The End of Gariben Girl V and What Comes After
A look at the conclusion of a landmark VTuber variety program and the quiet implications of its replacement by an AI-focused show.
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
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
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
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
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
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?