A virtual anchor prepares for a live broadcast on April 7, 2022 in Tokyo, Japan. Virtual anchors originated in Japan.
Just like in the movie “Ready Player One”, the highly skilled gamer takes off the VR glasses but lives in a shabby room; the virtual idols who are always responding in the live broadcast room may also be embarrassed by the actors behind them.
In May 2022, when Jiale, a member of the leading domestic virtual idol group A-SOUL, announced its “dormancy”, some fans discovered the social media accounts of suspected Jiale actors. She recorded a clip of her work: she often worked overtime, trained until the early hours of the morning, and it was not until the broadcast that she found that she had been cut on her thigh by a motion capture device. (See Southern Weekly report for details“Behind the “collapsed house” of virtual idols: controllable “holsters”, uncontrollable people”）
The actors behind the virtual anchors or virtual idols are called “people in the middle” in the circle. This is not the first time that the situation of the people in the middle has attracted the attention of fans. In 2019, Japan’s “Game Department Project” was rumored to be bullied, oppressed, and under surveillance. Subsequently, the company issued a statement on station B and did not directly respond to the rumors; the virtual anchor Kizuna Ai, which appeared in 2016, stopped after 5 years. During the event, the suspected person said on social media, “I don’t want to lose to annoying adults, I want to protect myself” – but she did not explain the specific dispute, or even stated that she was the actor of Kizuna Ai.
This is a problem that has existed in the emerging industry of virtual live broadcasting since its inception. Lu Zhicong, an assistant professor at the City University of Hong Kong, said that virtual anchors are not just live anchors with a layer of animation masks – when the animation image becomes the company’s intellectual property, the people behind the virtual anchor lose their bargaining power over the company. Although fans will feel indignant about their situation, this does not change anything; on the other hand, even if fans have a sense of justice, most of the time they are not familiar with the situation of the people in the middle. It is an inherent characteristic of the “otaku” culture.
In 2021, Lu Zhicong, in cooperation with scholars from the University of Toronto and Carnegie Mellon University, interviewed 21 virtual live broadcast audiences in China, and published a paper “More Kawaii Than Real Anchors: How Otaku Perceive and Understand Virtual Anchors”. In this paper, they summarize the characteristics of virtual live broadcast audiences and compare them with real live broadcasts, and the important feature is “separation” – the separation between characters and people, do not be curious about the identity of the person in question, do not leak their information. This may help explain the plight of people today.
The following is a conversation between the Southern Weekend reporter and Lu Zhicong.
Lu Zhicong.
Fans won’t expect the affection of virtual anchors
Southern Weekend: