Anime Girl VTubers Are Selling Out Concerts, but Are They ‘Real?' Depends on Who You Ask

WIRED

7 days ago

Jul 25, 2025 7:00 AM Virtual anime streamers are selling out live venues, singing at pro sports games, and launching record labels, with fans showering them with presents and suspending disbelief in service of the bit. PHOTOGRAPH: ERICA HERNANDEZ
I'm at a sold-out concert in Hollywood, and I'm the only one in the 1,200-plus-capacity venue who doesn't know any of the songs. One of the acts has just finished, and everyone around me begins chanting and waving their light sticks. We don't have to wait long: Kou Mariya, one of the headliners, appears. Not on the stage itself, but on a massive screen spanning the entirety of its length. (She will never appear on the stage, because she is a sexy 6,669-year-old blonde vampire anime girl who exists only in virtual reality.) Mariya starts singing in Japanese. A grown man next to me seems like he's on the verge of tears.
Welcome to Fantastic Reality, a mini-festival at the Vermont Theater that brings eight main VTuber acts—all anime girls of varying eye and hair color—to a live venue, accompanied by IRL musicians. I'm here to find out more about why fans are willing to pay up to $180 (the cost of a VIP pass) for the privilege of watching these acts in person, rather than on their screens from the comfort of their own homes. PHOTOGRAPH: ERICA HERNANDEZ
If you've never seen a VTuber before, it's probably just a matter of time. VTubers have been around for about a decade in Japan, hosting everything from online weather stations to iPhone launches, but they surged in popularity outside Japan during Covid quarantine. If you like watching anything online—cooking, gaming, history—there is a VTuber version of it. The name is a portmanteau of 'Virtual YouTuber,' and as it suggests, it's a livestreamer or video creator, but instead of showing their face, the audience sees a virtual 2D or 3D avatar.
Technically, a VTuber could take on any appearance or theme (my favorite: an ex-Yakuza in prison stripes who talks about real-life organized crime), but the most popular ones are anime girls with cute voices. Some of these VTubers also sing, and output ranges from simple karaoke streams to full-on music videos. If the VTuber is big enough, fans can also listen to their music on most major streamers. The market is growing: Last week, major VTuber agency Hololive launched a record label. Which brings us back to the concert.
For most of the roughly three-hour show, there are three human musicians on the stage: a drummer, a bassist, and a guitarist, who play accompaniment for a parade of anime girls that appear on the massive monitors (one in the center, two hovering over the right and left side). The two DJs, Mono Monet, a VTuber with purple hair who hops from filter house to gabber, and JOENN, an actual human DJ who appears physically on stage to close out the night with an even more frantic set, easily could blend in (musically) at any rave. But the meat of the show is what a casual listener would probably just call 'anime music,' veering occasionally into songs that ranged from goofy memes (Issa Corva: ' I hate cilantro, baby / I hate you almost as much / as I hate cilantro, baby ') to equally goofy link-in-bio rap (CottontailVA: ' Shout-out to my gooners / that showin' my Fansly love ').
Mariya, the aforementioned sexy anime vampire, started VTubing in 2020, just in time to ride the surge of quarantine-fueled popularity when everyone was looking for a parasocial friend. Her content ranges from gaming to chatting to (occasionally members-only) ASMR videos to karaoke, and she's also released a single to streaming services.
'Just imagine Paramore, but Hayley Williams is an anime girl.'
I've watched some of her streams, but I didn't know what to expect at her concert. Promotional material for the event promised that there would be a live human band, but how exactly would she be interacting with them?
So I arrange to speak to her remotely, a couple days before the show. The video call starts, and she appears just like she does in her streams. I mean this literally: I am speaking to the avatar that her fans see.
'I am a vampire born thousands of years ago,' she tells me as an introduction. 'And you, and all of my viewers, are mortal humans. And my goal is: Every time you die and reincarnate, I will find you. And this is the way I found you in this lifetime.'
Now that I understand what cosmic forces led me to this blessing of an interview, I try to figure out how the concert is actually going to look . I ask Mariya how she would explain her show to a complete newbie, and she offers: 'Just imagine Paramore, but Hayley Williams is an anime girl,' and laughs. This doesn't answer my core question: How, from a technical aspect, are they going to achieve this? Will it be a hologram? Will the artists be streaming in to the venue from home? From backstage?
These are not good questions. At least, not according to the internal rules of VTubing.
VTuber culture is often compared to professional wrestling, because of a common internal rule: kayfabe , a term for presenting a fictional story as reality. Most people who have heard the word know it from wrestling, where the athletes in the ring are performing a sweaty soap opera for the entertainment of the audience. Everyone knows it's fake, from the match itself to the shouty post-match interviews.
VTubers take this to another level. When Mariya tells her fans she is a vampire, that lore is now fact . It is generally inappropriate to directly ask a streamer how they 'made up' their backstory or who they 'really' are. People have put effort into finding theoretical backing for this. In a book titled The Philosophy of VTuber ( VTuberの哲学 ), a recent PhD graduate of the University of Tokyo references the philosopher John Searle to argue that a VTuber is an 'institutional being': VTubers 'exist' in the same way that money exists, because people agree to believe in it.
Some VTubers take their kayfabe more strictly than others (Mariya has occasionally shared some details about events in her life), but in general, audiences follow their lead and will ostracize anyone who breaks the fantasy boundary, especially in the livestream chat. Fans are protective of their oshi (a term borrowed from Japanese idol-music culture that literally means 'push,' but in fan context roughly corresponds to 'favorite artist'), and they feel a responsibility to promote and encourage them in a way that nobody ever would for Dwayne Johnson. There is no fourth wall: As Searle's rival Jacques Derrida might say, everyone is always-already on the stage with the VTuber, building the fantasy together.
So my repeated attempts to get Mariya to answer questions about how she and her co-performers would all appear in the venue are a non sequitur. She will just be there .
The closest she gets is telling me what she wants people to experience: 'We don't want it to feel like, 'this is just virtual,'' she says.
'This is just reality . [The idea is] … how can we mix it all together where you can't tell what is virtual and what is real anymore?' PHOTOGRAPH: ERICA HERNANDEZ PHOTOGRAPH: ERICA HERNANDEZ
Outside the venue, I see a group of people in matching Kou Mariya shirts, and I try chatting up a friendly looking guy in a backwards ball cap and glasses. I ask him if they all came as a group. He tells me no; they just grouped up here because they're Mariya fans. His IRL friends wouldn't come.
'A lot of my friends are just kind of regular guys,' he tells me. 'They wanna watch like, UFC fights, and I'll go watch that [with them]. We just do the basic stuff, like watch sports. With them I just kinda do my normal stuff, and then I just kind of do my own thing out here with these guys,' he continues, pointing to the crowd.
I ask him what sort of shows he usually goes to. 'I usually do a lot of hardcore concerts. Metalcore, hardcore, like a lot of mosh pits and stuff like that. But my latest one was a V4 concert,' he says, referring to a larger VTuber agency group called V4Mirai that Mariya is signed to. Then he pulls up his sleeve to show me a massive tattoo covering his forearm—a cutesy batlike mascot, a reference to Mariya's fans.
'She's my kami-oshi ,' he says, proudly. Kami-oshi: literally, ' god-push,' your ultimate favorite amongst your other favorites. Worthy of ink on skin.
Other than him, though, I don't meet many 'conventional' music fans. Almost everyone else I ask about recent shows they've attended name-drops conventions, VTuber fan meetups, or other anime-related events. For most people I talk to in between sets, the music seems to be a bonus aspect of a VTuber they watch, not necessarily the main draw. Being at the show is a way to 'see' and support their oshi, and to be around other people who are into the same thing. Pretty similar to what brings most people to Anime Expo, which was also running that week in Los Angeles.
Putting this on during Anime Expo is a smart move, and not just because it's convenient (one fan says they chartered a whole party bus to shuttle people from the convention to the concert). The cultures are very compatible, as there's a good amount of crossover from anime and idol-music fan culture in VTuber fanatics. One of the more obvious ones is the flower stand: a sort of collaborative display between independent fan groups and the artists themselves. Fans will pool money to buy elaborate flower arrangements; at the entrance of the venue is a life-size cutout of Mariya with a wreath of roses, complete with a message to the VTuber herself: 'Congratulations for making your Fantastic Reality dreams come true!' Underneath, there's a list of online handles of people who've contributed money or art to the display. This is the sort of thing you'd see at a J-pop concert. Fans independently deciding to form communities isn't unique to any music scene; but not every genre sees the artist management setting aside official space at a concert hall for these fans to display their enthusiasm.
In general, VTuber fans are known for heavy spending when they like something. If you really want to show your support, you'll need a pair of light sticks so you can wave them in unison with the crowd when your oshi takes the stage. It simply won't do to bring your own from home—when Mariya takes the stage, you want to be glowing in the precise hue of deep red that everyone else is. So you want the official pair. A merch booth sells them at the front—about $60 per stick.
A music purist might scoff at all this; to say that VTuber fans don't even like music, they just like anime, and that the whole scene is fake. Full disclosure here: I will admit that I walked into the venue with a touch of this mentality, but that slowly turned into an existential crisis: Who can say that their favorite genre isn't also fake?
Hip-hop, despite being a commercial genre obsessed with 'reality,' has always had at best a tenuous relationship with the concept. Rick Ross took the name of an actual drug dealer and has tried to downplay his past job as a correctional officer. He still has fans. So does Drake, despite the fact that there is a televised record of the fact that he did not 'start from' anywhere near what a reasonable person would consider 'the bottom.' Lil Tecca gleefully admitted, on camera, that his first breakout single was full of fibs (he doesn't have a gun, doesn't own much designer fashion, has never been to Milan), but so what? It's a fun song, and I still like it.
Punk, hip-hop, folk, and so on—fans continually foist 'authenticity' purity tests on their artists and each other—partially because we all know that our fandom is ultimately based on a mutually constructed fiction of what we hope or imagine the artist to be. But it's fun to pretend! And sometimes, it's nice to be in a room of people who want to pretend along with you.
VTuber fans are just more straightforward, and less pretentious about the whole thing. PHOTOGRAPH: ERICA HERNANDEZ
One of the more impressive things about the Fantastic Reality show is that it happened at all. As Mariya tells me, she simply decided she wanted to do a show and started hitting up other VTubers she liked and asking them to participate. She knows the audience: If you're into this sort of thing, the presence of acts like Japanese stadium-filler KAF and Indonesian virtual girl group JKT48V on the lineup would have been reason enough to buy a ticket. And Mariya herself has a big fan base as well, but she's nowhere near as well known as perhaps the most impressive name she got on the bill: Ironmouse, who once broke Kai Cenat's record for the most paid subscribers on Twitch.
'It isn't silly to be an anime girl on the internet.'
Others have more resources. Hololive is able to put on multicountry tours easily, and unlike Mariya's show, they don't need to call in favors: They have their own stable of in-house VTuber talent who are able to speak and sing in English and Japanese. A couple days after Fantastic Reality, Hololive—whose parent company, Cover Corp, brought in over $140 million in merch alone last fiscal year—make their second appearance at Dodger Stadium, with three virtual anime girls singing 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' in cutesy voices during the seventh-inning stretch.
Not everyone is a fan: 'Oh, so that's why we lost', one commenter says on a Dodgers fan Instagram account. 'God was punishing us.' But the fact that the event happened at all shows how much investment is already happening in hopes that VTuber culture can make money in the mainstream.
Mariya's ventures are on a much smaller scale, but for her fans, Fantastic Reality is a huge deal. So much so that one of them helped her tell the world that it was happening— by putting her in their private plane and flying her over Los Angeles, so that she could livestream the announcement from 2,000 feet in the sky. (Out of respect for kayfabe, I did not ask how this was accomplished.)
'This project is a challenge to myself,' Mariya tells me. 'How can I make all those connections and prove to not just myself, but to a lot of other people, that you know, it isn't silly to be an anime girl on the internet?' PHOTOGRAPH: ERICA HERNANDEZ PHOTOGRAPH: ERICA HERNANDEZ
VTuber artists probably don't signal the end of music any more than the Gorillaz heralded the end of concerts when they started putting cartoons on stage in 2001. I'm more concerned that VTuber musicians are going to be replaced, and what that could mean for the rest of music.
The stage seems pretty well set already: Timbaland has co-launched a startup that wants to use AI-generated 'artists' to help create music. Velvet Sundown, an apparently AI-generated psych rock band with over a million monthly listeners on Spotify, has been twisting music journalists' brains for a few weeks, mostly because it sounds pretty decent. And that's only the most recent high-profile case: The lo-fi beats scene has been struggling with AI for a while now.
Then, there's Bloo, an AI-generated VTuber created by a popular YouTuber who voluntarily replaced himself because he was getting burned out, but realized if he wasn't onscreen, he wouldn't be able to continue his business. As he told CNBC: 'The flaw in this equation is the human, so we need to somehow remove the human.' Bloo's creator says it's already brought in seven figures.
Put the two together: Couldn't we 'remove the human' from the equation of VTuber music?
An AI VTuber singer wouldn't need to take breaks. 'She' could endlessly entertain 'her' fans with an unlimited stream of cozy chat and cute tunes. There is an obvious financial incentive here, if not for individual creators, then for corporations; venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz posted an article last year in which it put AI companions and VTubing together on an 'Anime Market Map,' signaling an obvious interest in figuring out how to make money more efficiently off fans. It also doesn't help that xAI's Grok just dropped a sexy 'AI companion' that looks like it could be Mariya's little sister.
Whereas conventional hip-hop or rock audiences have largely turned up their nose at AI creep, VTuber fans are already used to an abstracted version of music entertainment—wouldn't they be the earliest adopters of AI?
Mariya disagrees.
'I think that the culture in VTubing is that if you use AI, it's really looked down upon,' she says. 'In our sphere, we're pretty safe from that.'
She does understand that AI is starting to encroach on everything, though, as do the show's promoters—the press release for the concert promises none of the performers will be AI. 'One of the things that I was very vocal about for this concert is that I did not want AI involvement in it,' she says. 'I think that it would be a little bit insulting.'
'VTubing has grown because of artists, you know, our visuals are made by human artists. Our rigging is made by human riggers. Our songs are made by humans. A lot of the fan art that's made, like the people who watch us, are humans. I think we should do our best to make sure that they always have a place here.'
Mariya has a point. Maybe because of the spillover from anime fan culture, which geeks out about the voice actors of their favorite anime almost as much as the drawings themselves, VTuber fans are also interested in the behind-the-scenes artistry of their oshi. Some agency pages for VTubers include credits for the person who designed the avatar—one of the few exceptions made in the kayfabe rule. At the end of the Fantastic Reality concert, the screens show a long credits roll, including artists and names of the writers of each song. People actually stick around to watch it and cheer.
I want to believe Mariya—that VTuber culture has spent so much time close to the edge of the human-created and the machine-generated that they've figured out how to draw boundaries and protect the human side. Maybe she's right: They have had longer than the rest of us to think through these problems.
Three weeks after the show, Fantastic Reality's closing singer, Ironmouse, posted a video explaining that she was leaving her agency, Vshojo, alleging that it withheld over half a million dollars in payment, not to her, but to the Immune Deficiency Foundation. Ironmouse has previously shared that she has a 'low to near-non-functioning immune system' that forces her to be isolated for long periods. (Vshojo has since announced that they are out of money and are shutting down. WIRED reached out to Vshojo for comment but did not immediately receive a response.)
In the days after Ironmouse's post, her fans not only expressed support but have helped raise over $1.2 million for the foundation.
VTuber fans still care that there are humans involved. Everyone is pretending in the same room together, and perhaps more importantly, they want to support the humans who keep the story going.
If the corporations are able to ruin VTuber culture, I don't think the rest of us stand a chance.