A continued exploration into the vocaloid music genre.

This time, I wanted to examine the limits of parasocial relationships as they exist in the VTuber community. Although VTubers (or Virtual Youtubers) have been around since the early 2010s, their popularity has recently taken off due to the pandemic. VTubers are able to create personas using 3D, 2D, and static rigs (called PNGTubers) and this has fascinated me because of the inherent decoupling of the entertainer’s identity from that of the rig, which alters the viewers’ relationship with both the entertainer and the virtual entity as well.

This brings into question who these personas exist for and how they operate when the entertainer isn’t actively puppetting them.