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I was having a discussion about vtubers in a Discord and someone made a point that I felt really well. The vtubing field was created from the top down, as opposed to from the bottom up like other content creation fields. The corporate influence is far beyond anything controllable now, poisoning what could’ve been an otherwise amazing field. I feel like vtubing was handicapped from the start because of that. Now the idol-like culture seeps into all of vtubing… all part of why I don’t mark myself as a vtuber for the most part. I came up with a convoluted term for myself which may seem silly, but I think is an incredibly important distinction to make. I don’t want to be a vtuber, I want to be a content creator with a virtual avatar. Companies like Hololive and Nijisanji are considered the icons of vtubing, unlike talent companies in other fields being considered more like rarities than the standard. It’s just a shame…

I hope that the vtuber sphere is able to break out of the corporate influence one day, but it’s perpetuated itself so deep at this point I really do wonder if it will. There’s so many “traditions” in the sphere for lack of a better word where there really isn’t in others. Sure, there’s types of let’s say “regular” YouTubers and stuff, but vtubing is so uniform. There’s so little variety, people just go with what’s out there instead of starting from scratch. I think I’m in a little bit of an advantageous position of never having been in the vtuber sphere at all until I started considering being one myself and even then I don’t really watch any, all the news I see about any is second hand, but even so, I feel like I’ve followed traditions unwittingly at times. I really wanna see people break out of the standard model more and make something special, myself included. Here’s hoping. Goodnight folks.