Author’s Note
I first finished this essay on May 19, and by now it seems a little ill-timed. After all, the VTuber named Kagura Mea has already returned to streaming at full throttle. The teetee crowd is saved, Aqua is trying so hard, and it’s time for the romantic daydreamers to put in some effort too and forget 774.1 Still, I don’t think my original purpose in writing this has been lost. As long as the tengu keep getting mind-controlled by that woman, love for something empty and yet real will not stop.
0. Introduction: Feelings with Nowhere to Go
Empty names have long been a subject of interest in contemporary philosophy of language. If we set aside the tedious technical ramifications, empty names are simply things that do not exist in reality but that we nevertheless talk about. Philosophers’ favorite examples are the golden mountain, Pegasus, and “the present bald king of France.” In fact, these examples are positively worn out. Philosophers have, at least to some extent, already found a satisfactory place for the “bald king of France” within our system of beliefs about the world—but what about the bald French maid in military dress? After May 16, 2019, where will this “bald underground rap queen of France” find a place in some people’s worlds?
There is no need to be coy: the immediate reason for writing about VTubers at this particular moment is the recent incident involving Kagura Mea. To summarize for readers unfamiliar with it, on May 16 Mea, for certain reasons, acknowledged that the person inside—the human performer behind the avatar—was a girl still below the age of majority; that her family circumstances created many difficulties for her VTuber activities; and that she had done some potentially controversial things, including selling gifts from fans and staying and streaming at the home of a man strongly suspected of being her boyfriend.2
I believe contemporary philosophers probably have plenty of technical ways to handle the name “Kagura Mea” as the name of a VTuber. Perhaps, strictly speaking, it is not even an empty name, so this essay will contain very little philosophical argument. But logical refinement has never been very good at attending to joys and sorrows that people cannot share with one another. In the Mea incident, the dividing line between virtual and real has further obscured many people’s already complicated feelings. For my part, these past few days have made me feel, as never before, that I am something of a “gachi” too.3 This does not mean that the May 16 statement made me love Mea more. If regret, jealousy, and loneliness are positively correlated with the love one already feels, then my negative feelings over the past few days have made it very clear to me that I love this virtual character more than I had realized.
This is also why I gave the essay its title. “Love for real empty names”4 sums up how I feel—though I imagine many other viewers feel nothing of the kind, so I can only invoke an author’s privilege to indulge in a monologue here. Of course, at least as I understand it, Lab on Roof is not a platform for empty talk about feelings. Starting from my own feelings, then, I want to discuss a question that may recently have left quite a few people confused and shaken: when we support a VTuber, what exactly are we supporting? The reasoning in this essay may not be particularly sound. My only hope is that people whose feelings have been as tangled as mine lately might find a fitting place for this “bald French maid in military dress” within their own worlds.
1. Beyond “the Suit and the Person Inside”
Let us clarify the question carefully. Doing so will show us that VTubers are more complicated than we intuitively suppose. “When we support a VTuber, what exactly are we supporting?” actually has two distinct dimensions. The first runs through the history of our experience of virtual reality. At least literally speaking, VTubers do not exist in the real-world sense. Yet we talk about a VTuber quite ordinarily, even interact with it—or him? her?—and its effects on us are always plain to see. In this respect, anime, manga, and games have long offered us similar virtual experiences. We otaku not only develop feelings for virtual characters in anime; we also masturbate to pictures, videos, and figurines of them, and even, in something like a piece of performance art, walk down the aisle with “Nene-senpai” from LovePlus on a little screen.
But this dimension is not enough to reveal what makes VTubers uniquely complicated. However deep our feelings, any otaku in their right mind will defend themselves by saying, “They may be books, pixels, and dot patterns, but our love is still real.” Yet this defense also concedes that the farther shore of the virtual and this shore of reality can be connected only by fleeting love.
This makes it easy to list the differences between Kagura Mea and Nene Anegasaki. Nene is a program and a set of images determined in advance; inside Mea there really is a girl who is still a minor. One could run through all the ways Nene can interact with an otaku; you never know what startling thing Mea will say next. Yuko Minaguchi, who gives Nene her voice, is a voice actor who plays different characters; Miss Ai, who exists as Mea, is in fact the VTuber herself.5 It is perfectly ordinary for Minaguchi to play different roles; if Miss Ai becomes another VTuber in the future, we will speak, with a certain wistfulness, of her “reincarnation.” Nene’s romances with otaku cannot, in principle, have an outcome beyond the bounds of her programming; Mea’s story can, in principle, keep being written through the coming years of Miss Ai’s life.… The list could go on. I believe these differences apply to many VTubers, at least.
So when we ask, “When we support a VTuber, what exactly are we supporting?”, the more fundamental question concerns not their virtuality but their reality. For VTubers like Kagura Mea, at least, all this complexity arises because there is an actual person inside. A VTuber is not entirely a role that someone can play. No actor has an exclusive right to play a role onstage, but a VTuber’s virtual figure often has only one person inside.
In this respect, the somewhat tongue-in-cheek analogy of “the suit and the person inside” is not an adequate way of understanding VTubers. Like a conventional role, a suit has no single exclusive performer. Indeed, most tokusatsu, or special-effects live-action shows, use multiple suit actors, and viewers can sometimes even tell from one episode to another that a suit character is being played by someone different. Usually, there is no causal connection between the suit actor and the appeal the character possesses in its own right. Perhaps Shunsuke Gondo’s perfect physique does make the Ultra Warriors he plays more pleasing to look at than those played by others. But the qualities for which audiences admire and love a character as that character have almost nothing to do with Gondo’s V-shaped torso. For many VTubers, however, this is emphatically not the case. From the first stream, or even earlier, the person inside is causally involved in the virtual character’s appeal as a character in its own right. This is precisely why at least some genuine gachi fans waver between performer and virtual character, confused and in pain: if that nineteen-year-old girl has already started living with someone, have Mea’s gachi fans already suffered heartbreak?
Certain facts offer further evidence of this peculiar complexity. We often notice that some VTubers who stream very rarely are constantly posting on Twitter (hmm?). They are sometimes even jokingly called “Twitter entertainers.” Yet we remain certain that whoever runs the account is a VTuber, even though our intuitive first impression of a VTuber is a character with a virtual appearance who performs through video. At the extreme, we may see a Twitter user with a virtual character as their profile picture and “Pre-debut VTuber” still appended to their display name, and still regard them as a VTuber without a moment’s doubt. Such facts clearly show that the VTuber we support cannot be understood simply as a virtual image brought to life by the person inside. Even the various things associated with virtuality have, to some extent, become secondary. Instead, it is the commitments, declarations, statements, and various speech acts of the actual person inside that make us confident of a certain degree of virtuality. From this perspective, a VTuber might better be understood as a complex social convention.6
Another cultural understanding that cuts across differences between societies may offer even better evidence of this complexity: the special status accorded to the word “soul” in many societies. Over the past two years, we have witnessed numerous incidents directly involving the person inside. In many contexts, people directly or indirectly call that person the VTuber’s soul. This has even become more than a metaphor. When a VTuber’s performer is replaced, we say that the VTuber’s soul is about to change; when the performer debuts as a new VTuber, we say that this soul has been “reincarnated.” In many societies, the soul is always accorded a higher status within a person: the body decays and can be discarded, while the soul is immortal and unique. Obviously, people today no longer believe those old claims about the soul’s immortality. But at the rhetorical level, the word “soul” still carries the meaning of that ancient cultural understanding. Just think how much contempt we felt for those people here in China who had the gall to say that VTuber performers must not be allowed to become irreplaceable, or those abroad who said there were as many replaceable performers as anyone could want.7
If we regard VTubers in the virtual world as beings similar to humans, it is not hard to understand why we give the person inside the status of a soul. Perhaps everything in the real world has indeed been properly accommodated within a world picture free of anything supernatural. But that does not prevent us from hoping that, in the virtual world, each soul retains the most indelible meaning behind the word “VTuber.”
2. Soul, Bone, Flesh
Clearly, the analogy of soul and body is no longer fashionable. As a way of describing the joys and pains VTubers bring us, I believe it also lacks verbal beauty. For someone like me, with so little aesthetic sensibility, the best option is to steal some inspiration from a familiar work. In my limited experience, no work of the past two years has given me more aesthetic pleasure than Land of the Lustrous. Its premise that soul, bone, and flesh have been separated seems, in particular, to herald the landscape of the VTuber age.
In Land of the Lustrous, a great catastrophe drives humanity into the sea. Over the long years that follow, humans divide into soul, bone, and flesh, each part taking an independent form and surviving. Bone makes a pact with microorganisms, becomes incorporated into gemstones, and returns to land. Flesh becomes the marine Admirabilis, endlessly repeating the human body’s cycle of reproduction and death. Soul becomes the Lunarians on the moon, ceaselessly demanding the return of bone and flesh.
This beautiful premise resonates in many ways with our concerns about VTubers. As the previous section argued, the person inside has the status of a VTuber’s soul. The flesh, then, is undoubtedly the virtual image presented to the audience. Virtual images have many subtle similarities to human bodies. Most importantly, for VTubers and humans alike, appearance is often the principal and most immediate basis for recognizing someone as the same individual. Many otaku can distinguish which voice belongs to which voice actor even amid a hubbub, but most people find it easier to recognize others by their faces and figures. The same is true of VTubers. We may delight in telling stories about their activities, but when someone asks, “Who is Kagura Mea?”, the best answer is still to show them the image of that white-haired maid in military dress. Another important similarity is that flesh continually comes into being and decays. Just as human bodies keep reproducing and dying, we can regard a virtual image’s rise to fame and fall out of fashion as the birth and decay of flesh. More subtly still, just as most people are born and die in obscurity, a virtual image’s rise and decline also occur in silence. Bowsette flooded social media last year thanks to a four-panel comic, yet today, as I write this, it is already hard to find new submissions on illustration sites. It is not just our otaku fickleness that gives virtual images their rhythm of life and death. The changing times themselves imperceptibly cause works in a particular style to wither away. How many people today can still get off to those old bishōjo games?
Following the usual intuition of “the suit and the person inside,” we might take it for granted that once we have the performer as soul and the virtual appearance as flesh, we have a complete VTuber. But this intuition neglects how we actually experience VTubers, how they make us happy or sad. It sweeps out of sight something crucial that connects us to them. This is why we also need bone. If human bones are the framework that gives humans their distinctive form, then what actually allows a VTuber to stand like a statue before an audience is not the perishable virtual appearance, but the VTuber’s words and actions.
We might unthinkingly attribute everything a VTuber says and does to the person inside. But this confuses the two. The person inside is the VTuber’s soul, but the person inside is not the VTuber. If we can trust what the “North Korean Songstress” says in chats about the French maid in military dress, then Miss Ai, the person inside, is a good kid who treats people politely—different from the Kagura Mea we often encounter online. A VTuber’s words and actions ultimately come from those of the person inside, but they are not what that person would ordinarily say and do in the real world. This is precisely the double significance of bone. On the one hand, the VTuber’s words and actions inspire all sorts of feelings in us, through which we paint an inner landscape of that figure. On the other, those words and actions connect the virtual and real worlds. Whether she is letting her nature loose or playing things up for the show, this allows Miss Ai to open every stream with whatever shocker she pleases—and makes us think involuntarily of Mea’s brash talk the moment we see the white-haired maid in military dress.
3. Crying Out for Love at the Edge of the World
To be honest, there may be no logical need to borrow soul, bone, and flesh from Land of the Lustrous to describe a VTuber. But beyond the pursuit of beauty, the premise that soul, bone, and flesh were originally one might at least help me persuade readers, and even myself, that a VTuber, too, ought to be one whole.
When we support a VTuber, what exactly are we supporting? After Mea’s May 16 statement, alongside the deluge of perhaps hollow expressions of support in Bilibili’s comment sections, I saw other traces scattered through the corners of the internet. Even through screens and text, I could see that at least some people were as hurt and lost as I was. At the time, one response seemed to offer comfort: “I support Kagura Mea, the virtual character. What does anything the person inside does have to do with me?” Yet even if this claim makes some people like me feel better, for me it is nothing more than self-deception. A VTuber is a being in whom soul, bone, and flesh are one. When Mea says, in her cobbled-together, rough-and-ready Chinese, “I’m cute. Please give me money,” that is not a voice issuing from the virtual image itself, out of the void. It is the voice of a girl living in the neighboring country, staying in someone else’s home. When a woman studying at the University of Tokyo proposes to Mea at an in-person event, what answers that declaration of love is not a miracle inside an electronic screen, but words spoken by a girl somewhere in the venue, nervous about her first such event. When the tengu respond with wild cheers to the dream of reaching a popularity score of one million, we are not responding to dots and pixels called Kagura Mea, but to her—the one we all want to support a little further along the way.
When that statement appeared in the early hours of May 16 and left so many people awash in sentiment, the one who had sold the fans’ gifts, who had lied to the fans, whose family circumstances made VTuber activities difficult, who was still a minor in real life, who lived and ate with someone else, and who declared that she would keep on being cute—that was, at the very least, not just Miss Ai or Tanaka Shōji, but Kagura Mea herself, that “inept” VTuber who seemed capable of mind control.
Without a doubt, this essay is full of my feelings: longing and disappointment, satisfaction and jealousy, and much else. Letting feelings lead the writing for once has been a very new and interesting choice. After all, however technically refined an argument may be, it struggles to find a fitting place for feelings within one’s own world.
Fortunately, as the essay draws to a close, the feelings themselves have brought some good news. Leaving self-deception behind need not mean plunging into an abyss of pain. If Kagura Mea the VTuber stands at the center of the virtual world’s stage, then you and I, the so-called “tengu,” and Miss Ai in the real world, facing so many difficulties but unwilling to give up her VTuber activities, are all, to some extent, people at the edge of the world’s stage. I hope this essay—also an exploration of my own feelings—can at least give us this conviction: the most romantic miracle the age of VTubers brings us is that, when we truly are in love with a VTuber, we may indeed also be in love with someone in the real world whom we have never known personally. Perhaps it is ill-timed to say this now, when “2D”—the world of anime, manga, and games—has become something of a term of ridicule. But we otaku have long yearned for the farther shore of the virtual while, consciously or not, avoiding the cramped unease of the real world. If VTubers give us a chance to experience what it is like to fall for someone, isn’t that rather nice?
Let us cry out for love at the edge of the world.
Editor’s note: I admire the author’s wizard soul for daring to express these feelings (laughs).8