Waiting for a face reveal that never comes? How VTubers challenge our understanding of influencer authenticity

ABSTRACT

Taking as examples the VTubers CodeMiko and Ami Yamato, this article attempts to offer insights into two alternative approaches to dealing with the prevalent imperative of authenticity for social media influencers: While the former thematises her hypermediated virtuality explicitly and only refers to her ‘human form’ as ‘The Technician’, the latter goes to comedic lengths to never acknowledge the artifice of her avatarial presence. Analysing the aforementioned multi-layered masquerades in the context of interaction and viewer reception allows me to observe the ways authenticity is used, not so much as an existentialist guiding-principal for self-actualisation, but as a form of currency that is context-specific and takes many forms. Authenticity, this article shows, is not necessarily grounded in anything ‘real’ that can be found behind masks or outside the virtual realm. Rather, authenticity must be negotiated continuously between the social media influencers and their audiences to achieve and maintain celebrity status. Ultimately, it seems that masquerades function to liberate individuals from established norms and constraints imposed on them by social, cultural, and, in this case, technological assemblages by subverting and thereby drawing attention to them. VTubers, therefore, might inform a new mode of presenting an authentic self on social media.

KEYWORDS:

• VTuber
• authenticity
• masquerade
• CodeMiko
• Ami Yamato

1. A new kind of influencer

The rise of social media platforms in recent decades has brought about a new type of celebrity whose selling point for audiences and advertisers alike is their supposed ‘realness’. Building their online presence across a variety of social media platforms by broadcasting their lives, influencers curate their brands and amass attention at scales anywhere from small niches of the internet to occasional worldwide fame (cf. Senft 2008, 2013, Marwick 2015, Abidin 2018, Brooks et al. 2021). To profit in this precarious field (Glatt 2022), influencers ‘present themselves, unlike traditional celebrities, as “common people”. For many, their appeal lies in their apparent ordinariness and in order to maintain a relationship with their followers being seen as authentic is key’ (Thurnell-Read et al. 2022, p. 5). Even though the meaning of authenticity or how it can be achieved is contested, it is universally extolled as ‘the quality that makes one person more influential than another, even if they have similar metrics. A sense of authenticity sells products’ (Hund 2023, p. 13). There has been, however, a new group of influencers that challenge the equation of ‘ordinariness’ and ‘realness’ with authenticity as a key predictor for influencer success.

Now appearing across social media platforms, so-called virtual influencers are a rather extraordinary phenomenon that calls to question many assumptions held about the authenticity of social media content and its star creators. As in the case of virtual influencer Lil Miquela, what is seen on screen is a computer-generated ‘19-year-old Robot living in LA’, as her Instagram bio reads. Behind the virtual influencer with an elaborate fictive life narrative, expensive outfits and jet set lifestyle that has garnered her over three million followers on Instagram stands the marketing agency Brud who created the digital-born influencer in 2016. Having worked with high fashion brands and collaborated with some of the biggest names in the influencer world, the virtual character is still highly perplexing to social media users, as the comments under Lil Miquela’s posts show (cf. Drenten and Brooks 2020, p. 1321). One Instagram upload (Lil 2022), for example, pictures her crying on a New York subway; this display of staged affect by a self-professed ‘Robot’ is met by expressions of confusion, disbelief and even the occasional thinly veiled frustration, which one user summarises: ‘[t]his acc[ount] makes no sense’. Virtual influencers like Lil Miquela seem to fall somewhere between curious and uncanny.

Similarly for scholars, the authenticity status of virtual influencers like Lil Miquela is a matter of debate, not least because it is ultimately an illusion created and maintained by the marketing agency behind her (Moustakas et al. 2020): ‘Lil Miquela’s perceived authenticity emulates that of a typical influencer – sharing insecurities, ambitions and vulnerabilities with the audience’ (Drenten and Brooks 2020, p. 1321). Accordingly, the virtual influencer is said to be no more or less ‘real’ than her non-virtual counterparts:

Audiences question the authenticity of traditional celebrities and social media influencers, whereas virtual stars invite audiences to revel in contradictions between the real and the artifice, recognizing that the concept of authenticity itself is socially and commercially constructed. The virtual star system begs the question: does authenticity matter when none of it is real?

(Drenten and Brooks 2020, p. 1322)

‘[T]he case of Lil Miquela showed that a nonhuman influencer’s seeming lack of “authenticity” would not necessarily be a problem’ (Hund 2023, p. 114), which might suggest that the question of authenticity may altogether lose its relevance in the face of these ongoing changes online. Others suggest that, since virtual influencers cannot be authentic by default, one should examine the authenticity of audiences instead (de Brito Silva et al. 2022, p. 12). Should ‘the doomed quest for authenticity’ (Duffy and Gerrard 2022) therefore be called off by influencers and those researching them alike?

Rather than shying away from the contradictions inherent in this juxtaposition of virtuality and authenticity, this article treats this seeming aporia as a point of departure. To analyse the way authenticity is understood and negotiated vis-à-vis virtual influencers, this article shifts attention from the widely discussed example of the virtual influencer Lil Miquela and her conventional authenticity signals to the comparatively underexplored English-speaking virtual influencers – or more specifically VTubers – CodeMiko and Ami Yamato. Considering that ‘Lil Miquela’s stardom demystifies the commercial production and consumption of the “authentic” microcelebrity’ (Drenten and Brooks 2020, p. 1322) and that ‘[a]uthenticity tends to be most conspicuous when authenticity claims are disputed and the boundary between the authentic and inauthentic contested’ (Thurnell-Read et al. 2022, p. 9), the virtuality of VTubers in the shape of their avatarial masquerades then are taken to be cases for investigating such ‘disputed’ and ‘demystifying’ authenticity claims.

2. What about being real? – VTubers between authenticity, masquerade and virtuality

The myriad ways authenticity is performed online suggest that it is an attribute which is sensed rather than quantified by social media users. Especially in the context of the influencer industry where authenticity is a key concept, ‘[t]he meaning of authenticity has never been precise, but it is usually tied to some sense of genuineness or originality’ (Hund 2023, p. 7). Common strategies for evoking authenticity in the audience are ‘the provision of detailed, mundane and personal content’ (Gaden and Dumitrica 2014, n.pag.) or the general verisimilitude in the depiction of the ‘real self’. But who is to say at what point enough of the life is represented online, when an influencer has exposed enough of their ‘true selves’ to their followers? The task of authentication lies in the hands of audiences who, through their participatory media use, bring certain expectations and values to their online interactions. Enli (2015, p. 2) speaks of a ‘tacit understanding or agreement between producers and audience as an authenticity contract, […] one that is based on a set of genre conventions, as well as established practises and expectations’. This ‘authenticity contract’ (or ‘pact’ as in Weixler 2012) acts as the epistemological default in social media interaction, so to speak. It can be broken, however, by the influencer or called into question by audiences. The specific terms of this contract, additionally, seem to be fuzzy and subject to ongoing conventionalisation.

VTubers notably orient themselves towards those established codes and norms of influencer authenticity but do so less comprehensively than virtual influencers like Lil Miquela. ‘Virtual YouTubers’ as they are called, though not exclusively found on this platform, thus form a distinct sub-set of virtual influencers (cf. Drenten and Brooks 2020, Robinson 2020, Choudhry et al. 2022). Sharing similarities in terms of their computer-generated appearance and reliance on the affordances of their respective technological apparatus, virtual influencers and VTubers nevertheless are distinguishable by their authorship and functions. The former is designed by individuals or teams intended solely ‘to accumulate audiences and promote products, brands and/or messages’, while the latter is a character that an individual creator envisions and manages across platforms to speak through (Berryman et al. 2021 p. 1).

Primarily, VTubers can be found using their avatars to interact with their viewers on livestreaming platforms like Twitch, Niconico or Bilibili (cf. Zhou 2020, Lu et al. 2021). With the creative use of the potentials inherent in their virtual online presence, they offer interactive affordances for their viewers that typical influencers on the platforms do not (Weller and Holaschke 2022). One of the main distinctions between virtual influencers and VTubers then is that the former builds a brand in a way that strategically mimics and aims to replace typical influencers; the latter meanwhile utilises their virtual presence in ways that subvert expectations and innovate how social media affordances are used altogether.

The alleged lack of ‘realness’ of VTubers that makes them such an interesting group of influencers to study is best conceptualised as an act of masquerade.¹ Rather than showing their own faces and bodies as do most other social media users, the individuals in question appear in the form of their highly individualised virtual avatars.² However, as the virtual mask is seen as a mask that conceals something essential that needs to be uncovered, it is commonplace for audiences to not only ask for but expressly demand a so-called ‘face reveal’. Such reveals often take place in special videos and cause a surge in attention that manifests in high view counts.³ This communicated desire for unmasking hints at an underlying assumption concerning their authenticity: that to call an end to the masquerade would uncover a ‘real self’ that is perceived as hidden behind the mask.

Although the tendential equation of the physical face and authenticity underpins the phenomenon of face reveals, I argue that it is useful to think beyond a definition of authenticity that is predicated on such essentialising undertones. Rather than supposing an ontologically ‘true’ self that predates performance, this article argues with Tseëlon (2003) that masquerades generally – and as I maintain perhaps more so in the context of VTubers – hold a unique potential for allowing individuals to perform what they believe to be their true self or facets thereof. Such an understanding ‘maintains that every manifestation is authentic, that the mask reveals the multiplicity of our identity’ (Tseëlon 2003, p. 4). The self here, additionally, is understood as the combination of context-specific but equivalent self-components that an individual can alternate between according to their communicative needs (Tseëlon 2003, p. 5, also Tseëlon 1992, 1995) without necessarily breaching the authenticity contract. Accepting masks as ‘a tool for self-definition and deconstruction’ (Tseëlon 2003, p. 11) foregrounds their essential role in contemporary conceptualisations of self-making at play across social media that are predicated upon the dynamic performance of identity.

These virtual masquerades seem to afford VTubers more independence from their offline existence in performing their selves (Bredikhina 2020). The avatars individually designed with 3D modelling software or more user-friendly, designated VTuber creator programmes and animated using motion capture technology allow their human creators to appear in posted images and present their stories and opinions in videos and livestreams while maintaining a sense of anonymity and privacy. How much behind the virtual masquerade followers are allowed to see can be consciously curated by the human creators. For some, we have come to find out real names and faces, while others have never broken the masquerade, leaving audiences to wonder who might be behind the mask – both viable alternatives that we will explore later in this article. The VTuber avatars moreover appear to offer greater potential for the blurring and testing of different virtual and actual identities. The concept of babiniku pertaining to Japanese VTubers which describes the performance of a virtual character (usually by a male user) is an important case in point. Bredikhina and Giard (2022) understand the associated phenomenon as ‘virtual cross-dressing practices’ which afford the individuals who appear as VTubers online a greater degree of freedom of gender expression than the offline world would (Bredikhina and Giard 2022, p. 15).

It goes without saying that the virtual in ‘Virtual YouTuber’ is intended to indicate the digital-born constructed-ness of the avatar in opposition to the physical bodies that exist outside of mediation. Virtuality, however, can also be understood as a form of potentiality. In the tradition of Deleuze (2002, p. 148), Lévy refines the layperson’s understanding of this relation as follows: ‘The virtual should, properly speaking, be compared not to the real but the actual’ (1998, p. 24). How this might be transferred to concepts of identity is elaborated by Shields (2006), in that

[v]irtualities are not just ‘ideas’ but things: a code, habitus or class that exists even if one cannot treat it as a tangible object. […] Gender is a case in point – not a tangible ‘thing’ or materiality […], but rather a performative identity, a theoretical object with predictive power. (Shields 2006, p. 283)

The virtual according to this binarism is intangible – but no less real – and can be performed in multiple ways and towards multiple actual outcomes: ‘Actualization is performative – the Virtual itself is a multiplicity which can be actualized in different ways’ (Shields 2006, p. 285).

Following this line of thought, the notion of the virtual as counterpart of the actual becomes especially relevant against the backdrop of the exploration of the performativity of masquerades at play here. The virtuality of the mask in the first sense, and of the masquerade in the second sense, can be thought of in terms of their potential for subversion and the expression of the ‘multiplicity of our identity’ (Tseëlon 2003, p. 4): ‘The Virtual is neither absence nor an unrepresentable excess or lack. It troubles any simple negation because it introduces multiplicity into the otherwise fixed category of the Real’ (Shields 2006, p. 285). Authenticity and notions of what is real, not to be found and uncovered somewhere behind the mask (Tseëlon 2003, p. 4f. Napier 1986), are negotiated within the act of the masquerade by drawing attention to the unfixed, transformative nature of identity. Just like the opposition is not between the real and the virtual, the counterpart of the authentic should not be taken to be the masked. Accordingly, VTubers’ masquerades reliant on virtual avatars do not automatically negate authenticity.

3. The avatar and the technician – CodeMiko’s double masquerade

CodeMiko’s cross-platform brand primarily relies on a 3D-animated avatar named Miko that appears in livestreams on the platform Twitch. CodeMiko, however, also encompasses the ‘human form’ of the avatar’s creator who is only referred to by the name of The Technician.⁴ It would appear logical to assume that Miko is the mask and product of the masquerade, whereas the Technician stands for instances when the ‘real face’ is revealed. This section argues, however, that the constellation is more complex than a simple mask-on – mask-off-binary. As the pseudonym of the Technician already implies, it is another mask that comes into play when the elaborate artifice of Miko is not the centre of attention. Just like Miko, this section will argue, the Technician is an additional layer of masquerade: While the overt masquerade of Miko is characterised by its overt and self-reflexive employment of animation technology, the presumed non-masquerade of The Technician is actively positioned as such by its curated sense of intimacy and immediacy.

3.1. Exploring the affordances of the virtual – Miko

It is immediately obvious that CodeMiko is a livestreamer unlike many others. When tuning into her Twitch streams or watching her VODs (videos on demand) on YouTube, we find a CGI-character animated in anime aesthetics with brightly coloured hair, who goes through processes of redesigns (itemised as CodeMiko 2.0 and 3.0) surrounded by changing, likewise computer-generated environments.⁵ The hypermediacy of the virtual environment, in turn, allows for various forms of ‘viewer-integration’, which Weller and Holaschke (2022, p. 27f.) have catalogued: from uncensored viewer chat messages being displayed across Miko’s chest, to certain pre-programmed actions such as ‘nuking’ Miko and changing her outfits or parts of her virtual body. All these forms of intricately orchestrated interactivity endow her viewers with a unique sense of control over the avatar (Kang 2021).⁶

These interactive potentials push and sometimes transgress the boundaries of what would be deemed common or appropriate for non-virtual influencers. Combining her virtuality with her own spin on the interactive affordances of Twitch enables Miko to be more experimental in how she performs this part of her ‘branded self’ (sensu Senft 2013) for her audiences. Often, as in the case of displaying chat messages on her outfit or changing of bodily attributes – which uncomfortably frequently ends in an enlargement of the animated breasts – these performances have sexual undertones. One paid form of interaction even allows viewers to appear as pre-set animated characters in the background of Miko’s virtual apartment. For the right amount of money, you can change Miko to your liking and even get closer to your favourite streamer. Moreover, many of Miko’s interviews of other streamers are laden with innuendo and often directly address sexual preferences of the interviewer and interviewee alike for the risqué entertainment of the stream. In her livestreamed interview with renowned political commentator Hasan Piker (CodeMiko 2020), for example, a discussion of Miko’s enlarged derrière at the hands of her audience and the question as to Piker’s preferences are already played out in the first twenty seconds of the fifty-three-minute YouTube version of the tongue-in-cheek interview.

By welcoming and even profiting off the audience’s desire to interact and transform, the hypermediated masquerade of CodeMiko allows for a special flexibility in navigating gendered expectations. In this sense, this VTuber perhaps comes closest to Riviere’s (1929) original conceptualisation of masquerade as a resource for navigating male-dominated fields: ‘[w]omanliness […] could be assumed and worn as a mask, both, to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it’ (1929, p. 4). CodeMiko can readily oscillate between the poles of overt sexualisation of her female-coded form and the scatological and violent humour that we have come to expect of predominantly male spaces such as online gaming and livestreaming (Paaßen et al. 2017, Bergin 2021). As a content creator who is somewhat empowered by her virtuality to do so, she can likewise strategically play to, and monetise the male gaze of her audience, while also adhering to the implicit codes of conduct of the online gaming space. By virtue of its liminal status between actual and virtual, it seems, more leeway is granted to the mask in navigating these norms without repercussions.

3.2. Peeling back the layers – the technician’s immediacy as strategic authenticity

Compared to the hypermediated performance of Miko, the occasional streams that feature the Technician feel like a peek behind the curtains or an ‘illusion of “backstage”’ as Marwick and Boyd (2011, p. 140) coin this celebrity practice. Those sparing cameos of The Technician proffer a look at a presumably more authentic version of the person behind the Miko-masquerade. Drawing this conclusion, however, is myopic: When the Technician appears it is certainly in the apartment of Youna Kang, the government name of the creator behind CodeMiko, where she lets her guard down to talk about her own life and the programming that create Miko on the screen. While this evokes a certain feeling of intimacy with her viewers – then interpolated as make-believe confidants – this is arguably no less a masquerade than the more overtly computer-based one of Miko. In one stream re-upload (CodeMiko 2021), ‘Technician shows off how CodeMiko is brought to life’, as the video description reads. She does so by juxtaposing a camera feed of The Technician’s human form equipped with the motion capture apparatus next to Miko mirroring her movements in her virtual environment. One commenter summarises the appeal behind this type of masquerade: ‘It’s interesting how the more you love Miko, the more you want to discover The Technician. Or at least that’s how it is with me’. It is again a desire for more insight into the person behind the masquerade that follows an initial attachment to the mask itself and ultimately leads to a loyal community of followers who interact with and financially support her online presence.

The Technician navigates streaming and animation technology – a field still predominantly populated by men – by performing her role of the expert for a crowd that is often infatuated by the very expertise needed to create the artifice. This human mask thereby counteracts the gendered expectations that the avatarial mask actively engages with for the crowd. The masquerade of The Technician, ultimately, does not rely on CGI, but more so on knowledge about CGI as well as the feeling of complicity between puppeteer and an audience believing themselves in-the-know. Taking off the overt mask as The Technician can be understood as an act of intentional immediacy. No longer donning the motion capture suit that supports the CGI-illusion and addressing her audience directly from her often messy apartment, which makes her even more relatable to viewers, erases the traces of technological artifice that characterise the hypermediacy of Miko. In this way, the Technician appears to be as close to the ‘real self’ of CodeMiko as the audience is going to get. Often dressed in loungewear, eschewing the technically demanding presence of Miko, and fostering an intimate communicative setting with the viewers that tune in for the ‘real her’ are deliberate acts that can all be understood as components of ‘strategic authenticity’ in Gaden and Dumitrica’s (2014) terms. But still, it is the mask of the Technician who is there to speak to them.

What the frequent ‘face reveals’ of CodeMiko uncover is an additional layer of masquerade that further destabilises the viewers’ perception of what the authentic core of CodeMiko might be. This claim is expressly not intended as an accusation of inauthenticity. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of influencers’ strategies that are an integral part of being a celebrity and safe online. Likewise, it is not a new practice but one that merely mirrors the way celebrities have been separating public and private personas even before social media and the more acute perils of parasocial relationships they have introduced. The sharp contrast between the two masks can be seen especially clearly when, in something resembling a ventriloquist act as one viewer notes,⁷ Miko puts her own creator into the hot seat (VODs 2021). Her unique selling point lies in the virtuality of her appearance and the extraordinary interactive affordances this generates; in the words of Reckwitz (2020) this is her mechanism for singularisation, i.e. what makes her stand out among myriad others equally vying for attention in an oversaturated market.

In CodeMiko’s approach to authenticity, we discover the context-dependent nature and situatedness of the concept. The brand differentiates into two different masks reserved for two different settings and towards two different ends. While the masquerade of Miko is seen to attract a large audience and invites them to participate in various forms of anything-goes-interactivity, the masquerade of The Technician can be understood both as a look behind the scenes for viewers who demand to know more about their favourite streamer and as a cordon sanitaire for privacy and against the looming and often gendered threat of parasociality turned pathological.⁸ It is a means for healthy boundaries between the online brand and the offline life and provides a certain degree of security. In this way, ironically, the masquerade conceals in the act of unmasking: The Technician acts as a decoy of sorts, intended to serve as a projection zone and addressee for viewers fascinated by the presumed mastermind behind the virtual avatar. Especially compared to the hypermediated, over-the-top performances of Miko, The Technician is ostensibly ‘real’ but a mask nonetheless. To condense this into a simple formula: Who audiences want when the mask comes off is Youna Kang – what they get is The Technician.

4. ‘Videos that confuse people’ – Ami Yamato

While both CodeMiko and AmiYamato appear as avatars, what distinguishes them is how they stage and address their virtual masquerades for their respective audiences. Ever since creating her YouTube channel in 2011, Yamato has been uploading content which negotiates and explores the status of her virtuality. In this sense, and as many of her viewers have remarked in comments, Yamato could be referred to as a ‘VTuber avant la lettre’, since she had built her internet presence as an animated character long before the trend and its associated terminology reached mainstream attention more recently.⁹ Still, Yamato only ever acknowledges the arising confusion surrounding her label characteristically obtusely: ‘I’ve been making YouTube videos since 2011. But I don’t upload very often which might be why people say I’m “virtually” a YouTuber’ (Yamato 2019, 1:34–1:42). Refusing both labels of VTuber and YouTuber in this way is a microcosm of her subversive authenticity this chapter intends to outline.

4.1. Blurring the lines of what is ‘real’

Yamato produces two forms of content for YouTube that rely on her avatarial appearance in pre-existing, more or less real environments. Arguably, the confusion broached in Yamato’s channel description (‘videos that confuse people’) stems from multiple nested levels of masquerade that purposely counteract established codes of behaviour and expectations of authenticity in vlogs. The VTuber only ever appears as her signature CGI avatar, which allows her to interact both with other content creators and characters played by actors in scenes from mainstream feature films.¹⁰ In the first type of Yamato’s videos called ‘mash-ins’ she overlays her avatar into various feature films and television shows in a way that makes it seem like she is interacting with fictional characters portrayed by celebrity actors. Conversely, the second type sees her in the real world and occasionally interacting with ordinary people in short video diary-style clips. This article primarily focuses on the second type as its conventionalised, yet contested non-fictionality is most illustrative for the form in which Yamato appears on screen. By transgressing the boundaries of the real world as represented in vlogs and Hollywood make-believe¹¹ – and thus of who an average YouTuber can interact with – she draws attention to her peculiar liminal state between actual online content creator and fictional character.

Not only is this illusion never broken by showing the ‘real’ person behind the masquerade in videos or even elsewhere on the internet; it is never acknowledged as illusion by Yamato at all. Comments by her viewers puzzled by this either ask for clarification or urge her to do a ‘face reveal’. Yamato, however, consistently responds to these inquiries without compromising the artifice needed to uphold the masquerade. As a form of click bait, the video titled How I Make My Videos (Yamato 2013a), for instance, implies a breaking of the illusion behind her videos. Viewers who hoped for an explanation as to how her CGI-form is created, however, are disappointed when she only confesses to using an ‘ordinary desktop webcam’ and widely available consumer grade editing software. Rather than revealing any real secrets, Yamato only offers a non-committal answer that could have been given by any other vlogger at the time. In a similar vein, the follow-up video What I Really Look Like (Yamato 2013b) is a reaction to comments begging to see her real face by begrudgingly showing a version of her avatar that is modelled to look like it is not wearing any make-up. As an act of meta-irony, the video closes by her addressing her audience with ‘the things I do for you guys […] Are you happy now?’ (Yamato 2013b, 0:29–0:36). In this way, Yamato methodically adds to the confusion by both adhering to standards of interaction on social media in the form of question and answer formats and presumed face reveals but also subverting them through her repeated frustration of audience expectations.

That Yamato never even admits that there is anything extraordinary about her is puzzling and even frustrating because viewers of YouTube videos are used to seeing ‘real people’ sharing their ‘real experiences’. Yamato, however, goes to great lengths to document the most mundane of experiences as in How I survived a heatwave. Yamato (2018) or thematising the lack of ideas for a thrilling vlog as in How to VLOG (Yamato 2017b) in the form of her avatar. Audiences have come to expect that influencers document their lives in minute detail and thereby showcase and establish their authenticity (recall the definition by Gaden and Dumitrica 2014 above). Authenticity, however, is something that a YouTube viewer might not naturally attribute to a virtual character on the platform, even when these virtual characters give an account of their lives that takes place in fictional and non-fictional environments alike. In this way, she can not only interact with James Bond or the kids from Stranger Things but also with other established YouTube personalities, or even herself as in Cup to the Future (Yamato 2017a). Tightrope walking lines of ontological separation in this way adds further confusion to a virtuality that is never addressed.

4.2. ‘Virtually a YouTuber’ – Yamato’s subversive authenticity

By blurring these lines, Yamato subverts and causes her viewers to rethink three conventionalised norms of influencer behaviour and the industry surrounding them. First, Yamato’s upload schedule, or lack thereof, signals a clear subversion of the self-commodification that governs many (aspiring) online celebrities. Best condensed in her tag-line ‘New Videos Every Someday’, but also present less obviously in the meta-commentary in her short video Taking Shortcuts (Japan) (Yamato 2014, 0:30) ‘everybody complains when I’m away for too long’ is exemplary of the defiant attitude that Yamato’s displays against the algorithmic culture of YouTube that favours quantity over quality. Second, Yamato subverts several stereotypes in her videos. Although she repeatedly states that she is Japanese and British, she does not subscribe to any expectations of looking like a stereotypical anime girl whose appearance dominates many Westerners’ image of Japan, particularly in the context of VTubers. In one of her earliest videos Breaking Stereotype (Yamato 2011) she addresses the non-adherence of her appearance to these expectations:

I’m Japanese. Now, I know this is confusing to some of you because I’m not wearing a sailor schoolgirl uniform and … I don’t have purple hair and my breasts aren’t larger than my head. But the reality is … real girls in Japan … look normal and dress as normal. So yes, I dress normal too. (Yamato 2011, 0:14–0:34; emphasis added)

Underscoring this paper’s earlier arguments, all the features enumerated here recall how CodeMiko’s avatar is designed. While Yamato tries to break with the stereotypes that dominate entertainment media, CodeMiko uses her masquerade to actively embrace them and even turn them ad absurdum. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Yamato subverts the expectation of the face reveal by vehemently resisting an act that epitomises the exploitative and privacy-threatening notion of authenticity that pervades social media. Observing the ways Ami Yamato maintains her masquerade even against sceptic and prodding audience members might provide insights into authenticity on social media on a broader scale. After all, Yamato has not ‘changed one bit’ in over ten years and has thereby ingrained her own definition of authenticity that relies more on consistency than exhibitionism.

In the only interview the VTuber has given, she is asked about the façade she has been putting up consistently for a decade and the frustrating fact that she has never addressed her avatarial appearance directly in a serious manner: ‘Okay, I’d like to address the elephant in the room: Quite a few people online say you’re not real … they say you’re animated. What do you think about that?’ In her usual tongue-in-cheek way Yamato answers the question: ‘I do get quite animated when I’m emotional about something. I guess it comes across in my videos. As for not being real, nobody is real on YouTube. Everyone is a persona of their true self’ (Travers 2020, n.pag.). Even in this humorous reply, the virtual YouTuber raises an important point pertaining to audience expectations and the relation of an influencer’s ‘true self’ and the self they perform online. The question of ‘realness’ and true selfhood is one that is always at the centre of interactions between celebrities and their audiences and one that we once again observe, perhaps more transparently than before, for online influencers. By not responding to outside pressures of the platform, audiences and advertisers, Yamato has remained true to herself and thereby cemented the status of authenticity for herself in the eyes of her followers.

5. Understanding virtual authenticities

Examining VTubers through the lens of the masquerade as particularly salient examples of these interactions has allowed for a more nuanced understanding of audience expectations and parameters for the influencer’s authenticity. Virtual masks, while not accessible outside of mediation, must be considered as equivalent actualisations of a VTuber’s self. At this point, I return to the notion that marked my point of departure for a more general reconsideration of influencer authenticity: ‘The paradox of the masquerade appears to be that it presents truth in the shape of deception’ (Tseëlon 2003, p. 5). But what is the truth that it presents and what does the deception hide? In this article, I have attempted to shed light on the ongoing discourse on the nature of authenticity of the self from a perspective not yet considered. As we have seen, the basic conundrum formulated by Franssen (2019) still holds true, even for marked departures from more classical notions of stardom: On the one hand, ‘celebrity culture can be understood as an endless quest for the sincere and the authentic’. On the other hand, however, it is equally ‘a culture of make-believe, artificiality and image control, in which it is profoundly challenging to determine what truly is sincere or authentic’ (Franssen (2019, p. 315). The cases of our two VTubers can be understood as paradigmatic examples of this tension as they are arguably ones in which the characteristics of this culture of authenticity become particularly visible.

The brief analyses of CodeMiko and Ami Yamato suggest that the avatar masks of VTubers are simultaneously unique selling points in oversaturated attention economies and tools for the experimentation with, and expression of, an authentic sense of self. It may even be useful to speak of virtual authenticities here to properly mark both the born-digital existence of these selves as well as their context-dependence and iterative nature (see also Nagy and Koles 2014, p. 280). Once the VTubers go into the offline world again, the masked online performance might make it easier for them to disengage from their audiences and live the life of the average person. As long as they are online, however, what they perform for their audiences – as far removed from ‘reality’ as it might appear in contrast to other mediated performances of self – is their real self for all intents and purposes. Masked and unmasked, online and offline are not only mutually constitutive states but much more so equal actualisations of the self. Authenticity, in this case, is afforded in the first place by the alleged deception of the masquerade. This is the case, not least, due to the very separation between online performance and offline existence that (multiple levels of) masks offer their wearers.

While the insights gained in this article speak only to a limited selection of VTubers, they might hold some value for traditional influencers as well by underlining the importance of understanding authenticity as a continuously evolving ‘moving target’ rather than a fixed, essential quality of the self (Enli 2015, p. 2). The volatility and exploitative dimensions of the influencer industry as well as the growing impact of artificial intelligence-powered virtual influencers (cf. Batista da Silva Oliveira and Chimenti 2021), for example, are some of the key factors that necessitate continuous engagement with the discourses and cultures surrounding the value of authenticity and how it is performed online. A related question is how readily advertisers will pivot to the wholesale simulation of influencers given their inherently more controllable and advertiser friendly brands, as the case of Lil Miquela has shown (Drenten and Brooks 2020, p. 1321). Another interesting avenue for further research might also be found in the understanding of virtual influencer practices as engagements with the non-human or even through the lens of post-humanist theory. Lastly, the specific performances and dramaturgy of ‘face reveals’ deserve a dedicated inquiry, as they could only be treated as the expression of a perhaps misdirected desire for authenticity of audiences here.

Above all, this article has shown that the rather unconventional case of VTubers by no means undermines but actually further supports the prevalent understanding of authenticity in celebrity studies that encapsulates multiple forms and objectives of presenting authentic selves. Rather than a simple binary of authentic and inauthentic that is usually upheld outside of scholarship on the issue, authenticity is a quality of social media influencers that is continuously negotiated between influencers and their audiences. Conversely, this perspective on the two VTubers has further supported the insight that the presence of masks does not result in an inexorable judgement call of inauthenticity, but rather that is part and parcel of how it is performed. Just how it is performed, however, can differ from one influencer to the next. CodeMiko exemplifies a type of strategic authenticity in which layers of masks allow for more flexibility and thereby more authentic self-expression. The ‘deception’ in this case allows Youna Kang to show aspects of her authentic self by letting the masks of Miko and The Technician shield her from negative consequences. Ami Yamato, in contrast, stands for a form of authenticity in which the mask acts as a mirror. As such, the subversive authenticity of Yamato’s masquerade can be understood as negative foil for influencer culture. Yamato is authentic exactly because she does not care much for authenticity.

Through a closer and more comprehensive analysis of overt forms of masquerades, like those of VTubers in this article, further research might be able to establish frameworks for cases when the masks are metaphorical and immaterial and thus harder to identify. In engaging with this particularly visible form of authenticity performance through the conceptual lenses of the masquerade and virtuality, I hope to have produced insights which may be translated for more traditional cases of less easily distinguishable masks. In this sense then as well, the masquerade would serve to ‘present truth in the shape of deception’ (Tseëlon 2003, p. 5). Although virtual masquerades draw more attention to themselves than merely metaphorical ones, they too seem to offer the tools for a continuous exploration of multiple selves in different contexts, as well as in response to specific needs, without necessarily losing any claim to authenticity in the process.

Acknowledgments

For valuable insights and critical comments on earlier drafts of this article, I want to extend gratitude to Rebecca Feasey, the editors of Celebrity Studies, and the two anonymous peer reviewers. Thank you for your time and labour.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robin Schmieder

Robin Schmieder is a doctoral researcher at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen. In his dissertation project ‘Vlogging the Self – A Narratology of Online Video Diaries’ he explores how vlogs as a media genre engender and shape their particular form of narrative self-making and are themselves shaped by the networks of remediation they are embedded in. Located at the intersection of media studies, narratology, and the study of culture, he works towards a better understanding of how the affordances of digital media and their platforms cause the emergence of new forms of self-narratives that result in the formation of a repertoire of new master cultural narratives about selfhood.

Notes

1. Bredikhina (2021) also understands Japanese VTubers as performers of masquerades. The focus of their analysis, however, lies in pointing out the reimaginations of traditional Japanese forms of theatre – a cultural background dimension that becomes harder to trace the more VTubers are translated and adapted for global, English-speaking audiences.

2. For an overview of the ways in which the concept of an avatar is used in regard to digital media see: Liboriussen (2014). This paper takes avatar to mean the visual representation of a person that is designed by themselves to represent themselves in virtual (or real) environments.

3. One of the most publicised face reveals in recent years, though not strictly by a VTuber, could be that of Minecraft content creator Dream, which has been viewed more than 53 million times at the point of writing this article (Dream 2022). As another case in point, see how the revealing of the person behind a VTuber avatar can be performed and draw massive attention in FACE REVEAL by VTuber Emirichu (2019).

4. CodeMiko has another less important mask as part of her repertoire that this brief discussion cannot properly include: Glitch. This character can be thought of as an easter egg for dedicated viewers of CodeMiko streams as it is only present for seconds at a time and appears rarely.

5. For a comprehensive rundown of the computing involved behind the scenes by the creator herself, see: Kang (2021).

6. This full control over the virtual body of the performer by the audience eerily resembles an online re-staging of Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (see Chapter 4 of Ward 2012). Though it is not the ‘real body’ of Miko that invites these transgressive and sexualised forms of interaction and even violence, it is nevertheless directed at a constitutive part of herself, and similarly devolves into exploring and going well beyond the boundaries of accepted behaviour.

7. User Aybe points out this metaphor and CodeMiko’s overarching extraordinariness across platforms in the comment section of VODs (2021): ‘She is a modern day ventriloquist and I’m just making that connection. She is also an insane person’.

8. That this is a very real danger is shown time and time again by cases in which ‘fans’ show stalking behaviour and trespass by breaking into streamer’s homes. See the reporting by insider.com, e.g. Dogdson (2020).

9. Bredikhina and Giard (2022, pp. 1–2) date the coinage of the term VTuber in late 2016 when Kizuna AI uploaded her first video.

10. This is an important distinction in Yamato’s content: She does not interact with the celebrity actors portraying the fictional characters – many other influencers do, and some celebrities certainly are active on social media platforms themselves. Rather, she creates the illusion of interacting with the fictional characters in their fictional settings of the films.

11. This dichotomy is arguably far more permeable than I have room to elaborate here. A more detailed discussion will form the centre of my dissertation.