crush wrote:I've never heard of "VTubers", do you have any examples of what you're talking about? There really isn't any regular Japanese content that pulls me in. I like some channels that repair and upgrade old gaming consoles (GameBoys, SNESs, etc.) but due to the nature of their content they aren't updated too frequently (with interesting --to me-- content). It's basically impossible for me to sit online and get lost wasting time in Japanese stuff like i can do too easily in English/Spanish.
From what you all are saying, i'm picturing some version of Cure Dolly playing video games.
Kizuna AI is probably by far the best known virtual youtuber. She was probably the first character designed and promoted that way, or at least someone who popularized the concept. I don't think that gaming streams, or any kind of live streams, are a significant part of her content though - in fact I'm not quite sure what her content even is, as I've never felt interested enough to check out. By contrast, the agency Hololive has been primarily oriented on live content using motion capture technology from the start, making money primarily via
YouTube's superchat donation system. While their characters all have an official kayfabe backstory and corporate-approved character quirks, I think it's the moments of the streamers' real personalities
seeping through the cracks (as well as the occasional
deliberate drop of the mask) that really endears the characters to the audience.
I have been hearing about several vtubers and their associated memes for a while here and there, but I think it was Inugami Korone who first piqued my interest. She tends to be the subject of crossover memes both due to her
interest in retro games and willingness to
engage the English-speaking audience, but what I find most interesting aside from her exuberant personality is her
unusual ideolect. I would love to read some serious linguistic analysis of her pitch accent patterns, because the most the Japanese fans managed to deduce is that it's probably a mix of at least two regional dialects, one from the rural region her IRL personality grew up in and another belonging to her grandmother, who apparently had an outsize influence on her upbringing. And speaking of linguistic curiosity, there's apparently a
hobbyist polyglot in Hololive's Indonesian branch!
Unfortunately I'm not too familiar with the other major vtuber agency, Nijisanji. I do know that they had a
TV anime last year, but apparently it's so full of inside jokes it's basically inaccessible to anyone who hadn't already been a fan at the time of airing. The only indie vtuber I have any familiarity with is Nanahoshi Suzu, mainly because of her
reviews of my favorite manga.
Edit: noticed I accidentally linked the Gura clip twice, corrected the link in the "seeping through the cracks" bit.