Co-Editor-in-Chief Emma Szabo
When the COVID-19 virus reached the US, the country went into lockdown, and even now plenty of people are still doing their work from home to stay safe. But while indoors, many people turned to video services such as Netflix and Youtube to stave off boredom. While that may not seem too different from what people regularly do, one major difference is what they’re watching. While it’s to be expected movies and television shows have risen in popularity, another surprising form of entertainment has grown in popularity during the quarantine – Virtual Youtubers.
Virtual YouTubers, or Vtubers, are exactly what they sound like; Youtubers who stream using a virtual avatar that usually has an anime style. The idea of Vtubers was started in Japan around four years ago when the Virtual Entertainer Kizuna Ai rose to popularity and coined the term. Since then, being a Vtuber has become an actual job after companies such as Hololive and Nijisanji began recruiting talents and sponsoring them. Most times, Vtubers stream themselves playing video games while talking with their live chat or collaborating with other Vtubers in a multiplayer game. Many Vtubers don’t exclusively play games though, a lot of them sing and play instruments as well! Since Vtubers are entertainers, most of them have great singing skills and idol-like qualities. This has led to many of them creating their own music as well as performing covers of songs for karaoke streams. One Vtuber who is best known for his musical talents is Rikka from Hololive’s male branch Holostars. While most other Vtuber’s focus on gaming streams, Rikka’s streams tend to focus on his singing and his guitar playing. He has music streams almost every day, and he’ll even collaborate with other Vtubers to cover different songs.
“Before this whole pandemic, I had never even heard of Vtubers, but for the past few months a lot of my friends have started talking about them. One of my friends is really into Rikka, and she sends me his music videos whenever they come out,” freshman Ava Machuca said.
Due to his popularity as a Vtuber, Rikka has written and produced his own music and is currently the second most subscribed Holostar member with over 80 thousand subscribers on Youtube.
But what makes Vtubers so different – and so popular? While what they do on stream doesn’t differ much from what normal streamers do, the main appeal of Vtubers is their avatars. Most Vtubers belong to companies who provide them with both a character and an animated avatar for them to use while streaming, giving the world of Vtubers much more variety compared to regular streamers. While a majority of the Vtube avatars are presented as humans, there’s still a good amount who play the role of non-human characters such as demons, vampires, witches, and even the Grim Reaper’s assistant. One of the most popular English Vtubers is Gawr Gura from Hololive EN, a streamer whose avatar is that of a shark girl. Even though she’s a shark, her avatar looks like a young anime girl and she acts like a normal person, just with occasional anecdotes from her life and experiences as a shark from Atlantis. While this kind of character may seem weird to some people, she’s been very well received among both English and Japanese audiences. Despite only streaming for about 4 months with the creation of the Hololive English branch, Gura has already surpassed 1 million subscribers, being the first Hololive EN girl to do so. Vtubers haven’t only grown more popular in America though, in Japan the Vtuber company Nijisanji had a recent collaboration with the PA League, one of the two professional baseball leagues in Japan.
One of the other things that makes most Vtubers different from other streamers is that it’s an actual job. While it is possible to be an Independent Vtuber – a vtuber who isn’t working for a company and handles everything themselves – most of the well known Vtubers stream as a career. Companies will provide their talents with an animated avatar, a character, and face-tracking technology for them to produce streams for a certain amount of time each week and keep them on contract for at least a year unless some kind of complication arises. This is very different from normal streamers like Ninja or Pokimane, who are independent streamers who set their own schedules and have no contract to abide by. But just because being a Virtual Youtuber is a job doesn’t mean that you have to be with a company to start streaming as one. As mentioned before, many successful Vtubers are independent, like Artemis of the Blue or Pikamee, who have both become popular independent streamers.
So, why have Vtubers become so popular during the pandemic? Besides people having more time to watch streams, there’s another group of people who have contributed to Vtubers rise in popularity, which are the translators. Since a majority of Virtual Youtubers are from Japan and China, translators provide a necessary service to fans who don’t speak those languages. While most translators only translate certain clips from streams, some will provide real-time translations for their favorite streamers, opening up the world of Vtubers to a worldwide audience.
Although the past year has had more downs than ups, one of the better things to come out of the lockdown has been the growth of this new, virtual form of entertainment. Many people have turned their hobby of streaming with their virtual avatars into a job, and the community surrounding these streamers has grown exponentially. As we go further into the digital age, it’s exciting to see what new innovations will surface and see what new ways people choose to entertain themselves.