Does Female VTubers Count As Women?

VTubers are on the rise, but is it empower­ing for women?

Men have primar­ily dom­in­ated YouTube game stream­ing. However, female gamers have been gain­ing pop­ular­ity on the plat­form for a long time.

However, only one of the ten most fol­lowed female game stream­ers is human. What does this mean?

Here we go:

Most Watched Female YouTube Streamers

StreamsCharts pub­lished this rank­ing on X (Twitter):

Japan dom­in­ates the chart.

The “odd-one-out” is, of course, the stream­er Valkyrae. When see­ing the list on X (Twitter), she said:

“I saw on Twitter there was this graph that said, ‘Top female stream­ers,’ of a cer­tain week on YouTube. And, I’m like, in the middle. And, I’m the only one from America and every­one else is a VTuber.”
— Valkyrae (via sports​keeda​.com)

So, all the oth­er females on the list are vtubers.

That’s worth know­ing a little more about, right?

The Avatar Puppetry of VTubers

What’s a vtuber? A VTuber is a vir­tu­al you­tuber.

Despite all the talk of AI clones and deep­fakes, the vtuber avatar is dir­ectly oper­ated by a human. For now, at least.

The vir­tu­al on-screen avatar is con­trolled by a human using facial track­ing hard­ware and a micro­phone. The hard­ware registers your facial expres­sions and voice to anim­ate the avatar in real time.

In many ways, vtubing is a form of social media puppetry.

And who are these game-stream­ing pup­pets? They are, almost without excep­tion, vari­ous animé characters.

So, is vtubing Sesame Street for “thirsty” animé fans?

Japanese Culture is Strange Sometimes

Combining girls, school uni­forms, animé, game stream­ing, and large online audi­ences look­ing for enter­tain­ment has been a recipe for suc­cess in Japan — and many oth­er places where animé vtubers are popular.

How much of this phe­nomen­on is an online mod­ern art install­a­tion — and how much is a Japanese “weird sex thing?” 

“Sex is where the weird­ness of the Japanese cul­ture peaks. I should start by say­ing that the widely held belief that you can buy soiled school­girls’ knick­ers from vend­ing machines is apo­cryph­al, but it cer­tainly could be true. It would hardly be out of char­ac­ter.”
— “Mad in Japan” by A.A. Gill

For con­text, it’s import­ant to point out that animé is a recog­nised art form with mil­lions of fans glob­ally. And Japanese fans are no strangers to “real-life” animé characters.

This is Hatsune Miku from 2016: 

Enter: Hololive Production

So, who are the people behind these vtube avatars? Most are run by a Japanese “vir­tu­al tal­ent agency,” Hololive Production.

“Hololive Production (Japanese: ホロライブプロダクション) (styl­ized in lower­case) is a vir­tu­al YouTuber agency owned by Japanese tech enter­tain­ment com­pany Cover Corporation. In addi­tion to act­ing as a multi-chan­nel net­work, Hololive Production also handles mer­chand­ising espe­cially in music pro­duc­tion and con­cert organ­iz­a­tion. As of January 2023, the agency man­ages 75 VTubers in three tar­get lan­guages (Japanese, Indonesian and English), totalling over 50 mil­lion sub­scribers, includ­ing sev­er­al of the most sub­scribed VTubers on YouTube.”
— Wikipedia ¹Hololive Production. (2023, October 9). In Wikipedia. https://​en​.wiki​pe​dia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​H​o​l​o​l​i​v​e​_​P​r​o​d​u​c​t​ion

So, it’s busi­ness.
And that’s fine.

However, we should be mind­ful of por­tray­ing vtubers as an empower­ing aspect of the grow­ing sub-cul­ture of female gamers.

On the oth­er hand, not hav­ing to show your face online might be the lib­er­at­ing force the online world of influ­en­cers (both male and female) needs. 

Perhaps anonym­ity and “free­dom from phys­ic­al appear­ance” will unleash the next social media revolu­tion of human expression.

Top 20 Most Popular VTubers

The Future of Online Avatarism

We knew life­like avatars were com­ing, but Mark Zuckerberg still amazed most of us when he show­cased Meta’s tech­no­logy via Lex Friedman’s podcast.

Your avatar can do many things you can’t (or won’t) do. Whether it resembles you exactly, a bet­ter ver­sion of you, or not, the future of avatar­ism seems to be com­ing. ²Anubhav. (2023, October 9). Meta is reportedly pay­ing celebrit­ies mil­lions of dol­lars to use their per­son­al­ity as AI Chatbots. Gizmochina. … Continue read­ing