VTubers Cleanup Thread

We have determined that Lets Players are not inherently tropable. They need to provide some sort of narrative, characters, and story to be allowed on this wiki. This applies to Vtubers just as much as other content creators, but Kayfabe makes the distinction between streamer and character particularly fuzzy.

The purpose of the thread is to remove tropes from pages concerning Vtubers that apply only to the actor rather than the character.

• If there is not a clear separation between the character and the actor, we assume that it is the actor represented, and thus they are not tropable.
  • In other words, it is up to the user writing the example to show that it pertains to the character and not the actor.
• Regardless, the content they produce must meet our standards for Web Video, meaning substantial original and/or transformative material.
  • A vlog, review, or Let's Play does not become tropable just because the person doing it has an anime avatar.

More details in this post.

For our full policy, visit our Administrivia page on Real Life Troping.

the Real-Person Troping Policy thread

Edited by badtothebaritone on Oct 12th 2022 at 4:58:06 AM

Part of what makes V Tubers interesting (to me, at least) is the fuzziness between actor and performance. On one hand, it's a way for a streamer to invest more of themselves into their streams without actually exposing themself. On the other hand, it makes clearly delineating between fiction and reality tricky.

I watch Hololive and edit their trope page, so let me use Ninomae Ina'nis as an example. The actress behind Ina (let's call her Real'nis) is an artist. Ina'nis is fictionally the high priestess of the Ancient Ones, but no aspect of her explicit fiction ties into her artistic skill. Does that mean that Ina's art skills shouldn't go on the trope page, since they're technically part of Real'nis and unconnected to Ina'nis the character, even though the art is a major portion of her image and especially her creative content? This fits the rules described by the mod post, but it's also pretty ridiculous.

It gets worse when you consider personality traits. Realmei is probably as kind and forgetful as Mumei, and it's only debatably connected to her fiction as Guardian of Civilization. Should we strike everything about [VTuber] personalities if they're not clearly either faked for the performance or connected to the [VTuber]'s fiction/lore?

I don't see a philosophically coherent argument that doesn't leave the [VTuber] pages either lightly edited or completely gutted. There's no clear line in the middle that I can see; either everything that's connected of their performance is tropeable, or everything connected to the real-world actors is untropeable. I'm open to having people explain a more moderate stance, but I don't know how convincing they'd be.

I personally think the former makes more sense, for what that's worth. It's not hard to see the latter leading to some of Holomyth's members having fewer tropes than their Mythbreakers characters; Yuul B. Alwright has a much cleaner delineation between actress and character than Ina does, so basically nothing would need to change there, but removing all tropes from Ina that are just tropes about Real'nis which transfer to Ina'nis wouldn't leave much behind. And that seems self-evidently ridiculous to me.

Edited by GreatWyrmGold on Aug 19th 2022 at 12:12:23 PM

so where's the line drawn with the Kayfabe? right now i can only think of the two extremes, there's most of hololive that only does the Kayfabe in their streams occasionally as an "uh oh, i forgot i was supposed to be this character" juxtaposition gag. the other extreme is streamers like Nijisanji's Hyakumantenbara Salome, who (as far as i know) seems to breathe, eat and sleep with her "pretending to be rich" persona in practically every stream she does.

i'm only an occasional casual editor on this site so i don't think i'd be much use on this cleanup, but i'd figure i'll ask this anyway so i don't at least make the problem worse with any future edits i do regarding the topic.

edit:

another edit in response to :

the way i understand it, Ina being an artist isn't tropeable, because you can strip away the avatar and you'd still have the real person being an artist. you'd probably only have a smidgen of an argument saying it was tropeable if you talked about, let's say, one of her earliest tweets where she revealed her art skills saying she was "drawing with the wrong tentacle", and that kind of just goes into the whole "occasional lip service to their Kayfabe" i was trying to get at earlier.

Edited by Freecom on Aug 19th 2022 at 3:15:33 PM

The problem is that people who are fans of Vtubers and want to write articles about them seem to want them to be exempt from the usual tropeworthiness requirements. Given the lack of tropable material in their performances, we just agree to pretend that they are "performing" their real lives.

If applying rigorous standards means that most such articles are cut, I'm fine with that.

i feel like i already know the answer to this, but does that mean if you get situations where the company behind hololive rolls up the streamers' personality quirks into their character's personality quirks and writes them into their animated shorts, it's still not tropeworthy?

we're this early into the thread and already the Kayfabe ambiguity is making my head hurt, lol

It feels to me, bearing in mind that I have zero interest in this format, that there is a degree of competition to make Vtubers "quirky" in order to capture audience interest. I have to wonder how many of these "personality traits" are real and which are exaggerated or completely made up. If the real "actor" behind the character is intentionally concealed, it may be impossible to tell them apart.

In a sense, these carefully fabricated characters are creative works, potentially tropable in and of themselves, but fortunately we have a way to sort through this mess that avoids the problem entirely. If the channel itself does not produce creative content, then it's not tropable even if there happen to be characterization tropes employed. We trope Batman because he appears in creative works, not because someone dressed up in bat ears and a cape in front of a camera one time.

Thus, someone vlogging about their life is not tropeworthy. Someone doing a Let's Play is not tropeworthy (in most cases). Someone creating comedy skits is tropeworthy. Someone vlogging about the life of a imaginary character is tropeworthy. Someone roleplaying while doing a Let's Play is tropeworthy. These facts are independent of whether they are wearing cat ears, a fursuit, or a full digital avatar.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 19th 2022 at 3:45:21 PM

What if they do comedy skits and vlogging as character? There are two ways. 1. They invoke intent to do is in-character. 2. Fanbase assumes it applies automatically when nothing says it should.

In case 1 a vtube actor makes a joke, then does a Verbal Backspace and clarifies that it's normal in whatever magical realm they're supposed to be from, effectively appending their character biography.

In case 2 a vtube actor describes themselves or their personal opinions, but doesn't specify if their character is also supposed to share that view. Per "culture", fans take whatever is said for granted as what the character would say.

I think 1. is fair game while 2. would require checking if there's a disclaimer of some kind to apply everything to the character retoractively and avoid troping if not. If an actor describes something they do outside of streams when not in-character, it's most likely it's something we don't want to document.

(For the record, for example hololive's company defaults to something like "assume the person behind the avatar doesn't exist, they all live in our story as-is, but please be understanding of private problems and disregard any personal information if appears.")

Edited by Amonimus on Aug 19th 2022 at 11:07:49 AM

Everyone seems concerned about these sponsored/professional shows, but as far as I'm concerned they are fine. If it is understood that the Vtuber is portraying entirely fictional events — in other words, they are an actor putting on a performance — then that is as tropable as any other performance would be.

The Kayfabe issue comes in when we aren't sure if the character and the actor are actually distinct people. For example, take Georgina, a hypothetical vlogger who digitally replaces herself with a Garfield avatar and pretends to be Galumphagus the Brown, but it's really just her own life. That's not really tropable.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 19th 2022 at 4:19:55 AM

yeah i feel like that's gonna be a lot of the problem with this cleanup. unless we're talking about real people who became VTubers in some capacity (e.g. Tomokazu Sugita), even just typing the words "real person" in most context results in rabid fans swearing to God Himself that you're "doxxing" them and putting their lives at risk, so i don't think we'll ever get to make that distinction without treading some apparently controversial ground.

Honestly, screw those people? I'm not interested in playing host to their fantasies.

Also, I highly doubt that lives are seriously at risk. That too seems like a fantasy. There are plenty of controversial streamers who don't conceal their identities and manage to stay alive. If there are really that many insane fans who will stalk and murder a YouTuber because they make themselves look like a Teletubby, that is a problem well beyond the capability of TV Tropes to deal with.

To clarify, I would rather "not deal with it" by prohibiting all such content. Let the weirdos do their weirdo stuff in their own weirdo spaces. I want no part of it.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 19th 2022 at 4:28:14 AM

Alright, let's start off with even more nebulous examples. From What the Hell Is That Accent?:

• As part of the kayfabe they maintain, some of the hololive idols affect accents or exaggerations to their accents. This is notably not the case with Sakura Miko and her extremely distinct lisping speech which, according to Pekora and Mio, is her normal speaking voice. According to Miko herself, this is probably because she has a rather short tongue in real life.
  • Ever since she revealed herself to have been a Farm Girl, Gawr Gura's fans have been trying to place where she is from as nuances in her speech make it difficult to pin down if she's from one or another Mid-Western American state, or even possibly from southern Canada.
  • Korone Inugami's particular accent confounds her peers as they have no idea where its from and find the pitch changes in her speech unusual. According to her, it may have been influenced by a number of accents growing up, with the pronounced being her grandmother's Kansai-ben.
  • Hakos Baelz has stated she's from Australia's east coast, but her accent wanders through three different continents, with viewers describing her accent as from Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Texas, Brooklyn and even Boston. Seeing she's representing chaos itself, it's only fitting.

My initial thoughts are to keep the Korone and Miko examples since there's in-universe explanation and speculation for both. No clue what to do with the Gura and Baelz one since it's just fan speculation.

i didn't post that to get you to agree with them, it's more to illustrate the difficulty of even getting enough info to make that distinction in the first place.

pretty much everywhere i go, the real person behind the VTuber is called "forbidden knowledge", just to get an idea of how deeply buried in the sand every VTuber fan's head is. hell, i even got shit from the VTuber subreddit for telling people that people who treat "forbidden knowledge" as a neat tidbit of trivia aren't all potential serial killers who are Yandere for their favorites. (slightly off topic, but for what it's worth, a lot of English VTubers also hate these people, but are unfortunately contractually obligated to play along with the concept)

if the general consensus ends up being "screw those people" when this thread's run its course, then i already have a couple of edits in mind for some people. just one example (spoilered for any special snowflakes in this thread): hololive's Amelia Watson used to stream on Twitch as someone named "sachiowo" using her real face, and i've noticed a lot of her mannerisms as both personas are practically identical. from what i've seen so far in this thread, everything about her portrayal as the former that'd normally be chalked up as "haha, it's the Kayfabe again" wouldn't be tropeworthy, as that's just how she generally acts.

Long story short, coroprate streamers are Reclusive Artist by contract, we may not need worry much about those, but we'd need to avoid troping slip-ups, them discussing "normal life" with no context and real-person gossip. And who they are were when not in-character not just "culture inappropriate", but simply irrelevant. For indie streamers we really need to watch they aren't just "PNG gamers", that's not content no matter how funny they are.

re above cases: I'd like to avoid geographical speculations unless they confirm where they are from themselves AND they have an excuse why they sometimes talk differently (almost all of them have voice filters), that's the basics of Speculative Troping.

Edited by Amonimus on Aug 19th 2022 at 11:38:20 AM

Also, the character Gura is explicitly from Atlantis. So unless she was raising seahorses on that farm, that accent stuff is very much people trying to trope the actor.

She could have been raising crabs instead but I digress.

Reclusive Artist has an entire folder for Vtubers that lists only exceptions to the trope. Seems like mainly actor troping. Permission for forceful graduation?

imo "forbidden knowledge" is trivia at best. at least, that's how i tend to treat it outside of this site.

edit: re #11 edit: i guess the best outcome we could hope for is cut examples that are troping a real person, not mention who we're talking about, and hope nobody notices?

i don't believe in just completely cutting VTuber pages as there's still some fictional element to them, but if it's more trouble than it's worth, then i don't really mind seeing them get cut completely

Edited by Freecom on Aug 19th 2022 at 5:18:59 AM

"Do not actually link specific "uncovered" information except in the cases where the Virtual You Tuber in question has made a public statement, as with the Kizuna AI example below.

Yet all these examples other than the one used for template (on the last one, I'd like the confirmation being both-sided) don't follow this note, and I don't think it's our job to link other channels together.

Edited by Amonimus on Aug 19th 2022 at 12:10:23 PM

So chop everyone except Kizuna. Which folder should I stick her in then?

OMG, really? Any attempt to separate a Vtuber from their character is "unmasking"? If that's true, it defeats the entire concept of figuring out which examples are violating NRLEP, and thus we cannot sort them out in our articles.

Pro wrestling abandoned Kayfabe decades ago and now some weirdos on the Internet have brought it back.

If that's the situation, I'd rather prohibit troping of Vtuber "characters", period. Treat them as if they were real people in all cases and only allow troping of the creative content on their channels, if any. I don't care if someone is roleplaying as a fairy dragon from Mars; their persona is treated as real and so it is not tropable.

Edited to add:

You can have it one way or the other: either these are real people wearing costumes or they are fictional characters being played by actors. They cannot simultaneously be both.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 19th 2022 at 5:47:14 AM

well, if we're gonna cut stuff as "not tropeworthy" when a real person acts almost exactly the same between VTuber personas and Kayfabe isn't an acceptable explanation for their act anymore, that's gonna slip through the cracks as an edit reason at least, i'd imagine. unless we're just gonna link to this thread and give a generic "it was part of a cleanup" reason. (to be fair, i've seen "Per TRS" and a link as an edit reason a lot, so that's probably passable)

edit:

yes.

it's part unjustifiably extrapolating from toxic parasocial relationships in real life Japanese Idol Singer culture, part actual toxic parasocial relationships on the other side of the pond, and part idiots blaming VTuber "dOxXiNg" channels for causing serial killer stalkers instead of something more reasonable, like blaming the feds for not treating stalking as a crime until someone gets hurt.

if you're morbidly interested enough in the reddit thread i was talking about earlier, it explained it better than i ever could and i could DM it to you, but i'm not sure if i should link it here in fear of importing drama accidentally. or better yet, you could just search "forbidden knowledge" on /r/virtualyoutubers and you'll see how much Serious Business people make this out to be.

i don't blame you for just wanting to toss all VTuber pages in the bin considerng how convoluted this is to the average bystander.

Edited by Freecom on Aug 19th 2022 at 5:53:33 AM

Edited by Amonimus on Aug 19th 2022 at 1:01:58 PM

I think this may touch on a wider topic I saw mentioned in another thread regarding what's tropable or not. I myself brought up Reality Shows in the context of Let's Players, but with Vtubers the distinction is even more of a topic of contention. Even if we discount any slip ups, some still hew closer to the character than others, and even that can fluctuate individually. Plenty use in-character euphemisms for what are pretty obviously real-life occurrences, but do we cut those even if they stay in-character perfectly? Because they're acting as though it applies to their character rather than whoever is behind the avatar even if it's obviously not. And with most corporates it's policy that anything done in-character applies TO that character, anything else be damned.

And to touch on the broader topic, I just want to highlight some others such as Gordon Ramsay. His creator page here is because (I assume) they apply universally across all his shows. And anyone would tell you that all he's portraying is an exaggerated version of himself, nothing truly "fictional", but does that completely invalidate entries like his Berserk Buttons? Those drive a lot of stuff that happens on his shows, so they are properly used, are they not? It's not like something from an interview that's basically trivia, it's something repeatedly shown and obviously a key component to him.

admittedly i haven't delved too deep into the VTuber iceberg, but my general impression is that all these VTuber talent agencies end up defaulting to the former no matter how much they think they're the latter by copying Kizuna Ai's "i'm really my character, trust me bro" schtick. the closer to indie VTuber you get, the more apt "real people wearing costumes" seems as a descriptor. they're really only tropeworthy if they got other "lore", like how hololive has other multimedia projects besides just their Let's Play shenanigans, or the now defunct Game Club Project, which had the occasional animated short between their Let's Plays where the VTubers are written like any other fictional character.

To above,

• If there are euphemisms, it's like Real Life Writes the Plot. There may be something occuring in RL, but if there are in-universe explanations, it should be fair. Conversly, if a vtuber talks how they've went shooping in real town, let's discard it.
• Let's not use personality tropes unless it gets a nod. You can't describe someone's morality because they say something inappropriate, but if they say they're playing Mad Scientist or something then it would be good enough.