Domestic Ecologies and the Aesthetics of Sufficiency: Rethinking Ecomedia Through VTuber Performances

This chapter argues that VTubers (virtual performers animated via Live2D or 3D rigs) are ecologically significant because they perform relationality, constraint, and infrastructural modesty, expanding ecomedia beyond environmental representation and industrial-scale critique. Combining digital ethnography, semi-structured interviews with VTubers and fans in Japan and Taiwan, and close textual analysis, the study centres on the Japanese VTuber Otsuka Ray, a single mother who incorporates her daughter Reika as a co-performer. Aesthetics of sufficiency shows that Live2D’s minimal motion functions as an ethico-aesthetic strategy with lower computational demands, producing affective engagement through deliberate restraint. Domestic ecology describes a media ecology constituted by modest tools, shared time, and affective labour, where performance is organised through rhythm rather than scale and sustained by feminised relational labour that recalls Allison’s (Precarious Japan, Duke University Press, Durham, 2013) account of precarious care in postindustrial Japan. Supplementary cases (scholar VTuber Juufuutei Raden; Taiwanese conservation unit RESCUTE) show sufficiency aesthetics operating across educational and activist registers. The chapter confronts the contradiction of performing ecological modesty on resource-intensive platforms, arguing that ecomedia studies requires scalar recalibration toward the micropolitics of care, cohabitation, and performance in the digital everyday.