Thoughts on Vtubers?

[VelvetSoul]

For those unaware Vtubers are essentially streamers or content creators who use virtual avatars to represent themselves. The most popular of them being from things like Hololive.

I want to prefix all of this by saying that I actually like Vtubers, but I dislike the indie Vtuber scene as I've been a part of it for years and I've seen the good and the bad. Unfortunately I've found that the bad far outweigh the good but I have a lot of thoughts on Vtubers as a new wave of internet entertainment.

The idea for Vtubers ranges from person to person, some see it as a method of not needing to put a real face or name to themselves if they wish to create content; others view it as a means to create an entire identity complete with backstory and everything. Personally I think both are really fun, but I feel like the second needs a bit more time to mature away from the corporate view.

What I mean is that Hololive is typically to blame for why so many people don't know "how" to actually use a Vtuber avatar as a character. See Hololive actually produces characters, they run an anime alongside their streams that gives these backstories and character motivations real meaning beyond just being a gimmick. It's one thing to tell me "this lady is the Warden of Time" it's another thing to show me a silly comedy anime skit where she uses her powers to go back in time because she keeps failing to make ramen noodles.

A lot of what I found on Twitter is that Indie Vtuber culture wants to be like "the real Vtubers" by which they mean corporate Vtubers, but they want to distance themselves from those "sellouts." It's one of those cases where people forget that unfortunately we have bills to pay along with being cynical and likely jealous of those who "made it" because yea I get it, Hololive are proper idols; they're paid a salary to basically play D&D as an anime character every day of their life instead of stocking shelves or doing backbreaking labor for pennies and dimes.

However, the whole "being jealous and thus cynical of people who made it" thing causes a big problem, they don't actually know WHY Hololive bothers to give their characters these elaborate backstories, and what we end up with are characters that don't mean anything; and that's fine on it's own but here's the thing... you're still trying to be an entertainer... right?

At the end of the day Vtubers are primarily streamers, they're trying to be entertaining; so when you have to stop the stream every 5 - 10 minutes to explain to me who or what your character is, and when that doesn't really amount to anything or add anything to the stream as a whole. You lose on both fronts, not only are you not taking advantage of getting to play a character, but you're also not allowing yourself to be entertaining as a streamer. Rather than using what you have to create this fun new angle for your streams, you're impeding your ability to actually do the primary function of being an entertainer.

A friend of mine explained it really well recently, he was talking about how when a streamer is playing the role of a Vtuber, there's actually two characters they play. For the sake of example let me explain one such Vtuber he used in his example, Calliope Mori; she's a Grim Reaper, or rather she's the apprentice of the Grim Reaper learning to be a Reaper herself. However, my friend was talking about how you have essentially 3 different people here;

You have the actual actress/streamer herself, she is not Mori, she's herself. She doesn't go around in her day to day life being "Mori the Reaper" you know? A degree beyond that, you have her being her character on stream. This likely amounts to keeping things more in theme with her character. She's not going to say "I was talking to my manager" she's going to say "I was talking to Death/The Grim Reaper" because this makes sense for her character, likewise she's not going to refer to practice for something like a new upcoming song by saying "I killed my voice practicing for our upcoming concert" she's instead going to likely word it as "I'm really tired because I was practicing my scythe swinging with Death again!" Beyond this even further, you have the streamer acting as "The Reaper" this would be essentially the idea of playing up the character fully, you're not even eluding to real life anymore. You wouldn't even mention practice, that's something you as the streamer actually did, this is similar to playing a D&D character at that point, where you're not even concerned with the real world because you're so invested in playing a character. This would be like when Mori is out on stage in front of a live audience at a concert, or when she's on a live show and supposed to be entirely in character for the sake of the anime or something.

So why does this matter? In my mind the distance that twitter's Indie Vtuber scene puts between themselves and "the people who made it" causes harm to them, because they understand the idea of "I should play a character, that's what Vtubers do" but they don't understand that the reason for that character to exist is only for the sake of something like the side content anime or for the concerts; or for the marketing. People come to watch Mori's streams for the STREAMER not the character, the character is a fun addition to the streamer.

So when you have these Indie Vtubers who come out on stream and give these long winded speeches about their characters, and how they're actually "an ancient god who was kicked out of the heavens and now I play video games on stream for your entertainment!" Only to then spend another 5 minutes explaining all their "godly powers" and such that we will literally never see because that side content doesn't exist; well, it just feels lacking to me.

I've been a Vtuber now for a good few years, nothing professional (unfortunately; my goal IS to eventually sign on with a proper label like Hololive), and for the first of those years I told myself I'd just follow the twitter culture and do it by the books, which was awful.

Not only do people stab each other in the back to get ahead constantly, but no one really understood how to make their character a fun idea for their streams. I remember bringing up how it would be cool to sort of view Vtubers as an extended multiverse, if I'm playing up a character and you are playing up a character; then if we do a collab I want to throw in something small but immersive of how we'd likely have actually met up. This shouldn't be big, it shouldn't take away from the main aspect of the stream, which is whatever game we're playing together. However I think it can be nice to sort of say "how was the traffic" but in a way that makes sense for our characters.

As a really kind of boring example but to make sense of this, it would be like if your character is this cyborg sci-fi future character; and mine is a mage from some fantasy setting. I might make a comment of like "It's crazy that you come from a world where space, and time travel; is just something you can do whenever, hopefully it wasn't too much of a pain to get here." To which you could sort of "yes and" that with "Nah no problem at all, like you say; we've got the whole space and time travel thing down back home, Though I need to get home in time to get the laundry out of the wash..." This allows me to make a sort of silly remark towards the idea of "Why can't you just travel back to right when your laundry is done?" All so that you could make a closing remark of like "WELL ANYWAYS we're here to play [game] aren't we?!" Sort of giving a comedic non-answer to that question.

^ This is what we sort of get with Hololive, they'll banter and play off each other's characters but always focus on whatever it is the main focus happens to be. If they're doing a concert (since it IS an idol company and they primarily do music and such) then the focus will always be Banter -> Announcing the next performance. If they're doing a live stream then the focus will always be Banter -> Announcing the game/topic of the stream. The problem with Indie Vtubers is they know about one or the other, so they either stick to the banter for far too long and never give you an out to focus on what people are here for; or they exclusively stick to the streaming and never banter at which point playing up a character loses it's novelty.

I'm not going to say that I expect professional level improv or anything, but I've seen that a lot of these people will write entire essays for their OC, but they won't stream with the intent on their OC, rather the intent of the stream is on some random game they're playing, they're just not talking about or sometimes even playing that game. They're instead giving you the entire backstory of their character while the game is running in the background. Every single time, you can watch the viewer count drop in real time; because while that sort of stream is fine, it's not what people came to watch.

I once suggested my idea of a multiverse as a means of cross promotion, essentially I have had this idea for a long time; but for anyone old enough to remember old Cartoon Network bumpers that would feature characters from different shows interacting. I pitched that idea to a few of my friends who are also Vtubers. Essentially, let me promote you and show you to my audience, but really casually; through the scope of a 5 minute bumper clip or something silly while I take 5 to grab a water. Every single one told me no, because that felt like too much work.

I feel like that summarizes the entire experience I had with the Indie Vtuber scene "no, that would take too much work." Every time I wanted to do something with the characters people had spent time creating, they'd tell me no; and explain that it would be too much work to put into something. They didn't want to actually do anything with their characters, their backstories, or their "powers" and I don't say this to stand up here on my soapbox and say "I'm so good I'm better than these people" no no that's not my intention at all.

I guess it's just my opinion of Vtubers has sort of split after my experience with twitter's indie vtuber scene. I watch people in Hololive and I enjoy the idea of what's basically stream LARPing, it's fun; and there's so much you can do with it. Even if you just casually want to have a character to represent you that's really cool! However then when I try my hand at it, and I talk with everyone who has these really cool well thought out characters, it turns out they want everyone to really like their character for having all these cool powers, and these elaborate backstories; but they don't want to actually DO anything with that. They want to just say it and not show it, and when they interrupt their streams constantly to tell people about it, to reiterate who and what they are; it's all a bit much for me. Because like I said earlier, at that point you're losing on both fronts.

If you asked me what I thought of Vtubers, I'd tell you I think they're a really cool concept that need to be executed on properly to be worth while.

If you want to just use the virtual avatar in place of a webcam, then that's great and I think you could absolutely use a nickname and an avatar to stream and have it be this fun thing where there's a way to represent yourself and share your reactions and such with your audience, without impeding your ability to be a streamer.

On the flip side, if you really want to deep dive into playing a character, then I think that's great as well! You can have a lot of fun playing up a fantasy character who couldn't exist in reality, you can be anything; so have fun with it and create a personality or a character that you think would be fun to watch!

And if you want to be somewhere in the middle, then play to the strengths of both, not the detriment! After a few years I've struck a balance I'm happy with. I play up this character of an Eldritch Demon Lord, who was basically sent to Earth by the Elder Gods; why? Oh well because surely only I was fit to claim dominion of Earth! The great old ones trust ME with this task! So I've studied your Earthly world and found these "streamers" who you idolize! People give them their time and money! They even "follow" them; well it can't be that hard can it?! These "stramers" play video games and do challenges, I could do that; I'm one of the elite soldiers of the Great Old One's army!

^ The main central comedy aspect of this is that by no means is this dude an actually edgy "cool" demon lord. When people ask me to summarize my character's major quirk I often explain that he's what I would call "Invader Zim-Like" he believes he was sent here because he's one of the greats, he thinks he's this cool demon lord; but everyone can see he's a dork and that makes him endearing.

At the core of it though, the major reason I like this as a character is because it lets me sort of be silly with my audience without ever having to encroach on being a streamer. I don't have to spend 30 minutes explaining who or what I am, I can just jump right into a gaming challenge or something, I can explain things in a comedic way saying stuff like "I see you mortals believe this Elden Ring to be a difficult challenge? Very well! I shall prove myself worthy by claiming this so called "Elden Ring" I don't know what that is exactly but if it's powerful then it shall belong to me!" That's all I need to "incorporate" my character into the "why" of things. You know why I'm playing Elden Ring, it makes sense for this guy to think this way he's a silly kinda dorky character who thinks he knows things he doesn't. That all just comes across clearly, it means that my audience who cares about my character and is watching me because they like this silly dork of a demon lord get their fix and the people in my audience who are watching my streams for ME the streamer; don't get burnt out having to deal with me sitting there going "no no I'm a demon lord sent from space, etc" for an hour of my Elden Ring stream.

I do know a good handful of streamers/Vtubers who are like that, it's how I learned to find that balance, not just for my own enjoyment of the craft but to ensure I don't disrupt the enjoyment my audience gets from it either. 

And I will fully admit this is one of those topics I care entirely too much about because of a personal bias, I enjoy Vtubing so I don't like when other people give it a bad reputation or something. That may sound bad, so I want to make it clear I'm not mad at the people giving it a bad reputation or something; I'm just sad that it happens. The truth is that I don't think there's necessarily a "wrong" way to be a Vtuber. Is there a "right" way? Well, if I'm being honest; yea. Just like how there's a right way to code, or a right way to do any craft. There's absolutely more than one right way to do it, but there are absolutely right ways never the less. That being said I do stand by saying there's no "wrong" way to be a vtuber or an entertainer of any kind for that matter, merely I feel like when you choose to be a vtuber you should probably know why you want to be a vtuber in the first place. If you want to capitalize on having/being a character that's great, if it's just to keep yourself anonymous on the web that's also great; but flip flopping too much as I've said multiple times, just makes you lose out on what makes either side enjoyable for yourself and others.

ALL of this is essentially too many words to say, I'm curious what people do think about vtubers. Do you think having a character or even being a character can add something to a stream? I would absolutely say it does or that it at the very least can when it's again; done "right" but that it doesn't necessarily have an inherent value as a gimmick. Do you have any vtubers you watch? If so I'm really curious what you like about them. A lot of the time people will tell me they watched someone based on the character design but later came to appreciate the streamer as a person rather than a character. It's kind of cool, you know?

Personally I've always wanted to host a Vtuber D&D campaign in which everyone would play as their actual Vtuber character complete with all their unique powers and backstories and such, give it some real substance instead of basically just being flavor text if that makes any sense.