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Friday Fun Thread for February 20, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm quite wary of vtubers in general, but "based vtubers" strike me as someone particularly untrustworthy. Hiding behind a pretty avatar and telling you things you want to hear in a pretty voice, they are, I'm 99% sure, in it for the money.

There's someone at the vtuber talent agency analyzing the potentical viewer demographic and going, "studies show that a significant chunk of Zoomer incels is not covered by our existing selection of personas, we need someone more... based, they call it?"

Sorry for bringing the CW into the fun thread.

It's actually quite the opposite.

Vtubing, I'd say, tends to lean more centric overall - if anything, recent attempts to try and make Vtubing more 'woke' or drag them into the cultural war have been received roughly akin to a wet fart. It's a weirdly meritocratic, and the benefits of a Vtubing avatar pushing forward toward anonymity means that they have less fear overall voicing thier opinions on things without having to worry about receiving censorship.

Conversely, the Vtubers that are rather left leaning have no fear whatsoever making hay about that - inevitably, they'll have some blow-up or drama or whatnot and then it's masks off. So grifters inevitably get found out, while others just blithly drift along doing thier own thing.

Now, having said that - Pippa gets glazed as 'alt-right' more than she deserves, mostly because the overton window has shifted so badly that someone talking like they're posting on 4chan pre-2016 is going to get people flocking to them in releif to get away from the overall cultural longhouse, so to speak. So while she can be spicy, if you're someone who's been following her for a long period of time, you've probably noticed that she's been purposefully dialing things back, not for herself per se but because she wants to save all her friends the grief and aggravation of dealing with Pippa being a little unhinged. She's quite the sweetheart like that.

Now, there are a few other talents that are actually what people think Pippa is, but I'm not gonna say who they are.

Also, Phase Connect is... weird. That would require a thread on it's lonesome.

The vast majority of these are indie, not corporate. That is, it's just a regular person who wants to be a streamer and using an anime avatar instead of showing their real face. Almost all of the corporations are too afraid of their image and the potential for being cancelled to let their employees express political views. With the exception of Phase Connect (which Pippa works for), which is much more hands off, though doesn't seem to actively encourage it.

But it's not like you need big corporate money to afford a Vtuber avatar, they're mostly there for handling marketing and sponsorships and stuff. All my experience with non-corporate Vtubers suggests they're the same as any other streamer. Some of them are probably grifting, some of them are not, and you can kind of get a partially accurate vibe check by watching them. It's imaginable that a woman who loves feminism would pretend to hate it just to be popular with men (though difficult, given the difficulties leftists have with understanding right-wing opinions), but it's also imaginable that a woman who hates feminism (they're rare, but they exist) would get on the internet and say so and then be popular with men. And then get signal boosted to the top. Once you start selecting for popularity, it's no longer a random sampling. And the authentic ones are much more likely have more interesting and insightful opinions and get discovered.

Sure, if you pick literally any random supposedly based Vtuber with a true random sampling there's probably a non-negligible chance of them grifting. But if you pick one of the more well-known ones they're probably authentic. Obviously they want money too, which is why they have cute anime avatar with big boobs. But it's easier to do that with authentic opinions than grifted ones.