That Time I Was Almost a Vtuber
I was almost a vtuber. I figure if I'm going to publicly degrade myself, I may as well get that out of the way early. The world of vtubing is a loaded subject, so strap yourselves in because this is going to be a bumpy ride today.
I recently (may the powers that be forgive me) started re-watching vtubers again. I got in on the craze in 2020, during COVID and the launch of Hololive EN. From then on, I was addicted for about three years, watching vtuber streams constantly in the background or actively engaging in them. I stopped watching in late 2023, giving up on it cold turkey. It was partly down to the increasing drama surrounding the space, partly the obvious collapse of two big vtubing corporations on the horizon, and partly a lack of time on my part.
This “coming back” moment only lasted a couple of weeks as I remembered what drove me away in the first place. This brief walk down memory lane reminded me of my own ill-fated attempt at becoming a vtuber. Or, rather, attempts.
My Audition for Holostars EN
In 2022, Cover Corp. (who run Hololive and Holostars) announced the start of Holostars EN, the male side of their vtubing business. They were having open auditions; all you had to do was fill out a form and make a short video about yourself. Back then, the idea of a male vtuber was novel (to me, at least). That I could not only be part of the same company as my favorite vtubers, my “oshis,” but get to collaborate with them was an intoxicating idea. I wanted to submit an application the day they announced it. For once I exercised some restraint, and prepared for it.
If you’re unfamiliar with vtubers, then, boy, most of this blog is going to go way over your head. Briefly: they’re Virtual YouTubers (although they’re also on Twitch, and pretty much every other streaming site). They have an avatar, usually an anime-styled character, that appears on the screen controlled by an app that mirrors their real life movements to that model. Often they create some elaborate lore for themselves, like they’re a chaotic rat born from darkness, or they’re an orc from another world, or perhaps a grim reaper here to extract souls through playing video games. This lore is largely ignored because maintaining a character through thousands of hours of livestreaming is annoying, so it’s only brought up to make a joke. These days vtubers are also notorious for being unrelentingly unhinged and horny, which is another reason I stopped watching.
Even with the foresight of preparation, if there were a handbook illustrating everything not to do when auditioning or interviewing for a job, I must have memorized it cover to cover.
I went all out for this audition. I created a vtuber persona of my own called Duke Hawthorne III, a charismatic and suave gentleman thief. Or so he thinks of himself. In reality, he’s a bumbling idiot who freezes when he’s around a woman and has never successfully stolen anything more than a candy bar. I don’t know why I went with a thief motif. I think it sounded unique at the time and I thought it played well against Amelia Watson’s detective lore, whom I adored.
For the audition, I created some basic art in GIMP that resembled the outline of a thief, modeled after Lupin III. I created a logo for the character’s name which was inspired by the UI of Persona 5, which I still love. There was a schedule I created in this format, and I recorded myself playing video games in a mock livestream of the character. I also showed off some other “talents” of mine.
Cover consider themselves a Japanese idol company, so I knew playing video games wouldn’t be enough. I’m not interested in singing and dancing. I figured that was something I would have to deal with if I wanted the rest of the perks of the job. So I recorded myself singing a sea shanty. Why? Because drunk sailors sing sea shanties, and they’re not trying to sound good, they’re having fun. I figured I’d buy myself some breathing room if they knew I was bad, yet still willing to do it and have fun. Plus a cocky character like Duke, he’d think he was killing it. In hindsight, probably not a great decision to intentionally sing badly for a company that emphasizes singing.
There are some other fun nuggets in there, and I would be more than happy to share the video so we can all laugh at how bad it is, except my hard drive where I kept it and all the files for this audition died a couple of weeks before writing this blog. Maybe the universe knew my plans and wanted to save me from myself. Or, more likely, anyone reading this. There were some other gems in there, like me trying (and failing) to speak Japanese and a segment where I showed my “skill” as a writer by writing Hololive fan fiction. Okay, now that I think about it, I’m glad the video is lost forever.
Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. I’m sure they didn’t even consider me. It was bad, and I knew that even back then. I had never streamed before, and my YouTube channel at the time had only about 5,000 subscribers. I don’t think I ever stood a chance. That’s okay, given the state of the company these days, especially on the Holostars side. Still, I’d be lying if I said a small part of me didn’t wonder what could have been.
A Genius Plan
Despite not getting the gig, the idea vtubing stuck in my head. By late 2023, my YouTube channel was struggling. Or I thought it was, compared to where I wanted it to be. As I considered how to turn things around, Duke popped back into mind. Look, I know how stupid what I’m about to say is, but at the time I was so desperate to make the channel work I couldn’t see that.
The problem with my channel was that I mostly covered obscure indie games. People watch videos about games they care about, they don't watch videos about games they never heard of but might like. So I always had a big problem getting new viewers. I thought about ways to get more attention on the games themselves, which would then drive people to watch my videos.
That’s when I remembered this cocky thief character I created: Duke Hawthorne III.
What if I made a new channel as Duke and play games that I’d later feature on the "main" YouTube channel? The idea was that these streams would get generate interest in the game I was playing, which would drive people to look up more videos about that game, where they'd find my "main" channel covering it. At the same time, I could familiarize myself with the game and record footage as I was streaming as Duke for this other channel. It was genius, and there were literally zero flaws in this plan.
Once again, I went all out. I found a website called Nizima that sells pre-made vtuber models and bought the cheapest one I could find that looked halfway decent. It was a generic-looking white dude of about my age wearing a dapper suit. I no longer have access to the model (or any of the files from this time), and I can’t find it on the website. I also lost everything else I made for this, including new logos (almost the same I made for my Holostars audition), general art and stream assets, and a new schedule. What a tragedy.
I had the first month of streams planned out. I’d stream three to four times a week. The first week would focus on thief games, to emphasis my character. Thief Simulator, Spirited Thief, and Thief of Thieves would have been the first three games I played, to be followed-up with reviews on Triple Iris, my main channel. To keep things interesting, I also planned a couple of chatting streams where I’d talk about some famous thieves of history, a watchalong of Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, and a cooking stream… where I would have baked a cake with a file in it. Yeah, I was going way too hard. I don’t know how I planned on managing all that on top of Triple Iris, which was the whole point of this, and my part-time job.
The thought of time management never crossed my mind, and I went full steam ahead. I had three practice streams on Triple Iris to get some experience. This was the first time I ever livestreamed, and it went about as well as you’d expect.
At first I tried to play Renowned Explorers, one of my favorite indie games and a true hidden gem. The problem is that it had been years since I played it, and it’s a very complex game. I couldn’t remember how to play, so I started with the tutorial. It was boring, I was ashamed at hyping the game up only to forget how to play it, and I was nervous about people watching me live for the first time. I ended the stream after only half an hour and only seven or eight people watching. My next stream was of House Flipper 2, where I spent two hours yammering (yapping, as the kids call it these days) about video games and my life in general. I barely paid any attention to playing the game, and much of the stream I wasn’t even playing. A few days later, I streamed the game again and paid more attention to playing. Too much attention, this time barely saying anything at all.
Look at that beard! Why didn’t anyone tell me I needed to trim it?!
The critical lesson from these streams wasn’t that I was bad at it. Everyone’s bad at stuff they try for the first time. I wasn’t sweating the lack of watchers, either. That wasn’t what these practice streams were about. That’s something very easy for me to say now. At the time, I was very stressed about that. The crucial lesson, though, was that I didn’t like streaming. It’s very difficult playing a game competently, having something interesting to do or say, and juggling chat at the same time. When I’m playing a game, I like playing a game. I don’t like chatting, and I don’t like doing the typical streamer thing of goofing around and causing chaos.
When I came to my senses, I realized how absurd this plan was. No one is watching my YouTube channel, so I’d make a second streaming channel unaffiliated with it in an already saturated market to drive viewers over there? What part of that makes sense, Josh? Please, share with the class. I was so desperate to make Triple Iris work that I was willing to try any harebrained scheme. If I went through with it, I would have abandoned it within a month, or spent all my time on Duke while Triple Iris slowly withered away.
There’s another reason I stayed away from vtubing, and why I’d never consider it even now.
The Dark Underbelly of Vtubing
It turns out there are a lot of people on the internet who love to do nothing more than hate. This isn’t news to anyone. What might surprise you is that seemingly one of the biggest and most lucrative hate mills (outside of politics, of course) is centered around vtubing. These people are called “antis” by the community, and their sole purpose in life is to spread hate and harass vtubers everywhere they can, as often as they can. In turn, this level of hatred has spawned an “anti-antis” community, who push back against this hate using pretty much the same tactics.
There’s a whole TikTok cottage cheese industry attacking vtubers, attacking antis, antis attacking defenders, and even other vtubers getting in on it. I won’t litigate any of that drama here. It’s exhausting, and I don’t want any part of it. The fear of being dragged into some kind of internet argument and forever carrying that baggage around like countless other vtubers (even if I did nothing wrong) sounds like my idea of hell.
While I was putting together Duke, the corporate world of vtubing collapsed. It started with Nijisanji, before spreading to Hololive and Vshojo. These are/where the three biggest corporations on the market, and from 2023 to 2025, they all struggled with losing a ton of talent, allegations of all kinds, and in Vshojo’s case going out of business entirely. They all learned the hard way that there isn’t any money in vtubing. We see that most with Hololive, who have turned to exploitative gacha games and live music festivals that detract from the thing that made them popular in the first place. I looked into some of the vtubers who left these companies, and they’re all dealing with a lot of regret about their time at these places.
This makes me super glad I made the decision I did. If I did somehow get hired by Cover, I think I’d be a miserable wreck right now. If I became an independent vtuber, think of what I’d be up against. A saturated market made worse by all the corpo vtubers becoming independent, constant drama, a day job, and either another YouTube channel to run or this blog. Like giving up my YouTube channel, I don’t regret giving up on my brief dreams of vtubing. If anything, I feel like I dodged a bullet.
Thing of the Whenever
As I mentioned earlier, another reason I stopped watching vtubers was because I grew out of that performative “unhinged” and super horny culture that surrounded it. Its only gotten worse in recent years, so my return to watching vtubers was short. Though I do want to share a couple that don’t seem to partake in that nonsense.
It’s considered a faux pas to mention somebody's “past life” in this space, so let’s say I’ve been a fan of dooby for about six years. She’s super creative and down to Earth, and she plays a lot of fun indie games. She doesn’t stream much anymore though, unfortunately.
Big Ham is someone I’ve discovered recently. She mostly streams art, but she plays the occasional game, such as this stream where she played Me & My Katamari. She’s chill, though the semi-frequent swearing offers a funny contrast. And she’s a Metal Gear fan, so that automatically makes her great in my book.
If more vtubers were like them, chill and quiet and not over-the-top, I’d probably watch more often. Though I feel like this isn’t something unique to vtubers in particular, it's a problem with streamer culture in general. I don’t know, maybe I’m an old man yelling at clouds. I’m okay with that.
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