VTuber Legend: How I Went Viral after Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream

Episode 5

Time moves quickly in the world of online creators. It hasn't been that long since Awa's accidental stream popped off and propelled her to a new level of fame but now she's already welcoming the next generation of VTubers coming up after her. It's layered—preceding VTubers motivated Awa to get into the practice and now she finds out how she's inspired the new crop of talent. Okay, "inspired" might be too soft a way of putting it, since at least one of the new characters introduced in this episode takes their admiration of Awa to… intense levels.

Last week's episode teased that Awa might have to deal with an unhinged stalker fan as she was gearing up to welcome her new kouhai, and now it turns out those are the same. Soma Alice's sole defining gimmick as a VTuber is that she's hopelessly obsessed with another VTuber—Awa, naturally. Already this works as a very knowing analysis of double standards. Awa starts up the next-gen streamer debut by acknowledging how she's going to thirst after these cute new juniors, only to be caught flat-footed by the sheer unhinged stalker-status crushing that Alice is displaying for herself. It's meant as a very monkey's-paw situation for Awa's wish to be admired by her new stream-mates and at least tacitly implies how her influence might grow as her legend continues.

It's a good way to keep the escalation up and things moving this many episodes into VTuber Legend. So much of this episode is based on prompting Awa (and the audience) to react with an "Oh God" of dread when a new character or situation starts. None of the newbies are even remotely "normal" but each debut of their gimmick is still pretty in line with actual "real life" VTuber insanity. Of course, Kaeru is a baby-themed VTuber, several VTubers role-play as babies! She also drops the Welcome to the NHK ED as the karaoke ending theme of this episode, which was the real spit-take shocker. And it's still not even the tenth most sputter-worthy thing Awa and the audience deal with in this episode.

Submitting yourself to watching weird VTubers is a form of self-inflicted psychic damage and part of the fun of this particular kind of content. Awa ought to know what she's getting into and is hardly one to talk about how offbeat her new co-stars are. What does she do right after reacting to the outlandishness of her juniors? She streams NSFW art of herself alongside one of her other co-workers. There's a sense of going from being shocked by those odd introductions to trying to one-up them to make sure she stays relevant. In that sense, the influence between creators in the VTuber space works both ways. The brain rot is contagious.

This even extends to Awa effectively influencing herself by the last segment of this episode. At first, Alice's assertion that they revisit Awa's stream from the first episode seems superfluous. It's not even halfway through the season yet. But while it does feel a bit overly repetitious at first, the writing soon finds the salience to this idea. That is: we've all had moments where we got too out-of-control (chemically induced or otherwise) and said or did some ridiculous stuff. The difference is that it wasn't recorded and uploaded for others and ourselves to revisit at any time, streamable forever as long as the internet is still connected. Just imagining the possibility of watching myself on too many Strong Zeroes is harrowing, so seeing Awa forced to wallow in her own cringe is very funny, but also (ironically) sobering.

VTuber Legend worships a bit too hard at the altar of benevolent streaming production companies for my liking but it does have its own positive point in how and why it does that. Multiple characters now have the origin story of eschewing "regular" employment and being inspired by others to cut loose on camera as a job instead. All of us have cringe moments in our past, but these people consented to make a living off of embodying that cringe. And while embarrassing to revisit each time, it's still freeing in its own extremely unique way. Awa, and now Alice's, story of being inspired to do VTubing by other VTubers is a common one in real-world VTubing and this episode gets just a little deeper into the psychology of how that works. Naturally, with some good-natured sapphic stalker thirst thrown in to spice things up.

Rating:

VTuber Legend: How I Went Viral after Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris actually tried streaming himself, for a little bit. It went about as well as you could expect. He's since resigned himself to words, which you can see more of over on his blog, while watching his Twitter for any ill-advised Strong-Zero-influenced posts.

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