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

Ken Jen Lee, PiaoHong Wang, Zhicong Lu

TL;DR

This study examines how English-speaking viewers experience and cope with the announced retirements of popular VTubers, Kiryu Coco and Uruha Rushia, by analyzing nearly three years of Reddit discussions. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines deductive and inductive coding with quantitative time-series modeling, the authors identify distinct emotional trajectories, coping strategies, and evidence of grief policing in VTuber communities. They propose a typology of VTuber retirements and demonstrate how identity co-construction, reincarnation discussions, and archival practices shape viewer responses and community dynamics. The findings offer design implications for online spaces that support parasocial grieving, tribute creation, and more nuanced VTuber recommendation and archival practices, with broader relevance to online identity, fandom, and digital culture research.

Abstract

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 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.

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

TL;DR

This study examines how English-speaking viewers experience and cope with the announced retirements of popular VTubers, Kiryu Coco and Uruha Rushia, by analyzing nearly three years of Reddit discussions. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines deductive and inductive coding with quantitative time-series modeling, the authors identify distinct emotional trajectories, coping strategies, and evidence of grief policing in VTuber communities. They propose a typology of VTuber retirements and demonstrate how identity co-construction, reincarnation discussions, and archival practices shape viewer responses and community dynamics. The findings offer design implications for online spaces that support parasocial grieving, tribute creation, and more nuanced VTuber recommendation and archival practices, with broader relevance to online identity, fandom, and digital culture research.

Abstract

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 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.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 51 sections, 3 figures, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background Information
  3. A Brief History of VTubers
  4. VTuber Retirements
  5. Related Work
  6. Research on VTubers
  7. Parasocial Relationships
  8. PSRs with Live-Streamers.
  9. Reactions to Involuntary PSR Dissolution.
  10. Grief Policing and Norms
  11. Digital Fandom & Identities
  12. Research Questions & Hypotheses
  13. Methods
  14. Exploratory Phase
  15. Description of Analyzed VTubers
  16. ...and 36 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: An overview of the types of VTuber retirements generated from the exploratory phase (Section \ref{['sec:exploratory']}).
  • Figure 2: The data analysis process; both the categorization and coding were done manually after passing initial IRR checks.
  • Figure 3: The number of relevant posts and comments posted over time for each analyzed VTuber.