>>8620234I'll put this in another perspective.
The idea of a vtuber as a character entirely divorced from the 'real' person is ridiculous when most of their stories are their real-life experiences run through a thin veneer of kayfabe. Coincidentally, when the 'real person' is tired because she stayed up late, the 'character' is also tired because she stayed up late? When the 'real person' is angry about disrespectful elements of their audience, the 'character' is also angry about disrespectful elements of their audience? If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck...
In fact, you might not have been around here back then, but the thread was absolutely pissed off about Gura's first zatsudan. She answered everything almost completely in character. "I'm a shark, I don't know anything about your surface world! Huhaha". It was not how 'things are done'.
If a vtuber goes that route, the fallout from being exposed is minimal. Everyone can tell they are "fake". But because the person behind the character needs material to talk about, in most cases they clearly convey their real feelings and experiences, albeit amplified or made more palatable.
Even then, there is nothing wrong with a relationship - yet. The trouble comes when you express thoughts or make up stories directly contradictory with your real life, when everything else was pulled from there - mixing falsehood, implied or not, with truth. It creates inconsistency.
If Fred Rogers had been found to be a heavy alcoholic who made raunchy and borderline offensive comments in public, while telling children on television that civility and self-respect are fundamentally important, do you think he would have been let off by the public with "well, Mr. Rogers is just a character he plays on TV"? Rogers' case is particularly relatable because he wrote and directed all his own epsiodes.
So, if a vtuber tells the audience that she is 'lonely', when in reality, she isn't, this is something that creates gross dissonance in the perception of the character when it is found out. A lesser example would be waxing poetic to the audience on the painfulness of having no friends when you hang out with them every week, and a grossly more damaging example would be, say, a streamer who claims to be paralyzed spontaneously standing up in the middle of his stream. The believability of the character is heavily damaged, and you can argue until you're blue in the face that it shouldn't be, but that's not how reality works.
