Thoughts on Vtubers

Just before Covid, during my first year of university, I got into watching anime. I started obsessing over the characters and stayed locked in my dorm room playing Azur Lane and StarCraft II while watching as many shows as I could. And a prevailing thought I had was "What if I could always watch Anime non-stop?". It seemed during the time of lockdown, my wish came true. I found Vtubers, starting with Kizuna Ai, then the various Hololive and Nijisanji livestreamers. I would watch them non-stop and always had a vtuber playing in the background. I mostly stopped watching anime at that point. All my time was taken up by vtubers. I remember I would finish with school, go to my work shift, then come back and catch whatever vtuber was online.

The only thing was that I never really interacted with was the community, I treated it like I treated television, keeping it as just something to watch when I felt lonely. I also didn't get the entire 'Idol' aspect of spending money on the hobby, the few times I did it was just for unique merch. I remember the craziest dream was that Nekomiya Hinata visited my dorm room, but it looked like a person in a mascot costume, and how real it felt. I soon realized the deeply parasocial aspects of it. It reminded me of how my grandfather would yell at the talking heads on TV. The few times I spent money on Vtubers, I was too overwhelmed by the attention of them calling my name on the stream and preferred to be a lurker.

The biggest reason I stopped watching Vtubers was because most of them stopped playing a character. I preferred them pretending to be their character and interacting that way, rather than the modern Vtubers who mix in their personal life with their persona. To me, that was the enjoyment, this anime character that reacted to the real world, in a sense. I don't like how the current Vtuber meta just uses the character persona they created to be more of a personal shield instead of embodying the character itself. Since distancing myself from the Vtuber space a couple years back, I've returned to occasionally enjoying anime again, and learned to focus on balancing my media consumption, realizing how short life can be.