Picking up from last time, in this post I’m going to talk about how I started to get more interested in vtubers after initially dipping my toes.

Since my introduction to vtubers was a compilation of Pokémon Scarlet/Violet clips, I decided to check out some streams of Pokémon Scarlet/Violet. A natural starting point was to watch some of the vtubers in the compilation I had watched. One hurdle was that streams tend to be pretty long, usually several hours. That’s a big reason why I don’t really watch streamers. An hour or two is about the longest I’ll watch a stream in a single sitting.

To avoid getting bogged down four to five hour long streams while first finding a vtuber I like, I made an effort to skip around streams a lot. Looking back, I should have first checked out more clips instead. But I watched parts of around six or seven Scarlet/Violet streams. While still not used to the anime characters in the corner, I did enjoy the exaggerated personalities.

The heightened mannerisms, reactions, etc. are probably a big reason why I watch vtubers instead of regular streamers. Rather than feeling like I’m watching someone play a video game, it feels more like watching a performer up on stage. That difference in framing makes such a huge difference.

For part 3, I’ll talk a bit more in detail about the specific vtubers I first watched.

It had been a while (for me, that’s a few months) since I’ve been obsessed with a new interest. So naturally I stumble into the rabbit hole of vtubers.

My prior knowledge mostly came from a few videos of Kizuna Ai I had seen a few years back, as well as one or two clips that randomly passed through one of my feeds. The thing that had always came to mind when I thought “vtuber” was the weirdly stiff animation they had. Other than that, I didn’t know much about them at all.

I got a bit more of a peek into the vtuber world through Pokémon. Just coming off of finishing Pokémon Violet, I was searching for videos to check out now that I didn’t have to avoid spoilers. One video that caught my eye was a compilation of vtubers’ reactions to one of the characters, Rika. I thought, “Players are reacting to just meeting this character? I wonder why.”

Being a cute character with an accent should have been obvious in hindsight. Some of the reactions were so over-to-top I couldn’t help but laugh. Despite the limited range of motion of the vtubers, they were very animated otherwise. Noticing the similarities between this reaction video and other reaction videos from non-vtubers helped me get used to the novelty of watching an anime character instead of an actual person.

I think I’ll end the post here and pick it up in a part 2 since I’ve been up for a long time, and my eyes can’t hold out any longer.