Imaginary Worlds - Generation VTube

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

There is a booming culture of VTubers – people who create content online, but their fans rarely see their real faces or know their names. VTubers use motion-capture technology to appear as animated characters they designed, and many of these characters are otherworldly from robots to aliens to demons. I talk with VTubers named Xinebi Ven, Pandora Arktos, GloopQueen and D-36-5908 Ω (a.k.a. Omega) about the joys and challenges of becoming a VTuber, and whether inhabiting an animated character allows them to be their more fully authentic selves. Xenebi Ven’s YouTube and Twitch streams Pandora’s YouTube and Twitch streams GloopQueen’s YouTube and Twitch streams Omega’s YouTube and Twitch streams Also mentioned in this episode: Ironmouse’s YouTube and Twitch streams Mori Calliope’s YouTube and Twitch streams This episode is sponsored by Aspiration debit card and D&Tea. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I've always been fascinated by stories where the line between what's real and what's imaginary gets blurred. and what's imaginary gets blurred. And I recently learned about a high-tech version of this phenomenon called VTubing, which is a form of content creation online. VTuber stands for virtual YouTuber, but instead of appearing as themselves on YouTube, VTubers use avatars, which track their movements using motion capture.

So if you're VTubing, you're talking directly to viewers in a video or a live stream, but you're doing it as an animated character. It's kind of like if Andy Serkis, after he played Gollum in Lord of the Rings, decided to play Gollum as a talk show host on the internet. Except most VTubers don't look like creepy monsters.

They look like anime characters or The Sims with virtual backgrounds. VTubing began in Japan over a decade ago, and it became huge in the West during the pandemic when a lot of people were stuck at home. Also motion capture technology got a lot cheaper and more accessible. I've enjoyed discovering this world of VTubers, but they make me feel very old. It is a much younger generation with their own language of media, with rapid-fire editing, over-the-top reaction shots, cutaways, and memes. And if the videos are done well, they're really funny. For instance, one of the most famous

VTubers is called Iron Mouse. There's no public information on her real name or what she looks like. We know that she lives in Puerto Rico, and she has an immune deficiency disease that leaves her stuck at home to the point where she needs an oxygen tank. But she has a whole second life as a VTuber. The character that she plays through motion capture animation is basically the devil, except the design of her character looks like an anime girl with pink hair, a goth gown, horns, a tail, and sometimes pink flames coming out. Welcome.

It is I, Satan. Iron Mouse does a lot of the same things that other content creators do online, except she's doing it as an animated character. So you can watch her character interact with fans by answering questions. Today we were supposed to do Q&A and random games. Do we even have questions loaded? We do! Question one, have you considered doing another VTuber deep dive?

She often appears as a guest on internet talk shows. Even if the host is human, she's still playing a cartoon character. Speaking from experience here, like how do you know so much? I'm an anime girl, of course I'm a degenerate that likes feet. And she plays video games on Twitch. If you're not familiar with Twitch, it's a website where people watch other people play games. And there's a live chat function and other customizable tools that allow the gamers to interact with their viewers. And if you're watching Twitch, the gamer will appear in a little box in the corner. The rest of the screen is the game they're playing. But a VTuber will appear to be an animated character

playing this video game. Iron Mouse has over 800,000 subscribers on YouTube, and she's one of the top VTubers on Twitch. The money she's made through ad sales and donations have actually helped to pay for her medical care. A lot of famous VTubers like Iron Mouse are not doing this alone. They have the support of talent agencies like Hololive or Bishouju, which do behind-the-scenes work in helping VTubers design their characters,

produce their content, and drum up publicity. After the break, I talk with independent, up-and-coming VTubers who are trying to break into this field. We explore the benefit and struggles of turning yourself into a fictional animated character. And we discuss what it's like to navigate a media landscape that is already blurring the line between what's real and what's imaginary. that is already blurring the line between what's Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant.

24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. I first learned about VTubing through a listener who goes by the name Zenebi Ven. She is a VTuber herself. Now, when I interview people, I use a site where I'm on one side of the screen, they're on the other side of the screen, and I record the audio from our conversation.

And when I went on this site to interview Zenebi, I saw a 3D animated character waiting to talk to me. The design of her character is loosely based on the Andorian aliens from Star Trek. She's a big Star Trek fan. Although her character looks more like a teenage alien with pink hair around her antennas. She's wearing a purple and yellow jacket over a shirt with stars on it. I asked how she came up with this design. I knew I wanted to be a blue-skinned alien with antennas. I knew that. And then beyond that, I wasn't sure about color schemes, so I just kind of messed around in the

program that I was using to create the avatar. And, you know, I've always been interested in fashion and things, so my own outfits and everything I've always been interested in fashion and things. So my own outfits and everything I've designed and yeah, it's like really fun. I literally feel like I'm talking to an animated character right now. And like, which is, which is for my imagination, not that far stretch. You know, it's kind of amazing how much I'm suspending my own disbelief right now. Yeah, it's, it's pretty believable and you get you can get immersed pretty quickly. The rigging is so good. Like I can see your mouth start to move into a smile

right before you smile. Like how is that happening? So there's the software I use. It's a program called VC face and we all love it. All of us 3D YouTubers love it because it's free, first of all, which is nice. It's really accessible. But it lets you record your own facial expressions. And I have programmed certain expressions onto my character. And when I move my face in a certain way, it's tracking certain facial movements I'm making that I had to record so that the program knows what I'm doing. I'm making that I had to record so that the program knows what I'm doing. I also have toggles I can press because if you rely too much on the facial tracking, what it does is that you end up

making a lot of facial expressions you don't want to make a lot of the time. So I used to have it where all of my facial expressions were tracked, but then I would be looking angry when I'm really just concentrating. So, you know, I can press, like, I can press this and look surprised. And when she said that, her alien face looked surprised. She says the VTuber that really inspired her, made her realize that she could actually do this herself, is a VTuber called Mori Calliope. That character is supposed to be the Grim Reaper, if the Grim Reaper looked like a pink-haired anime girl wearing a goth dress. Now, Mori Calliope is represented by one of the big production companies that I mentioned earlier.

So they put a lot of publicity into her first livestream, and when she went on, a lot of people were already waiting to watch her. Her debut was very charming because it was the first time she had ever streamed anything. And she was just thrust in front of this huge audience and was trying to figure it out as she went. And there were so many technological errors and mishaps, but everyone in the chat was so supportive and people just didn't seem to care. Like they just really wanted to cheer this person on. And seeing this person in front of such a huge audience just completely failing in certain degrees, you know, not being perfect, not having that polish of perfection, but still being received sympathetically. I thought there was something really powerful about that.

Senebi said it was also inspiring to watch how hard Mori Calliope worked to improve her craft over time, to become this character, the friendly Grim Reaper. Live music show from my house in the underworld. I want to do a show. And Mori Calliope is a rapper. Her music videos have millions of views. Cute as all hell in a literal sense. A bitter pretense for the music world.

Telling the show, don't listen to me. Not until the quiz. When VTubing began in Japan, a lot of Japanese VTubers were virtual pop singers. But a lot of independent VTubers who can't sing or rap have still gotten into VTubing as a way to become content creators and social media influencers. Although I talked with a VTuber named Gloop Queen, who started doing this for a completely different reason. When we talked, Gloop was supposed to have her motion capture set up so I can meet her

in character. But there is a construction emergency happening at her house. So we had to talk human to human. She says she discovered VTubing in 2020. At the very, very start of the pandemic, I started to change gender and I was like working with a voice coach. And she was like, well, when you're out and about, you know, make sure that you practice your voice. And I was like, this was November of 2020. Nobody was going anywhere. So I started a Twitch channel

and at first it didn't really go anywhere, but I saw that the VTubing thing was a fad that was ticking up. And honestly, completely to my surprise, I totally fell in love with it. Well, how has VTubing helped your journey in transitioning? When I first started with VTubing and transitioning was so scary and it takes forever to meds to kick in and I didn't look like how I wanted to look like, it was very, very nice to have this venue,

especially in a plague where we're all stuck at home. I had this venue where especially in a plague where we're all stuck at home. I have this venue where I can step on and with almost no effort be perceived completely differently. My words, my thoughts, my opinion, the way that I want to speak to people are suddenly coming out of a completely different body, which is so cool. And in those early days was absolutely a lifeline. Well, what was it like designing that body? Really powerful and also kind of intimidating in a way because there's a lot of like little fashion design elements, but when you have total control and over an outfit, everything that's on there is kind of an advertisement for who I am. So anything from like how, you know, sexual is the costume

shows cleavage because a lot of YouTubers are very sexual and a lot are very not. People are making a lot of judgments when they first see you. And I don't think that's necessarily as bad of a thing it is in real life because you have total control over this character that you've created. So, so I had a lot of agita about like, do I really want to commit to all these design elements? Ultimately, I was very, very happy that I did, but it took some experimentation and it took some reinvention and going back to the drawing board quite a few times.

The design of Gloop's character looks like a buxom anime witch with elf ears and green slime hanging off her hat. At first, the character was supposed to be dark and spooky, but she became goofier when she started going on Twitch and playing games in real time in front of an audience. That's one of the elements that really only VTubing can do right now is where you have this, you have this fantasy character who is completely unrealistic, is animated, does not have to conform to any human real world standards. And yet you can interact with them.

You can interact with them very easily. You can pop up in their chat and address them one on one. They can read what you're saying. They can comment back on it. Lots of them, including myself, for example, will have redeems and ways to mess with them. And even that becomes part of the act. And one of the things that they can do is they can use Twitch's functionality to make

a jet of slime hit me in the virtual face. And they think that's very funny. So it is that is not something, you know, if you are a human performer who wants to do that, you get one slime jet and then you got to close the show to go mop that up. This is what it sounds like when Gloop gets slimed. You people act like I'm not nice to you or something. Unbelievable. Now, I've mentioned that the design of a lot of VTube characters looks like anime.

For the most part, VTubers outside Japan have not been criticized for cultural appropriation because anime is a style that was designed to be universally appealing. But there's a difference between cultural appreciation, using styles and design elements from anime, and cultural appropriation. There are creators, and I've seen new things like that, who are not just copying the look, but they're doing a lot more mimicking. They're doing exactly what creators over there are doing

without any thought of the audience or things like that. And there's even been a couple, like it's only happened like a couple, like obscure times where somebody tried to like claim that they were actually from Japan when they weren't. And it feels like every couple of years, as for as long as anime has been a thing, there's somebody who tries that claim. Beyond the design of your character,

there are a lot of questions that VTubers have to ask themselves, which will define what kind of character they're creating and what kind of audience they want to attract. One question is whether you need to build up a lot of lore and backstory kind of audience they want to attract. One question is whether you need to build up a lot of lore and backstory and how much you want to commit to that. Zanabi says there can be practical reasons for sticking with the premise that she is a blue-skinned alien. I'm a huge fan of Chipotle. So if I ordered Chipotle, what I say is like, oh yeah, I, you know, I ordered Chipotle, beamed it up to, oh, yeah, I, you know, I ordered Chipotle, beamed it up to my ship and then, you know, here it is.

So, you know, I don't say like, oh, I got DoorDash delivered to my ship because that can't happen. You know, putting a limit out there, especially things like location related things. There's a lot of danger to being anonymous on the internet in that it entices people to want to figure out who you are. And so you have to be really careful about when you're eating at a restaurant, what you're doing. If you go to a concert, don't mention the band, you know, because it's really easy to figure out a tour schedule and where you are. There's varying degrees. I feel like i'm pretty authentic

to my real self um actually to the point i actually have said my real name on stream accidentally twice now i talked with a vtuber who goes in the opposite direction his character's name is d-36-5908 omega written out as the Omega letter from the Greek alphabet. Omega is so committed to this persona that he is a robot with a red and black faceless head. He used a voice changer when I interviewed him so he could stay in character. I am a mercenary for hire who has been taking upon himself to stream and entertain the audiences on Twitch TV. And where did you originally come from? Well, there is a galaxy approximately 700 or so light years away

that is controlled by a government known as the Galactic Conclave of Free Planets. That is the galaxy that I am from. I was originally designed and manufactured as a mining robot, but over the course of several months and years, eventually the ability to become sentient and free-willed came to be known for all of my kind. I asked Omega if he would talk to me outside his character, without the filter. And he agreed. This is one of the first interviews he's given

with his real voice. But he doesn't think that everybody needs to be as committed to being in character as he is. That's been a big contention point in a lot of VTubing is, oh, you gotta have lore. No, no, you can just be you it's fine well what's definitely not you like what's the kind of liberating part where you get to be omega

and not you uh probably just being able to actually unleash that uh that unhinged nature for myself like in my day-to-day life i'm'm a much more reserved, much more, like, withdrawn person. Omega's one of those characters where something can happen in a game and I can actually just fully let loose, just kind of scream at the top of my lungs about something, actually make a whole scene

about it, be much more emotive and expressive. That's something that's not normally me. Zenebi has found the same sense of liberation. By playing this alien character, she actually feels like she can be more authentic and less self-conscious online. I don't have to worry about the judgment piece of it. You know, someone has a thing to say about my model. I mean, I can just say, well, that's personal taste. It's a little harder to hear if someone had, you know, those personal judgments about my model. I mean, I can just say, well, that's personal taste. It's a little harder to hear someone had, you know, those personal judgments about my own body that I must, you know,

live with every single day and look in the mirror and see, you know, that kind of thing. Just gives a nice little shield from criticism, I would say. The last VTuber that I interviewed is called Pandora Arctos. And when we did the interview, she had her motion capture software set up. So I found myself interviewing an anime character with black and white hair sitting in a virtual panda themed chair. Her character is supposed to be a human training to be a panda. Well, so far, I'm just trying to become very panda-like in my day-to-day interactions. I'm very lazy. I like to lie around a lot. I fall off of things constantly.

I have yet to develop a taste for bamboo. Pandora says that question about whether to pull back the curtain and reveal more of yourself is a hotly debated topic among fans and creators. Because when VTubing began in Japan, the Japanese VTubers would never break character. Some fans who come from that side expect it from the indie and then get upset when an indie VTuber is like, here's my face. Because they're like, no, you're doing it wrong.

That's not how a VTuber is supposed to here's my face. Because they're like, no, you're doing it wrong. That's not how a VTuber is supposed to be. Look at Japan. And that gets a lot of pushback from the VTuber community. Pandora never drops her avatar. In fact, she's become friends with other VTubers. And even if they're having a private chat, they keep their avatars on. Nah, they've never seen me. If I have my druthers, they never will.

But she says those friendships are just as real as any face-to-face interactions online or in real life. They have been there for me during hard times. I've been there for them during hard times. Stuff we wouldn't show the world at large, stuff we wouldn't post in our communities or on Twitter, we've talked about privately and in a safe environment. In fact, having avatars and character names has helped them open up to each other. I think a lot of them are introverted. There's some exceptions, obviously. But most of the ones I've met have been very introverted people.

but most of the ones I've met have been very introverted people. But that brings up another issue, parasocial relationships, which is a term for when a fan feels like they have a personal relationship with someone in the media. The term was originally created to explore how we think about celebrities or fictional characters, but there's less distance between a VTuber and their fans. For instance, a few people that I talked with mentioned the term the girlfriend experience, where female VTubers are seen as imaginary girlfriends in the minds of some of the fans. It's something that Gloop has had to deal with. Where it gets difficult is there are people who want to know more. I think that there's very, very often this fascination,

especially when somebody's a trans creator and you know, like, okay, what this person looks like in real life is probably completely, completely different to this model. They get curious. And I think also for a lot of people, if you look like a girl and you're nice to them, if you take a few moments when they're talking to you to listen to their problems, they can develop a little crush. And sometimes they decide to want to know more about what's going on about the camera and you have to start to establish some boundaries, which is no fun.

Telling people no is my least favorite thing in the universe, but it's a constant in VTubing, unfortunately. And Omega says some VTubers have taken advantage of those parasocial relationships. We've had a lot of issues in the past in the community where people have become VTubers and have used that kind of popularity that they would get from being a VTuber to be a little bit more predatory in nature. Bad actors who've come into the community for malicious intent. And so we as a community need to hold ourselves to a high standard and call out bad behavior like that and, you know, work to try and make this community as open and inclusive as it can be to people.

Inclusivity is a big issue. There have been hate raids where trolls will harass queer VTubers or any VTubers who are producing content that they don't like. And if you're an indie VTuber, you have the freedom to say what you want, but your livelihood depends on your popularity. Gloop chooses not to engage with any political content at all. A lot of my audience is also LGBT and they feel very scared when they open the news.

Virtually anything that I can bring up with them is not news. Not news to them. They have already heard it. They're looking for a venue to not hear it. But the biggest challenge of being an independent VTuber is staying afloat in a media landscape that is dominated by corporations. Because if you're a VTuber and you're represented by one of the big companies like Hololive, they can help produce your content they can manage your public image pandora says when you debut as a hololive talent you've got a fan base built in because they are

so large at this point anybody new coming through the pipeline is going to have all of these other fans who are already part of the hololive fan base coming to their stream immediately. Additionally, you get a free model, and it's a really high quality, beautiful model that looks great and has all of these different expressions worked into it. But for a good quality model, it can be in the thousands of dollars. And if you don't have a computer that can run all of this software, that can be something you need to invest in as well. And computers can be quite expensive. Again, here's Zanabi. You know, there's a little bit of shallowness too, where if you don't have like a cute model,

it's harder to get people to watch you because they're attracted to, you know, the avatar that you're using to interface with. Right. I mean, it's like you could say it's shallow, but it's such a visual medium. It is. Yeah. You don't you literally don't have anything to go off of other than this this face and the way that this face can express itself. So if you don't if you haven't balanced it well, people won't engage with you. So, yeah, it's tricky. What do you think is like in the future? Like where would you where do you think VTubing could go given that it's growing so fast? Where where would you love, they'll put a put like a tablet on a Segway so that people can meet their VTuber like idols in the hallway and take pictures with them. So like it just the accessibility of being able to like merge those two spaces would be excellent.

In the near future, VTubers may become even more common than seeing a VTuber on an iPad attached to a Segway at a conference. Meta, formerly Facebook, is going all in on developing the metaverse, where they hope that we will all be interacting with each other through avatars. Apple is already going in that direction with their Memojis, which can act like little animated versions of our heads. And Gloop says motion capture technology is developing so fast, she thinks in the near future, having a virtual avatar will be an option that you can click on Zoom or Microsoft Teams,

the same way we use virtual backgrounds. It reminds me a little bit of The Incredibles, when they said, you know, when everyone's super, no one will be. Very similar moment there because it's like, well, when everyone's VTubers, how are those of you who are going to be performers make yourselves distinct? So I think what's going to be interesting is one thing that may be the dividing line

between VTuber and just Avatar is I've noticed when Metaverse has pushed Avatar creation or when it's shown up in teams or when it's shown up in Memoji, it tends to be cute and it tends to be fun, but it also tends to be business casual. They're not flashy. And I think that that's the difference is VTubers wear costumes and they wear at times ostentatious over-the-top costumes that have huge dragon horns and show cleavage and anything that you would want that is not something that the metaverse is interested in bringing into your next VR business meeting. It's like how Austin, Texas adopted the phrase keep Austin weird as their unofficial

slogan. We may come to the point where keep VTubing weird is a rallying cry in a metaverse that's becoming more and more homogenized. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Gloop, Omega, Pandora, and Zenebi. I have links to all of their YouTube and Twitch streams in the show notes. If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode, The Power of the Makeover Mage from 2019, where we talked with trans gamers who started experimenting with gender by customizing their video game avatars. And earlier this year, I did an episode called Snow Crashing into the Metaverse, which explored how the premise of the Metaverse came from a cyberpunk novel called Snow Crash.

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