gzb said:
I guess another way to view this is looking at the "soul" of a character. If you change her VA, does it affect her character? Can she stand on her own without her VA? Kizuna Ai is definitely a vtuber because we all know how people felt about the possibility of changing her "soul". For characters like Gold Ship, it probably doesn't matter as much. Some people will still argue that it's not the same anymore but it will certainly be much more acceptable.
caps7 said:
If we're talking about replacing VAs, I can say that that has only happened once in the entirety of Love Live!'s history (that is, for Yuki Setsuna), and that was only because the original VA has a disability that impacted her ability to perform live. I'm sure, even before VTubers even existed, that people would go absolutely nuts if any VA in Love Live! were to be replaced for no apparent reason. So I don't think that is a good metric.
As I had brought up on Discord, invoking the souls of the people behind the personas is just overcomplicating the situation, which is why our usual modus operandi for tagging VTubers is following the Japanese practice, which is to say, we tag them if they consider themselves VTubers. We develop practices for exceptional cases and exceptions (ala Katsura Kotonoha et al), but otherwise that's the simplest and most encompassing approach for us.
In practice, as far as Danbooru is concerned, there is no difference between someone like Hinoshita Kaho and Nerissa Ravencroft, except one is far more embodied/influenced by the person behind the model than the other, but that's meta information that isn't particularly necessary. The moment you try to create more narrow definitions of what a VTuber is (as most common Western definitions try), you end up kicking out key figures from the space from the definition and include folks who actively choose not to be VTubers (ex. trying to define it based on streaming ends up including VRChat streamers who don't call themselves VTubers, but removing folks like Kaguya Luna and Hatoba Tsugu, and the latter would also be excluded if you try to define it based on how much the character is influenced by the person behind the model, because Hatoba Tsugu is absolutely just a fictional character).
caps7 said:
If we're going to instead use whether they call themselves VTubers as a metric, then the Hasu no Sora members don't really count. I don't think it was the intention, even; people just conflated the word "Virtual" in "Virtual School Idols" with the concept of VTubers. There really isn't an easy way to describe their activities other than as "VTubing", though, since they do stream and perform as their characters complete with full 3D models. In that respect, they are much closer in concept to early VTubing than what most people would consider VTubing nowadays.
In fact, according to this interview with the staff of the game, they had received special training so they could perform live, in live performances and in normal livestreams. Though, that was more to emphasize the "fan interaction" aspect of the game, and make the transition between the provided story and livestreams seamless.
I'd argue it isn't conflating though. Given how much of a brand term "VTuber" is, having a broader (non-YouTube) term, especially one that hasn't been really used yet, makes a lot of sense. Nijisanji explicitly named its talent 'VLiver', a term that has now garnered its own life to refer to talent in 'closed garden apps' ala IRIAM and AniLive, for instance. And it's not like they haven't used the term 'VTuber' before for Love Live, as Tennoji Rina had a number of videos on YouTube explicitly labeled as such. That's why most recognize that 'Virtual School Idol' (バーチャルスクールアイドル) is just their way of saying VTuber - searching it on the Japanese net makes that abundantly clear.
The mention of 'early VTubing' is why we don't rely on common Western definitions for what constitutes a VTuber or not, because most Western definitions are based on the fact that most folks were exposed to VTubers only from 2020 onward. For the Japanese, their definitions still include 'early VTubing' styles because they are still fairly common on the Japanese side. To name but one example, the Omega Sisters still overwhelmingly prefer doing prerecorded content for their own channel as opposed to livestreamed (and have even pushed the boundary by the fact that they have their 3D heads applied directly to their actual bodies, allowing them an even wider breadth of content).
zetsubousensei said:
Just throwing out the opinion that the virtual youtuber tag is weird since it doesn't descibe anything observable about the picture it's more used as a "canon tag" than anything else. Perhaps there should be a tag for more explict vtubing as an action. We have a livestream tag but thats much broader.
You're not the only one with that opinion; the tag is one of the few instances of generic-copyright tags (alongside idol, utaite, voice actor, the once-proposed 'vocal synthesizer' tag, etc), where the concept/profession is tagged, a thing which isn't immediately observable from the art itself, and a number of builders/contributors have expressed their distaste for the tag's continued existence (and the only reason why the tag will continue to exist is because, despite all logical [to some] measures, a lot of people search the virtual youtuber tag, either by itself or in tandem with something like sex, or even use it in blacklists to ensure they get no VTubers in their search, so there's implicit support for it from the silent majority).
Regardless, on actually depicting VTubing as an action, in art, VTubers are just as often depicted as emotive as actual people, so something like that wouldn't make as much sense. Using livestream and fake video is good enough for that.