It’s easy to see Vtubers as a monolith. What started as a niche corner of the internet you’d somehow wind up at 5 years ago is now a slightly less niche corner of the internet that’s present everywhere from games partnerships to local convention scenes.

Like any fad that grows, it’s actually not that hard to track the growth of Vtubing- even a large group of anonymous anime characters will move in patterns, and you can separate them as easily as you can Panic! At The Disco’s discography. And now, on a beautiful spring-ish day, I’m going to stay indoors and do just that.

I like to think that currently there are 3 major waves of Vtubers. Your first wave would be the pioneer batch- these are your Kizuna Ais, your Tokino Soras. Here, Vtubing didn’t really have a lot in the way of rules aside from the anonymity- the main focus would just be keeping things Otaku-centric. Hololive would experiment further in the first wave, with what’s referred to as the 0th Gen. It’s important to note that while gaming is viewed as an integral part of the Vtuber experience, many of these older Vtubers are actually better known for their stage performances instead.

That’s just a taste of our breakdown of the different Vtuber waves. If you’d like to read the full article, subscribe to our newsletter. You can read the full article for free just by putting your email address in the box below:

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