The Many Adventures of a Bear in VR Chat: Anime, Memes, Public Forums, and Alternative Notions of Self
It could be that I did things the wrong way and like any psychedelic experience, I should have gone through a setup process and taken some safety precautions. I went into VR Chat for the fourth or fifth time last Summer, after they’d stockpiled some virtual environments and developed a userbase. What happened, was a 15-minute, virtual fever dream that in reality lasted for 3 hours, making me both disoriented and late to an appointment. The memories of the experience came back piecemeal as I remembered visiting a haunted prison, fulfilling my childhood of becoming a Pooh Bear, and getting in a Westworld-style shootout. What triggered my was a meeting with three creatures in a grassy field on an obsidian-black night. They were three identical, upright foxes with luminant green fur. My naivete shown through when I asked if they were ‘Fantastic Mr. Foxes’ and they had a good laugh at my expense. One of them told me to keep walking until I found a dark highway where I would find a cat that’d been hit by a car. I did what he asked and, as prophecy dictates, I found the fallen cat. When I reached out to touch it, I was immediately blinded by overhead lights, and deafened by speed metal shreds and drumbeats. After that, the memory gets a bit hazy.
Recently I found a well written thesis on embodiment in SocialVR by Claudia Maneka Maharaj, where she discusses group representation and expressions of the embodied self in AltspaceVR, vTime, and Rec Room. And since reading, I’ve been curious about gender representation in particular. It may just be my experience, but in AltspaceVR and vTime I’ve rarely encountered people who identify as female or male in real life inhabiting avatars of the opposite gender. Gender identities in Rec Room are bit more fluid, in my experience, and boil down to hair length and clothing choice. For example, I spent months wearing braided pigtails, a pink blouse, a beret, and a blond beard. Only once did someone make a heteronormative comment about my costume, and he quickly backed down when I challenged him.
Apart from these leading platforms, there is the aforementioned VR Chat where something very different with regard to gender seems to be taking place. In VR Chat, users with the expertise are allowed to bring their own avatars. Again, I’m limited to my own experience. But during my subsequent visits to VR Chat, there seemed to be a disproportionate number of female anime characters inhabited by users who identify as male. This trend has been confirmed to me by others in the SocialVR community. To understand the supposed phenomena, I put on my citizen journalist hat and went to VR Chat where I could ask those users myself.
My first stop was an Avatar corridor where I could re-inhabit that honey-loving Bear of Very Little Brains. Worlds for avatar selection are mostly inhabited by pop icons, so I left it for another world that may be more populated with the anime characters. It turned out that almost any environment other than that one would be filled every type of them. I went to a fairground, where the female characters wore skin tight leather and flowing kimonos, they were cybernetic and as tall as your ankles, they wore long rainbow-colored hair and had cat whiskers, they were armed with katanas and they were armed with guns. I found a group of anime girls huddled together. I approached the tallest of them, who had a male voice, and said:
Me: Hi, what’s going on?
Her: (Speaking to the group) Check out the colliders on this avatar.
Me: Looks nice.
Her: Hey, it’s Pooh Bear! Would you like to drink some honey, little Pooh Bear?
Me: No, I don’t think you have any.
My response got some laughter and it turned to a whole routine in which I was absorbed into a minutes-long role play where the tall character tried to give me honey and I reacted with skepticism. I soon recovered from the exchange and approached another character with short, purple hair and a white leather suit (also, with a male voice), saying:
Me: I noticed there are a lot of anime characters in VR Chat.
Her: Yeah, that’s true.
Me: Is there any reason that most of them are girls?
Her: I think people just like them. Think they look cool.
White Knight: (Runs Over, Interrupting) I am the Great White Knight fighting for the right in search of the bright white light. Have you seen the white light tonight?
Her: All right.
Me: I think I saw the white light in flight tied to a big, white kite.
White Knight: Impossible. The kite would ignite. All right?
This conversation between the three of us took place for some minutes while we tried come up with new rhymes relating this Holy Grail narrative. When our material started to wear thin, I remembered my goal for signing into VR Chat and saw a crowd of anime characters around a floating, green mask with a deep, somewhat ominous voice, who said:
Mask: Welcome my children. I am the all-knowing and all-seeing. The past, present, and future are one and the same to me. You may ask any question that weighs upon you and it will be answered.
Anime Girl: You’re a terrible father! I’ve had this phone for two years and I asked you to buy me a new one and you won’t do it.
Mask: You are troubled my child. Have patience and your desires will come to you.
Me: I agree with your father on this one. Learn to appreciate what you have.
Mask: Well, my daughter is strong-headed, but I still love her with all my heart.
White Knight: Will I succeed in my quest to find the bright, white light.
Mask: Look into my eyes. Hmm…I can see all realities simultaneously, every path untaken and every missed opportunity. There are some realities in which you are homeless, but this is not one of them. I believe you will be successful.
Me: Father, why are there so many anime girls?
Mask: I have often wondered this. Indeed, it is curious.
Anime Girl: You never listen to me.
After another half hour of us, as a group, engaging with the all-knowing mask, we hopped into a nausea-making fairground ride, which forced me to close my eyes for the duration. From that location, I teleported to a courtroom. The environment was furnished with seats for the audience kept behind a barrier, the judges bench, and three tables for the prosecution, the defendant, and the defense, respectively. I entered as a murder trial was wrapping up and I sat down at the defendants table, an action which volunteered me for the next case. The crime in question was armed robbery, stealing a flower from a florist while in possession of a knife. I objected, claiming that the knife was not a weapon but a tool to cut the stem of a flower. My defendant, an anime character with green hair and a track suit, came to my side and yelled at me for the self-incrimination. I then claimed that the thief could not be me because I was deathly allergic to pollen and sneezed whenever I got near a flower. The bailiff tested this by producing a flower and running it beneath my nose. I coughed violently, greatly distressing my attorney. The judge declared me guilty and dropped a portal, which then transported me to a prison environment.
On later reflection, I realized that, in trying to answer a question about Anime Culture in VR Chat, I was learning how Meme Culture translates into virtual environments. The White Knight, the Green Mask, and the courtroom itself engage people in short, repetitive, and presumably gratifying ways that are highly replicatable. Upon entering SocialVR platforms, we might choose to be social, meet people with assumed authenticity, and have a real conversation. But we can, especially in platforms with user-generated avatars, decide to adopt an affect, a persona, a gimmick that functions as a meme and engage with others purely for entertainment value. When memes collide, the façade may get clunky and fall apart, but these meetings can often be magical as had happened with the Mask and Knight.
Realizing I couldn’t rely on happenstance to produce the best respondent to my questions nor could I trust myself not to be distracted by Meme Culture, I did not return to VR Chat for answers, but reached out on social media. I was directed to Endgame, the YouTube series, by one of its creators and VR Chat itself. Endgame has a weekly meetup/forum on different issues related to the VR platform and the metaverse generally. I watched Episode 29: The Anime Community, which answered many of the questions I had about them. During the episode, there are three moderators standing on a slightly raised platform while avatars line up on a carpeted central aisle to comment or raise questions. These are some of my takeaways from the episode:
One: Anime culture is prevalent in VR Chat and the vast majority of the avatars are female. (This was my impression already, but I didn’t know if I’d been unduly biased by my own experience. Now, at least, I have some corroboration.)
Two: Men choose female avatar characters because they’re pretty. (When I started looking into this, I was tempted to put on my Freudian hat and find some psycho-sexual core to the behavior. But I came to realize I might have been overthinking it and it’s not any of my business anyway.)
Three: Calling them the Anime Community is reductive. Identities are fluid in VR Chat, so users often don’t have one avatar to represent them. They may adopt different aesthetics or genres of avatar. Likewise, people in anime avatars usually don’t practice exclusivity. They happily engage with any type of character.
Four: As suggested by three, there could be a labelling problem. We know that people are tribal and we’ve seen tribal behavior replicated in virtual worlds like Second Life, where you can branch off into a sub-culture where you can be a vampire, elf, sub/dom, or mer-person. This hasn’t yet happened in any SocialVR platforms, as far as I know, but there is a chance that this will happen when the community scales. This could self-perpetuate due to our habit of applying labels to people and behavior.
Five: The core community strives not to judge other people and does not wish to be judged in return. At the moment, the greatest value is acceptance. The truth is that most people, IRL, cannot openly and completely explore their identity, be who they want to, or even wear the clothes they want to, because they’d be trolled or snickered at by a judging public. Where there’s a strong community, these judgmental personalities are in the minority and well-intentioned users have recourse to, more than ignore them, cancel them out completely.
As humans, we have a symbiotic relationship with our environment and, in this case, the metaverse is trying to figure out what is as its inhabitants try to figure out who they are. Placing a high value on these values of acceptance and constant dialogue, I believe, will give the best experience for the greatest number of people.
