As expected, Vtubers are continuing to expand their influence and reach new heights as we move forward into 2021. What I didn’t expect was for somebody to go, “wait a fucking minute, what if we just make an avatar for a character, have the official voice actor speak for them, and hop in on the train?” The craziest part is that it was done a long time ago. In 2019 the KADOKAWA anime channel uploaded a video of the Uzaki-chan character playing Bomberman. In case you forgot, Uzaki is an annoying little gremlin who caused a lot of controversy with her body proportions… for some reason. A couple videos have come out since then, most recently a collaboration between Uzaki and Disgaea 6, an upcoming tactical role-playing video game developed and published by Nippon Ichi Software. In these videos Uzaki plays the game and interacts with the “Senpai” character (who also appears to be voiced by the official guy) in a manner very reminiscent of the source material. Here’s the video in case you want to see what I'm talking about.

Let’s break this down a bit. Vtubers doing promotions and brand collaborations is old news by this point, but I’m struggling to recall any situation where an authentic anime character from a series has been made into a Vtuber, with the official VA behind them, and made multiple videos. Unfortunately it’s not really the type of thing one can simply Google. Trust me I tried, but searching for stuff like “list of real character Vtubers” or “real anime characters who are Vtubers” got me nowhere as it’s too general terminology to narrow down what I’m talking about. That being said, it became abundantly clear that right now the big Vtubers are overwhelmingly the ones that are created from scratch like Gura and Korone, not already established characters. My question is are we going to see more companies deciding to engage in Vtuber content with their intellectual property?

Uzaki-chan is a unique case where the original souce material is already just dumb fun so doing a Vtuber side promotion gig fits right in with the feel of the series. But are we going to see the day where Light Yagami, Monkey D. Luffy, Lelouch Lamperouge or another big name anime character becomes a Vtuber in an official capacity and takes the stage? God I kinda hope not. Again this shit works for Uzaki in my opinion because it’s not serious. I don’t want to watch Light playing the latest League of Legends patch and promoting that shit. Well, okay if he rages at teammates and tries to get them killed I guess that would be in character. Still, I don’t see the property owners taking that leap anytime soon with characters that are that famous. If this idea does gain any traction it will likely start small with other series at the popularity level of Uzaki.

While we're on the subject, can Uzaki's mom be a Vtuber too?

What do you guys think about official anime characters becoming Vtubers? Would they ever be able to stand up to the Hololive-Nijisanji empire? Are more copyright holders going to consider doing this? Leave a sugoi dekai comment below!