>>7151209>the mixture of fiction and reality that vtubers createthis is something chuubas exemplify rather than create: they are the extreme case of many already extant phenomena.
you could approach this from at least 3 points of view:
>1) socialpeople already formed connections to people they never met, be it to individuals or abstract "communities", but with streamers the "distance" or "separation" is much smaller: reading about your favourite celeb's personal life on a gossip rag is very different to watching them do things in real time and possibly interacting with them through chat. this is made more prominent by the vtubers being "idealised" streamers compared to regular streamers. this means they can manage their public-facing and private reality ("ura" and "omote") to a whole new degree.
>2) epistemologicalhuman consciousness is already the application of a layer of fiction on reality to make the world understandable, but art, especially as heavy on symbolic representation (eyes don't look like actual eyes but symbols of eyes) as anime-style art this is very apparent. the symbols are "realer" than the actual thing they represent. the line between "character real" and naka-no-hito real is another complication, where it depends on the streamer how deep they are into the "kayfabe" or how they manage this line. Shigure Ui is an interesting case in this since her character is herself with her actual name (with the caveat that her "pen name" and chuuba name is full hiragana) afaik. Ui's bestie Tamaki/Norio is another fun case.
>3) phenomenologicalvtubers could be thought of as yet another postmodern deconstruction of what it is to "be" ("what does it mean to be human" is an incredibly popular subject in japanese media). again, a spectrum from fictional character, actor acting a fictional character, regular streamer having a stream character and so on.
tl;dr read debord
