Part 1. What are Vtubers
First of all: What are Vtubers
When people speak of VTubers, they generally refer to content creators who use 2D or 3D avatars that follow anime aesthetics as their online, content-creating persona. Avatars that do not follow anime aesthetics do exist, are popular on Twitch, and people using these avatars (such as CodeMiko) would be recognized as VTubers, but they likely would be excluded from participating in vtubing culture. By this I mean people like Code Miko were very rarely talked about in main vtubing fandoms, such as the subreddit r/VirtualYouTubers, and VTuber fans would not make fanart or clips of Code Miko as they would VTubers with anime style avatars.
The VTuber category can be further divided into corporate VTubers–those affiliated with a VTuber agency–and indie VTubers. According to the Japanese site Vstat, which compiles data on VTuber activities on YouTube, Hololive and Nijisanji VTubers accounted for 74.5 percent of the total watch time of all VTuber content on YouTube in 2023, with Hololive accounting for 38.7 percent of the total watch time, and Nijisanji 35.8 percent. This data did not take into account VTubers active on Twitch, such as western VTubers under the agency Vshojo, but given that most VTubing culture is most prevalent on YouTube–especially because clipping culture does not exist on Twitch–it remained a fairly accurate assessment of the cultural influence of the two agencies.
In the Western vtubing world, however, Hololive was much more influential overall. In the first quarter of 2024, the Hololive English branch (including 15 female talents) amassed a total of 15.8 million hours of watch time, while the Nijisanji English branch (including 31 male and female talents) amassed 6.3 million hours of total watch time. Outside of YouTube, the most largest platform for VTuber fans is reddit, where Hololive reddit has 1.1 million members, while Nijisanji reddit has less than one hundred thousand.
On reddit, the Western vtubing world is made of separate, clearly delineated online spaces–each housing the fandom of one particular VTuber agency–with different lingo and expectations. People could communicate in both spaces, so it’s best not to think of them as distinct communities where membership in one community excluded membership in a different community, but communications and expressions in one online space usually followed the common expectation of that space. Hololive’s official documents usually referred to the artist behind the VTuber as talents, but informally a variety of terms like Holomen were also used, while the Nijisanji fandom much more consistently referred to the artist consistently as Livers, for instance.
The major subreddits include the Hololive, Nijisanji, and Vshojo subreddit, and the general subreddit VirtualYouTubers which is used mostly by indie VTubers. In general, content about one agency would not be posted on the subreddit of the other agency, so all the major fandoms have a gatekeeping tendency. On YouTube, the boundaries between fandoms are not as sharply delineated–clippers who clip VTubers from different agencies exist, but are less common than those who only clip VTuber from one particular agency. Moreover, when a viewer clicks on clips or content featuring talent from one agency, YouTube is much more likely to recommend content from that agency rather than other agencies, which may be both an effect and a contributor to the different cultures of different agencies and fandoms. In short, being a VTuber means using anime style avatars as one’s online content creator persona, and different agencies have different cultures and expectations on what exactly VTubers would look like.