VTubers Are the Future of Identity
Would a shark by any other name sing just as sweet? Virtual Youtubers, entertainers who embody a virtual avatar to perform over live stream, have been around for a few years now. It’s not even fair to call them a niche phenomenon anymore. According to Brazilian researcher Rafael Dirques David Regis, VTubers made up 38% of YouTube’s 300 most profitable channels in 2021, raking in tens of millions of dollars. The industry is growing at a phenomenal rate, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, the increasing alienation of workers, and Slavoj Zizek’s self-isolating class.
VTubers are a bit difficult to describe. Pro-wrestler and VTuber Brennan “Mace” Williams says it’s literally the same thing as kayfabe, the practice of wrestlers portraying fictional characters and storylines as completely real. This fiction applies off camera, to the point that in 1975 Tim Woods wrestled two weeks after a plane crash that resulted in broken ribs and a concussion, just to help hide the fact he’d been on the plane with two of his supposed rivals.
Actors often use their authentic selves to build convincing, crowd-facing facades. Vtubers similarly behave as more enhanced versions of themselves when online, with some anime tropes thrown in. It’s a third type of entity, somewhere between the human and the kayfabe. — D’Anasasio
There are a number of parallels between VTubers and kayfabe. For one, there’s a strong taboo around talking about other personas the VTuber may have online. Performers generally change avatars when they “debut” with a new company, and fans are expected not to compare their new persona with their former “past life.” Equally, some VTubers have a separate account where they stream with their actual name and face, and fans are generally expected to treat this persona as entirely separate.
There are a few reasons for this. VTuber personas are often owned by a corporation, and if they switch companies or decide to make a personal channel, they could get into legal trouble if they incorporate elements from a persona they don’t own. Part of it is for safety. VTubing has roots in idol culture, which has had problems with stalkers and even violence from entitled fans or “anti”-fans. Part of the appeal of having a virtual avatar is that you can be very open and expressive without fearing a direct impact on your personal life.
The other key similarity is that both VTubers and pro wrestlers have written characters with a backstory or lore they are meant to inhabit. VTubing really blew up in the English-speaking world with the advent of Gawr Gura from Hololive Production. She is a 9,000 year-old shark-girl from the Lost City of Atlantis. She debuted with a Lovecraftian cephalopod priestess and the Grim Reaper.
Already we’re seeing some big differences from pro wrestling. Because VTuber characters are so outlandish and the nature of their medium involves live streaming and interacting with fans for hours at a time, the written character is very quickly outstripped by their native personality. Gawr Gura is much better known for her love of cowboys than anything to do with the Atlantis story, something she shares with her past life.
As I addressed in my article What Do Virtual Youtubers Have to Teach Us About Authenticity? nearly two years ago, some VTubers reject the comparison between their craft and wrestling. According to Ayunda Risu, a squirrel-girl from Hololive, VTubers are just as “real” with their audience as they are with anyone else in their life. She’s saddened by people calling her fake online, because she talks to her audience more than anyone else outside of her family.
If you say that this is not our true self, then what are we? We’ve been with you, 24/7. — Ayunda Risu
This is to say that VTubing is more than an act. It’s an identity. According to philosophers Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio, there are three primary technologies people use to express their identity. The first is sincerity, which involves sincerely embodying a role given to you by society, like a man, a father, or a cashier at McDonald’s. Next is authenticity, where identity is seen as an effort by individuals to discover their unique inner “true self.” If you’ve ever known someone go on a road trip to “find themselves,” that was peak authenticity.
Ayunda Risu expresses her relationship to VTubing in terms of authenticity, and she isn’t wrong. However, what makes VTubing a brand new way to express identity is its advanced usage of the third identity technology, profilicity. Profilicity is built around the development of profiles, which are curated and displayed for evaluation by the “general peer.” A classic example of this is Instagram. You decide what images to post on your profile, and nonspecific people, possibly even strangers, respond to those pictures through likes and comments. One posts photos on an Instagram profile to develop an identity which is validated by a general peer.
For VTubers, the general peer has a name: Chat. When VTubers live stream, fans are able to send messages, including paid ones called Superchats, that the VTubers are expected to interact with in real time. When Ayunda Risu says that she’s with Chat 24/7, what she means is that she spends hours of her day talking and interacting with the general peer that composes her audience. She spends more time talking to this general peer than she does with anyone outside of her family. Ayunda Risu’s VTuber persona is not a character. It is a genuine expression of identity that in some respects exceeds her “real life” one.
Curation is more complicated. Much of the content VTubers post is planned and curated ahead of time, whether it’s official artwork, songs, announcements, or skits. However, spontaneous reactions to Chat, the core of VTubing, can’t be curated in the same way as a TikTok or a Tweet.
VTubers plan out their streams ahead of time, choose which chats to respond to, and curate their brand through conventional means, but none of these are the most important curation behavior. Rather, the most crucial form of curation comes from the community in the form of clippers. Clippers are fans who watch livestreams and repost short clips of the most entertaining or meaningful moments. For example, the video I posted above is a six minute clip of a four hour livestream posted by Youtube user kabukibuki.
It is difficult to overstate how important these clippers are for spreading and developing the VTuber profile. Few people have time to sit down for a four hour stream, and clips make it easy to sample a wide range of VTubers while keeping track of the best moments of multiple performers. For these reasons, it’s common for a clip to have multiple times more views than the original stream.
VTubers are very much aware of the importance of their clippers, and some stop by to watch and comment on clips posted of their streams. This brings up the issue of second order observation. VTubers do not merely experience their streams directly from their own perspective, but additionally or even primarily from the perspective of their viewers. It’s common for a VTuber to do something outrageous and bring up their clippers, either to acknowledge that the moment will be clipped, to ask for it to be clipped, or to ask for it not to be clipped (uh oh, don’t clip this!).
VTubers act spontaneously, but with constant awareness that their audience could decide to transform the smallest moment into a permanent core component of their profile. Iconically, Gawr Gura was propelled into fame with a technical problem that made her 15 minutes late to her debut, only to open her stream and say “a” before closing it immediately. It’s hard to explain how legendary this moment was or why, but somehow it defined the beginning of an era.
Identity is constantly being constructed and redefined collaboratively in this space. For example, when one chatter mentioned the term “simp,” traditionally referring to someone who’s desperate enough to give up resources for romantic or sexual attention (the opposite of a pimp), Gawr Gura faux-naively read it as “shrimp.” This became a popular unofficial name among her fans and the VTuber community more generally, and was part of a sea change of fans becoming comfortable or even proud for financially supporting streamers, especially female ones.
Gender dynamics are a big part of VTuber culture. Sometimes, the expectations around a profile become toxic and end up hurting a performer. One particularly dramatic instance involved a VTuber whose character (outside of the outlandish one) was a sort of “psychotic girlfriend” or “yandere.” She would make jokes about Chat watching other VTubers and threatening to kill them for “cheating” on her.
When rumors started that she was dating another performer in real life, some people lost their shit and there was a flood of harassment. It turned out that the mental health angle wasn’t all for show, and she ended up making rash decisions that lead to the company “graduating” (firing) her. She was able to recover and build a new profile with another large agency, keeping many of the same shticks but without the “yandere” angle.
What we see in practice is an organic development of norms approximating Hans-Georg Moeller’s “7 rules for life in profilicity.” Profiles are never definitive of someone’s identity, and fans are expected to be supportive of new profiles while maintaining a separation between them. Despite the dramatic fallout of the performer in question, her transition between profiles was practically seamless and fans continued to appreciate her identity while still respecting that it could never be the same as it was before.
What emerges then, is a regime of what Moeller and D’Ambrosio call “genuine pretending.” By acknowledging the paradox of identity, that there is no one true identity and different elements of ourselves will always necessarily be incongruous, VTubers free themselves to play with identity and express it in evolving and multiplicitous ways.
My favorite example of this is “Pomufication,” which is the phenomenon/inside joke of VTuber Pomu Rainpuff saying “I’m Pomu” over and over again, originally out of an insecurity of people forgetting her. This spread to her chat claiming they too were Pomu, then other members of her agency claiming they were Pomu, and finally the development of impomu.com, where people have as of now clicked 1,685,602,714 times to hear random audio clips of Pomu saying “I’m Pomu.” This somehow led to Elira Pendora producing an eight hour stream where she clicked the button 200,000 times to celebrate 200,000 subscribers.
Besides beating her name into the ground and inventing an empty signifier, Pomu Rainpuff has also produced an absurd interactive dystopian fiction story disguised as a dating simulation, where the entire world has been transformed into Pomu as the phrase “I’m Pomu” spreads like a virus. The character of “Pomura” represents an authentic resistance to the takeover of this virulent form of profilicity. In the end, profilicity wins. Pomufication is inevitable.
This deconstructive absurdity, playfulness, and dynamism around identity is a regular feature of VTuber culture. As a sort of parody of over-identification, I think this story highlights the vision VTubing has for the future of identity. We can have fun, be creative, and not take ourselves too seriously. We can genuinely pretend.
Yet, as fun and creative as profilicity can be, I think it would be a tragedy if it were to replace authenticity. The relationship between a VTuber and their Chat is meaningful in its own way, but it can never be a romance or a friendship. Profilicity cannot be a replacement for the public sphere, nor is it a cure for the very real alienation that is experienced by an increasing large group of isolated people.
We may have to expect authenticity and sincerity to be sublated into profilicity, in the sense that they will remain technologies people use, only synthesized and incorporated into a prolific regime.
We can already see some of this sublation in friendships between performers. For example, Enna Alouette and Millie Parfait had apparently been real life friends for many years before joining the Nijisanji agency. This fact is integrated into their profiles and even written into their lore. When VTubers meet in real life, they may perform an offline collaboration, where they stream together from the same physical space. Real life experiences and drama also make their way to the online space as performers feel validated sharing the more intimate details of their personal lives with Chat.
The danger I see here is that real life intimacy will be consumed by the need to share everything about our lives to be validated by the general peer. Cute anime girls simply cannot fulfill all of our needs, nor can we fulfill theirs, and when second order observation detracts from our ability to live in the moment and experience the joys of life first hand, I feel we are losing something core to the human experience. Our challenge going into the future will be learning to balance the different aspects of our identity in a healthy way and have fun while not being consumed by our profiles.
