Shirakami Fubuki

About

Shirakami Fubuki is a member of the virtual YouTuber collective Hololive. She has produced many livestreams and videos that have become viral, especially on the English-speaking internet, thanks to her meme-savvy content and popular remixes of her singing clips. Her character design was created by Nagashiro Mito and modeled after an arctic fox.

Online History

Shirakami Fubuki joined Hololive as part of its first generation of virtual YouTubers, with her first stream taking place on June 1, 2018^[1]. Like many of her fellow Hololive members, her content includes gameplay footage of various different video games, as well as casual chats with her audience.

Reception

Occasionally, Fubuki would upload short clips to her YouTube channel of her singing various songs. On October 24th 2019, she uploaded her most popular video "Im. Scatman," in which she sings the 1994 hit song "Scatman" by Scatman John ^[2]. As of June 2020, the video has received more than 1.7 million views. Due to the popularity of the video, Fubuki later recreated this video using her 3D motion-capture avatar^[3].

Following "Im. Scatman," Fubuki made many other meme-centric jokes and clips. Such songs would include Astronomia (made popular by the Coffin Dance meme)^[4], and the opening instrumental theme to Terminator ^[5]. She has also made recorder covers of My Heart Will Go On ^[6] and recreated Shia Labeouf's Just Do It video^[7].

Like many other Hololive members, clips of Fubuki's Livestream would be translated and shared by Hololive's overseas fandom. In particular, Fubuki's musical clips would go viral and be shared in many places, especially as media share requests on The8BitDrummer's Twitch livestream^[8]. Said clips would also be remixed with backing tracks and visual effects added to improve the production quality of the original videos. Channels like Hamburgaga have made many such remixes, with views in the hundreds of thousands.^[9] Shirakami Fubuki's popularity with overseas fans would lead to her being called the "Meme Queen" of Hololive. Fubuki would later thank The8BitDrummer and fans who remixed her videos and sharing her content.^[10]

Related Memes

Burger Fox

A popular clip not involving music is Fubuki reacting to Wendy's Hamburgers, exclaiming how American hamburgers are "on a whole different level." ^[11] Her excitement and poor English pronunciation proved to be popular to fans, with her subsequently being heavily associated with a love for burgers.

"I Am Not a Cat!"

New viewers will frequently confuse Fubuki with a cat, which she will angrily deny, despite sometimes adopting cat-like mannerisms. Fans will sometimes provoke her by insisting that she's really a cat.

The Marine-Shion Wake-up RTA / The Waking of the Grannies

On August 21, 2020, Hololive members Murasaki Shion and Houshou Marine had scheduled for a collaboration stream starting at 8:00 am JST, but both of them had overslept for the next several hours. Fubuki seized on the opportunity to entertain their audiences and held a speedrun competition to see how long before they would wake up. For the next four hours, Fubuki livestreamed the countdown while providing running commentary, before the two finally woke up past 12:00 pm. ^[12] Fans looked to the move as a masterclass in trolling, while at the same time covering for her friends in their absence and even promoting them. The hashtag for the livestream, "Waking up with Baba (lit. Granny)," became #1 trending in Japan on Twitter.^[13]

Friendzone Fubuki

Like many other members of Hololive, various chat members have proposed to Fubuki; her response is almost always "No, we're just friends!" This has resulted in many memes about Fubuki putting the entirety of her chat into the friendzone and breaking their hearts. Fubuki would later elaborate on this saying that the reason she rejects proposals is because if they cheat on her, she will stab them.

Hiding on Reddit

On Fubuki's twitter, she began posting screenshots of memes taken from the r/Hololive subreddit, later confirming that she had a Reddit account but not revealing its name. This caused redditors to panic and accuse one another of being the real Fubuki and posting memes about Fubuki hiding among them.

Fanart

Search Interest

External References