Demonstrates how VTuber talents create their online personas through interactions with agencies and fans, indicating a new framework for understanding these digital identities.
In recent years, Virtual YouTubers (also known as VTubers) – human content creators who primarily perform and interact with online audiences as 2D or 3D avatars – have experienced a meteoric rise in prominence and popularity on YouTube and other livestreaming platforms. Existing literature on VTubers have characterised this new form of digitally mediated celebrity as perpetual and unsettled personas collectively enacted between online users. However, missing from these accounts is the role of VTuber agencies, as they do not meaningfully distinguish between independent VTubers and VTuber talents (VTubers who are employed under talent agencies). As such, this paper proposes a new analytical framework – kawaii kayfabe – for understanding the collective construction of VTuber talents’ online personas between agencies, talents, and fans. By analysing the online performances of hololive Indonesia’s Vestia Zeta across YouTube and X (formerly Twitter), this paper demonstrates how VTuber talents are conceived as kawaii assemblages by their Japanese employers, as well as how their human performers embody their kawaii-ness to co-construct their online personas.
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Lee Choo Sum (2026) studied this question.
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