Alright fellas, the results are in: the best anime of 2020 is officially… Vtubers! Be it Hololive or otherwise, and this article is my review on who to check out. With the previous year giving a rather meager lineup in terms of anime to watch, we were saved from actually starting on our backlogs by constantly watching streamers pretend to be anime waifus, husbandos, and in some cases, daughters and winning sons.
With pretty much all of us seeing our travel plans wind up in dust, many of us have thrown our budget into things that we can all get behind, giving anime girls superchats. Honestly speaking, many fans (simps) wouldn’t think twice about showing some support to their favorite Vtuber.
As for most of them, these talented and entertaining individuals really made a horrible year a little brighter. And these forms of support can come as either messages with some money attached to it, or dragging friends down the rabbit hole.
Seeing as I’m broke, you can take a wild guess on what I’m about to do.
What you saw above is the equivalent of a Pokemon Rap but for Hololive’s Vtubers. That’s about half of them at the point of this writing. And well, allow me to peddle you some of my favorites from this group.
Tsunomaki Watame
A talented lyricist and singer, accompanied by a voice that’s as fluffy as her personality. Watame’s just one wholesome sheep that can guarantee a relaxed, comfy stream ahead. Whether that be playing a game, singing songs, or just sharing stories with her audience.
She also has some sides to her that gives her a down-to-earth persona. Occasionally messing up in games, rolling along with the jokes and teasing that her fans give her, lending an ear to other people’s problems, and more. She shows her appreciation of her fans by regularly interacting with them.
One instance that she agreed to want to regularly eat food prepared by a fifteen year old girl. Her tastes, that seems to reflect one of a dirty-minded old man, has earned her the nickname of Wata-oji. Suddenly, her character having horns might be more revealing about who she is- as only male sheep have them.
A big part of her appeal is that she likes older anime, which shows in her song choices during her karaoke streams, something which I usually come to her channel for.
Hoshou Marine
Twintails? Check. Lecher? Check. Unbelievable amount of knowledge about retro anime and games to the point that the age disparity of her character and self are way too apparent? Check. If Marine was a highschool girl, she would have started an anime club, one that would only accept cute girls as members. Rather than disliking boys, it’s probably more accurate to say that her goal was to imitate situations in her favorite anime.
While I enjoy her singing as much as I do with Watame, she’s definitely got the crown of biggest weeb among the group. She’s also known to be a capable illustrator, being able to make rather impressive drawings of other members. Her skills become even more apparent with the limited tools provided by the game Passpartout: The Starving Artist.
What’s even more amazing is that she does this all the while making playful banter with her audience. She really likes to talk a lot, and the speed she does makes me wish I took Japanese language studies more seriously.
She’s the type of girl that can lighten the mood in whatever she’s doing; either by inserting a dirty joke as she’s desperately screaming for her life, or taunting other members to bring out the more lively side of their respective personalities. Whether she’s being cheeky or charming, Marine is indeed a treasure that gets me recharged after a long day at work.
Kiryu Coco
If any of you had come to know my tastes in anime waifus, Kiryu Coco would seem like a complete curveball. But my experience of watching this drug dealing dragon has been quite the trip, so to speak.
Her ability to fluently speak both in Japanese and English makes it much easier for the rest of the world to interact with her. It also helps that she’s savvy with Western pop culture as well as the culture of the internet. Being greeted ‘good morning motherf*ckers’ was the one line I needed to hear to know that she’s not playing the usual streaming idol card.
While she has little confidence in her ability to carry a tune, Coco didn’t allow this to slow her down. She’s come up with ways to stand out from the rest while supporting her co-workers. Her sharp sense for picking up on what would draw in viewers to her content has made her step up her creative game: She created an early morning news series that allowed her to corner a timeslot nobody was really interested in, invented a fake product line to have as a running joke with other members, revamped her karaoke sessions, took risks with unarchived streams and injected creative twists in them to make them more fun to watch.
She even effectively made a cultural exchange show where she would translate and explain memes posted on the Hololive Subreddit.
All the work she put in convinced me that Reddit was a place worth visiting again, reviving my dead reddit account. I do believe that is a miracle.
You might ask “Hey! Aren’t you just talking about hololive?”, and well, yes that would be true. 95% of the vtubers I watch are all from hololive. I do watch others like Pikamee, Tsukino Mito, and Roberu from time to time. But my lack of (time and money for superchats) Japanese makes it hard to follow more people. But that doesn’t mean that the other people out there aren’t worth watching, I think the real question is if you can watch them all? (Ah yes, another pokemon reference, I’m so witty)
So here’s a few other content creators I do enjoy watching. Nah, they’re not all vtubers but they’re fun all the same:
Nyatasha Nyanners
Nyanners is probably an old name to you if you’ve been lurking around YouTube long enough. Last July 2020 she came back featuring a vtuber avatar. And well, she’s been a treat.
‘Seiso’ is probably the farthest word you can use to describe her. But she’s mostly a streamer with a sense of humor that I can’t get enough of. She could be driving a truck as gracefully as a bull in a shop of porcelain wares, or just reacting to videos that her audience asks her to. Nyanners’ experience with streaming and her general eccentricity can make for an entertaining time, especially if you’re looking for a good laugh.
She, along with a few other vtubers, have started their own group called VShojo. Considering that one of the members literally does content on adult sites, you can expect something very different from each member.
Koefficient
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Long story short, I came for the fighting games, stayed for the vtubers (and fighting games). Koefficient is a weeb that likes to play anime fighters, so his encounter with Hololive was pretty much inevitable. A fan may recommend him to check them out or the algorithm might have done that ahead of time. But the moment he checked them out, we knew that, like us, he’d be looking for more.
He incidentally created a meme for himself when he called out Coco’s origins due to how she moved her hips. Honestly I never knew you could do that, but Koefficient did. His knowledge of games, anime, food, and dance has made him a source of interesting insight and a goldmine for reactions. He’s also a mature, level-headed guy that knows how to have fun.
If any of what I said stuck, and got you slightly interested in checking them out, my work here is done.
Being able to share moments with these people has been one of the highlights of 2020 for me, because when each of them read memes, played games, or just reacted to things, each of their emotions felt authentic. While it sounds strange, the most genuine people I found on Youtube last year were the ones pretending to be anime characters.
I hope that if you decide to check them out after reading this review, you enjoy them as much as I did. And when you do, allow me to welcome you, by calling you a simp for vtubers.
