Yuki Tanaka was once an ordinary office worker... Which, by Japanese standards, means she was overworked, underpaid, and exploited down to the bone. At least, she was, until she quit the rat race and decided to become a Vtuber instead! Assuming the name Awayuki Kokorone, and portraying a prim and proper winter spirit, she hides her true nature behind the gentle exterior of a beautiful avatar. This persona fails to gain traction in a notoriously over-saturated market, and she begins to fall behind the other third-generation members of the Agency Live-On! until one fateful night, after concluding her regular activities and cracking open a few cans of her favorite beer, she drops her mask and enters gremlin mode, switching between a few of her coworkers’ streams while perving out to them... Which does not go unnoticed, as she forgot to end her stream. Well, it’s too late to go back, so Yuki will have to charge forward with her much more popular drunk persona as she opens new doors, and finds brand new opportunities awaiting her!
I’ve mentioned the animation studio TNK before, and it wasn’t in the most promising context. I said, years ago, in my School Days review, that their best looking project was probably Highschool DXD, which while not necessarily a bad looking show, still wasn’t exactly setting a high bar. Well, I’m happy to say that Vtuber Legend does in fact raise that bar. That’s not to say it looks like any kind of high budget show, but a lot of effort clearly went into making it look as good as it could for what it is. There’s usually not a ton of movement on screen, but through some really smart direction and budget allocation, that’s nowhere close to a problem for this production. This is, after all, a show about Vtubers, so the animators were able to get by with a plethora of key frames, chibi humor, and cheap CGI that looks all the more authentic for being as cheap as it is.
With so many long conversations going on through each episode, and most of the comedy revolving around over-reactions and dirty jokes, there had to be a ton of money left over to make all of the necessary movements in between this content look as smooth as it needed to. The actual design work is impressive as well, feeling not only bright, colorful and pleasing to the eye, but also highly authentic in its presentation of a fictional Japanese Vtuber agency. The characters look exactly like what you’d expect from such a source, taking classic anime tropes and applying a tasteful amount of visual cues towards whatever their gimmicks are, decking each one out in one or two main colors that complement each other well. I like how the level of detail and sophistication of the designs increase with each generation, as well. The facial expressions are also diverse and consistently on point. The only visual choice I really don’t like was that the Vtuber characters look identical both on and offline, but we’ll talk about that later. For now, it’s a really good looking show, and easily TNK’s most impressive effort.
I’m also happy to say that the English dub is quite nice as well. The dubbing for this series was handled by Crunchyroll, and while I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t cast actual Vtubers... What a mindfuck that would’ve been... They did hire a nice blend of well known and less appreciated actors. Or at least, there’s a ton of actors here that I’m unfamiliar with. I’ve never heard of Hayden Davaiu outside of Goblin Slayer, but she does a fantastic job in the lead role, making both sides of Yuki’s personality feel equally natural and believable, and when she goes into drunk mode, she is beautifully unhinged. I have a little more experience with Sarah Wiedenheft, and she stands out as Mashiro, a snarky character whose deceptively monotonous voice does contain some depth.
It's basically the kind of role I would usually expect to be played by Jad Saxton, but Sarah nails it. I don’t have any other individual notes, it’s a large cast, but as far as I could tell, there were no sour notes in the crowd, and the adaptive writing contained just the right amount of modern slang to not feel cringe. Good work overall.
A Vtuber, if you didn’t know, is an online personality who hides their face behind a motion-capture avatar. It’s an expensive line of work to get into, and it can take a long, long time to take off, especially considering just how overwhelming the amount of competition is. It’s a job that requires your full commitment and confidence, and you’d have to build up a significant following just to break even. I personally got into Vtubers in late 2020, and I’m not the only one, because Vtubers exploded into the mainstream during the pandemic. I started off with Nyanners, who joined Vshojo like a month later, and then I found Gawr Gura, who dragged me kicking and screaming into Hololive, so it's fair to say that my horizons expanded massively in a very short period of time. I’ve only gotten a little into the Japanese side of things, but it turns out I’ve seen at least enough of it to come into this series with a deeper appreciation for the subject matter than I would have otherwise.
I never expected anyone would make an anime about Vtubers, with the exception of the occasional low-budget shorts that Hololive puts out, but when I heard one did exist, I was intrigued by the possibilities of a fictional approach to this huge global phenomenon that I’ve been into for four long years. Just imagine, we could get a fictionalized look at the duality between Vtubers and their real life counterparts... What their lives are like off camera, how their daily struggles play into their streams, the way the dynamic between two friends changes on and off camera... The concept is a lot like professional wrestling, with kayfabe defining the difference between what you see in the ring and what you don’t see behind the scenes, with actors mainly playing extreme versions of themselves, leaving you to wonder just how much of it is really them, and how much is an act. How much of a feud is thought up by writers, and how much of it is based on real life drama? There are so many possibilities for this kind of anime series, and in the end, they decided to do fuck-all with it.
Well, okay, to be fair, the actual premise of the series is pretty clever. You’ve got a Vtuber accidentally dropping her mask and being herself, and as a result, her career takes off in new and unexpected ways, that’s a genuinely great idea. Here’s the problem, though... The writers play this card way too early, and once it’s played, they have nothing left in the deck. First off, Yuki’s mishap begins three minutes into the first episode, including the opening song. She’s introduced before this through her viewers watching her on screen, and we don’t find out anything about her until after the mishap has already begun. We only get a few lines about how poorly she’s doing as a Vtuber, and how close to broke she is, and she doesn’t sound all that upset. This is all problematic for many reasons, chief among them being that while these proceedings are funny... They are... it’s set up in such a way that you’re not really given any reason to become emotionally invested in the character. This idea would have been executed a lot better if she had forgotten to turn off her stream towards the end of the episode, so we could have developed a familiarity with her circumstances prior.
At some point, the novelty of how her new dual persona has changed her career is going to wear off... It took three episodes for me. After that, this series doesn’t have much left in the tank. Don’t get me wrong, what happened to her in the first episode would be a huge deal IRL, but Vtuber news is not slow enough for people to still be gushing about it months later. For the entire series, people obsess over Yuki, both fans and colleagues alike, as everyone she interacts with is either in love with her or passionately inspired by her, even though from a writing standpoint she plateaus as a character and stops developing very early on, making it difficult to see her as anything other than a degenerate Mary-Sue. Almost the entire series, she faces no real hardships or struggles other than her own insecurities, and her entire story is just a constant cycle of stream, collab, fetish, stream, collab, fetish. I’ve never really given much thought to what a scripted Vtuber stream would look like, but apparently they’re really fucking boring. Why would you watch that, with an infinite amount of unscripted Vtuber content just sitting there on Youtube?
Why would anyone want to watch a group of interchangeable one-note characters play through a session of some non-sensical Among Us clone, when they could just watch actual Vtubers play Among Us? And while we’re on that subject, did they imply in this episode that one of the characters has the ability to go invisible in any game she plays? Was I not supposed to take that literally?
Speaking of Vtuber streams, I would say that coming into this series as a long time Vtuber fan is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good, because you’re already familiar with some concepts that the series doesn’t do a great job of explaining, but it’s bad, because you know a lot of details about the industry that the writers either slept on or tried to gloss over. Now, there are a ton of Vtuber agencies out there, but only three that have achieved any real success: There’s Nijisanji, which is going through a huge downfall. There’s Vshojo, the primary American agency, which has had its ups and downs. And there’s Hololive, the OG, the most well known, successful, and important agency to the rise of Vtubing over the years. This is just an assumption of mine, but based on the overall presentation of Live-On!, the fictitious agency in Vtuber Legend, Hololive is what that agency is supposed to be based on, although that comparison is more than a little questionable.
Every Vtuber agency has gone through some kind of controversy, and as big as Hololive is, they’ve become notorious for making their talents sign some considerably strict contracts. With very little exception, they do not let you choose your own personas or avatars, so some of the circumstances surrounding Yuki’s casting seem laughable in hindsight. The character Alice Souma mentions during her debut that she used to belong to an Idol group, but publicly acknowledging a past or alternate persona is a strict nono for Hololive talents. They’re also pretty strict about the direction they want their talent to go in, which is why Ceres Fauna from the American branch had to graduate when they started insisting she focus more on singing and dancing than streaming and ASMR. Oh, and it’s called Graduation, not Retirement. As much as Live On! was visually designed to resemble Hololive, the way it treats its talents seems far more reminiscent of Vshojo.
Vtuber fans are also a lot more terrifying than this show makes them out to be, like, they can be as vicious as Kpop stans. Vtubers have had their careers destroyed for simply having boyfriends, or for calling Taiwan a country. I’m not saying Yuki’s change in direction wouldn’t have steered her down a more profitable path, but the vocal few fans who refuse to accept that change would have posed a much more prominent threat. I’m talking about death threats, harrassment campaigns, stalkers... Well, this show does feature a stalker, actually, but all she does is find out where Yuki lives and go around to all the local convenience stores to buy out their stock of Yuki’s favorite beer so she can’t activate her other persona, the monster. Hey, remember when an obsessed fan put a tracker in a gift, gave it to Vtuber Camila at a convention, and then showed up at her house in the middle of a stream with a fucking sledgehammer, forcing her to activate her panic button and have him arrested, and she couldn’t return to her home for weeks afterwards? Yeah, stalkers are a very real threat and it feels at least mildly uncomfortable to ME that this anime treats it so lightly, and I’m not even the one at risk.
But wait, you ask, how did this stalker know where she lived? I don’t fucking know, but this does seem like a good place to return to that issue I said we’d come back to later, the creative decision to portray the Vtuber characters as looking identical their avatars IRL, because this anime cannot decide for the life of itself whether this detail is diegetic or not. It might just be a stylistic choice, because actual people are represented as headless game pieces, and if they ARE Vtubers, we don’t see what they look like until Yuki recognizes them. On the other hand, there’s literally no other explanation for how the stalker found out where Yuki lived or where she shopped, and we learn almost nothing about any of these characters outside of their Vtuber personas. Wikipedia tells me that Yuki had a bad relationship with her parents, who died in a car crash, and if that detail was mentioned in the series, it went right the fuck over my head.
Another issue this creative choice bleeds into is the LGBT element of the series. Now, I will again clarify that I am in no way a Vtuber expert, but it doesn’t take long to realize that there is a ton of queerbaiting in the Vtuber industry. The vast majority of Vtubers are female, and the vast majority of their fans are male, so it should come as no surprise that Vtubers will often act really flirty or even outright lewd with each other, presenting the suggestion of lesbian or bisexual connections, but it’s almost never serious. It’s extremely rare for Japanese Vtubers to clarify their actual sexual preferences, not only because fans aren’t exactly entitled to that information, but because to acknowledge a queer identity would shatter the illusion, and you’d have to address how you’re living out your identity in a country that still hasn’t largely accepted LGBT rights. For the record, it’s a lot more common for American Vtubers to talk candidly about this aspect of their identities, but even here, the flirting is mostly just for show.
Why is this a big deal for this anime? Because right in the early episodes, when Yuki was openly proposing marriage and sex to her gen mates, I kept waiting for literally anyone, from those gen mates to her fans, to ask the one question that would shatter the illusory veil over the series... “Are you gay?” Because for her to actually have to clarify whether she was flirting with her friends as a joke, or was actually attracted to the same sex, would have required the writing to get a lot smarter, and really fucking fast. To actually address that part of her identity, and how it affected her life. But it never happens, no matter how many declarations of love are thrown around throughout the series, none of it ever leads to anything, because none of it ever means anything. By Vtuber standards, there is a strong possibility that every single one of these characters as written is 100% straight, and that’s what you want from an anime that reportedly has strong LGBTQ themes, right?
But alas, you’re not allowed to see these Vtubers as actual people. There is no depth whatsoever to their lives outside of Vtubing. It honestly feels like this anime portrays Vtubing the way a big agency like Hololive... Or more likely its parent company, Cover Corp... Would want the industry to be portrayed. The talent have no lives outside of Vtubing, unless it makes the agency look good for improving their situations. There’s no competition, the talent are all legitimate best friends, and the agency is super supportive about letting them be themselves. The talent gets flirty with each other, which is super sexy, but don’t worry, they’re still theoretically available for you. This series has nothing to say about Vtubing that’s actually worth saying. I guess it’s possible that I’m being unfair to what’s probably the first real anime about Vtubers, but have you ever seen an anime about online gaming that didn’t explore the real life personas of the players to some degree? Even the worst of them get a LITTLE psychological about that duality, so I don’t think I’m asking for much here. I don’t hate this show, but I see what it could have been, and I am damn disappointed by how far off the mark it fell.
Vtuber Legend: How I Went Viral After Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream is available from Crunchyroll. The original light novels by Nana Nanato are available stateside from NA: J-Novel Club, and a manga adaptation is available from Kadokawa Shoten.
The first few episodes of this series were, to be fair, very entertaining. A lot of that was due to the shock factor of the premise, and the unexpected ways that Yuki’s new persona affected her career. Unfortunately, this novelty was not strong enough to carry a twelve episode series, which is unfortunately what it tried to do. I don’t necessarily need a plot for an anime to be engaging, but even the most uneventful slice of life anime that I’ve ever seen had some kind of conflict, some kind of struggle, and characters who wanted or needed things that you, as the viewer, were supposed to root for them to overcome or accomplish, and this series has absolutely none of that. Its premise, while an intriguing one, only keeps your interest for a few episodes before it runs out of steam, leaving you with around nine episodes of scripted, barely entertaining Vtuber streams that will make you wish you were watching the real thing. This show could have been a lot of things, but all it wound up being was vapid and shallow.
I give Vtuber Legend: How I Went Viral After Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream a 4/10
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