Everything Is Liv Agar

Liv Agar. Her very name is a meme, repeated early and often by her cult fandom, whether in her periodic Twitch streams or beneath the posts on her over 225K follower Twitter account. Everything you need to know about Liv Agar is contained in this one fact. While it’s not fair to accuse her of being “famous for being famous” because she 1) isn’t all that famous and 2) actually does produce content not immediately related to her own public persona, the Idea of Liv Agar as the It Girl for a certain kind of transfeminine nerd is much more powerful and influential than any of the content the actually existing Liv Agar produces. For this kind of trans woman, to say Liv Agar’s name online is not so much an identification of an actually existing person as a prayer that you too might ascend to the heights of cute-hotness, unaffected nonchalance, sly humor, and political and intellectual unassailability that she represents. For Those Who Know, she’s perfect.

To be clear, this piece is not about the actually existing Canadian citizen named Liv Agar—that would be parasocial and weird. It is about the mythical Liv Agar, who is far more important.

You want to be Liv Agar, you want to be with Liv Agar, but maybe more than these things, you just want to know why she’s so alluring. What’s her secret???? On paper, she seems so moderate. She’s chill, but she’s not exactly hip. She’s pleasant to listen to, but she’s doesn’t lean on charisma to make her points. She possesses wit, but she’s not a jestermaxxer. She’s deeply political, but she’s rarely inflammatory. She’s fairly accessible, especially for an account of her size, and yet she’s infuriatingly elusive.

A theory: Liv Agar is the Smart Girl who drove you NUTS in high school, whose merest friendly hello could have you on the mental ward for a week with the recognition that life is, in fact, hopeless, all desire simply the pursuit of more desire in an endlessly self-consuming loop.

Remember how there was always a geeky girl in teen movies that people would make hot by taking off her glasses, dying her hair, and putting makeup on her? Remember how you always thought she was prettier before they did all that to her? Liv Agar is that girl, and she has refused the makeover. She doesn’t need it. She has Twitch. She has Crazy Parking. She has Theodore Adorno. Her very existence is a making over of the makeover. She is the New Woman of the Internet age, flashing her Mona Lisa smile at a panicked world as if to say “It really is as bad as it looks—in fact, it’s even worse,” but somehow, that makes you feel okay—not out of nihilism, but out of a hope that, for the sake of good taste and a bit of superstition, dare not articulate itself.

According to Google’s Gemini (I didn’t fact check this, sorry, I’m on a deadline): Many believe the cult of Liv Agar only goes back a few years, but its history stretches back beyond memory. The cult first arrived in Europe via soldiers of Alexander the Great, who are believed to have picked it up from some lost Persian mystery religion. In those days, Liv Agar was venerated as Agarta, from which the modern name “Agatha” is believed, by a minority of scholars, to be derived. Details of the cult are utterly lost to history, but its existence is affirmed by both Herodotus and Plato, whose tantalizingly brief mentions focus on their use of the phrase “Live Agarte” as a bivalent hello and goodbye, and of the followers’ term for themselves: διάλεκτος, translating most germanely for our purposes to “Chat.”

When you die—probably sooner than you expect, especially with all that microplastic lodged in your sad gut—you will see an entity that looks like Liv Agar, clad in grey shorts and a grey t-shirt that perfectly matches the gunmetal frames of her Marcy from Peanuts glasses, but the grey will be glowing as if it’s blinding white. She will ask you to take her hand and you will take it, and she will lead you either to hell, heaven, or purgatory (97% of people go to purgatory). She will not say a word about why you’re going where you’re going, but you won’t protest because she just seems to know. The memory of Liv Agar holding your hand in an entirely professional yet compassionate manner will sustain you as you endure the trials of purifying your soul.

When the Gautama Buddha said “Here, Shariputra, form is emptiness, emptiness is form; emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness; whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form,” he was talking about Liv Agar. As he sat under the Bodhi Tree, tormented by the aggression of Mara, he kept himself vigilant by listening for Liv Agar’s still, small voice, discoursing about the Labor Theory of Value.

“You know that’s a guy, don’t you?” said Mara.

The Buddha said nothing. On his face, he wore Liv Agar’s own smile.

Dreadful fellow Canadian Keffals, who’s very much the Wario to Liv’s Mario, once said, “being a trans woman isn’t about trying to imitate women. it’s about trying to be better than women.” Cheaply funny, but untrue. Being a trans woman is about trying to imitate Liv Agar. Keffals knows this all too well, unfortunately, wherever she is. She does not possess an ounce of the je ne sais quoi that Liv Agar seems to radiate at all times like an undying star.

When Liv Agar posted this picture of herself enjoying a sandwich in Seattle, she caused immense rage. A lot of it was just misogyny, some of it was veganism, but a little of it, I think, was due to the fact that even if you had this same sandwich, you could never be Liv Agar enjoying it. Surely even the real Liv Agar can’t always be the mythical Liv Agar, but she’s able to do it just enough to keep being Liv Agar.

Is it lonely at the top? The top of what? Liv Agar lords over no one. She has no actual clout—what you think you see is illusion, Shariputra. If you think you’ve grasped Liv Agar, you will look down and find you have nothing but straw in your hands. Envy bounces off her like light off a perfectly polished mirror, lasering itself back onto its originator and burning them to a crisp. Many have tried to hate Liv Agar, but it just never works. You can do it, but it just doesn’t feel good. Her only sin (not actually a sin at all) is that you can’t be her and/or have her.

But what would you do as her and/or with her anyway? Admit it, you have no idea, and that’s why she’s Liv Agar and you’re literally anybody else. Give it up, get over yourself, and enjoy her newest Twitch stream or her latest exhaustively researched, delightfully edutaining piece for the QAA podcast. You should just be happy to be here, on the same planet with Liv Agar. I know I am.