Thousands of hours of content uploaded daily and yet there was still nothing of interest to be found. The Youtube* homepage was as barren as ever. Harper could only sigh as she hovered over the same analysis video of her favorite anime that she'd watched four years ago. Click. A young man's voice would blast through her headphones, muffled slightly by the sound of a visual novel's BGM** she had been playing for the past twelve hours.
Absent-mindedly she'd scroll down and check the top comments of the video. For some reason the video had been in her recommended section of the website nonstop for the past week. Perhaps there was a new season of the anime coming out? Surely she would have heard about it though. It would have been natural for the show to get countless Youtube videos gushing about all the possibilities and theorizing what would happen next. Yet there hadn't been. Not that she had seen anyways.
"This is the crap Erin is doing a collab with? It's so cliché!" 10 upvotes.
"Anyone else here because they want to support Erizu-sama but don't want to bother watching a whole anime?" 25 upvotes.
"It's actually pretty good. I don't know why everyone is bashing it so much. Vtuber fans are the worst." 5 upvotes.
Vtuber? The term faintly rang a bell. Perhaps she'd seen the word while on social media at some point. It was something anime related, right? Probably. With not much to lose she'd head to Google and type in "Vtuber Erin". Immediately images of a cute blonde girl appeared on stream. "Erizu Erin", an article on a Wikia*** began, "Is a virtual Youtuber from Japan that streams on Youtube and Bilibili.**** She often streams in Japanese and Chinese. She's part of an agency known as WINTER DREAM."
There were paragraphs upon paragraphs of information. Every movement in her career had been dutifully recorded and archived by presumably the most dedicated of her fans. Clicking on the channel links lead to hundreds of videos with titles indecipherable for someone who only knew English. But the thumbnails were recognizable at least, most of the time. One of them had a drawing of the cute blonde girl eating what appeared to be a wasp. Another video was her playing the latest edition in a long line of first person shooter games, her avatar bearing a sloppily drawn shotgun.
Clicking on the videos would lead to disappointment for the first few minutes. Idly clicking through the hour long video's first ten minutes only to see the same "Starting Soon" words and dozen pieces of what was presumably fan art over and over again. Yet after managing to find the exact second where those words faded into show a girl playing a simple game of Minecraft, it was instantly fascinating. The character would bob up and down as a cute girlish voice would shout "ZU~UD MORNING!". Her long platinum blonde locks bounced up and down and the ribbons of her dress would jiggle like gelatin. In the girl's hand was a scepter, and as she rocked side to side it was almost like she was using to command the thousands of people in her chatroom that she deemed "Pezunts". What a comically terrible name.
Comedy seemed to be this loud girl's shtick. She'd overreact to everything, speak in broken English to try and impress her audience, and burst into improvised songs one might expect a child to sing on the playground. At one point in the game she'd angle the camera up the skirt of another player, then whip the camera back and start loudly scolding her chat for being so perverted.
In almost an instant, despite hardly understanding anything, the livestream was over. Like that an hour had passed and Harper's Youtube recommended page was now littered with videos put out by Erizu Erin and dozens of fan translations of her content. Another hour would go by of Harper clicking through livestream clips and animated versions of Erizu Erin's best moments. There were song covers, collaboration events, announcement videos and merchandise releases.
Before she knew it Harper had spent the entire rest of the day watching her new favorite vtuber.
*Youtube: A famous video uploading site. Home to countless vtubers.
**BGM: Background music in a video game or stream.
***Wikia: A small community version of Wikipedia. Fans can create easy to read and organized sites to house the intricate details of media that might otherwise be too niche for a proper wikipedia page.
****Bilbili: A famous streaming platform in China.