beat, without it. You think their marketing team will read this interview?” she asks with a wink.The subsequent rise to fame was even quicker and more abrupt than Phan anticipated. In an article posted earlier this month, Polygon listed her as the tenth-fastest growing streamer on Twitch. Just this February, she was hovering just under 8,000 followers, with an average of 100 concurrent viewers and 20 to 30 monthly subscribers. Today, she’s skyrocketed to 120,000 followers, while boasting an impressive 4,000 concurrent viewers and 1,600 subscribers. Her eyes light up as she describes her recent milestones. “I had a fan donate two thousand dollars to me last night. How it happened was, first they donated a thousand, and I was super shocked, right? I asked if they could even afford donating that much. Maybe that was rude? I hope not. And then they donated another thousand, saying they have more than enough surplus, and like… My highest donation up till then was something like a hundred fifty, I think. That’s still a lot, of course. It’s just surreal. It’s hard finding the words to describe how grateful I am. But at the same time, I have to wonder, how do people have all this money lying around?” “‘Hey, I lost my dominant hand at work recently, and just this month I found you and your stream. You’re such an inspiration, you’re the reason I’m relearning counter-strike,’” StumplessQuaddess reads the twenty dollar donation message aloud to her chat. “Aw, that’s so sweet! Thank you! And I’m sure you’ll be back and better than ever. CS is playable with no hands, if you’ve still got one I know you’re hitting Global Elite, yeah?” (Transcribed from StumplessQuaddess’ May 8 2023 stream, “missing my shots like im missing my limbs // !faq”), You mentioned earlier some of the growing pains associated with your rise to stardom. How have you been enjoying your recent successes otherwise? Actually, you know what? Everything is making me feel like I was right all along, about everything. Not in the vindictive, proved-the-doubters-wrong sense. I never really had doubters. What I’m trying to say is, I always kept faith that I’d make it, even when my channel had been stagnant for over a year. I’m here now. I did make it, and it’s everything I thought it would be and more. But what’s even bigger than that, to me, is finding out that I really was made for streaming after all. Do you know what I mean? It’s all the experiences and challenges I’ve faced, being limbless all my life, that have equipped me, like… extraordinarily, perfectly well for the demands of this career. You know how there’s this shared sentiment among the big streamers, that we - isn’t it crazy that I can say ‘we’ now? - we start feeling like no one treats us like a normal person anymore. But it’s like nothing’s really changed for me. I’m not trying to take away from the hardships that other streamers face. It's just that I’ve always been treated differently, looked at differently, talked to differently, ever since I was born. And all the weird, insensitive, stupid questions and comments and constant unwanted attention that are associated with fame - I’ve dealt with it all already. I know, yes, that it’s going to come at me in higher and higher volumes from here on out, but I really feel like I’ve been prepared well enough to handle it. After 25 years of being called helpless by complete strangers, kids pointing fingers at the mall, classmates sighing when they had to help me get my pencil from off the floor… My skin is pretty thick by now. A lot of other streamers who made it big didn’t have that, like, protective buffer to start out with. So I’m glad. I’m glad I was born without arms or legs, even if only for these reasons. And that’s the fabled why.Huh?What you alluded to earlier. It’s why you don’t wish you had limbs, right? No, no, don’t try backtracking on me. But like, ah, fuuuuckk… [laughs] I say way too much when I get comfortable with someone. Do you mind, like, not including that bit when you put this out?I can omit it, yes. But are you sure? I think it’s fair to say-No, I’m joking. Include it, include it. Like, it was a minigame to me, of it being my secret to keep, and I had my reasons to do so, but I lost, so now the world should get to know my real answer. Very fair of you. I imagine all your biggest fans will be ecstatic to read up on everything you’re sharing here. Oh, yes. You put it that way, and like… I’ve thought of it from that angle myself from time to time, and it makes me just want to vomit out everything there is to know about me, to my entire stream. But I hold back. I’ve really been holding back. I’ve had to exercise a serious amount of restraint the past few weeks, because I love my fans so much and it hurts that I feel like they barely know anything about me. Because I don’t let them. Why is that? Why? I’ve had a hard time coming up with an answer myself. Maybe it’s because I don’t even know what it means for someone to really know me. I think my family does. Alex does. But… I don’t want what I have with Alex to be the same as what I have with every single one of my viewers, right? And maybe that’ll happen if I start volunteering information about myself on stream. Oh, you know that raccoon poem from DDLC? Sorry, that’s an obscure reference. But it’s like that. If I give them even a little, they’ll want more and more, and I’ll give them more and more until it reaches the point where everyone knows practically everything there is to know about me. So does it feel wrong to be here, volunteering information about yourself here, to me?To you, and to everyone who sees this. Yeah! It’s scary. But I also plan on being a full-time streamer for years, hopefully decades to come, and I have to face reality. Total secrecy is not a feasible option in the long term. It’s for the best that I give up the act now. People have waited long enough, and I do want my fans to eventually, finally know who I am. Even though being a gatekeeper is fun. Even though being mysterious and keeping people wanting is fun. That Elden Ring clip that made your stream blow up so suddenly - why, do you think, was it this that drew people’s attention?It’s so weird, right? I’d already had a few popular clips before that, and those only did a little bit for me in terms of channel growth. Like the ten-second clip of me watching the Endoparasitic intro cutscene, and I’m like, “Wow, he’s just like me for real.” That one got eighty thousand views or something, but my career didn’t take off from that at all. Another clip with thirty thousand-ish views was of me waddling forward to slide out of my chair and walking, on my bottom, out of the room. I had to do that ‘cause Alex wasn’t responding when I was calling out for her. That clip was big, I think, because I guess most people have never seen someone as limbless as me moving with independence. But again, it did nothing for my channel. I’m not sure what people found so special about me beating Elden Ring. It was a hard game, yeah, but I’ve beaten and played tons of hard games before. You said you didn’t know if you’d have been able to beat Elden Ring without the Quadstick. How does that device work, and how does it help you with gaming and streaming?Here! It’s right here. So I use my mouth to control all these little tubes, which are bound to in-game functions, and basically this lets me game with more speed and precision than would ever be possible otherwise. All I have to do is suck and blow, like so… Why’s your face getting red? No, it’s not, I’m fucking with you [laughs]. Sipping and puffing. The family friendly way to say it. So, the best thing about the Quadstick is that it has this joystick also, and for most games that functions as my mouse. Meaning it can take care of either movement or camera control. Whichever it is, it’s super important, because before 2022 when I didn’t have this, I could only play games by holding a single mouth stick, and I’d have to choose between using only my keyboard or only my mouse with it. And for games like League of Legends, that meant I was more or less restricted to onetricking Yuumi, sitting permanently on my strongest carry, and using my mouth stick to manually click on my abilities. It was really bad. I couldn’t get out of Bronze, and it was entirely owing to me having zero limbs. I would tell my chat my brain deserved Diamond, but my body was Iron IV. So I might have lied earlier. Most of the time, I feel I don’t have any want for limbs, but back then I was definitely wishing I had an arm, just so I could play League and other mechanically intensive games. Even a tiny little stump would’ve been nice, so I could maybe get some sort of prosthetic to operate my mouse with. But now I have the Quadstick, and none of that matters anymore. I get to be happy about being limbless again.What rank are you now? In League? Gold I. I will get to Diamond one day, trust. The main thing is that the Quadstick lets me play way more than just Yuumi now. I instantly gravitated towards Miss Fortune, Neeko, and Nami. Nami I have a special connection with, ha. I might try out Elise soon. She has enough limbs for the two of us. And I’m starting to get good at Riven if you can believe it. Zeus needs to take notes.League players are known to be notoriously abusive, aren’t they? Have your past experiences also made you impervious to flame in competitive gaming?One hundred percent yes. Oftentimes, the shit people say to me, I just find really funny. It used to be even funnier, back when I didn’t have the Quadstick. I kept an exact count of how many times I had an ADC who would say anything along the lines of, “My supp has no hands,” “This Yuumi is legit disabled.” I had a jungler ask, “Why botlane no limbs every game?” I told him that it was tetra-amelia syndrome, and he’s like, “What is that, is that what you have?” I’m like, “Yes! It is,” and plugged my channel. Fast forward fourteen months to today, and he’s a tier-3 sub who shows up to every stream. But nowadays, I can play so well that people don’t think I’m disabled anymore. Which is, it’s kind of a shame that they’re wrong, ‘cause I still have no limbs and they’ll never get to know that. The whole thirty or forty minutes, they have it in their heads that they’re playing with a support who has arms and legs. Is that not crazy?It’s impressive you chose to play these fast, complex games that demand a lot of dexterity even before you had the Quadstick. There are plenty of accessible games that you could have played to the fullest with only the use of a mouth stick, but you refused to restrict yourself to only those.Yeah. Minecraft, Stardew Valley, even chess got popular around that time, and that would have been easily playable unless I was playing that one minute timer version. But it would just be way too boring if I played nothing but the easy ones. I need a challenge. What’s the point of gaming otherwise?Is using the Quadstick a challenge in and of itself? You make it sound simple, but it looks fairly complicated to operate. How do you split your focus between it and the screen? The Quadstick looks complicated? I see you people using ten individual fingers all at the same time, in all these crazy combinations for like fifty different keys. No, I swear the Quadstick is so easy to use. I think after three days of using it, it felt like a natural part of my body. An extension of my mouth and lips, if that makes sense. I don’t even split my focus, ‘cause I don’t need to focus at all on what I’m doing with my mouth. I think it’s called muscle memory? Alex taught me that. “No, you’re gapped! You’re literally so gapped,” StumplessQuaddess tells her fiancée after making her second successful bottle flip, having used only her teeth to grip it by the cap. Alexandra skips over the bottles scattered about the room to smother the phone’s lens with a hand, but not before the viewers can see her suppressing a grin. “Saw nothing. I’m still up 3-1,” Alexandra giggles, to which StumplessQuaddess can be overheard replying, “You’re up 4 limbs and down 4 games, how do you feel?” 981,635 channel points are awarded to those who predicted a StumplessQuadless victory. “There’s no way we’re doing this in 2023, by the way. My mom was watching bottle flip compilations last week, that’s how you know this trend is crusty as fuck,” Alexandra complains. “And in case you forgot? Your hula hooping: fucking dreadful. Maybe next time you’ll get further than half a second in.” StumplessQuaddess gasps with no less stupefaction than is reflected in chat.(Transcribed from StumplessQuaddess’ April 15 2023 stream, “PROVING 0 LIMBS >>> 4”) Where do you think you would be right now, had you not found streaming? Honestly, that’s a scary question. Those shitty jobs, modelling and taking calls, were so depressing for me. I didn’t want to feel like that was all I had to offer to the world. I’ve always been decent at art, but I’m nowhere near good enough to pursue it professionally… You’re kind of mean for bringing this up, you know? Everyone who ever knew and cared about me growing up was worried for me. It took me a while to put two and two together, but I think it’s the reason my parents moved us to Canada: for the healthcare, for me. There were all these questions about how I’d manage. How’s the limbless girl gonna get through school? How will she ever support herself, let alone a family? It’s not a stupid thing to be worried about. Alex and I were barely making it when I wasn’t bringing anything in. Disability checks only go so far.But you’re here now.I am here now! I did find streaming - because of Alex, of course - and now it’s like a million doors have been opened, and I can see all the possibilities life was hiding from me.Possibilities - you show such ambition in every facet of your life, in spite of your limitations. What’s next for you? Are you on the lookout for new challenges? There’s so much I want to do. I have so many ideas. I want to do more art streams, for more than just emotes. I want to try setting up some workout streams. I made a list of streamers I wanna DM, just to see if they’re down to collab. They’re all the ones I looked up to when I was just starting out, and it’s so unbelievable to think that I’m basically their equal now. Equal, not lesser. I’m sure that fits in with you having been limbless your whole life.That’s what I was just about to say! Like, it’s more than just making it big as a streamer. Getting good at any game I want, better than people who have two functioning hands… even just having a conversation of any kind with anyone on the Internet. Things like this, where no one gets to overlook me just because I have no limbs. I feel like I’ve been fighting for this recognition my whole life, and never did I think I would actually get to this point. Where it’s like, okay, I’m just as good, if not better than everyone else at everything I want to do. I’m sincerely wondering, what would I ever want arms and legs for? They could come out with the greatest prosthetics ever, indistinguishable from normal limbs, and you know what? I don’t think I’d even try. I’m good. I’m comfortable. I can go the rest of my life with just my head and torso, no limbs needed, and that’s more than enough for me....

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