Managing Anime Employees in the Virtual Office: A Case Study of hololive

Virtual YouTubers (or VTubers) are online personas of transnational fame who perform on digital streaming platforms using animated, motion-tracking avatars which are usually drawn in an anime style. Some of the biggest VTubers are now managed by corporate entities. The largest of these, Japan’s hololive, situates its VTubers in a virtual office with virtual anime talent managers, and the CEO of the network’s parent company even appears in mixed reality settings. This article therefore poses the question: why might a company in the business of futuristic trends such as the metaverse choose to reproduce its own highly conventional organizational structures in anime style? By examining playful depictions of managing virtual performers in hololive’s own YouTube videos, this paper argues that stories of VTuber management are indebted to the conventions of anime’s transnational, transmedia nature. This playfulness in turn represents an invitation to audiences to play with these conventions, and with the concept of the talent management organization itself.