So there have already been two award ceremonies involving video games and streaming so far this month, and while our favorite war criminal moon rabbit didn't win the Content Creator Award at VGA 2024, Ironmouse took home VTuber of the Year for the second year running at the 2024 Streamer Awards.

That leaves only the Vtuber Awards which are exactly what they say on the tin, namely the only awards ceremony for vtubers and only vtubers. This year's awards are a bit more organized than the first ones held last year and will be hosted on Twitch by Filian and Shylily this evening. And because the nominations were open to the public, there's a wide variety of names from both existing agencies and indies alike. As an example, the nominees for Vtuber of the Year include:

- Fuwamoco of Hololive
- Ironmouse of VShojo
- Vedal987 (aka Neuro-sama)
- Dokibird
- Tsukino Mito of Nijisanji

It should be worth checking out, even if only for the lewdtuber category.

>It should be worth checking out, even if only for the lewdtuber
>category.

...which Projekt Melody won.

The winners are:

• VTuber of the Year: Fuwamoco

• LewdTuber of the Year: Projekt Melody

• Gamer of the Year: Zentreya (ZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN!!!!)

• Stream Game of the Year: Lethal Daddy, I mean Company

• Best VTuber Event: HoloGTA

• VTuber Parent of the Year: Nanoless

• Best VTuber Organization: Hololive

• Most Dedicated Fanbase: Dokibird's Dragoons

• Rising VTuber Organization: Mythos

• Miss VTuber: Takanashi Kiara

• Mr. VTuber: PorcelainMaid

• League of their Own: IronMouse

• Rising Star: Arielle

• Hidden Gem: LongLiveReya

• Most Chaotic: Gigi Murin

• Funniest VTuber: Chibidoki

• Best Tech VTuber: Vedal987

• Best Music VTuber: Hoshimachi Suisei

• Best Roleplay VTuber: Ceres Fauna

• Best FPS VTuber: Dokibird

• Best Art Vtuber: Raora Panthera

• Best Just Chatting VTuber: Ceres Fauna
  

--
Jen Dantes - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lady of Sith Tech Support.
"This may not be a good idea, but it's the only one I have."

With ZERO intention to disrespect any of the winners, I think the industry right now might have a little bit of a “Disney movie” problem. That. Is, since a majority of people only know about the biggest names and have little to no experience with the other non-Holo nominees, they ended up receiving the bulk of the votes, potentially just by default.

The academy awards have this problem with the animation categories, where the Academy members will just dump votes on whatever Disney movie got nominated because they heard of it and their grandkids liked it maybe, without even seeing them.

I Hololive sweeping the awards like this, as much as I love all the girls, and as much as they all deserve rewards and recognition, concerns me.

Yeah, at the very least I'd've expected Brave to take "Best Organization", for their incredibly graceful and generous handling of their buyout of Idol Corp. Also, I'm not sure when the voting happened, but Fauna winning two "Best Of" categories feels a little like it might be a response to her graduation announcement. Even just among HoloEN, Calli is at least as famous for RP.

That's the other thing: literally the only (individual VTuber) winner who doesn't stream primarily in English is Suisei.

LAST EDITED ON Dec-15-24 AT 06:59 PM (EST)
 
Like, I want everyone to win, of course I do.

But I don't want them to win by default just because they're the only ones the voters have heard of. And that's why I have concerns.

>With ZERO intention to disrespect any of the winners, I think the
>industry right now might have a little bit of a “Disney movie”
>problem. That. Is, since a majority of people only know about the
>biggest names and have little to no experience with the other non-Holo
>nominees, they ended up receiving the bulk of the votes, potentially
>just by default.
>
>The academy awards have this problem with the animation categories,
>where the Academy members will just dump votes on whatever Disney
>movie got nominated because they heard of it and their grandkids liked
>it maybe, without even seeing them.
>
>I Hololive sweeping the awards like this, as much as I love all the
>girls, and as much as they all deserve rewards and recognition,
>concerns me.

If one wanted to stay with the analogy of the Vtuber Awards and the Academy Awards, then Hololive and Nijisanji are the Universal Studios or Warner Brothers of the industry, the big studios with such an outsized presence that the odds are you've seen their products without even seeking them out. For lack of a better term, Hololive is the gateway drug of vtubing, the sort of vtubers you'd feel comfortable showing clips of to a family member or friend to introduce them to the industry. Then once you've eased them in, you start showing them clips from VShojo or Phase Connect, before finally leading them into the land of hard drugs like Cottontail or Trickywi.

That the award nominations and voting were open to the public rather than an insular conclave of industry insiders and alumni leaves me with the overall feeling that what we saw was the decision of a majority of vtubing fans rather than a handful of powerful votes dragging the others in the direction they wanted to go. So as competitors in the form of rival companies and indie vtubers continue to grow in size and presence, we may see the awards going to a greater variety of winners in the future. But right now, I think it's safe to say that HL will continue (for better or worse) to be the dominant force in the industry.

There’s good points here, but there’s also the fact that a lot of people just focus on one or a small handful of talents rather than even attempt to follow more than that. It’s easier with the big corpos, they’re relatively self contained and self-referential. You can keep up with more than just your oshi just by a kind of osmosis - watching Bae for instance, you’re probably going to hear about at least a half dozen of the other girls. But you may never hear about Onigiri or Tenma because they’re out of your sphere. By the same token, you may not know anything about the big two, though that seems less likely than not knowing about, say, Punkalopi.

And that’s not even touching the YouTube/Twitch divide.

>but there’s also the fact that a lot of
>people just focus on one or a small handful of talents rather than
>even attempt to follow more than that.

At least in my case, even if I just pared it down to my top 3 (Kronii/Shiori/Cecilia), they still put out more material in a typical week than I even have time to watch. Which makes it rather hard to branch out in any meaningful sense, especially since there are other Holo girls I enjoy watching as well.

>And that’s not even touching the YouTube/Twitch divide.

Ugh, Twitch. If they just held vods for any length of time I wouldn't hate them more than I hate Youtube, but right now they're in 2nd place for me.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

>There’s good points here, but there’s also the fact that a lot of
>people just focus on one or a small handful of talents rather than
>even attempt to follow more than that. It’s easier with the big
>corpos, they’re relatively self contained and self-referential. You
>can keep up with more than just your oshi just by a kind of osmosis -
>watching Bae for instance, you’re probably going to hear about at
>least a half dozen of the other girls. But you may never hear about
>Onigiri or Tenma because they’re out of your sphere. By the same
>token, you may not know anything about the big two, though that seems
>less likely than not knowing about, say, Punkalopi.

I imagine a lot of people learn about vtubers in the same way I did: memes, clips, and collabs. Clip compilations and collabs in particular are a big way to learn about new vtubers, because odds are if you like the one you're watching, you'll probably like anybody they're willing to collab with. And it ends up being a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon situation where you're watching clips of a vtuber who's collabed with another vtuber you've watched who's buds with another vtuber you like, and so forth.

>And that’s not even touching the YouTube/Twitch divide.

Considering their behavior in the past year towards vtubing, the divide is certainly very real.

And even if you don't specifically decide to track them down, youtube will probably recommend them to you. That's how I first ended up on Sinder's channel, following recommendations after someone here mentioned Filian.

(Although in that specific case, I actually *didn't* like what I'd seen of Filian...)

-IA.

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Personally, I'd have a hard time even deciding who to vote for if you asked me on most of these, since I have a hard time rating that way when it gets down to my top five or so of anything. But I've got some thoughts on the full nominee lists...

*There's a lot of people whose content I've actually watched at least a bit of. This is pretty damn surprising given how few vtubers total I actually follow.

*Quite a few indies on the list. (Which accounts for a lot of the "ones I've watched".)

*Vshojo also looks pretty well represented, and covers another decent sized chunk. (Also most of what's left of "ones I've watched".) Not exactly indie, but sorta fits in with the same crowd?

*I have no idea how many Niji talents are on here. But ex-Niji seems to show up quite a lot for the number I know of... (Admittedly that's about half Dokibird, but geez.)

-I'm not sure how I feel about PorcelainMaid being in the Mister Vtuber category. Shouldn't that be someone who shows off masculine fashion? (Don't ask me if I'd have felt the same way before listening to Michi talking about the fashion industry though.)

*"Lewdtuber" kinda feels like it's selling Melody short these days. Though I guess technically the sex education content she's been talking about making would technically still fit the category definition... (Think less cornhub, more Scarleteen.)

*There is one hell of a lot of overlap between the nominations this year and last year, comparing category for category for any that were in both years.

-IA.

(received information not interpretable)