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.