Gura and The Future of VTubing
Well, alright, I admit I watch VTubing.
For those not in the know on why it's hard to admit how embarrassing their addiction is, VTubing is basically watching the virtual avatar of another person do things, overwhelmingly playing video games. If you're wondering why it is worthwhile watching anyone do anything, I suggest you turn your attention first on how much money it makes - such an economy is preceded by reality TV shows (ex. "Keeping Up With The Kardashians") and mukbang. It's a legitimate concept: people want to watch other people do outlandish things, and life itself is outlandish, even when you're eating large quantities of meat.
(Why videogames? I've wondered myself on that question. VTubers will, for example, draw or unpack things onscreen as supplements, the latter of which is truly baffling and I can't imagine who would watch it. I think videogames provide a narrative for the audience to ride on - something as simple as the gamer's path to beating the game is a simple narrative framework. The next most popular i.e. moneymaking activity for VTubers is singing, which also has a dynamic element.)
What's embarrassing about VTubers is that you could just watch...real people instead of anime avatars. Though I suspect there's more to it than that.
Gawr Gura is at once the biggest and worst-named VTuber ever. Astronomically so. I have talked about her before. She gave her fans a reason to miss her - approximately four months of a reason. She has also given her haters ammunition. Which is a ridiculous idea.
If an entertainer requires anything, they need confidence in full reserve. The greatest performer, as far as singing, acting, and speaking, can't do anything without confidence. It is said that there is an extra-something special needed to go from baseball's Minor Leagues to Major Leagues. Once and for all, confidence is that magical substance: when things are going well, you feed on it to make things better; when things are going bad - and they will - you use it to stick the landing and ensure the audience doesn't go away empty-handed. Gura is one of the least distressed streamers I have ever seen, which helps her plethora of talents, singing being one of them. Given that she frequently spills her guts onscreen, it's safe to say that her knack for un-over-thinking things is embedded in her personality.
Which is something to mention, that being the unusual quality of streaming is that a substantial part of the streamer is given away to the audience. Watching streams is at times an unnerving activity when, given so many hours, the entertainers start talking about the various aspects of their lives. Which attribute has caused people to start parasocial relationships with the VTubers. I would call that bottom-of-the-barrel entertainment, as compellingly voyeuristic as it is. This has led streaming in general to be derisively called The Girlfriend Experience. Gura in this sense is a bit like a black hole: no matter how much she reveals about herself, concerning "Animorphs" or Japanese Pringles or Twinkies, you don't really get any closer to her, and she's almost inviting you to laugh with her (or sometimes at her). Her streams are consistently good because she's very funny, and her hiatus hadn't diminished them.
Objectively speaking, you can look at any graph of the subscriber count of her contemporaries in her company, Hololive, and you can see a very clear pre-Gura and post-Gura era - the pre-Gura era is defined by flat curves of modest growth, as flat as the shark is herself, and post-Gura era is defined by an upburst of activity across all of the talent in Hololive's portfolio, such that any newcomer enjoys a pretty substantial existing fanbase.
Other things to consider when stacking Gura to her contemporaries: you almost have to throw out Japanese performers entirely from the analysis. Why so? Because Japan has a built-in idol culture since the post-war era. It is not an unusual concept for them, and therefore they buy into it more readily, in terms of viewership and hard cash (literally. VTubers can make a cool million in USD from fan donations alone). Gura crushes all English competitors like Caesar conquering the Gallic tribes.
So while Gura had been away, instead of missing her, I had been thinking a lot about her impact on her company and on VTubing in general (she appears in a goddamn Taco Bell ad, of all things). It has been hard not to notice Hololive's English divison struggling while she has been gone. I came to this one conclusion during her hiatus:
If Gura goes, so too shall VTubing collapse in Western culture.
Oh, it'll exist. I want to emphasize that. But it'll exist solely as niche entertainment i.e. for weebs.
One has to consider what goes into a successful stream, and then consider what differs between a VTuber and a real person. The answer, so far, is very little, if the question resolves to talent and personality.
Gura is a new human. (I confirm I'm not a Gura-stan.) Let's consider this: what is the difference between a traditional star, such as Cher, Madonna, Britney Spears, Rihanna, and Gura? Sexuality. Let's be earnest about it. I'm glad in my generation there is somewhat a shift from this, with Lorde and Billie Eilish, but we're not even at the 10% mark of separating the female artists' sexuality from their overall image. Not to say Gura is at all on the same level of celebrity as them, and not to say that all artists must succeed in the aforesaid way, but it is unusual to the point of being remarkable that Gura is taken as an entertainer and not a novelty, whereas we would be reluctant to call the likes of Sleater-Kinney or Joni Mitchell entertainers over capital-A Artists (and Kinney has literally gone on-stage to say, "We're not here 'cause we want to entertain, / go away, don't go away").
Gura's appeal is about 20% sexuality and 80% talent. She has to maintain the cutesy routine. That being said, the ratio is pretty good. To emphasize, no one knows who this woman looks like; they're only watching pixels. The only other female artists as anonymous are Pussy Riot.
This makes for one of the curious appeals of VTubing, that being the complete disconnect between entertainer and entertainment. And I'm all for it. I've quoted William Gaddis a million times: people tend to look way too much at the author over the author's work, although it's just as true that people are looking for (and will find) clues of Gura's real ego behind the computer screen.
The act is quite important here, as much as parents believe any homeless man with a beard is Santa and we believe Trump is a real-life WWE wrestler - the belief matters, though reality disagrees, and it's actually quite powerful. There's a difference between looking at a virtual character versus a live human. Human beings are wired for empathy - we actively put ourselves in other people's shoes so that we don't walk over them, help them out, by holding open doors, and even learn from them, as when we get curious whether the crowd indicates a flash sale. The alarm of an ambulance does not annoy where a crying baby does, because we empathize with the baby or their caretaker. This doesn't hold true for everyone and every situation, but it holds true in the vast majority of situations.
To emphasize, empathy is not strictly compassion. As in the crying baby scenario above, empathy is used to hate things. That there is an understanding does not mean there is tolerance; rather, it can be the basis for indignation and outrage. Boy bands are a fantastic example. So one can't make the predictable, eye-rolling argument that this pattern of VTubing is somehow disconnecting a younger generation from reality; it is, instead, a layer of separation of the personal from the professional. Which can be a good or bad thing. For example, listening to a Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen song is an undeniably personal experience. But, for the most part, our consumption of media is professional and impersonal; things as trashy as TMZ or TLC's "Milf Manor" are experimental, and genuinely fascinating, methods in finding out how thin that layer between profession and person is. At the very least, VTubing is a possible method for the artists to take back agency from that divide.
Which all goes into how weird it is, or potentially can be. This difference is perhaps best documented in the last track of David Bowie's "Blackstar", "I Can't Give Everything Away". As people, from both the entertainer and the audience's sides, we want to get closer, even to a destructive extent. That may be the real reason why people automatically wince at the idea of VTubing, as it seems to violate our human instincts. The mind gets twisted as to the who, what and why of the entertainment it is watching. At its fundamental level, entertainment is not about entertaining content; it is about content that reveals the human. This has been one of the greater mysteries of streaming's lure I've been pondering on.
So I think VTubing is very useful and may even be essential for the entertainer; the audience is expected to train themselves, to a certain extent, on how they consume entertainment. This certainly works in a very hierarchical and therefore formal society like Japan's, so it remains to be seen how it will work in the West.
Not to get overly conspiratiorial with this line of thinking: another reason why I find Gura so fascinating is that she seems to be an American country bumpkin (said in jest, obviously). There are elements of her speech that suggest a Midwestern idiom. She frequents fast-food restaurants (whether this is part of her endorsements or Hololive's policy, no one knows). She likes wrestling. For the most part, she seems down-to-earth. That's the bizarre thing about this whole Gura phenomenon. There's not a whole lot of scrubbing going on (as far as we know; she could be a drug addict, a murderer, compulsive shopper, furry).
Of the English-catering VTubers available (and that doesn't really say much, because they do play up to a substantial Asian crowd anyway), Gura is the one most herself, and able to get away with it. All of the rest have balked at the pressure or actively fear their fans, whom they depend on regardless. I suppose when I look at it from that perspective, I can't help but root for her. She really did come out of nowhere. That's probably the real reason for her popularity: no one else has found a quantity like hers.
Addendum
I had written the above before seeing the English concert on July 1st. I hadn't paid for the "experience" (through the method of ...), though it still represents how much time and energy I have invested in this odd little pasttime.
The reasons I wanted to see the concert were intellectual. Well, okay, that's not true: out of the ten-people cast, two were actually good singers, Gura included - good as in, you could enjoy their singing and not think on their flaws (which is a good way of thinking what is "good"). But a bad eight-tenths of a two-hour long concert does not my entertainment make. The concert had the definition of a momentous event, in the same way Lauryn Hill winning Album of the Year was: the event would demonstrate the legitimacy of a movement, or an idea.
But legitimacy is won only in one way: through talent, or, should I say, the talent. No matter how bright the stage, the talent shines the brightest. I'm reminded of Tommy Wisseau's obsession with filming "The Room" in a staged set, when it would have been wiser to film in more natural surroundings. Nothing covers over substance, and nobody knows this more than an audience (well, more often than not, I would say).
The concert was a big failure. Let's not mince words. I felt I watched VTubing jump into its grave. Gura, the subject of this article, had minimal presence. She legitimized the event and gave it reason to exist. She was hardly there.
Fair enough. I have thought on the oddly democratic spirit of these groups, which aim to showcase the eccentricities of each individual talent. You wouldn't want one to eclipse the rest - think BTS over Backstreet Boys. But it doesn't hurt for a leader to, well, lead. Logic sometimes dictates: perhaps Gura should have led, through a cleverly conceived performance, some of the other talents into their strengths. Like rapping. Or dancing. Or playing a guitar made of bones. Instead of just poking the talent with a stick and saying, "Just do something."
Because concerts are critical in showing a performer's other face, much in the vein Cobain cemented his fame through "MTV Unplugged". A recording is static and encapsulates a moment; the performance bends the moment, breathes life into it and makes it eternal. Not that this is a ubiquitous judgment across all of the performers, two/three of whom stood out.
On the topic of recording, all of the performances were prerecorded. Not just the physical movements, the singing too. There is a physical component to a live performance: sound waves come out of the singer's mouth, often they're amplified by speakers, these waves then reach the audience and bounce around the walls of the environment. The sound literally interacts with the venue and the crowd and takes on a distinctive character, with pockets of echoes, reverb, etc. This is great. This is what an audience should want. You go to a concert for this very quality, the feeling of being there with the performer as they make a moment in time that will never come back. I don't even like concerts, but my ears always take joy in the way sound interacts with air. Prerecorded sound takes the air and room of the recording environment and displaces it into a different environment so it sounds like nothing, in time, in space. You are being fucking cheated out of your dollar when you hear a prerecording. I can forgive it under some circumstances - what, you expect Beyonce to sing like that all the time, in the dead of winter no less? - but this is a controlled environment in California.
It was a concert not built around the talent but the very novelty of the concept, which is fictionalized characters coming to life on stage. It's not about the creativity of these quite-creative people and more a tribute to the otaku culture it was inspired by. All to say, who cares?
I likened the experience to seeing The Beatles reunite (imagine a world where Lennon and Harrison lived), buying $1000 tickets to see them on-stage, only to find the manager wrote all of their new songs. You have a Beatles concert where they only play their instruments?
What a misstep this concert has been. Perhaps I was naive in my expectations and didn't see who the audience really was. (The performers did not see them, either.) I'm starting to wonder whether my prophecy will come true: VTubing will never become a thing, precisely because it's not about the performer but the rinky-dink avatar they're rigged to.