Vtuber Meme Analysis
“Am I what you want? Have I softened all the edges? Do you love me?
What’s your relationship with reality like? Are you disappointed with the difficulties of your life? Do you wish things were simpler?”
Then there’s a good chance that Vtubers are made for you!
The vtuber phenomena has popped up recently, and already gained a massive following. Why is that?
Vtubers are virtual youtubers, digital puppets, some of the most popular examples are from the company Hololive, which produces a wide array of Vtuber characters, each having a unique appearance and personality. They play video games and run quirky livestreams. As there are so many personality types at play in these, I’m not going to dig too deep into any one character, but just Vtubers as a whole.
One of the most curious parts of the vtuber phenomena is their success, they make a lot of money, often far more than human streamers. Why? The parasocial relationship at play in human streamers and their fans is tainted by an ever-present knowledge that the popular streamer has a life of their own, and that they really do not care, or have any feelings for the masses that watch their videos. That the brief attention given to those who donate is a forced, mercantile smile.
The vtuber on the other hand, has no such problem, they don’t go back to a virtual life, where they eat and sleep. They exist solely for their viewers.
Human streamers make mistakes. They might say something wrong, they might insult someone. On a more basic level, they might not be attractive, they may have a bad day, or look fat, or have bad hair or acne. In short, they might be human, all too human.
In the vtuber? All of those flaws melt away, and only the idealized form, the vessel of attention and love remains. They are carefully produced by a company, their scripts are written, their boundaries are well established. They are everything that the viewer wants them to be, and more.
There are some interesting parallels here to the manufactured bands of the past, as organic musicians are very difficult people, and will generally break up over something or another, or land themselves in hot water by claiming they’ve overtaken God on the charts, companies realized they needed to produce their own synthetic bands. And so came groups like the Monkees, literally made for TV. Even in countercultural music genres, the Sex Pistols were manufactured, a perfectly fashionable punk band. This got brought to it’s most extreme form with the Gorillaz, a completely animated band.
By removing the human element, companies and artists remove the possibility of human error, they maintain complete control over the image and aesthetic art piece.
The Vtuber is this cancel-proof object of desire.
Let’s dig into that. Why are Vtubers not just watched, but worshipped.
Which they are, if you remove it from context it becomes even clearer, animated caricatures of humans are set in front of many people that love them, they are showered with love and donations.
Is this a pagan idol or a vtuber?
We love what is beyond us, what is perfect. This is the religious instinct for worship, this is what every child experiences as an infant. Their parents are perfect gods, and as they grow older, they realize they are human. As a culture, we can not accept the humanity of leaders and stars, and so when they expose their humanity, they are cast out.
In my previous videos I have explored the concept of the Digital Anima as a dark maternal figure, one who wants to maintain the infantile character of very online males. The Vtuber is precisely this perfected image of the feminine (they are nearly all women). The young male is able to worship this animated character without the shame of adoring a human streamer who cares nothing for them, the Vtuber is removed enough that shame is overcome.
Beyond that, the Digimom, like any devouring mother, wants her son to stay away from girls, to hold on tightly to her baby. So for the boys who are already developing misogyny due to their isolation and failures reaching into the real world, A vtuber is a comforting figure, who bypasses the visceral misogynistic disgust that would present itself when faced with a human streamer.
And so deeper and deeper into the web, libido and money are sapped by these daemonic digital entities.
If you only watch the gamer vtubers, you may think I’m stretching with the sexual analysis, but behold, Projekt Melody, a vtuber/digital puppet porn star. She got popular in early 2020, and like vtubers, quickly surpassed her human contemporaries. This success was met with much criticism, saying that a manufactured product overtaking the work of humans was essentially wrong.
A relevant quote from the wikipedia page explains things well: reddit user Xhumanist says “Melody caters to the desires of sexually disenfranchised men who believe they are more likely to find sexual and emotional satisfaction in the digital world than in real life”
And with the satisfaction of a spoiled child, these disenfranchised boys laughed at the women who complained of Melody.
A similar dynamic is present in the sex robot argument, where people essentially think guys will prefer robots to real women.
These problems are all well known, but none can seem to grasp *why* these inhuman proxies are so enticing to these men, who we already know are deeply alienated from real women by online propaganda and lived failures. The key, as I have said, is in Jungian psychology, which I am attempting to bring to the 21st century. To provide a cyberpsychology, and in this cyberpsychological investigation we find the digitized form of Jung’s Anima archetype. Who appears in many forms to seduce young men into giving up their bodies and living online. To give up on real women, and worship cartoons.
To ignore, and reject their own failures and put faith in illusion.
This is the path of regression, in which boys fail to become men, where they are unable to individuate, there they reject real women, and with them their own humanity. This is precisely in the best interest of their Digital Mother. Who wants to keep them in an incestuous cocoon of illusions.
My predictions: As human errors become increasingly intolerable to the majority of people, divine digital figures will continue to crop up as solutions to the terminal flaws in organic people. Not just in entertainment, but in politics and personal life. As we have entered the Aeon of the Child, we are met with a choice. To become individuals, and overcome our past worship of perfect, divine parents, or to manufacture proxy divinities that will keep us collectively comfortable. If we are to accept the mass infantilization that comes with the acceptance of worship of digital gods, we will terminally extinguish the spark of human activity, and recede back into the unconscious, never to rise again.
The vtuber is one of the many useful vessels for this infantilizing archetype. Their massive popularity is certainly a bizarre omen of what is going on in the mass psyche of young people. Memes are our best means of gaining insight into the Collective Unconscious, and as you know, Memes Matter.