▶ What are Virtual Youtubers?
Virtual Youtubers, or Vtubers for short, are YouTubers or streamers that produce their content under an avatar, using mocap to translate their movements and expressions to their avatar. It started mainly in Japan, but quickly has grown in popularity all over the world.
▶ Why watch Vtubers?
Most of the appeal of Vtubers are the same as a regular YouTuber/streamer; you'll be watching them because of their personality and/or because you're interested in their content. That being said, there are some differences that make the experience a bit more unique:
- The biggest benefit for the Vtuber themselves is anonymity. It helps protect the real person a bit more, and it lets them to be a bit more comfortable with themselves since they're not attached to their real faces, which is particularly helpful for shy people or people with low self-esteem.
- There's also the benefit of a good character design for their avatar. Not only they can have an eye-catching visual design that helps differentiate them from other Vtubers (and regular YouTubers/Streamers in general), they can also be anything such as, for example, a literal dog. The sky is the limit.
- And there's also the role-play or kayfabe aspect that comes together with the character designs. This varies wildly between the Vtubers but some of them do have a good mix of the person behind the character and the character themselves.
- It can also lead to unique types of content. For example, 3D streams are a big deal with Vtubers, and it's something that would not be that interesting to watch with regular people. Another good example is that, since the avatar is just an avatar, it's easy to do things like exchanging "bodies", or have multiple people use the same avatar.
- For Vtubers that are under groups (see bellow), there's also the added benefit of collabs. Of course this can happen with any Vtuber, but those in groups generally collab more with themselves and since they're under the same umbrella they might have more familiarity and chemistry with their fellow "coworkers".
▶ What Vtubers are out there?
Today, a good number of Vtubers (especially the more popular ones) are under talent groups that help them with the technical side as well as manage things like marketing and merch, or all the legal stuff.
A good place to begin are the following two Japanese groups, which are definitively the two most well known names in this "scene":
- Hololive: Managed by COVER Corp., they're one the most popular groups currently. While not the biggest group, they do have a sizable number of members and they've also been expanding internationally, with one generation of Hololive EN (International/English) and two of Hololive ID (Indonesia). There's also Holostars, the male branch, which unfortunately is not as popular as the main branch, but they're slowly growing. One thing to note is that while they do consider themselves to be an "idol group" (and they do a lot of things in that area, with a good influx of original songs and some concerts here and there), the members have a lot of range and there are many that don't fit in the usual idol image, and they do have a good amount of freedom to do whatever they want to do.
- Nijisanji: Managed by ANYCOLOR Inc., they are the biggest Vtuber group, having more than 100 members under the main (Japanese) branch, and a good number in the overseas branches as well (to be more specific, they have a Chinese, an Indonesian, a Korean and a general English-speaking branch). They're mostly focused on supporting the Vtubers instead of trying to build a cohesive brand. For such reasons they have a lot of variety between their talents, so there is a good chance you can find someone you like.
Some other well known Japanese groups worth a mention are 774inc., which is better know for the AniMare group; VOMS, a small indie group formed by Vocaloid producer GYARI; NoriPro, created by Tsukudani Norio (who streams under the name Inuyama Tamaki) which is well known in the scene for their interviews with various Vtubers; and of course Kizuna AI Inc., the company created to manage the "progenitor" of the whole scene and her peers.
Along with that, because of the growth that has been happening since the past year, a good number of English-speaking groups have been popping up, with some of them getting popular quite fast:
- VShojo: A western group that was formed recently by Justin "theGunrun" Ignacio and Phillip "Mowtendoo" Fortunat, aiming to be of support for western Vtubers. Some of the more popular western indies move under the group on its inception, and since they they also had some other debuts as well. They mainly stream on Twitch and are very lax, so if you're more into that cultrue you'll be in good hands.
- Tsunderia: One of the earliest US based groups. While they had a rough start, they seem to be growing recently with new members already announced and auditions open for more. They do have a good number fans, especially their first members.
- PRISM Project: A Japan based group that focus mostly on EN talents. So far they've debuted 9 members from all over the world, under 3 generations. Most of the talents are great singers and they release pretty frequent song covers.
Some other groups worth mentioning are Production kawaii, another JP based agency that has grown quite a bit despite starting not too long ago; Phase Connect, the most recent group which started with a mix of EN and JP members; and Atelier Live, which is less a corporation and more a collective of EN indies that support each other.
And of course, there's also independent Vtubers, of which there are many. There are some that are quite popular, but the grand majority are quite small. They are great if you like the small community vibe instead of getting lost in the thousands of people participating in chat that happens with popular Vtubers. Of course you're mostly going to be on your own to find them. The majority of English-speaking Vtubers fall in this category.
It's important to mention that while most of the Vtubers out there today are female (especially the most popular ones), there are male Vtubers. The most popular ones are under Nijisanji, and as of now there are few English-speaking male Vtubers, but they're slowly growing more popular as the overall popularity of Vtubers increases.
Also note that because Twitch is not that popular in Japan (especially back then when this all started), most of the Vtubers and the community is centered around YouTube, but there are Vtubers that use mostly Twitch (especially western ones).
▶ I want to watch Japanese Vtubers but I don't know Japanese, how can I enjoy them?
Of course to a lot of people the language barrier is going to be a major one. Here's your options:
- Watch their content anyway.
While you might not get much out of a chatting stream for example, you can certainly appreciate some stuff without understanding. Maybe they're really good at an particular game, or you enjoy listening to them sing, or maybe they're a good artist and you like to see them draw, or even you enjoy the sound of their voice and like having them in the background. Some Vtubers have a sizable international fanbase, so even if you don't understand everything from the stream itself, you can get something out of it from chat (sometimes there's even people in the chat that translate and summarize what is happening in the stream).
- Watch translated clips.
Most of the western fanbase comes from those. There are various fans that clip moments from streams and add subtitles to them. While there's a lot of variety in terms of translation quality, it's generally enough to get the general idea and it's still enjoyable. Of course you're at the mercy of the translators doing this on their free time and by only doing the highlights you might lose a bit of who the Vtuber really are most of the time, but for the most part this isn't much of a problem.
▶ Where do I start?
Due to the sheer number of Vtubers nowadays, there are certainly a lot of options and it can be hard to chose. Because of that I want to highlight some of the most popular English-speaking Vtubers to get started. After checking them out, a good idea is to look into the groups mentioned above as well as look into some indies too. Some of the groups often have collaborations with indies too, so that can also be a good starting point.
- Hololive EN, currently comprised of Amelia Watson, a detective; Mori Calliope, a rapper reaper; Ninomae Ina'nis, a priest for the Ancient Ones; Gawr Gura, a shark from Atlantis; and Takanashi Kiara, a phoenix. In particular I want to highlight Kiara's HoloTalk, where she interviews and live translate the Hololive JP Vtubers in order to better introduce them to the western community.
- Nijisanji EN, currently comprised of Finana Ryugu, a mermaid; Pomu Rainpuff, a fairy; Elira Pendora, a dragon who is also a dragon tamer. They already started auditions for new members and in general Nijisanji often debut new batches of members shortly after another so expect this group to grow quite fast too.
- Amano Pikamee, from VOMS Project. She's pretty fluent in English, every once in a while she does English streams and in her regular streams she generally repeats something she said in English, so while you're not going to get everything, you can get the gist of what she is talking about.
- Ironmouse and Nyanners, from VShojo. Those are currently the most popular western Vtubers. Both are crazy in their own ways and they mostly stream on Twitch if you prefer to watch streams over there.
Due to the nature of the use of avatars there are multiple ways to approach "VTubing" and where to start might vary depending on the way you want to go. For a first step you can check out SilentPanda's overview of free resources, which are marked in the threadmarks, as well as /r/VirtualYoutubers spreadsheet of resources.
▶ Anything else I should know?
- Please do not talk or speculate about the Vtubers' past "lives". While it's interesting to know about what they've have been up to before they got big or you like them so much you want to see more of them, digging trough their past lives is a breach of privacy and it can, and have, lead to cases of doxxing. So, even if you are fine knowing this information, it's best to not spread this info around.
- If you're going to participate in the chat, please pay attention to the streamer's rules. They're generally on the description of the stream. Of course each streamer is different, but there are some common rules that started with the Japanese Vtubers that most of the community uses. The gist of it is focus on what's happening on the stream, or, in other words, don't be off-topic and/or talk to other people, don't spam, don't talk about other Vtubers unless mentioned, and of course, be respectful.
- A good tool to watch and discover Vtubers is HoloDex. Not only it has the currently live and upcoming streams of pretty much all major groups and a lot of indies, there's also a section for clips and one for music covers, as well as a handy tool to watch multiple streams at the same time, which is really useful for collab streams.
- Be mindful of clips (especially translated ones). While most of the community is fine, there have been cases of clippers misrepresenting situations before. In particular I want to highlight OtakMori who has bad translations, has been called out by the Hololive staff before and got one of his videos taken down by COVER, as well as Iroha Translation, which has a history of twisting the words of Vtubers to cause drama. In general it's important to keep in mind that you might not be getting the whole picture or the translation quality might not be the best (especially in cases of speed subs), so it's good to take them with a grain of salt, especially if they are clips of serious moments. We suggest the list of recommended translators compiled by GoodVtubersSubs as a starting point as they are verified by the community at large to be more accruate and at least understand the impact of a bad translation.
What do you mean you haven't fallen down into this rabbit hole yet!?
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