"Can't believe I'm crying over an anime girl": Public Parasocial Grieving and Coping Towards VTuber Graduation and Termination

要旨

Despite the significant increase in popularity of Virtual YouTubers (VTubers), research on the unique dynamics of viewer-VTuber parasocial relationships is nascent. This work investigates how English-speaking viewers grieved VTubers whose identities are no longer used, an interesting context as the \textit{nakanohito} (i.e., the person behind the VTuber identity) is usually alive post-retirement and might ``reincarnate'' as another VTuber. We propose a typology for VTuber retirements and analyzed 13,655 Reddit posts and comments spanning nearly three years using mixed-methods. Findings include how viewers coped using methods similar to when losing loved ones, alongside novel coping methods reflecting different attachment styles. Although emotions like sadness, shock, concern, disapproval, confusion, and love decreased with time, regret and loyalty showed opposite trends. Furthermore, viewers' reactions situated a VTuber identity within a community of content creators and viewers. We also discuss design implications alongside implications on the VTuber ecosystem and future research directions.

著者
Ken Jen Lee
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
PiaoHong Wang
City University Of HongKong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Zhicong Lu
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States
DOI

10.1145/3706598.3714216

論文URL

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714216

動画

会議: CHI 2025

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2025.acm.org/)

セッション: XR and Virtual Characteristics

G314+G315
7 件の発表
2025-04-30 18:00:00
2025-04-30 19:30:00
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