Beneath the Skin: VTubing and the Performance of Authenticity by Bichen Xu (she/her)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21403017
Published July 19, 2026.
Keywords: technology, virtual identity, performance, personhood, avatars;
Beneath the Skin: VTubing and the Performance of Authenticity
The Avatar as a Recreated Person
Vox Akuma is a Voice Demon who holds great superhuman power to influence and mandate others with his voice. Despite his supernatural and aristocratic background, his major activity during livestream is gaming, chatting, storytelling, and occasionally, singing. What Vox does very much resembles role-playing, an embodied, performative practice widely adopted in the online world.
VTubers commonly create an avatar with a thorough attention to the design of their fictional character, including background stories and setting up a worldview; in other words, worldbuilding. They can also have different skins, which is the colloquial expression for outfits. Skins are an alternative artwork created by the visual designer of the avatars, which can be swapped around while maintaining the identity of the character. An avatar hence becomes the site of creativity and self-expression. It is relatively easy and low-cost to DIY your own avatar.³
Meanwhile, the movements of the characters are generated by tracking intentional and unintentional actions from the nakanohito. In live streaming, the actions of the performers and the virtual avatar/characters are synchronised in real time, rendering a sense of co-presence.
From 2023 to 2024, I conducted 6-months of fieldwork for my anthropology thesis on the experiences of VTubing in the Chinese online context. While talking with independent VTubers, audiences, and model designers, the perception of the VTuber as 2.5-dimensional – someone lying between the emic conceptualisation of the “two-dimensional” and the “three-dimensional” world – has been widely shared by all those involved in the culture.
When I ask the VTubers what the core of VTubing is, Nico, the nakanohito (see glossary at the bottom of the page) of a cute purplish devil Kata, says: “you know, it’s like bringing a fictional figure to people’s side, who can talk and sing, and respond to whatever you say to them”.⁴ This understanding is shared by Kai, a current graduate student and an amateur VTuber. He suggests that it is just a pure pleasure to simply watch VTubers move and talk:
“You don’t really know who the nakanohito is, you can just see them as a two-dimensional fictional figure. And anonymity is the whole point…People don’t like watching three-dimensional people [streaming], therefore we watch VTubers…If you don’t want to ruin your fondness for them, you don’t strip off their mask.” ⁵
In English, ‘virtual’ refers to a state of approaching the actual; something on the boundary of ‘being’ and ‘not-being’. From the perspective of the VTubers I spoke with, being ‘virtual’ means engaging with and enacting the different potentials of becoming and being someone. This ‘virtual’ personhood is essentially experienced as real and constructive. Through the ethics of anonymity and the performative nature of VTubing, imagination becomes the ‘creative faculty’⁶ that can ‘touch beholders and induce in them a sense of being true and powerful’⁷. The whole concept of VTubing is to make a world where the boundary between believing and make-believe is blurred.
AVATAR FILES
#001_Actias Gnoma
#002_久伴_Adrenaline
Nakanohito: Nico
Species: Female Devil
Biography: Despite the cute personality, she is a little devil who likes to mess around online.
Worldview: [???]
#004_VenomX
Nakanohito: Sina
Species: Actias Gnoma
Biography: A male subject of a zoological experiment. He used to have an outgoing character, yet the traumatic experience of once being made into a specimen has made him introverted and prudent. Actias Gnoma is asexual because he is still a juvenile.
Worldview: Posthuman era.
Nakanohito: Kai
Species: The incarnation of the chemical element adrenaline.
Biography: Can only be visually detected by humans when he is incarnated in this anthropomorphic material entity. He is calm, empathetic, elegant and reliable.
Worldview: Adrenaline and his sister Entropy are immortal. Their existences are incommensurable with the materiality of humans.
#003_Kata
Nakanohito: Selene
Species:
Biography & Worldview: Shi, code name Venom X, used to be the leader of the Night Guardian of the ancient city Sikong. While on a mission to retrieve the Empress’ stolen treasure, the mirror Xuan, VenomX discovered an unexpected curiosity — the mirror is a portal to an alternate universe.
Do We Really (Want to) Become Someone New with an Avatar?
For VTubers, successful role-play means being able to specifically call back on detailed information from the character’s design or backstory. For example, Vox Akuma is deemed good at roleplay exactly because he always remembers to do this. He even designs some of his livestreams as solely role-play based, meaning that he is going to speak in the same way that his character does. During the storytelling session, he narrates his personal story to the audiences, telling them how he travels around the world, meets interesting people, encounters different accidents and forms relations with others.
Role-playing, therefore, is a practice that builds on this particular imagination of the presence of a two-dimensional being in the three-dimensional world. In the world of VTubing, avatars become vessels of imagination through which individuals can craft an ideal image to become (and become with). Roleplaying suggests a specific perception of the VTuber as an independent image with a coherent persona, in which the personhood of the nakanohito and the avatar merge with each other.
However, a rather surprising finding I made is that many of them don’t consider themselves as “proper” VTubers because they cannot, or choose not to, perform role-play. During my fieldwork interviews, nearly everyone expressed the idea that they prefer a sense of realness and authenticity in their performance.
“I’m just a pitao-ren.” When I ask Nico, the nakanohito of Kata, about her experience of performing with the avatar, she interrupts me firmly and resolutely, while making a little bit of chuckling sound. Nico believes that her streaming lacks the role-playing aspect because she does not try to perform the fictional persona of Kata based on any character design or worldview. She considered Kata as having no unique identity, – Nico is just being herself. ⁸
There are other VTubers who, despite having done comprehensive designs, also tend not to consider themselves proper performers. Such is the case of Kai. He has crafted a full character and worldview design for Adrenaline, yet he still believes that he is selectively presenting only some of the ideal parts of himself that he wishes to show the public, such as kindness.⁹ Selene, on the one hand, believes that she is certainly role-playing VenomX. Yet, she is not always speaking in the manner of VenomX, nor narrating Shi’s story. She thinks that roleplaying is not only tiring but also unnecessary for livestreaming.¹⁰ Similarly, Sina does not want to “perform” Actias Gnoma at all. As she concludes: “It is too tiring to perform all the time, and I don’t want to be popular or get famous by being a VTuber, so there is no need for me to roleplay. Plus, I am really not a good performer, like, I am really not an eloquent public speaker.”¹¹
Instead of playing a role, they prefer being themselves while VTubing and respect the plurality of ways one can be. The invisibility of the nakanohito and the ethics of anonymity have a formative impact on sustaining a reality where VTubers exist in a liminal state, which offers them more space for self-expression.
June 2024
Around 9pm, I receive a notification from Bilibili informing me that VenomX has started streaming. VenomX’s loading screen is exquisitely made, with an animated cartoon lion-cat positioned in the middle of the screen. I see crawling comments appear on the left side of the screen, post greetings like:
“good evening!”;
“sister”;
“mommy”.¹²
Soon, the loading scene cuts open, following a fancy opening page of the landscape of Sikong. VenomX starts the stream talking casually with the chat. She responds to comments enthusiastically and continues to send kisses to her fans, greeting the audience with her signature yujie voice, in a melodic pitch and heartfelt tone.
While listening to these greetings, my attention sometimes gets fixed on the movements of VenomX. Her cat ears twitch, and her huge fluffy tail sways occasionally. Her expression is very vivid, and she deliberately makes some cute poses to cheer the chat. I especially like the moment when she laughs, and her eyes narrow into slits.
(figure 2: VenomX livestream screenshot)
A Complicated Negotiation Between Authenticity and Representation
It is widely known of the labour required to animate an avatar for a proper roleplay. Nico uses the term “driving ability” when describing her lack of engagement with the avatar. As she says, ‘Usually while streaming, you won’t be aware of the need for driving with your avatar. At least I can’t’. She ends up summarising that her skin is just her mask, something that she has meticulously decorated and really adores.¹³
Similarly, Kai does not keep an eye on his avatar while he is streaming, and does not care about how the avatar moves to accompany his expressions. It is only in some specific and special occasions that he would utilise the designed modules of facial expressions to “perform” for the audiences, which usually happens when fans donate money and top donors (loyal fans) send gifts.¹⁴
Driving an avatar is hard: there is a learning curve, a process to become skilled at doing it. It is an embodied and sensorial practice. Shylily, however, is a “master driver”. In her livestream, she states that one “can’t just sit there, blank stare” and “expect the model to look cool.” A nakanohito needs to “give it emotion, and movement, and things”.¹⁵ Due to the technological affordance of the facial mocap, the nakanohito have to tune and augment their feelings in order to achieve a lively animation of the avatar. Not just Shylily, but many other VTubers share that their faces hurt, and their cheeks cramp after streaming.
The animation is never a one-directional process dominated by the human actors. The nakanohito and the avatar are two separated actors who enact their agency and intentionality on each other. For example, the blush effect is a pre-existing code or normalised expression of shyness in Japanese anime.¹⁶ These codes are materially built into the model by the illustrator and modeller of the avatar. When I tell Kai that I really like the blushing effect, he informs me that many of his female audiences also like him doing this. “They think it is kinda erotic and cute.”
As social norms have entrenched the aesthetic expressions, forms, and styles of the avatar, there is hence a normalized, usually heterosexual binary, standard of performance, which is not always pleasant for many. Selene once suspended her independent VTuber career and joined a guild. The avatar provided by the guild was a sexy female with huge breasts. Even when Selene just shook her head and slightly moved her body, the avatar would have an exaggerated breast jiggle. Selene felt as though she did not have control over the body of the avatar and their multiple co-presences.¹⁷ Though the pre-existing codes are embodied, as it can only be animated by the VTuber’s movements, they are also shaping the representation of the nakanohito.
It is precisely by being in the state of taopi that VTubers are able to define the social norms of their avatar, and in turn reconfigure the industry’s inscribed rules of performance. For Kai, blushing is merely a gratitude he would like to show to his audiences, no matter female or male. For Selene, instead of being gazed by male audiences like what she experienced in the guild, she welcomes the idea of cultivating intimacy with female viewers through expressing her femininity.
Techniques impart actors with knowledge or memory, shaping their bodies and minds through habitus.¹⁸ While role-play is a way of transforming the self, taopi is also a type of technology of self for VTubers to form and mediate their identities with others. Taopi redefines not only what it means to be a VTuber, but what it means to be a good one.
So, do we really become someone new with an avatar?
In this mediated gap of 2.5-dimensionality, being virtual innately means embracing the doubled layers of personhood at once. This is what makes digital live performances unique – as we navigate the mediated world of the Internet, we redefine what it means to be free, comfortable, authentic, and intimate with ourselves and others.
Vox claims to be a virtual streamer, yet he feels no less real than any other YouTuber: the interaction between him and his audience is both immediate and affective. Yet within the erotic atmosphere Vox creates on his channel, whom am I gazing at, and whom are we talking to?
February 2022
“Have you heard about VTubers? Very unexpectedly, I’ve found a VTuber called Vox Akuma. It’s so damn brilliant, his whole profile.” ¹
It was the first time I had heard of the term. I replied in confusion.
“What’s a VTuber?”
“Hold on,” in just a second, Amy had sent me a video clip from Bilibili, one of the largest Chinese video-sharing websites.
I see an anime-esque man with pale skin and golden eyes, wearing a white suit jacket and a crimson shirt (see figure 1). He is sitting in front of a long table while crossing his hands. It seems like he is talking to someone in front of him.
Through verbal performance, Vox is setting up a scene where he is on a second date with “you” – this could be any audience member from the chat, imagining this to be their fictional date. Meanwhile, there is the nakanohito that speaks and acts for this avatar, and behind Vox Akuma there is a British man.
I scroll down to the comments and fans are posting messages like:
“I really like it when sweet words are spoken with a commanding tone”;
“Spank me daddy”;
“he’s such a brat tamer!” ² .
The clip cuts off bluntly when his flirtation with the audience ends.
(figure 1: Vox Akuma livestream screenshot)
¹ from a conversation with Amy.
² comment section of 2023 livestream video For Masochists? Daddy’s Most Bewitching Dom Moments.
³ commonly known within the VTubing community
⁴ conversation with Nico.
⁵ conversation with Kai.
⁶ Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations by B. Meyer, 2009, p. 7.
⁷ Sensational Movies by B. Meyer, 2015, p. 13.
⁸ conversation with Nico.
⁹ conversation with Kai.
¹⁰ conversation with Selene.
¹¹ conversation with Sina.
¹² VenomX’s livestream chat.
¹³ conversation with Nico.
¹⁴ conversation with Kai.
¹⁵ Shylily’s speech from the video.
¹⁶ everyone who watches this kind of media has learnt to interpret it this way. Even more broadly across genres, this is what blushing means.
¹⁷ conversation with Selene.
¹⁸ Technology by L. Coupaye, 2022.
Glossary
VTuber: An abbreviated term for ‘Virtual YouTubers’. Other colloquial names for VTubers include Virtual Liver.
nakanohito (中の人，中之人): ‘Person inside’. The metaphor is first employed by participants of the anime industry to refer to the voice actors (seiyū) of anime characters.
Skin / pitao (皮套)/ pi (皮): In the context of the VTuber industry, adopted from the game industry’s terminology, “skin” is used in English to express the graphic appearance of the VTuber. Pi is in turn a literal translation of the word “skin” and acts as the widely used terminology in the Chinese context. The etymological root of the word pitao in Chinese is directly translated from Japanese into English: “suit actor” (suuchi-akutaa), which refers to the performer of a Japanese tokusatsu production who does all the stunts while wearing a full costume. The costumes worn by the stunt performers are translated as pitao.
taopi (套皮): ‘To be covered with a skin’. Tao means an action of putting on/to cover something with.
pitao-ren (皮套人): A neologism established in contrast to “VTubers” who are considered more skilful at effacing their presence through performance. A pitao-ren meanwhile acts as themself, only that they do so while wearing a 'skin'.
yujie (御姐): Derived from the Japanese term onē 御姉, meaning elder sister. In the Chinese online context, it usually refers to a hot older-sister.
SOURCES CITED
Published Sources:
Coupaye, L. (2022). Technology, in C.D. Roeber and L.A. De Cunzo (eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Handbooks in Anthropology), pp. 436–468. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108622639.018.
Meyer, B. (2009). Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations: Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms, and Styles of Binding, in B. Meyer (ed.) Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, pp. 1–28. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623248_1.
Meyer, B. (2015). Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana. Berkeley, UNITED STATES: University of California Press. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oxford/detail.action?docID=4401382 (Accessed: 29 June 2024).
Published Gossip:
VenomX’s livestream chat:
十月星彩, 2022. [Clip/Subbed | Vox Akuma] For Masochists? Daddy’s Most Bewitching Dom Moments【切/熟/vox akuma】M向？daddy的dom蛊人时刻 [WWW Document]. Bilibili. URL https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Xi4y1f7Nq/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click&vd_source=160ade4076c8cdf9462dae2bf693aa80 (Accessed February 2022).
Shylily’s speech from the video:
无忧马, 2023. [Subbed / Shylily] Lily on Driving: “You can’t even drive it—what do you know about its performance?” 【熟肉/Shylily】莉莉关于机体驾驶的心得。“你开都不会开，还讲什么性能。” [WWW Document]. Bilibili. URL https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1iW4y1Z7cP/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click&vd_source=160ade4076c8cdf9462dae2bf693aa80 (Accessed May 2024).
Direct Conversation:
Nico, interview by Bichen Xu, 12 April, 2024.
Kai, interview by Bichen Xu, 9 April 2024.
Selene, interview by Bichen Xu, 6 April 2024.
Sina, interview by Bichen Xu, 22 October, 2023.
Common Knowledge:
It’s known within the VTubing community that it is relatively easy and low-cost to DIY your own avatar.
Blushing is generally interpreted to mean shyness - everyone who watches anime and other kinds of media in this realm has learnt to interpret it this way.