Around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I entered into a rabbit hole so enourmous I may never climb out of it. It all started with a clip of Shirakami Fubuki singing Scatman. And now I’m here; three years later still stuck watching streams at the end of nearly every day.
- Pipkin Pippa (Phase Connect)
- Tenma Maemi (Phase Connect)
- Ceres Fauna (Hololive)
Vtuber Culture
Clipping Channels
Clippers are an integral part of the vtuber community and stand as the gatekeepers to the neverending rabbit hole.
Kayfabe
Kayfabe is a term from professional wrestling which expresses the convention of presenting the staged performance as genuine/authentic. This term has been adapted to the vtuber scene to mean one’s keeping up the illusion of the truth of one’s lore.
Whether it be Gura continually claiming to be a shark girl from Atlantis or Fauna professing that she is mother nature, kayfabe is an integral part of the vtuber community. However, unlike wrestling, kayfabe is not the fount from which we derive entertainment from the genre. It is more like a necessary but not sufficient condition to be able to call oneself a genuine vtuber: it won’t make you loved by itself, but you must have a kayfabe in order to be successful.