The Rise of Hololive: How Memes Played A Significant Role In The Prevalence Of Virtual YouTubers

As 2020 drags along at a creeping pace, many have found themselves stuck at home with nothing to do but watch livestreams and videos. Fortunately for them, the meteoric rise of virtual YouTubers this year has given weebs and the quarantined alike a seemingly endless stream of content. With their faces rigged to an anime avatar, these streamers have found a niche on YouTube and Bilibili that attracts Japanese and international viewers in droves. One agency, however, currently stands above the rest: Hololive. What started as a virtual idol agency has become one of the most successful virtual YouTuber groups this year.

There are dozens of reasons to explain why Hololive has been so successful, but the one thing that remains clear is that it could not have reached its international acclaim without its dedicated community. Fandoms can often make or break a community and heavily impacts how the outside perceives the thing they follow. For example, the negative attitudes towards overzealous K-Pop stans are often reflected on K-Pop as a whole. The international Hololive community has managed to find their place and are generally well-received from outside perspectives. While communities and fandoms are no strangers to the plethora of fan art and memes, Hololive managed to do something that has reinforced and elevated their community to the point where it's ultimately come to define it. In order to further understand this, let’s examine how Hololive has used its vibrant community to increase their influence on the online stage.

"Why Do People Watch This Weeb Trash?"

The whole concept of Hololive and virtual YouTubers is challenging to explain as to what exactly they "are," let alone why they have appealed to so many. In short, Hololive is a collection of virtual YouTubers intentionally structured like a real-life Japanese idol group, akin to AKB48. Due to this structure, the initial expectation was that these streamers would collectively act like stereotypical idols. While this assumption wasn’t entirely wrong, Hololive ultimately rose to prominence in part due to defying these preconceived expectations. Like the plethora of Twitch streamers, each Hololive member brings something different to the table, both in terms of content and personality. With such a diverse array of content creators streaming both independently or collaboratively, inevitably, audiences from within and outside of Japan would eventually flock to it.

The Rise of the Western Fandom

You may be wondering how international viewers "got addicted to anime girls" streaming variety content on YouTube without even understanding Japanese, but the solution was surprisingly simple. Fan translators, who took clips from Hololive streams and added subtitles in various languages (though mostly English, Spanish and Mandarin), played an instrumental role in this widespread interest. It was from these highlights, which began popping up on the YouTube algorithm in the first months of 2020, that Hololive was propelled to international acclaim. These clips provided not only ample entertainment but also highlighted specific traits and characteristics each streamer brought to the table. Whether it be the chaotic Minecraft antics of Usada Pekora or the regular 10-hour kusoge streams of Inugami Korone, viewers soon define clear characteristics and interact with them as a result. It is from these characters that memes were born. Both Japanese, Western and international memes would find their way to Hololive stream chats and fan creations. However, the language barrier meant that most of the memes were split between the Japanese and international fandoms.

The language barrier started to break with the rise of Kiryu Coco. Debuting in late 2019, the bilingual Coco served as a bridge between the Japanese and Western communities. It is at this point that the Hololive community truly begins to immerse itself in meme culture. Whether it be teaching her fellow streamers English slang or playing along with jokes made in chat, she created the foundations of a unified and nonsensical meme community. Other streamers would catch onto this strategy, and soon had memes about them on their channel both in Japanese and English. These unique characteristics and mannerisms resulted in each Hololive creating a collection of memes and jokes based solely around them and their stream.

A notable example is Shirakami Fubuki, who created a series of videos that can only be described as shitposts, such as "I'm. Scatman." In turn, the community would build off these shitpost videos and create a wide array of kuso-style meme videos. The various memes also allowed for lesser-known members to gain recognition, ultimately becoming large parts of their success.

Beyond the Streams

The rapid growth of Hololive, partially thanks to the proliferation of these memes, was no longer constrained to the streams and clips. The subreddit, /r/Hololive, was renovated from a fan subreddit into an official one for Western fans. The content there was always awash with fan art and memes, but after official recognition from the virtual YouTubers themselves, memes began to be produced en masse. At points, the subreddit looked akin to /r/CallMeCarson or /r/PewdiepieSubmissions, two subreddits dedicated to the followings of other large YouTubers. While it's not uncommon for large content creators to have meme subreddits dedicated to them, some Hololive members like Kiryu Coco have taken a page from other big names, such as PewDiePie, and streamed their own series of meme reviews on their channels, assessing a variety of Hololive-related memes.

What Coco and Hololive have done is something that many companies and content creators alike strive to achieve. They have not only produced many memes from the community and themselves, but they have also incorporated their fandoms’ meme cultures into their streams. This assimilation of memes allows for creating a much tighter-knit community, with the virtual YouTubers and the fandom being heavily involved with each other. Fan bases often dictate how a community is seen from the outside, but Hololive has taken it to the point where the community and fandom are nearly the same. The memes made between them will forever define Hololive and its meteoric rise into the mainstream. While there is a lot that has not been addressed in this article about Hololive's success, it's clear that memes have made a significant impact on the agency and industry at large.

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