The Algorithm Demands More Anime – This Week in Anime

Christopher and Steve look into the recent mini-trend of content creator-focused anime series and how it reflects current entertainment trends.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Mayonaka Punch, VTuber Legend, Love Live! Superstar!!, Virtual-san Looking, and Kizuna no Allele are currently streaming on Crunchyroll. Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is available on HIDIVE.

Chris

Steve, I don’t know if I’ll be up for discussion tonight. I’ve been scouring the anime of the new season, and I haven’t quite been able to come up with something that could produce that all-important internet resource: content.

Steve

Never fear, Chris. When the going gets tough, there’s only one surefire answer: cracking open a cold one.




Much like alcohol, one could also dub the internet the cause and solution to all of life’s problems.

The magic of spellcheck might make it easier to drunk-write this column, but I don’t know that we’re that deep in and desperate to get stuff out yet. Maybe we need to pregame before a panel we put on in person someday.



Fortunately, the modern landscape of the internet and entertainers therein provides plenty of fodder for discussion—especially since several anime lately have tackled the subject!

Including at least two currently airing ones, if our choice of screenshots hasn’t yet given that away. It was only a matter of time, too. The past ~15 years have seen video and streaming content explode from a niche pastime into a central pillar of modern entertainment. It’s a viable and extremely lucrative career for the select few at the top. That’s a fascinating ecosystem that lends itself to fiction as easily as the rest of the entertainment industry, and it seems like a genre that’s finally hitting its stride. The youth yearn for anime on YouTube. Or NewTube. Or OurTube. It’s a series of tubes.

Being so deeply entrenched in our current, real-life entertainment, you could see the online aspect creeping into anime of other topics over those years. Last season’s Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night stood out from its swath of concurrent music shows by having its group be not a traditional “band” but instead an online collective that released animated music videos put together by their on-team VTuber, naturally.




Virtually any anime about the entertainment industry these days, from Ya Boy Kongming! to Girls Band Cry, is going to include characters talking up views and subscriber numbers.

You bring money and livelihood into getting people to pay attention to you online, and the result is some…outsized performances and personalities. Even the latest version of Love Live!, which long treated a performance as more of a sport or hobby, recognized the financial motivator that might inform someone in that “industry.”




The good news is it resulted in the arrival of our lord and savior, Natsumi Onitsuka, along with the broader point that more shows with YouTubers is a really good thing if you’re a fan of anime girls who suck.

Truly, those rectangles we carry with us everywhere contain nothing but horrors.



But for a more contemporary example, Mayonaka Punch is a heavyweight contender in the overlap between the “girls who suck” and “girls who stream” categories. And not just because most of the cast are vampires.

Punch is right; this one hit me right out of nowhere when it premiered a few weeks ago.



It helped that I hadn’t looked too deeply into Mayonaka Punch save for knowing that YouTubers were involved. So there’s a whole lot of instant, surprising joy in seeing a violent, angry video gremlin paired up with a dipshit-thirsty vampire voiced by Ai Fairouz.

I was on the lookout for it because P.A. Works has a pretty good track record with original shows bearing idiosyncratic premises (hello, Akiba Maid War), but it still felt really nice to have my anticipation vindicated almost immediately.



I love her. All she’s missing is a ukulele.

Masaki is great because she’s terrible, and I think that immediately underlines what’s compelling about doing Anime About Online Content Creators. Anime about, say, idol or vocal performers generally still have to abide by the “rules” of that industry culture and its pretenses of purity, even if you get occasional subversions like Girlish Number. But YouTubers are technically, pointedly, their own self-employed shows. So even though she opens the series up having been canceled for it, you can still totally believe that a realistically, and lovably, shitty person like Masaki was once a beloved icon in her world.

I think Mayonaka Punch also fully understands that the phenomenon of internet celebrity sits on the razor’s edge between admiration and revulsion. It can and will teeter back and forth between the two, depending on the fickle consensus of the crowd. To that end, I like how much the narrative acknowledges all of the commenters rubbernecking Masaki’s downfall and attempts to save face. Heck, that in itself becomes its own form of content.

We’re beyond just referencing Twitter numbers; this is a show that gets the internet.



Like I’ve seen anime before that featured characters reacting to and hiding negative comments on their socials. But in Mayonaka Punch‘s case, they use those comments to let Masaki demonstrate that weird in-between area where Being Online is both your livelihood and tied to your sense of self-worth. It actually draws sympathy for her, making her feel even more human, alongside all her other follies.



Or maybe I’m just impressed by her because I’m way beyond the point of being able to venture into the comments section myself.

Oh, big same. And I also love that the narrative makes her sympathetic by showing us how much more pathetic and exploitative that internet content creation can get. Slugging someone on stream seems tame in comparison to some of those vultures.

This show so clearly both loves and hates the internet. That’s how I know it Gets It.

Masaki is an engaging protagonist, too, because she thinks and acts like a YouTuber. Now, I haven’t watched a single Mr. Beast video, but I think he’s a really fascinating case study for how people condition and mold themselves to chase the ever-evolving algorithm. We see that (to an admittedly lesser extent) in Masaki as she navigates the behind-the-scenes planning and production. That granular stuff is another way I can tell that Mayonaka Punch Gets It.

She may have been too late on the apology video, but she still knew enough to do one. She even brings up things like the subscriber thresholds you need before you can actually get monetized. Love Live!‘s Natsumi, even with her perfect clickbait thumbnails, feels like more of a surface-level parody compared to the way Masaki gets into things here.



I keep half-expecting her to go into a canned Raid: Shadow Legends spiel whenever there’s a lull.

Even the form of the videos is accurate. Just taking a single idea and churning out enough tiny variations to flood users’ recommendations, then noting what variations work better than others and iterating on those, and so on. From what I understand, that’s basically how TikTok works. That’s also how kids’ YouTube got overrun with those Spiderman and pregnant Elsa videos, but I don’t think I’m mentally prepared for an anime to tackle that particular ecosystem.

Social media management is not my department, but even I can confirm that videos with falling do really well. And I can’t even claim to be above the appeal of fine-tuned variations since Mayonaka Punch itself feels like a spin on my earlier fave Call of the Night, just with a heaping helping of sapphic shitpost energy.

Now those are two series that have cracked the code: vampires need to be horny and pathetic.

There’s a joke in here somewhere about calling participants in this internet entertainment ecosystem “vampires,” but then the irony is that Masaki is the one who’s attached herself to these bloodsuckers to farm them for content.



Though it’s in exchange for her bodily fluids. It’s a mutually beneficial (?) arrangement.

Nothing is off the table when it comes to content. One vampire’s two centuries’ worth of trash is another YouTuber’s treasure. Sometimes.




This, incidentally, is another thing that Mayonaka Punch gets right. People watch some weird stuff, and they watch a lot of it.

This is another interesting aspect of making anime, or any show, about YouTubers and other online content creators. These videos, generally, are their kind of media, separate from scripted television. Doing a fictionalized take on that material has to, as Mayonaka Punch does understand that appeal while telling its own compelling story of the behind-the-scenes that leads to it.



In Mayonaka Punch‘s case, adding vampires as its hook is a simple enough move. But I think there’s room in this subject, as in past anime about actors and singers, to tell stories about this profession that are 100% grounded in realism.

Most definitely, and I’d bet we’re not far from getting a more Girlish Number-esque takedown of the scene and its participants. And like, while it wasn’t the focus of Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night, I think Kiui’s material ended up the most compelling part because it so frankly dealt with their reality as a VTuber, both the ups and downs.

Mayonaka Punch is also still a comedy, first and foremost, but I’d love to see it take some shots at the more serious sides of self-worth in putting yourself out for online content creation—which it’s already motioned towards a couple of times with Masaki. Because yeah, Jellyfish and Kiui’s arc showed the salience that could be found in that material.



Streaming and making videos this way paints a very interesting blurred line between performance and authentic identity, making this modern material ripe for exploring the characters of those who participate in it.

I also heard from some VTubing business friends that Kiui just hit home. Both the nitty gritty stuff, like the way their computer software was set up, to the big picture stuff, like how they used their Nox persona to explore and conform to their gender and queerness. Again, I’d love to see a complete story devoted to those aspects of the scene.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Kiui’s arc was the best part of Jellyfish. And we might see more full, serious stories exploring those aspects sooner rather than later as VTubing continues making its way into the mainstream.

I think that’ll have to be later. For now, we’ve got VTuber Legend.

Yes, as is often the case with these kinds of fresh trends, they’ve got to get a simpler, sillier take on the topic out of their system first.



Which isn’t to say that this show isn’t too relatable in its own way.

It’s interesting, that’s for sure. It indulges in about as many head-scratching creative decisions as compelling ones. Still, it certainly has a strong foundation in reality, i.e., a layer of bedrock made out of empty Strong Zero cans.

This came up in Mayonaka Punch too, actually, so I want to take an aside and note how much I appreciate that these anime star adult women of drinking age.




But yeah, compared to the layers that Mayonaka Punch has already built up, VTuber Legend really could not be more basic. I think it’s done a generally good job of embodying the askew appeal of VTubers, even as that means many segments are indistinguishable from just watching a stream. Or being directly based on some of those streams.

Oh, there’s no doubt that the writing is quite familiar with watching VTuber videos. It even knows the “toes first” method of introducing a new model.

I don’t even watch that many VTubers myself, and even I knew that one total Leo-point moment.

That’s also its fundamental problem, at least when compared to something like Kiui’s arc or Mayonaka Punch. Despite the story ostensibly being a behind-the-scenes look into a VTuber’s unlikely road to success, it feels like it’s written from the viewer’s perspective, not a creator’s.

There’s an outside-looking-in reverence for the material. It can be seen in Awa’s in-universe origin story, having her begin as a fan of VTubers herself before trying it out, which I know isn’t an uncommon path in that industry, but still.




I also laugh every time she contrasts her previous hellacious office job working for a black company with the 100% not-exploitative-at-all new role of…working under a professional VTuber production label.

Lol yeah, the VTubing industry is as prone to controversy and scandal as any other branch of the entertainment industry. There’s truly no business like show business. However, I will admit that VTubing does come with its unique advantages. It is, after all, one of the few venues where you stand a reasonable chance of seeing an anime girl eat a spider.

The general free-form unhingedness is a big part of the appeal of VTubers and stories about them. You just aren’t going to see any of the Love Live! girls getting sloppy drunk in their goon caves.



Much like Mayonaka Punch, there’s appreciable messiness to all this, even as VTuber Legend, perhaps ironically, feels a little less authentic than the other show. Maybe it’s the insistence on the characters sporting their VTuber model designs all the time in “real life.”

If I were writing a story about a VTuber, I think the gap/overlap between the avatar and the person is the juiciest part. It’s that seasoning of kayfabe that both streamer and audience create together, and it’s also the furthest thing from VTuber Legend‘s mind. On the other hand, the narrative’s point of view lends itself to one of the more accurate personifications of “chat” I’ve ever seen in fiction. Chat is a chaotic soup of id-addled in-jokes, but the symbiotic relationship between chat and streamer is paramount to the medium. They are, collectively, one-half of a comedy duo.

Awa even keeps getting baited by her chat into making ill-advised gaming decisions, like she’s anime girl Jerma.




I think this is how VTuber Legend proves its value compared to being able just to watch “real” VTuber streams. It is similar to one of those, but it’s one where all the antics of the performer and the audience egging her on are 100% scripted, which lends it its flair. Yes, odd mishaps contribute to the lore of VTubers overall. Still, in a controlled fictional environment, we can enjoy a story where one of them goes on an on-mic bender and is celebrated for it instead of getting hit with one of the ol’ “graduation” text graphic posts.

There’s also a very real precedent of VTubers, even corporate ones, leaning into the safety of their character’s gimmick at the start, only to grow more unhinged and true to themselves as they become more comfortable with their job and audience. Awa’s story is dramatized, but even at her “worst,” she’s tamer than some of the most popular VTubers on the platform. That’s not to say the industry can’t be fickle, though, from the audience and corporate angles.

Much like Mayonaka Punch, there have been hints already in VTuber Legend that it could explore those heavier sides of the industry and the multitudes of Awa’s character. As consistently as it invokes Strong Zero as a punchline, the writing still brings up the idea of how much Awa should cut back, compared to her reliance on alcohol to “get into character.” That’s something.



Not that I’m expecting the silly streamer show to get all Bojack Horseman, but as with Kiui in Jellyfish, that performative personality divide is an aspect that this modern era of internet-savvy show business shows is uniquely suited to.

On the other hand, I’d forgive a lot if we get an episode that’s just Awa spitting out a 20-minute Northernlion-esque rant in response to something stupid chat said. That’s real streaming.

Much like most successful streamers and YouTubers, VTuber Legend has already been playing all the hits, so that may not be as far off as you joke.

I guess it’s also worth considering that the anime industry’s brushes with real VTubers have resulted in shows like Virtual-san Looking (cursed in a good way) and Kizuna no Allele (cursed in a bad way), so maybe it’s for the best that we stick to fictional ones.

Though I’d never stop Houshou Marine from commissioning more gay city pop music videos with her buddies. That’s an ethical application of the industry’s resources.

I would not put it past VTuber Legend to do an entire episode in the style of Virtual-san Looking.

The dozen other Virtual-san Looking fans and I are waiting with bated breath.

And if they don’t, well, at least they already know we expect an apology.