The VTuber phenomenon is an interesting one. These past few years have seen anime girls take up a lot of different roles, not just limited to online celebrities. You want companionship? Here's an anime girl for that. Virtual assistants? Here's an anime girl. Camgirls? You bet there's an anime girl for that. And now anime girls are breaking into the music industry. Granted, anime girl pop stars are hardly a new thing. Hatsune Miku has amassed legions of fans and has performed at huge music festivals since she burst onto the scene over a decade ago, followed by a number of her Vocaloid alumni. But while Vocaloid's waifus were essentially mascots for voice synthesizer software, these anime singers are the products themselves.
Meet the RevDol! girls, a virtual idol project from Happy Elements Asia Pacific. From left to right there's Isabella Holly, Tamao Jinguji, Xi Mo, Seika Li, Katia Uranova, Rose Barrett. The lore behind Revdols!, is that, in the near future, menacing structures called Nightmare Domes begin to appear across the world that can only be defeated by "Swan," i.e. the singing voice of an idol. The United Nations forms a special taskforce called IDUN (Idols Disciplined to Unpurified Nightmare), who fight these mysterious things with their music in between releasing songs and YouTube videos.
Honestly, I couldn't stop laughing while typing that. Do companies really need to give their virtual idols such an elaborate backstory? I wouldn't have a problem if this were the premise of an actual anime series (*cough*Symphogear*cough*) but to come up with a premise like this to sell anime waifu music just strikes me as ridiculous. Anyway, here's their latest music video: Cool Girl, where you can see them strike some poses in swimsuits. The music is some pretty standard J-pop fare, so the least you can say is it's catchy and upbeat. The real focus here is the idols themselves. Somehow the 3DCG models look less manufactured than actual East Asian pop idol groups, and the animation ain't bad either!
So what do you guys make of the VTuber/virtual idol craze? What do you think of the music video? Does knowing that the group's singing voices are able to defeat "Nightmare domes" make the music more enjoyable? Let us know below!
