5. Toward Virtual-Ordinary Nexus in Futuristic Chinese Media: A Digital and Affect-Inflected Ethnography of ASOUL VTubers’ Livestreams

Converging AI/VR technologies and everyday media practice of livestreaming, a new type of virtual anthropomorphism has been exercised on the emerging subcultural genre of the ‘VTuber’. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, VTubers in China have gained momentum as their livestreams offer an alternative articulation of the ‘metaverse’ where viewers are expected to deal with loneliness, social anxieties, and life’s hardships by projecting an optimistic and promised future. Against this backdrop, this conceptual chapter intends to empirically investigate a popular VTuber group ‘ASOUL’, providing a case situated in China that blends virtuality, future speculation, and everyday lives. By conducting a digital and affect-inflected ethnography, my study focuses on the affective co-production between VTubers and viewers through a form of everyday interaction (danmu) in livestreams. Such ethnographic research on chosen Vtubers’ (Jia-Ran and Jia-Le, two topical members of ASOUL) livestreams demonstrates their potential in co-creating digital affects with viewers, which may complicate the binary structures of technologies versus human, the future versus the present, and the virtual versus the everyday. This, I argue, challenges the optimistic speculation prevalent in the digital China of today, but sheds light on the potential of VTubers and their corresponding digital affects in (re-)mediating the everyday world.