Why So Many VRChat Users Play as Female Anime Avatars
Why do so many VRChat users look like cutesy anime girls, anyway? If you assume the snarky and simplistic answer is, “Because it’s full of otaku geeks with a weird waifu fetish”, watch this video which suggests the actual story is much deeper and far more fascinating than that.
Created by “Strasz”, who’s becoming something of an anthropologist of VRChat on YouTube, his insights are based in part on a survey of over 200 hardcore VRChat users, heavily skewed (at 85%) toward people who access the virtual world through a VR headset.
His thesis for why so many VRChatters play as female anime avatars, he tells me, boils roughly down to “a confluence of factors”:
“First, anime avatars were popularized on the program early due to them looking good, being relatively available, and technologically ‘easy’ to import into the game. Because of that, you had a lot of people tuned into otaku culture that flooded to VRC. Cosplay is a large part of that culture, and [gender] crossplay comes along with that.
“While at first, people used female avatars for utilitarian reasons (they were what existed prominently because of the above reasons), eventually it started to become something of a joke — like, ‘Haha! Everyone on VRChat is an anime girl!’ This, over time, just fundamentally became…
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