Me in one Concert sold in Hollywood, and I am only in one place 1200 plus capacity that doesn’t know any of the songs. One of the acts has just finished and all the people around me are starting to chant and shake their light sticks. We don’t have to wait: Ku Maria, one of the headlines, appears. Not on the scene itself, but on a huge screen that entirely. (She never appears on the scene, because she is a 6,669 -year -old sexy anime girl that exists only in virtual reality.) Maria begins to sing in Japanese. It looks like an adult man next to me is on the verge of tears.
Welcome to the great reality, a mini-festival in Vermont Theater that brings eight main VTBER acts-all anime girls with eye and hair color-with a live place, with IRL musicians. I am here to find out more about why fans are willing to pay $ 180 (a VIP crossroad) to view these actions in person, rather than paying for their homes.
Photo: Erica Hernandez
If you haven’t seen VTUBER before, it is probably just the subject of time. Vtubers has been in Japan for about a decade and hosts everything from online climatic stations to the launch of the iPhone, but they increased the popularity of outside Japan in Coveid quarantine. If you like to watch anything online – play, play, date – there is a VTUBER version of it. This is a portmanteau name from “YouTuber Virtual YouTuber”, and as it shows, it is a life or video creator, but instead of showing its face, the audience sees a 2D or 3D virtual icon.
Technically, a VTUBER can have any appearance or theme (my favorite: a former jacket in the prison tape that talks about the organized crime of real life), but the most popular are anime girls with beautiful sounds. Some of these vtubers also sing, from simple Caruch streams to full -fledged music films. If the VTBER is large enough, fans can also listen to most of their main music players. The market is growing: Last week, the main vtuber Hololive agency launched a record label. That will bring us back to the concert.
In most of the almost three -hour plays, there are three human musicians on stage: one drummer, one bass and a guitar that accompanies an anime girls’ parade that appears in huge monitors (one in the center, two on the right and left). These two DJs, Mono Monte, a purple hair that goes from the house to Gabber, and Joan, a real human DJ that appears on stage to close the night with a even more unpleasant set, can easily be mixed in any strange (music). But the meat of this show is what an occasional listener can only call “anime music”, sometimes to songs that come from ridiculous patterns (ISSA CORVA: “I hate cilantro, baby / I hate you almost as much as I hate Cilantro, baby“) As much as the link link in rap (cottailva:”Screaming to my goone / that love of my fans“)
Maria, the aforementioned anime vampire, started operating in 2020, only in time when everyone was looking for a parasitic friend, she mounted the popularity of quarantine fuel. His content varies from game to chat to ASMR (sometimes only members) to Karaoke, and he has also released a single -song service.
I watched some of his streams, but I didn’t know what to expect in his concert. Promotional material for the event has promised that there would be a living human group, but how exactly does he interact with them?
So I arrange to talk to him a few days before the show. Video call starts and he appears just like him in his streams. I mean that is literally: I talk to the avatar that its fans see.
