Anime Girl VTubers Are Selling Out Concerts, but Are They ‘Real?’ Depends on Who You Ask

I’m at a sold-out concert in Hollywood, and I’m the only one in the 1,200-plus-capacity venue who doesn’t know any of the songs. One of the acts has just finished, and everyone around me begins chanting and waving their light sticks. We don’t have to wait long: Kou Mariya, one of the headliners, appears. Not on the stage itself, but on a massive screen spanning the entirety of its length. (She will never appear on the stage, because she is a sexy 6,669-year-old blonde vampire anime girl who exists only in virtual reality.) Mariya starts singing in Japanese. A grown man next to me seems like he’s on the verge of tears.

Welcome to Fantastic Reality, a mini-festival at the Vermont Theater that brings eight main VTuber acts—all anime girls of varying eye and hair color—to a live venue, accompanied by IRL musicians. I’m here to find out more about why fans are willing to pay up to $180 (the cost of a VIP pass) for the privilege of watching these acts in person, rather than on their screens from the comfort of their own homes.

PHOTOGRAPH: ERICA HERNANDEZ

If you’ve never seen a VTuber before, it’s probably just a matter of time. VTubers have been around for about a decade in Japan, hosting everything from online weather stations to iPhone launches, but they surged in popularity outside Japan during Covid quarantine. If you like watching anything online—cooking, gaming, history—there is a VTuber version of it. The name is a portmanteau of ‘Virtual YouTuber,’ and as it suggests, it’s a livestreamer or video creator, but instead of showing their face, the audience sees a virtual 2D or 3D avatar.

Technically, a VTuber could take on any appearance or theme (my favorite: an ex-Yakuza in prison stripes who talks about real-life organized crime), but the most popular ones are anime girls with cute voices. Some of these VTubers also sing, and output ranges from simple karaoke streams to full-on music videos. If the VTuber is big enough, fans can also listen to their music on most major streamers. The market is growing: Last week, major VTuber agency Hololive launched a record label. Which brings us back to the concert.

For most of the roughly three-hour show, there are three human musicians on the stage: a drummer, a bassist, and a guitarist, who play accompaniment for a parade of anime girls that appear on the massive monitors (one in the center, two hovering over the right and left side). The two DJs, Mono Monet, a VTuber with purple hair who hops from filter house to gabber, and JOENN, an actual human DJ who appears physically on stage to close out the night with an even more frantic set, easily could blend in (musically) at any rave. But the meat of the show is what a casual listener would probably just call “anime music,” veering occasionally into songs that ranged from goofy memes (Issa Corva: “I hate cilantro, baby / I hate you almost as much / as I hate cilantro, baby”) to equally goofy link-in-bio rap (CottontailVA: “Shout-out to my gooners / that showin’ my Fansly love”).

Mariya, the aforementioned sexy anime vampire, started VTubing in 2020, just in time to ride the surge of quarantine-fueled popularity when everyone was looking for a parasocial friend. Her content ranges from gaming to chatting to (occasionally members-only) ASMR videos to karaoke, and she’s also released a single to streaming services.

I’ve watched some of her streams, but I didn’t know what to expect at her concert. Promotional material for the event promised that there would be a live human band, but how exactly would she be interacting with them?

So I arrange to speak to her remotely, a couple days before the show. The video call starts, and she appears just like she does in her streams. I mean this literally: I am speaking to the avatar that her fans see.