VTubers
Streamers who are cartoons, an entertainment industry built on never showing your face.
You might remember it as Kizuna AI, virtual YouTuber
A trend people joined in with
- SourceNo single original
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
A performer streams behind an animated avatar driven by real-time motion and face capture. The character is consistent and often has a backstory; the person behind it usually stays anonymous. Kizuna AI, from late 2016, was the first to use the phrase virtual YouTuber, and by 2020 there were more than ten thousand active VTubers.
It first appeared in 2020, during short-form and streams.
It solves the problem streaming created — that being an entertainer online means being permanently visible — by separating the performer from the persona, and it did so at industrial scale. Agencies like Hololive and Nijisanji operate rosters the way idol companies do. It is the largest cultural export from Japanese internet culture since anime itself, and the English-speaking internet mostly discovered it in 2020.
VTubers hold livestream superchat records, appear in national advertising, and have generated a genuine labour argument about who owns a character when the person voicing it leaves. The model has since been adopted well outside Japan, including by performers who use it to work without being identifiable at all.
More from 2020
- Doggface208 Dreams video 2020Short-form and streams
- Baka Mitai 2020Short-form and streams
- Xue Hua Piao Piao 2020Short-form and streams
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons 2020Short-form and streams
- Jerusalema 2020Short-form and streams
- Tiger King 2020Short-form and streams
- Jerusalema Dance Challenge 2020Short-form and streams
- Ratatouille the Musical 2020Short-form and streams
- We did it, Joe! 2020Short-form and streams
- Dalgona coffee 2020Short-form and streams
Short-form and streams
- The GameStop short squeeze 2021Short-form and streams
- FoodTok 2021Short-form and streams
- Noodle 2021Short-form and streams
- Hawk Tuah 2024Short-form and streams
- Moo Deng 2024Short-form and streams
- Sigma Boy 2024Short-form and streams
- AI slop 2024Short-form and streams
- Grimace Shake 2023Short-form and streams
- Skibidi Toilet 2023Short-form and streams
Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- A performer streams behind an animated avatar driven by real-time motion and face capture. The character is consistent and often has a backstory; the person behind it usually stays anonymous. Kizuna AI, from late 2016, was the first to use the phrase virtual YouTuber, and by 2020 there were more than ten thousand active VTubers.