My Favorite VTuber Is Scary IRL Volume 1 Review

Riyo Yorima’s My Favorite VTuber Is Scary IRL started life as a doujinshi posted on the mangaka’s Pixiv account before being picked up by Square Enix for an official publication after its success. Now the series has made its English debut from Square Enix Manga, but does it live up to the hype?

The story follows an unnamed deliveryman working for the food delivery app Eatza. He works out in the boonies (according to him) and often makes deliveries to an intimidating lady who doesn’t say a word to him. But even when his job is difficult, he always has his favourite VTuber to turn to: Fuwari Hanae.

Little does our protagonist know, but the woman he often delivers to is the person behind Fuwari. She’s a shut-in who struggles with social anxiety, but she wants to overcome it and believes the first step is to speak to the man who always delivers her food. Perhaps they can even become friends and help her reintegrate into society and into work beyond her VTuber streams.

Unfortunately, because Fuwari (we don’t know her real name, so we’ll use her VTuber name) is so tall and so anxious, her aura frightens our protagonist, who runs away when she talks to him. But her voice reminds him of Fuwari, and his curiosity gets the better of him, so he soon finds himself invited into her apartment and getting to know a little bit about her.

The two strike up some kind of friendship, but by the end of Volume 1, our protagonist still has no idea that this lady is Fuwari. And she has no idea that he’s one of her devoted fans either. They’re simply strangers who have come together through these somewhat odd circumstances. It’s not an unusual set-up for a premise like this, and broadly I like the concept, but Yorima’s execution of it leaves a lot to be desired.

As I’ve mentioned, Fuwari has crippling social anxiety. She also has very low self-esteem due to her height and large breasts. She once dreamed of becoming a voice actor, but others auditioning for the same roles gossiped that she must have used her body to get picked for roles. The problem is that there’s a big disconnect here between her issues and how the series goes about depicting her as a character.

It’s difficult to accept Fuwari’s issues with her body while the series’ mangaka is always putting a large emphasis on her chest. Our protagonist will often comment about her being ‘huge’, and the art will be focused on her breasts, even if the dialogue wasn’t explicitly referencing them. I was on board with the idea that Fuwari had trauma related to her body, up until I noticed how often she was being depicted in a titillating manner. That completely ruined the whole thing for me because it doesn’t feel like Yorima is willing to treat this with the seriousness it deserves. Especially when a lot of the art page-to-page is zoomed-in shots of Fuwari…

The other problem is that the chapters are really short. There are 14 chapters here made up of regular chapters, .5 chapters told from Fuwari’s perspective and a ‘chapter 0’. They’re all about 10-15 pages in length, so that means you have a lot to cram in, and that works against it. Although I liked the idea of the .5 chapters because it meant we got to know Fuwari better, I wonder if it would have been better to scrap those and give the main story more room to breathe.

Really, it would have also helped if our protagonist had a name; as it stands, he has very little agency of his own and feels like a stand-in for the reader. Which does not help when this already feels like it wants to be racy rather than tell the heartfelt and relatable story it could have been. I was also surprised by the fact that the end of Chapter 1 seemed to imply the protagonist had figured out that his customer and VTuber Fuwari were the same person, but Yorima immediately backtracks and reinforces the idea that he only thinks their voices are similar.

As mentioned earlier, My Favorite VTuber is Scary IRL, which comes to the West thanks to Square Enix Manga and has been translated by Caleb Cook with lettering by Greg Deng. The release reads well and comes with colour pages at the beginning. However, my copy, as well as one a friend received have a printing defect of some sort. It doesn’t seem like the bottom of the pages was cut cleanly, so the whole book is a bit stuck together (thankfully, the pages pull apart okay), and the bottom of it feels rough. So certainly worth keeping an eye out for that if you are planning on picking it up.

The series is ongoing in Japan with 3 volumes currently available (#4 later this month). Here in English, Square Enix has #2 scheduled for release in June and then #3 following in October. This is also available to read on MANGA UP!

Overall, I don’t like to judge series by their cover since some of my favourites have had relatively misleading ones. However, with My Favorite VTuber Is Scary IRL, you are getting exactly what you’d expect from the fact that Fuwari is depicted bending over like that. It’s a shame, but this first volume does nothing to convince me that there’s actual substance here, and thus it’s hard to recommend.

A free preview can be read on the publisher’s website. 
Our review copy from Square Enix Manga was supplied by Turnaround Comics (Turnaround Publisher Services).
©Riyo Yorima/SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD.