Cacozelia

On Parasocial Grief and the Question of What a VTuber Actually Is

2026-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Any attempt to understand grief tied to parasocial attachment among VTuber fans must begin by setting aside the instinct to dismiss it as existential whimsy. While mourning a digital persona may appear frivolous from the outside, the phenomenon is psychologically and socially real.

After analyzing 13,655 English-language Reddit posts and comments, Lee et al. found that VTuber graduation can evoke a range of intense emotional responses constituting a form of grief that's both authentic and comparable to bereavement following the loss of a loved one. The authors conclude that these reactions stem from the audience’s deeply invested parasocial relationships, cultivated through repeated interactive engagement.

Before addressing the emotional dysregulation associated with grief in the VTuber milieu, we need to first consider the statistical framework through which the study’s empirical results were established. Binomial regression models with a logit link were used to analyze binary outcomes... (I’ll spare you the full methodological detour unless you’re into that sort of thing.)

The paper adheres to a conventional HCI structure and is scrupulously researched. It poses questions that are well-motivated by gaps in existing literature, particularly the lack of attention given to VTubers as a case distinct from celebrities in parasocial relationship-related studies.

However, this distinction between “graduation” and “termination” is largely borrowed from the Virtual YouTuber fandom wiki’s categorization of retired VTubers and is introduced without substantial elaboration. This effectively amounts to a form of folk taxonomy elevated to scholarly usage through convenience.

Another limitation is the paper’s evident selection bias. The authors choose to ground their analysis in only two emblematic cases meant to contrast graduation and termination: Kiryu Coco and Uruha Rushia. While analyzing a small number of cases is methodologically allowable, the selection of two exceptionally prominent and historically consequential cases introduces a limitation on generalizability.

Coco’s graduation was anything but uneventful and followed a period of significant tension within the community. Rushia’s case, by contrast, involved termination for alleged contract violations. These are not representative of the broader range of VTuber graduations and terminations.

This would still fail to account for the graduations of smaller VTubers. Although the affective response to the retirement of creators with millions of followers is predictably magnified by audience size, examining graduations among lesser-known VTubers may yield analytically “cleaner” results precisely because of the reduced scope and density of participation.

The paper applies parasocial relationship theory somewhat sloppily. While the authors provide a competent exposition of PSR, they don’t sufficiently interrogate how parasocial structures may be transformed when the subject of interaction is a VTuber.

Unlike typical streamers, VTubers frequently occupy a dual performative function, combining entertainment with affective companionship, thereby generating parasocial bonds of distinct intensity and structure. Community-specific notions such as the Girlfriend Experience and Boyfriend Experience are pervasive within VTuber culture.

The paper further restricts its scope to female VTubers with predominantly male audiences, leaving unexamined the possibility that parasocial responses may differ in cases involving male VTubers and predominantly female fanbases.

Initially, my intention was to draw primarily on the paper’s conclusion, but reading it generated a growing number of additional questions. I was initially misled by the person who shared the link on Discord, along with the surrounding discussion that incorrectly framed the text as the authoritative analysis of VTuber-induced parasocial grief.

I reckon many place too much faith in academic papers and in academia as a whole, or at least mistakenly assume that it can provide a complete, all-encompassing overview of something that is fundamentally interdisciplinary. It cannot. What it can offer instead are incremental contributions.

Notwithstanding my earlier grievances, Lee et al. have provided a useful foundational text. Their primary conclusion is sound: VTuber retirements trigger identifiable grief reactions among audiences.

This leaves us with three pressing questions to resolve:

Why does this occur?</li>
What, precisely, is it that grief takes as its object?</li>
And, perhaps most troublingly, what exactly even is a VTuber?</li> </ul>
It is to these questions that the next installment will direct its attention.

The End of Gariben Girl V and What Comes After

2026-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

A significant era in VTubing is about to end with the recent announcement of the conclusion of Gariben Girl V (ガリベンガーV), a VTuber-centered variety program that began airing in January 2019 on TV Asahi. Across its run, the program’s core format centered on an interactional triad consisting of VTuber participants, comedian Kotouge Eiji as principal host figure, and a guest expert drawn from a rotating pool of academics and specialists. These experts delivered compressed lectures or demonstrations on a wide range of topics, while the VTubers were positioned as students in what amounted to a quasi-pedagogical setting.
The program’s official X account and an announcement from its most prominently featured VTuber, Dennou Shojo Siro, confirmed that the broadcast will end in May 2026.
A Brief History</h2>
In line with TV Asahi’s tendency to experiment in its late-night block, Gariben Girl V stands out primarily for treating VTubers as talents castable in terrestrial television. By the time the show premiered in 2019, the so-called “Four Heavenly Kings of VTubing” had already achieved recognition among fans and has been codified as a category in user-generated compendia such as Pixiv Encyclopedia and Niconico Encyclopedia. Concurrently, the emergence of agencies signaled an incipient industrial consolidation. Despite this, the field was still far removed from the eventual Cambrian explosion, since Virtual YouTubers existed as a phenomenon legible primarily within otaku-related spaces and had yet to establish any durable presence in mainstream media. Gariben Girl V was the mediating platform within this transitional phase.
Gariben Girl V didn’t manifest ex nihilo as a VTuber project; it constituted the third iteration of a struggling late night TV Asahi franchise. The Neo Bara 2 slot inaugurated Choujin Joshi in October 2017 as a sports variety, reconfigured it a year later into the talk show Choujin Joshi to Zukejyo, and subsequently executed a more radical relaunch on January 17, 2019 as Choujin Joshi Senshi Gariben Girl V.
The Educational Variety Format</h2>
Structurally, however, the show was closer to a sort of educational variety. Each episode invited a “special lecturer” to explicate a specific topic before an assembly of VTuber “students,” while Kotouge assumed the role of the disciplinarian “instructor.”
Since we mentioned that the show had predecessors, I believe we should provide a more comprehensive chronology for better understanding. Choujin Joshi, or Superwomen, launched on October 6, 2017, as a sports variety show, pitting women with exceptional athletic abilities against each other in physical challenges to showcase their “superhuman” feats.
On January 17, 2019, the program underwent a further rebranding, receiving the unwieldy new title: Superhuman Girls and Zuke Girls Present: Superhuman Girl Warrior Gariben Girl V, and redebuted in the usual late-night slot.
The title constitutes a pun derived from gariben (ガリ勉), a Japanese slang term for a student who studies obsessively hard.
How the Show Evolved Over Time</h2>
The first substantive rescheduling occurred on April 4, 2021, when the show migrated to a weekly Saturday slot at 12:05 AM. A further 30-minute displacement followed later that same year, in October, to 12:35 AM, followed by a reversion to the Thursday late-night slot on April 4, 2022.
The real structural shift, however, arrived on October 15, 2022, when the show moved to Saturday at 6:30 PM. With this act of mainstreaming, the program transmuted from a late-night VTuber-education show into a national early-evening program.
Perhaps that was the issue. The show returned to Thursday late night in October 2023. The prior identity endured until October 2, 2024, when a further time slot change coincided with a more radical retitling that brought along the termination of the “VTubers-as-students” paradigm. The new designation was Garibenture V, broadcast every Wednesday in the late-night slot.
The Shift Toward AI</h2>
The announcement that the program would end in May 2026, followed in June by a new AI-focused show titled “AI large-scale operation,” or AI Daisakusen, inheriting the same time slot, gave the conclusion the appearance of a natural and perhaps inevitable endpoint.
TV Asahi kept everything except the VTuber, replacing it with AI and thereby implying, whether intentionally or not, that the two entities occupy the same level of beinghood.
The VTubers were never co-hosts in the sense that Kotouge was; their role was to be a presentational frame, and to ground facts provided by the expert within a novelty act. With this, the question becomes kinda inevitable: what does it mean when an institution that spent seven years performing recognition of an entity as a person reveals, through the act of replacing that entity, that what it was recognizing all along was a structural position rather than a specific being?
What the Replacement Actually Means</h2>

This is what a captioned image looks like using the new shortcode.</figcaption> </figure>
The ease with which AI-driven VTubers are assimilated into existing fan communities is itself a significant sign that this may not only be an institutional categorization, but actual fan sentiment, as it demonstrates that the VTuber, as a cultural form, is not reducible to the human subject who may or may not inhabit it. Neuro-sama is not cherished in spite of her artificiality. She is cherished qua VTuber.
Consider the range of what currently falls under the “VTuber” label: human-operated VTubers in which the operator functions as the acknowledged authorial agent; human-operated VTubers in which the character-entity has accumulated sufficient autonomous narrative existence; AI-driven VTubers in which no human authorial subject exists behind the wrapper; and hybrid configurations.
Each of these already inhabits the word “VTuber.” Our charge is to forge a definition ample enough to ratify what usage has already enacted.
So, where do we start?

About

2025-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

I write here occasionally about the ordinary difficulties of trying to live an examined life — attention, time, beginnings, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are becoming.
I’m not an expert in anything in particular. I’m someone who has noticed that certain questions keep returning, no matter how many times I think I’ve answered them.
Most of what appears on this site will be wrong or incomplete in five years. That’s the point. Writing is how I think, not the record of finished thoughts.
If something here resonates, I’m glad. If you want to talk about it, you can find me at the email address in the footer or through the links on the home page.
Thank you for reading.