Tag: drama

VTubers II: Oshi Boogaloo

TiberiusLeave a comment

Never said I was immune to the craze

Two years ago, I dedicated a post to what was then a more recent upswing in Japanese pop culture spreading far and wide: the virtual youtuber, VTuber for short. Sometime later, about a month, around the same time as the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III 2023 and how loved and adored that game’s campaign was, I watched two videos about the game. The first one was by The Act Man, chastising the game for such a sorry excuse of a presentation and structure. The second was a Vtuber reacting to that Act Man video. This one, specifically:

Channel: SmugAlana

The VTuber in the thumbnail of the above video is one I watch regularly and I’ll get to those soon, but she’s not the first one I began watching. Sometime, after my first venture in the Army around November 2021, a Japanese VTuber who was recent to the Anglophone world showed up in my YouTube recommended feed. This Japan-based VTuber is known as Kamizuki Naki, an independent English-speaking VTuber who debuted a few weeks before I had discovered her.

I was aware of VTubers, but didn’t pay them much mind. 98% of the time in 2022, I had been too focused on trying to return to the Army, and much of my content consumption was redirected elsewhere. By 2023, after one recruiter gave me the red light (and I started this blog hoping to achieve a career in writing), I started watching more and more VTubers. Kamizuki was one of the regulars, but with more and more VTubers debuting from different parts of the world, what began as a largely Japanese phenomenon had followed the footsteps of animanga and taken the world by storm, so much so that a little shark girl sung Take Me Out to the Ball Game at a Dodgers game.

She now lives as a cat-shark named Sameko Saba because she couldn’t keep the model

As I’ve said before in that post two years ago, I’ve accepted VTubers as another arm of Japanese culture sinking its hooks into the world, and a fine addition at that. I admit I was a bit apprehensive when they became popular due to no one having a lot to do in 2020, but over the years, with my viewership being taken up by the Trash Taste podcast and their individual and combined collaborations with VTubers like Ironmouse, Mori Calliope, Rainhoe, Haruka Karibu and others, I was gradually exposed to more VTubers like them. Eventually, I have built a rotating reportoire of VTubers that I regularly come back to and check on. I’m quite sparing with the subscription button and with a lot of VTubers being more active on Twitch than YouTube because that platform is more live streamer friendly, so the VTubers I follow and the VTubers I’m subscribed to don’t always overlap. But when they do, they show up on my feed regularly. Then again, YouTube’s recommended system sometimes overpowers its subscription system, so if you’re subscribed to a bunch of channels and your favorites get drowned out by the others, you’re bound to miss a few of them.

Around 2016 when Joey of The Anime Man/Trash Taste fame starred with Kizuna AI, the Queen Mother of All VTubers and Virtual Content, it was done by way of her titular agency, which is standard fare in many VTuber circles. Many of the famous ones like the aforementioned Gawr Gura, Mori Calliope, Kurone, Oozora Subara, Takanashi Kiara and many more tend to be tied to Japan-based talent agencies, the two largest being VShojo and Hololive and the former of these falling into controversy over donations and revenue owed to and withheld from Ironmouse, who genuinely needed the money to cover a serious medical condition.

Channel: Ironmouse

In solidarity with Ironmouse this year, many other VTubers called it quits and went independent or got scooped up by different agencies.

Suffice it to say, VTubing is as expensive as being a regular YouTuber or other such content creator when all the expenses are added up. Designing a unique model, rigging it to react to your movements, dedicating assets to the animations, in some cases dedicating a webpage to your content; many VTubers do align with agencies, but not all do. Some are able to do it independently like Kamizuki Naki and SmugAlana. Others adopt VTuber models for commentary, as is the case with Rev Says Desu and Hero Hei, both content creators who were previously faceless voices on their own respective channels, recently adopting VTuber models.

Now let’s break this down just a bit: a content creator represented by a large company uses an idealized and heavily designed persona to entertain masses of fans. Sounds a lot like idols, doesn’t it? Well, there is a connection between VTubers and idol culture and my opinions on the latter as one of several reasons for avoiding the series Oshi no Ko (the other being that series’ fanbase). With how corrosive behind the scenes actual idols’ personal lives can be due to the control they tend to surrender to the agencies, the sacrifices demanded to be seen as this Pygmalion-esque husk for worship makes the business of idols unappealing. VTubers have similar issues with inside toxicity at times, but in its own unique way that doesn’t always involve the agency or the individual VTuber in question.

So why do I flock to VTubers more? I don’t watch a lot of agency-associated VTubers, so I can’t say what I’ve seen of them, but the independents thankfully seem to have more control over their personal affairs and finances. There also seems to be less pressure to fake a persona with the intricately-designed model being the stand-in, not to mention these characters have their own associated lore. There’s an elevated level of creativity to VTubers, but with only the viewer/audience perspective to look at, I’m definitely missing a few salient points that expose the complexities of VTuber culture.

For as carefree as the community looks, a carefully crafted image needs to be presented to give off the illusion. As for the controversy side, this is also a unique issue that VTubers grapple with be it from their own audience, themselves, fellow VTubers, or their agencies. One such VTuber, Sinder, had a brazier lit beneath her feet for badmouthing and double-crossing VTubers Bao the Whale, Buffpup, and Silvervale after these three bent over backwards to help get her on her feet, as well as hiding a secret relationship with her manager and fellow VTuber Red/REDACTED. In an attempt to alleviate the heat, she published an encyclopedia of sorts contextualizing everything and the short version of it is Sinder’s unreasonable at best and downright psychopathic at worst. The controversy is why I know about her and this video by Evanit0 breaks down the follow-up to this betrayal of hers:

Channel: Evanit0

All the power to those who can separate art from artist I suppose

I’m not an expert on all things VTuber nor am I privy to every controversy to arise from the medium, but between VShojo imploding on itself and Sinder backstabbing fellow VTubers, these controversies arose accidentally. They both fully intended to do harm, but VShojo wasn’t counting on Ironmouse to blow the lid, nor was Sinder accounting on the other VTubers to fire back on their own platforms. If you’re gonna threaten someone, make sure they can’t fight back.

But a lot of that arose by accident. It’s rare for something to arouse intended controversy and I was made aware of one such group whose stated mission purpose is to achieve that. Another SmugAlana reaction, this time to YouTube channel, RoyaltyIsHere, to the indie VTuber group, VTards, and with a name like that, the associated “talents” were swinging at the fences. Waking up and choosing absolute violence.

It’s times like these I wish I had the Discord-style unique emojis/emoticons

The short version is that five VTubers formed a group with the goal of going against the grain of what was considered politically correct, i.e. an edgy forum welcome on the internet in the late 1990s or early 2000s when the general attitude was f[keyboard]k authority, f[drum roll]k the man, as a result of the whole grunge era fighting back against the consumer age of decades past. And I’d welcome more of that, but the controversy that swamped the group since debut had to do not just with their deliberate attempts to arouse controversy but mostly in what they believed.

I promise I’m not s[neighing]ting you when I say that one of them held neo-Nazi beliefs, larping as Hatsune Miku’s evil twin: Nachisu Miku. Along with another member allegedly commission loli art of Anya Forger from Spy X Family, only more disturbingly erotic.

Side note: Emoticons are an artform that need to return; I’m honestly not certain if these Google-searched images are effective for a topic like this

Regrettably or fortunately depending on how your wheels turn, the group was short-lived. Soon after Royalty’s video, the group had fallen apart. There are VTubers who arouse controversy without meaning to. SmugAlana, whom I mentioned plenty here, does so simply because she grew up speaking Russian to her family, leading to the absolutely false assessment (on Reddit and Twitter) that she’s a shill for Putin’s Russia. Call me biased because I’m subbed to her, but I don’t recall any reverence or pride in Putin’s government. After Alana comes Leaflit & Asari, a mother-daughter VTuber duo, mostly run by the daughter, Leaflit. The two are Japanese-Americans from California who’ve since relocated to Butt-Kiss, Texas (I think), and while SmugAlana tends to cover whatever crosses her feed, politics notwithstanding, Leaflit does have a clear slant covering current events. The lion’s share of her content is some kind of political-babble, which I say requires a specific type of mindset. If you live on the internet, move out. This shouldn’t be treated as a hotel and I shouldn’t have to explain why.

But seriously, even if you lean one way politically, exposing yourself to multiple points of view can broaden your worldview. I bring this up because the permanent internet residents regularly attempt to target Leaflit & Asari for harassment with erroneous connections to the American far-right. Yeah, I’ve taken the piss out of this corner of the internet on this blog before and the only thing I take seriously about them is that they take their own convictions very seriously. But like their enemies who fled to South America after World War II (they don’t know they exist on Twitter), or who they think are their enemies (they think they’re a laughingstock, all things considered), this part of the internet isn’t worth committing to memory.

An even more politically active, current events VTuber, with a crazy associated lore, Kirsche Verstahl. She also courts controversy, half the time for content like Rev Says Desu and the other half because her detractors, more or less, lie through their teeth about her. I don’t follow her as closely as the other two or however many I named here or before, but nonetheless, Kirsche, Leaflit, SmugAlana and others who’ve incited unnecessary controversy are all the proof you need to know that their detractors and haters don’t watch them whatsoever, merely parroting lies about them. A time-honored tradition of lying about someone you hate because your desire to see them fail can only get so strong.

If nature birthed the concept of hatred, humanity made it an art form a million times over

All in all, VTubers are another arm of the idol industry with its unique rules and controversies and myriad of personalities. While not under the same limitations put on idol groups like, for instance, AKB48, thanks to the fantasy angle of the VTuber model, different circumstances surround the individual VTuber and associations they fall under. There’s tons of variety in who you choose to view on a regular basis. There is one more VTuber I wanna recommend before I close this post out: Scarle Yonaguni.

https://www.twitch.tv/scarleyonaguni

https://youtube.com/@scarleyonaguni?si=537-iDpDPfe9sVGc

Like I said, many of these VTubers stream more on Twitch than they upload individually produced videos. Find them there if you can spare the hours.

Also, you may notice that the overwhelming majority of these VTubers are female and tend to have massive boobs for their models. Male VTubers are often and sadly lacking in the audience count. After nearly a decade, it’s still a majority female-creator/male-viewer space with no obvious signs that the tides are changing save for NuxTaku, Rev Says Desu, and Hero Hei who are some of the only male VTubers I can name.

The Wonders of Golden Kamuy

Tiberius1 Comment

A near-perfectly balanced dramady

As both a history buff and a weeb, I like to think that history can work well even in graphic novel form. I’d bring proof, but so many political cartoons and, as mentioned before, graphic novels, have come out that the proof is everywhere you look. Here’s one of my favorite examples:

For the topic of this post (and something more lighthearted), I bring to you the manga series Golden Kamuy.

Created by Satoru Noda, Golden Kamuy is about a former Imperial Japanese soldier and Russo-Japanese war veteran named Saichi Sugimoto. After his military contract expires, Sugimoto hears from an ex-convict about a complicated story involving a legendary convict who hid a large stash of gold from the Ainu people of northern Japan, Hokkaido, and the Kuril Islands. When he was caught, he tattooed a map onto nearly 40 other convicts, each of whom is a specialist in his own right. After this, the prisoners were set to be relocated to another prison in the north of Japan, but the guards were ambushed and the convicts went into hiding. Sugimoto doesn’t buy into the story at first, but when the ex-con reveals that he’s one of the dozens tattooed by the legendary convict, he reveals the tattooist as “Noppera-bo.”

So far, we’ve got some interesting and familiar hooks, don’t we? A retired soldier searching for treasure, interactions with indigenous people groups, a changing political landscape, and slight spoilers for later, competing groups with similar interests. Almost sounds like a western… A story that fantastical would normally disappear into legend until you meet undeniable proof of its existence, but before we delve deeper into that, I want to discuss the historical background on which the manga is based.

Very briefly oversimplifying, Russo-Japanese relations in the early 20th century, the Russian and Japanese empires, both had conflicting interests in East Asia: for Russia, they wanted warm water ports and more land for the Trans-Siberian railway, and for Japan, they wanted to maintain political influence over East Asia, particularly Korea–but so did Russia. War broke out due to these conflicts and Russia maintaining a military presence in Manchuria when the original promise was for them to demobilize.

By 1905, the Theodore Roosevelt administration brokered a peace between the two powers that saw Japan as the victor, gaining the southern half of Sakhalin Island, political influence on the Korean peninsula, while Russia had to abandon its railway plans and its warm water port in Asia, the former of these later becoming Japan’s Southern Manchuria Railway which connected to that warm water port of Port Arthur.

Golden Kamuy is set in the aftermath of this. The fighting is long done away with, but the outside influences do have an impact on the characters. Keep in mind that decades before Japan went to blows with Russia, it was busy organizing itself into a modern country, and its first step was the reorganization of domestic territory into the modern day prefectures, all the while convincing the last of the samurai and feudal lords to surrender their holdings. Many did, but there were still a few holdouts, the most famous of them was the Vice Commander of the Shinsengumi, a hastily organized group of swordsmen with samurai sponsorship: Hijikata Toshizo.

This was all done during the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s. Although Golden Kamuy is decades after that, select characters with strong memories of the pre-Meiji days do still hang around. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the manga takes several liberties with history and some characters’ roles in specific events. Since I bring him up, Hijikata does appear in the manga, and is a part of a few flashback panels, but in the manga he appears as an old man and political prisoner since the Shinsengumi opposed the Meiji government. In real life, Hijikata Toshizo was shot dead on horseback while commanding troops in a major theatre of the Boshin War.

For the rest of the population of Japan, the Japanese government and media these days tend to promote an image of a homogenous populace, but reality is far different than what you’d believe. I briefly brought them up earlier, but the Ainu people are another central piece to the manga. The prisoner called “Noppera-bo” or “No Face” was the one who buried their gold in a hidden location and it takes the help of numerous Ainu peoples to help locate it. The Ainu people typically includes the indigenous groups found often in northern Japan and Hokkaido as mentioned before, but there are similar related groups elsewhere, on Sakhalin and in Russian Manchuria. These include but are not limited to the Uilta/Oroks, the Nivkh, the Nanai, and many more. One of these characters whom Sugimoto meets in Golden Kamuy is a little girl named Asirpa.

Asirpa serves as the audience’s window to an ethnic group that Japan has at best ignored and at worst disrespected. In history, the Yamato people of Japan gradually fought with them even into the Tokugawa Shogunate where they were forcefully relocated to Tohoku and Hokkaido. During the Meiji government in 1899, non-Japanese who were subjects of Japan (including the then-recently added Taiwan and soon to be added Korea) were forced to adopt Japanese names and use those publicly. True to this, even Asirpa has a Japanese name that would have to be used on official documents, as explained in her associated wiki page.

Nevertheless, love and appreciation for Ainu culture is evident and expressed in the Ainu characters, especially Asirpa when she explains language, naming customs, rituals, folk beliefs and several others. The name given to that convict who tattooed the map onto his fellow prisoners, Noppera-bo, is a reference to a Japanese spirit or “yokai.” The yokai come in a wide range of forms and depending on the legend, some are harmless or vicious. The Noppera-bo is described as a harmless yokai that takes the form of a human, only they have no face. Sorta like this:

Though as explained before, it normally takes the shape of a faceless human.

Regarding Ainu customs, the most famous aspect of the series among fans is the cuisine. It’s a common joke to refer to the series as a cooking show, which isn’t exactly inaccurate. Playing dodge bullet with loads of contentious groups is a key point of the series, but when there’s enough Arisaka rifle rounds flying for one scene, the next one transitions to Noda’s briefest possible tutorial on Ainu cooking, like so.

Channel: Crunchyroll Collection

It may seem insignificant plot-wise considering where the story takes our main leads, but funny enough, there’s a healthy hosting of food scenes throughout the series. Noda explained that much of his experience comes from growing up in Hokkaido as an ethnic Japanese. The conceptualization and characterization of the Ainu in particular comes both from his own experiences, which he admitted were limited and from research, which there’s a lot of.

The characters as a whole are all varied more so in personality than in ethnic group, though there’s a couple of the latter such as the Matagi, or traditional winter hunters also in Tohoku, or even people with varied accents and dialects, notably Satsuma dialect.

Although Japan also promotes a singular dialect of Standard Japanese, there’s a variety of accents in the archipelago. Like the U.S. or U.K., there’s often different words for many of the same thing like soda, pop, or coke in many U.S. regions or what lunch in dinner are called in different parts of the U.K.

Personality wise, the characters all differ in what they want the Ainu gold for. Sugimoto made a promise with a wartime and childhood friend that he’d look after his wife who moved to the United States who was at risk of going blind. A mutinous faction of soldiers, led by 1st Lieutenant Tokushiro Tsurumi, a vengeful intelligence officer, wants the gold to fund a separatist state in Hokkaido to spite the Meiji government. Asirpa was influenced by her father and another Ainu character to also use the gold to separate the Ainu from Japan but for different reasons, and some characters never reveal the truth of their intentions with the gold.

For the most part, the characters are in some way based on real life characters from history. Some are obvious like Hijikata Toshizo living for another 40 years in this universe, and others require some more research to determine their inspirations. My favorite has to be the character Yoshitake Shiraishi who was based on the similarly named prisoner and escape artist, Yoshie Shiratori. Like his inspiration, Shiraishi is described as a master escape artist, finding creative and innovative ways to get out of a jam from contorting his joints to making false keys and using lockpicks. You’d probably need a rotating body of prison guards to keep him in place.

Between Shiraishi and Tsurumi, these characters are both unique and not unique. Their quirks make them stand out from regular background characters, but there’s a bunch of characters who match that description anyone. Sugimoto, for example, gained fame during the war as the Immortal Sugimoto and has thus carried this nomme de guerre in the civilian world. Tsurumi and select soldiers within his unit — 27th Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division — are all quirky as well. One might describe it as a circus of sorts. And this is a similar case concerning the prisoners who carry the map on their bodies.

Just about everyone is a specialist in some singular skill or trade. This may make them one-trick ponies by themselves, but there’s a lot of moments where they get to shine independently or in mixed company. Asirpa, for one, may initially seem like a monolithic standard-bearer for the Ainu, especially since she’s introduced with an old and negative stereotype of indigenous people groups from westerns, but both her and the rest of the Ainu presented don’t seem to adhere fully to these misconceptions.

Similar to the Amerindians in the Americas, the Ainu and other people groups in North Asia would’ve spent their lives directly or indirectly interacting with non-indigenous folks, fighting, trading, working, befriending them among other things. They would’ve been exposed to foreign customs and technology sooner or later, hence why during the Manifest Destiny era of the U.S., bands and tribes of American Indians would have fought back with the same rifles that were being used on them. Off the battlefield, cooking and craftsmanship have also caught up with the times, so old depictions of indigenous folk as backwards and removed are just that: they’re old and quite inaccurate.

My introduction to the series came from some old Funimation ads in 2018. At the same time as my anime speedrun during college, bouncing between Crunchyroll, Funimation, and the now defunct VRV, the ads for then-recently adapted Golden Kamuy were showing and initially, I wasn’t that interested. Most people weren’t either. No matter how high the marks, the average viewer would’ve been looking for “time well spent.” This conflicts with the overall negative opinion of CG in anime and with most of the ads depicting Sugimoto’s battle with a CGI bear, prospective audiences were initially turned off.

Then I started watching in 2019 and continued to do so during the pandemic. My opinions on CG have been somewhat influenced by those expressed online, but in all honesty, if it looks good and it means the animators don’t have to crunch to get an episode out, then it can work well for an anime production, and I feel it does here. I honestly didn’t realize the bear was CG until a few frames in. Just goes to show how rare and at times apprehensive studios can be about integrating this technology into a production.

The manga concluded in April 2022, but the anime recently wrapped up it’s fourth season in June after taking a hiatus out of respect for a treasured cast member’s passing in November 2022. A fifth season is currently in development, though as of writing there’s no release date. This is ample time to go through the anime and then continue in the manga or start the manga and compare/contrast the anime. Whatever works best for you.

It’s a month divisible by 2, and the last of the year so as a final sendoff, December’s first YouTube recommendation gets to the heart of a topic I have in store for next week: Cynical Historian.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN5mhhJYPcNUKBMZkR5Nfzg

The Cynical Historian is a YouTube channel that covers the history of the American Southwest primarily, and other topics in history secondarily. Started in March 2013, by former Army cavalry scout and noted historian Joseph Hall-Patton, the Cynical Historian has himself produced lessons and dissertations on his specialty in the American Southwest, namely violence and conflict, sometimes touching on the historicity of the local American Indian groups and figures active during the era. He runs a tight ship on his YouTube channel and has little tolerance for bigotry, hatred, or conspiracy theories of any kind.

One series he does that I recommend above all else is his Based on a True Story series that compares and contrasts historical moments and their silver screen depictions. Since the most recent video he did was in the lead up to the theatrical release of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon film, I suspect that a Based on a True Story video on the little corporal is somewhere in the pipeline, but without clairvoyance, I can’t say more. Be sure to check him out when you find the time.

Before I sign off proper, I had another video lined up emphasizing the surprising significance of food in Golden Kamuy, but couldn’t put it anywhere above, so I’ll link it down here.

Channel: BOOFIRE191