Waiting for a face reveal that never comes? How VTubers challenge our understanding of influencer authenticity

Abstract

Taking as examples the VTubers CodeMiko and Ami Yamato, this article attempts to offer insights into two alternative approaches to dealing with the prevalent imperative of authenticity for social media influencers: While the former thematises her hypermediated virtuality explicitly and only refers to her ‘human form’ as ‘The Technician’, the latter goes to comedic lengths to never acknowledge the artifice of her avatarial presence. Analysing the aforementioned multi-layered masquerades in the context of interaction and viewer reception allows me to observe the ways authenticity is used, not so much as an existentialist guiding-principal for self-actualisation, but as a form of currency that is context-specific and takes many forms. Authenticity, this article shows, is not necessarily grounded in anything ‘real’ that can be found behind masks or outside the virtual realm. Rather, authenticity must be negotiated continuously between the social media influencers and their audiences to achieve and maintain celebrity status. Ultimately, it seems that masquerades function to liberate individuals from established norms and constraints imposed on them by social, cultural, and, in this case, technological assemblages by subverting and thereby drawing attention to them. VTubers, therefore, might inform a new mode of presenting an authentic self on social media.