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

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?
• What, precisely, is it that grief takes as its object?
• And, perhaps most troublingly, what exactly even is a VTuber?

It is to these questions that the next installment will direct its attention.