Kara Dennison
July 15, 2024 
There once was a time when YouTube was a social platform for memes, weird videos, and (not that we ever went looking) illegal uploads. Nowadays, though, streaming on various video services can be a full-time job—even an aspirational one! Case in point, these heroines from the summer anime season, who are living their streamer dreams… though probably not the way they expected to.
Meet a VTuber who finds success after breaking kayfabe, a cancelled content creator with delicious blood, and an up-and-comer from overseas who will do anything to land that perfect collab!
Masaki
Let’s start the summer anime season off with a bang… or rather, a punch! MAYONAKA PUNCH dives straight into the woes of Masaki, a streamer who got a little too violent and got kicked unceremoniously off the channel she helped found. Rather than filming an apology video and picking up the pieces, she doubles down. Now she’s content creator poison… but one person’s poison is another’s tasty midnight snack.
Enter Live, a vampire who’s been asleep for two decades and has just awoken to the modern world of smartphones and streaming. She dreamed of a girl just like Masaki, and now she wants to chow down on that sweet blood. Masaki makes her a deal: help her new channel get to one million subs, and she will let Live tap that… neck.
Anna Aveiro Nakamura dos Santos Moreira
Let’s just call her Anna. She’s one of the six stars of Narenare -Cheer for You!-, the summer anime season’s new project about the joys of cheerleading. When we first meet Anna, though, she’s not all that interested in being a cheer girl. Rather, she’s chasing down Suzuha: a parkour master who leaps impossibly across town on her way to school. Her goal? To launch her underperforming channel into the stratosphere.
Kanata, the central heroine of the series, is the only one who can keep pace with Suzuha. She’s also had a hard time jumping as a cheerleader ever since an accident. But perhaps the little group of girls forming at the center of this series can help each other make their dreams come true.
Awayuki Kokorone
It’s not just livetubers getting the spotlight in the summer anime season. VTubers also make an appearance. Meet Awayuki Kokorone, the star of VTuber Legend: How I Went Viral after Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream. She’s barely scraping by with her polite, princess-like persona, and dreams of making it big. Then one night, she cracks open a tall one and watches her fellow VTuber stars to unwind, making increasingly unhinged comments… and not realizing that she’s still streaming.
As any VTuber fan knows, the unhinged stars are the best girls. With her manager’s blessing, she casts aside her demure demeanor and begins going buckwild on the mic. Is success finally within reach? Watch on this season to find out!
Check out how some real-world YouTubers crossed D&D with Pokémon!
