The End of Gariben Girl V

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),[1] a VTuber-centered variety program that began airing in January 2019 on TV Asahi (テレビ朝日). Across its run, the program’s core format centered on an interactional triad consisting of VTuber participants, comedian Kotouge Eiji (小峠英二) 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,[2] and then an announcement from its most prominently featured VTuber, Dennou Shojo Siro (電脳少女シロ),[3] (following the official romanization) confirmed that the broadcast will end in May 2026. (You could argue it actually ended back in 2024, but let’s start at the beginning.)

Four Heavenly Kings

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” (バーチャルYouTuber四天王) had already achieved recognition among fans (Although presumably not the first time the term appeared, based on my X bookmarks’ epignosis, the earliest instance that received mainstream attention was on December 20, 2017, when X {then Twitter} user @/q_d__b_p posted four images outlining the Four Heavenly Kings’s characteristics,[4] including Mirai Akari {ミライアカリ}, Kaguya Luna {輝夜月}, Nekomasu {バーチャルのじゃロリ狐娘Youtuberおじさん}, and Kizuna AI {キズナアイ}. Kizuna AI later came to be known as Boss {親分}, and Dennou Shojo Siro {電脳少女シロ} was referred to as the fifth. The post has accumulated 43,000 likes since.) and has been codified as a category in user-generated compendia such as Pixiv Encyclopedia (Pixiv百科事典)[5] and Niconico Encyclopedia (Niconico大百科).[6] Concurrently, the emergence of agencies signaled an incipient industrial consolidation.[7] Despite this, though, 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. By positioning Siro in the permanent first-seat role of “Gariben Girl V No. 1,” and supplementing her with other performers from .LIVE (どっとライブ), like Yamato Iori (ヤマト イオリ) and Kagura Suzu (神楽すず) in the first episode, alongside a later expanding roster of guest VTubers,[8] the program effectively established a weekly point of convergence at which Four Heavenly Kings-era figures could co-appear with emerging talents. The interplay was structured around Kotouge Eiji of the comedy duo Viking (バイきんぐ), whose role as a “human axis” facilitated a sort of cross-dimensional interactional regime in which the physically present performer directed tsukkomi at beings with no corporeal existence in the studio. The expert’s enthusiasm, the VTubers’ exaggerated reactions of horror or excitement, and Kotouge’s exasperation together constituted a tripartite comedy grounded in the temporal and rhetorical dynamics of manzai, but avatar mediation extended it beyond the conventional dyadic form and into something closer to mixed-reality slapstick where idiotic questions penetrate ontological boundaries.

The Beginning

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 (ネオバラ2) slot (TV Asahi’s late night window, rebranded in 2022 to Media City Zone {メディアシティゾーン}) inaugurated Choujin Joshi (超人女子) in October 2017 as a sports variety, reconfigured it a year later into the talk show Choujin Joshi to Zukejyo (超人女子とズケ女), and subsequently executed a more radical relaunch on January 17, 2019 as Choujin Joshi Senshi Gariben Girl V (超人女子戦士 ガリベンガーV). The new format positioned Gariben Girl V as an organization training superhuman girl warriors to resolve “ultra difficult phenomena” pervading Earth (地球にはびこる超難解な現象),[9] borrowing its naming and visual rhetoric from mecha anime and tokusatsu. Veteran anison singer Ichirou Mizuki supplied both the opening theme and the narration until his passing in 2022.

Structurally, however, the show was closer to a sort of educational variety. Each episode invited a “special lecturer” (特別講師) to explicate a specific topic before an assembly of VTuber “students,” while Kotouge assumed the role of the disciplinarian “instructor” (教官). The first official episode archive[10] uses the template “The super-difficult question we’re asking “Gariben Girl V” to solve this time is… “ (今回『ガリベンガーV』に解いてもらう超難問), lists Kotouge as instructor (教官) and Siro, Iori and Suzu as Gariben Girl V, closing the announcement with “A new variety show featuring lively VTubers!” (VTuberが躍動する新感覚バラエティー！). The first episode’s super-difficult questions comprised: Why does Mount Everest not sink into the ground despite its immense weight? (なんでエベレストは重いのに地面に沈まないの？) What distinguishes Mount Fuji from Mount Everest!? (富士山とエベレストの違い!?) Did India collide with Asia!? (インドがアジアにぶつかった!?)

The Predecessors

Since we mentioned that the show had predecessors, I believe we should provide a more comprehensive chronology for better understanding. Choujin Joshi (超人女子), or Superwomen, launched on October 6, 2017, as a sports variety show, pitting women with exceptional athletic abilities (like marathon runners or climbers) against each other in physical challenges to showcase their “superhuman” feats. (It should be remarked that the underlying motivation for this tangent is to contrive a pretext for mentioning the anime, Iwa Kakeru! Sport Climbing Girls {いわかける！- Sport Climbing Girls -}, a work of considerable merit that deserves your attention. Yes, it has cute girls.) On September 14, 2018, the program was succeeded by a sequel titled Choujin Joshi to Zukejyo (超人女子とズケ女). The element “zuke” derives from “zukezuke” (ズケズケ), an onomatopoeic adverb signifying bluntness of speech, a disregard for politeness or the interlocutor’s sensibilities. Within the show's framework, “ズケ女” designates women of candor and directness. The term characterizes the guest MCs, specifically unfiltered, forthright female comedians such as Ookubo Kayoko (大久保佳代子) and Makoto (誠子), the latter performing as one half of the manzai / conte duo Amakou Inter (尼神インター).

Seven Years

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 (超人女子とズケ女プレゼンツ 超人女子戦士 ガリベンガーV), and redebuted in the usual late-night slot (1:29-1:59 AM). The start date requires carefulness, since official Japanese TV pages employ the broadcast-date convention of Thursday deep night; consequently, summaries may cite January 17 or January 18 depending on whether they follow TV scheduling convention or calendar time after midnight. The safest wording is that TV Asahi launched the renewed program on January 17, 2019 broadcast date in the Thursday deep-night slot.

TV Asahi’s announcement designates this as a “significant renewal” (大幅にリニューアル) and characterizes VTubers as “beautiful-girl-type virtual characters who stream and make videos” (VTuberは、動画配信を行う美少女系の仮想キャラクターのこと。), citing that “they began gaining attention around late 2016 with figures like Kizuna Ai of A.I. Channel” (A.I. Channel（アイチャンネル）のキズナアイなど2016年後半ごろから注目され始め), “and have since established a solid position as a major genre in the YouTuber world” (YouTuber界の一大ジャンルとして確固たる地位を築いている。). The title constitutes a pun derived from gariben (ガリ勉), a Japanese slang term for a student who studies obsessively hard. The “超人女子とズケ女プレゼンツ” prefix disappears from official archive pages by April, during a cleanup of legacy branding from the prior program. Later, on June 6, the show’s official VTuber mascot, Buiko (ブイ子),[11] debuts, and the program evolves from a mere broadcast slot into a VTuber culture node with a stable YouTube presence and an active community.

The first substantive rescheduling occurred on April 4, 2021, when the show migrated to a weekly Saturday slot at 12:05 AM. This was mostly a change in visibility, not a premise reset, though according to Oricon’s article,[12] “beyond the lecture content delivered by specialist guest instructors, the show will feature a secondary audio commentary by QuizKnock, the genius collective YouTuber group led by Izawa Takushi (伊沢拓司).” As Kotouge comments, “With the broadcast time moving earlier than before, I'm really worried that people will find out I'm involved in a weird show. I'll keep doing my best to make sure not too many people end up watching it.”

Pixiv Encyclopedia[13] attests a further 30-minute displacement 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. テレ朝POST[14] announced the move, along with the show’s new title, “Puzzle-Solving Warriors!,” or Nazotoki Senshi Gariben Girl V (謎解き戦士！ガリベンガーV). The article divulging this change notes that the show “has now amassed 178,000 subscribers on its official YouTube channel and 49,000 Twitter followers (as of September 2022).” With this act of mainstreaming the program transmuted from a late-night VTuber-education show into a national early-evening program, though official promotion emphasized the preservation of Gariben Girl V’s essence and its “late-night atmosphere” (深夜の雰囲気).

Perhaps that was the issue. The show returned to Thursday late night in October 2023, although it retained the old, educational structure, according to episode archives. 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 (ガリベンチャーV),[15] broadcast every Wednesday in the late-night slot at 12:15 AM. “ガリベンチャー” constitutes a portmanteau compounding “venture” and “adventure.” The institutional allegory transformed from a classroom into a venture concern, with Kotouge anointed CEO and VTubers or entertainers cast as hirelings. The first episode,[16] titled “Viking's Kotouge Establishes a Company?! A Mysterious New Program Finally Launches” (バイきんぐ小峠が会社設立！？謎の新番組がついに始動), already sets up the new direction with its topics (company rap {社ラップ}, for instance), and while VTubers still do appear prominently in the episode description (“A fresh take on adventure, experimentation, and discovery featuring humans and VTubers!” {人間とVTuberの新感覚な冒険＆実験＆発見バラエティ！}), it is at this juncture that many began to discern a divergence too abrupt and to perceive VTubers being progressively demoted from central participants to side-characters.

The demarcation is unusually clean because the official back‑number pages on either side preserve the format language. The September 5, 2024 archive[17] describes a beatbox lesson from SARUKANI members with VTubers learning from special lecturers, and the September 19, 2024 archive[18] still refers to Kotouge as instructor, who clashes with VTubers over popular hobbies (and tries Beyblade for the first time {Unrelated, but Mariah from Beyblade was my first anime wife. I was just starting elementary school, and 2D already won me over.}). The October 2, 2024 archive recommences as Garibenture V and catalogues segments that more closely approximate a late-night variety project lab than the antecedent lecture format.

The Conclusion

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 (AI大作戦)[19] inheriting the same time slot, gave the conclusion the appearance of a natural and perhaps inevitable endpoint to a trajectory spanning roughly a septennium. At the executive level, TV Asahi has characterized AI Daisakusen as a strategic response to the persistent pressures of television production, notably those arising from cost, time, and technical complexity. The project purports to examine whether recent advances in generative image, video, and text models can compress production cycles, empower smaller teams to create visually ambitious sequences, and produce characters and formats flexible enough to be repurposed across multiple platforms. The transition does not indicate a repudiation of VTuber culture so much as a recalibration of focus. The initiative is actually quite consistent with the broadcaster’s ongoing emphasis on experimental programming practices. Where Gariben Girl V functioned as a testing ground for integrating virtual performers into television, Garibenture V served as a bridge to AI Daisakusen, and AI Daisakusen redirects that exploratory mandate toward AI-assisted production processes. That Kotouge Eiji has been retained as host, and that the time slot remains unchanged, signals an intentional continuity of tone. What defined the predecessor was a hybrid sensibility in which technical inquiry, subcultural themes, and the dynamic of a corporeal performer responding to non-human entities coexisted within a single format, and this sensibility appears to have survived the changeover. In this respect, the new program represents an evolution of an established format. It’s logical, really. But isn't that logic a little unsettling?

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? The program constructed VTuber personhood through the conventions of variety television, only to demonstrate that this construction was merely format-level. The VTubers, it turns out, were themselves presented instead of being presenters, or perhaps more accurately, were deployed as a mode of presentation. But they were, at the same time, employed as working talents in terrestrial television. So, following this trail, and simplifying our previous question, what becomes unavoidable is to unpuzzle at what level a VTuber really exists. Is VTubing an art form, or is it the artist? If VTubing is an art form performed by the person inside, then replacement by AI constitutes job loss. If the VTuber itself is a being, then replacement constitutes ontological cessation, because what is underway is the supersession of the VTuber by another entity that occupies the same liminal space. It is TV Asahi‘s seven-year treatment of VTubers as beings that makes the second reading legible, and what transforms it into an eschatological question, from a VTuber phenomenological standpoint, is the act and implication of replacement itself happening at the entity-level.

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. The community’s affective apparatus does not distinguish origin. This retroactively destabilizes every human-driven VTuber’s claim to an ontological status stemming from the human inside. The architecture of the form was always already agnostic to its substrate, waiting for something sufficiently vivid to inhabit it. But whether this truly constitutes a threat depends on how we understand “VTuber” as “entity” in the first place. If we hold that the VTuber is, at bottom, a wrapper around an external identity, then the menace dissipates, for the audience’s reception remains structurally invariant and it’s ultimately the audience that adjudicates the category of the “real.” If that’s the case, then Gariben Girl V's pivot from VTubers to AI in the exact same format is completely logical and defensible.

Consider the range of what currently falls under the “VTuber” label: human-operated VTubers in which the operator functions as the acknowledged authorial agent working through the avatar; human-operated VTubers in which the character-entity has accumulated sufficient autonomous narrative existence to exceed the intentional control of its operator; AI-driven VTubers in which no human authorial subject exists behind the wrapper; and hybrid configurations in which AI and human agents co-produce the entity. Each of these already inhabits the word “VTuber,” whether we have furnished that word with permission to hold them or not. Our charge is to forge a definition ample enough to ratify what usage has already enacted. For “VTuber,” it now appears, is no mere label affixed to a single species of being. So, where do we start?

Footnotes

[1] KAI-YOU, “VTuberが多数出演した「ガリベンチャーV」5月で放送終了 電脳少女シロも感謝を綴る,” March 11, 2026, kai-you.net/article/94862.

[2] ガリベンチャーV【公式】 (@/garibenV), “視聴者のみなさまへのお知らせ,” X (Twitter), March 11, 2026, x.com/garibenV/status/2031656379799224661.

[3] 電脳少女シロ (@/SIROyoutuber), “7年間続いた番組が５月で終了となります...,” X, March 11, 2026, x.com/SIROyoutuber/status/2031661597056442643.

[4] Azusa.exe [@/q_d__b_p], “バーチャルYouTuber四天王まとめたった,” X, December 20, 2017, x.com/q_d__b_p/status/943477296203055104.

[5] Pixiv Encyclopedia, “バーチャルYouTuber四天王,” accessed April 9, 2026, dic.pixiv.net/a/%E3%83%90%E3%83%BC%E3%83%81%E3%83%A3%E3%83%ABYouTuber %E5%9B%9B%E5%A4%A9%E7%8E%8B.

[6] Nicovideo Dictionary, “バーチャルyoutuber四天王,” accessed April 9, 2026, dic.nicovideo.jp/a/%E3%83%90%E3%83%BC%E3%83%81%E3%83%A3%E3%83%AByoutuber %E5%9B%9B%E5%A4%A9%E7%8E%8B.

[7] Mogura VR, “VTuber運営企業一覧 代表的なグループやプロジェクトまとめ【2023年7月版】,” July 27, 2023, moguravr.com/vtuber-management-companies-list/.

[8] Pixiv Encyclopedia, “ガリベンガーVのゲストVtuber,” accessed April 9, 2026, dic.pixiv.net/a/%E3%82%AC%E3%83%AA%E3%83%99%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AC%E3%83%BCV% E3%81%AE%E3%82%B2%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88Vtuber.

[9] TV Asahi Post, “バーチャルYouTuberが頭脳を鍛える新番組、水木一郎がOP曲＆ナレ担当,” January 17, 2019, post.tv-asahi.co.jp/post-74052/.

[10] TV Asahi, “第1話 「エベレストの謎を解明せよ！」,” ガリベンチャーV, backnumber, January 17, 2019, tv-asahi.co.jp/garibenv/backnumber/0001/.

[11] Pixiv Encyclopedia, “ブイ子,” last revised June 14, 2019, accessed April 9, 2026, dic.pixiv.net/a/%E3%83%96%E3%82%A4%E5%AD%90.

[12] Oricon News, “『ガリベンガーV』土曜深夜にお引っ越し 小峠英二「変な番組に関わっている事がバレる」,” March 12, 2021, oricon.co.jp/news/2186969/full/.

[13] Pixiv Encyclopedia, “超人女子戦士ガリベンガーV,” last revised March 9, 2019, accessed April 9, 2026, dic.pixiv.net/a/%E8%B6%85%E4%BA%BA%E5%A5%B3%E5%AD%90%E6%88%A6%E5%A3%AB%E3% 82%AC%E3%83%AA%E3%83%99%E3%83%B3%E3%82%AC%E3%83%BCV.

[14] TV Asahi Post, “『ガリベンガーV』深夜から土曜夕方に大幅昇格！バイきんぐ小峠「なんて時間だ！」,” September 9, 2022, post.tv-asahi.co.jp/post-195787/.

[15] Oricon News, “新番組『ガリベンチャーV』今夜放送スタート 終了発表の『お願い！ランキング』人気企画もここに集結,” October 2, 2024,oricon.co.jp/news/2347643/full/.

[16] TV Asahi, “第1話「バイきんぐ小峠が会社設立！？謎の新番組がついに始動」,” ガリベンチャーV, backnumber, October 2, 2024, tv-asahi.co.jp/garibenv/backnumber/0194/.

[17] TV Asahi, “第51話「ヒューマンビートボックスを学べ！SP」,” 謎解き戦士！ガリベンガーV, backnumber, September 5, 2024, tv-asahi.co.jp/garibenv/backnumber/0190/.

[18] TV Asahi, “第53話「小峠教官vsVTuber人気ホビーで大激突SP」,” 謎解き戦士！ガリベンガーV, backnumber, September 19, 2024, tv-asahi.co.jp/garibenv/backnumber/0192/.

[19] Oricon News, “テレビ朝日、6月から新番組『AI大作戦』発表 AI制作の部署新設で「未来のテレビに備える」,” March 11, 2026, oricon.co.jp/news/2441259/full/.