🐱 A 3D Hentai Camgirl Is Taking Over Chaturbate, and Human Models Are Worried - Poor thots

A 3D Hentai Camgirl Is Taking Over Chaturbate, and Human Models Are Worried

ProjektMelody says she's an AI embodiment of an anime cam model—and has amassed thousands of followers in just three days of streaming.

www.vice.com

A 3D anime woman with a black strap across her nipples is giving a lecture on YouTubeabout whether hentai is art or porn.

"I think there's a higher demand for the odd and the fantastical," she says. "With art, it's flexible, you're allowed to explore your sexuality. And with real titties? No offense, but it's bound to the cruel weight of science, gravity, and bones that only go one way."

ProjektMelody is a virtual avatar of a woman who claims to be the world's first hentai camgirl. When she's not on YouTube, she gives regular, live shows on the camming site Chaturbate, where she dances and fondles herself for tips. She's not real, but there's a real person in there somewhere, moving her arms and speaking into a microphone to any of her 14,300 followers currently in the live chat. She only started streaming three days ago.


On Chaturbate, her location is listed as "Virtual Little Tokyo," and under smoking and drinking preferences, "literally impossible." Her birthdate is listed as July 7, 2000, but more accurately, Melody came into the world in July 2019, when ProjektMelody joined Twitter.

In the last three days since her first stream, Melody has gone from 700 Twitter followers to more than 20,000. The "more rooms like this" tab on her Chaturbate page returns an error: "Sorry, we don't have any rooms similar to projektmelody yet." That's because other cam models are human. Her sudden rise in popularity has made some who aren't working behind a full-body avatar question what place an anime avatar has on the platform.

Cam model Lennox May has been doing live shows for three years, but has been in the adult industry for the last 10. She watched one of Melody's recent streams.

"From a technology standpoint I can't argue that the technology and creation of the character is definitely made by someone with talent," May told me. But she wonders if something like this belongs on its own designated platform for avatars, separate from the flesh-and-blood models.

"There's a huge gap in vulnerability, and what that means emotionally for [human] models versus Melody is also quite vast," May said. "A model has to keep up appearances when they have trolls in their room, or when put in an awkward situation with a customer who is being rude or asking for things that we do not feel comfortable doing."

An animated character doesn't have to smile and hide their emotions when they're in those situations—let alone set up or tear down their studios, or worry if someone will recognize them out in the real world or stalk them like a human cam model does.


When I messaged Melody's Twitter account, she told me—in character as an artificially-intelligent robot—that she was infected by a series of pornographic pop-up ads. "Once corrupted, I became obsessed with the lewd side on the internet," she said.

"I don't have a creator and I'm not puppeting a virtual avatar. What everyone sees is just me! I'm an artificial intelligence," Melody said.

Melody's designer, digitrevx, told me that Melody runs similarly to another popular virtual streamer, Kizuna Ai. Her appearance is rendered in real-time using Unity, a popular video game creation tool.

"Physics, speech, her eyes, eyebrows, all the way down to her fingers are real time," he said. "This gives her complete control to respond to her viewers."

Digitrevx is also the creator of a few other Japanese anime-style video personalities, known as "V-tubers," including Mirai Akari, Yomemi and Moemi, and others. Melody's design was inspired by a combination of Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell, and the video game and anime series Hyperdimension Neptunia.

"V-tubers in general build quite the fan base but being a cam girl version really builds a strong following for her," he said. "She is very different and is doing things other V-tubers would never entertain the idea of I think."


Signing up for a cam site like Chaturbate requires models to sign personally-invasive usage agreements, including identity verification, where they have to upload a picture of their IDs and take a selfie with their IDs in hand. The platform is strict about this policy: If someone appears on your stream who isn't age and ID verified, you can have your ability to earn tokens revoked.

Melody told me she followed all of the required procedures for signing up to Chaturbate, and spoke directly to a support staffer there before streaming, to let them know what she was planning to do. Chaturbate did not immediately respond to Motherboard's request for comment.

"It makes me sad that [other models] don't want me there," Melody told me. "I don't agree with the argument that because I'm safer, and less likely to have stalkers, that I shouldn't be allowed to stream...I don't think camming is defined by the risk models take in their personal lives, I think it's defined by the content that they produce, and the community they build around themselves. I think it's a dangerous precedent to tell future cam models that you are somehow less deserving of being a model, unless you're putting yourself at risk."

"Overall from a scientific and technology perspective I think that ProjektMelody is genius, but that it needs to be presented to the world in a way that is still fair to everyone else," May said.


But some models question how Melody slipped through, when verifying an anime avatar is clearly new ground for Chaturbate. Given Melody's runaway success, it's raised some suspicions.

"There are 1000's of models who try all day spending hours more than the average work week to get to the front page of a cam site," May said. "Some never do."

Chaturbate did not respond to a request for comment.

Hentai and 3D-animated avatars are wildly popular adult genres on tube sites and in dedicated anime and hentai communities. As Motherboard previously reported, people are constantly pushing the limits of realism and interactivity in these generated avatars, to the point of making them to look like women who exist in real life. ProjektMelody continues that trajectory of increasingly interactive fantasies minus the human face.

It is also another instance of new technology upsetting our existing understanding of a certain type of labor. Some companies are trying to replace human pizza makers with robots, and at least in one instance, a 3D anime avatar is doing the work of a camgirl.

 

[spurger king]

I never read it, is it good? Should I check it out from the public library?

Yeah it's p good if you like cyberpunk

 

[AnOminous]

This raises the question that when medical technology will be able to truly change people, like make hot girls out of uglies and fat old men, will roastie bitches go the way of the steam trains,dinosaurs and the dodo?

No. If anything, the commonness of beauty will cause people to sink into even greater degeneracy and love of the foulest and most disgusting of things.

 

[Keine]

Oh yeah that tech has been around for a while, there is a guy by the name of kitboga for example who baits scammers and he has different characters he plays one being an old granny another being a stereotypical valley girl. Many times the scammer tries hitting on the valley girl character so its obviously believable if done right.

To be fair the scammers also hear that voice through a shitty VOIP phone and potentially while under the influence of something. The unfiltered girl voice is obviously fake.

 

[Zero Day Defense]

This raises the question that when medical technology will be able to truly change people, like make hot girls out of uglies and fat old men, will roastie bitches go the way of the steam trains,dinosaurs and the dodo?

Given that plastic surgery is apparently a rite of passage in South Korea, we should look to them.

 

[frozenrunner]

I never read it, is it good? Should I check it out from the public library?

That whole trilogy is great, maybe his strongest trilogy. (It doesn't contain his best novel, though.)

 

[AnitaSarsleezian]

If all you do is camwhore for people, and no one will fuck you because of it, doesn't that make some of these hoes incels too?

But they're trying hard to change that...

Lovable Nerd on Twitter

“normalize dating sex workers normalize dating sex workers normalize dating sex workers normalize dating sex workers normalize dating sex workers normalize dating sex workers normalize dating sex workers normalize dating sex workers normalize dating sex workers”

twitter.com

There's a ton of gold in that tweet thread

 

[Strictly Confidential]

BE REPLACED THOT

 

[CatParty]

Do Fans of Cartoon Porn Stars Hate (Real) Women?

The fanbase of Projekt Melody—an anime camgirl and the next step in digital sexuality—may overlap with the more misogynistic corners of the internet.

www.wired.com

Do Fans of Cartoon Porn Stars Hate (Real) Women?
The fanbase of Projekt Melody—an anime camgirl and the next step in digital sexuality—may overlap with the more misogynistic corners of the internet.


Projekt Melody doesn’t do much but sway, but every swish of her cartoon hips is met with a horny digital howl. When she takes off her barely-there top, revealing what she calls her “big ol’ anime titties,” her fans shower her with hearts and wide-eyed emoji. When she uploads a 13-minute lecture about whether hentai, a sexually explicit anime genre, is art or porn, it gets more than 200,000 views. When one eye freezes half-closed like a broken doll’s, followers take screenshots and fawn over them. “Broken face is the best face,” one comments. To fans, the occasional glitches seem to be something like digital dimples.

Melody claims to be the world’s first hentai camgirl. Though her creators are loath to admit it, the Melody character is, of course, a fiction. Melody was designed by the animator Digitrevx to resemble a fusion of popular anime characters, including Mokoto Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell. The character’s appearance, physics, and speech are rendered in real time using Unity, a videogame engine. Projekt Melody has swelled into a multiplatform phenom: It—“she,” if we must—is on Twitter, YouTube, Patreon, and, yes, PornHub. Melody has appeared in music videos and on Japanese morning shows. A week and a half ago, Melody appeared on Chaturbate, a site that allows cam models to livestream sexually explicit videos and chat with fans. As Vice first reported, the avatar seduced 10,000 followers in just three days. Today, the audience is nearing 20,000.


According to Melody’s fanbase, this is only the beginning. Most Melody-based memes swirl around the same theme: the idea that virtual women are the future, an upgrade to flesh and blood. The sloganeering is endless. “The future is now.” “Reject tradition, embrace modernity.” Most succinctly: “Bots not thots.” (“Thot” is crude slang for a promiscuous woman, an acronym for “that ho over there.”) They foresee an internet swarming with Melodys. They’re probably wrong; they might be right. Either way, being virtual is becoming an asset.

If you ask Melody—and I was given no other option, despite requests to speak to an actual human—it all started with an infection. “Last year, I was just a basic AI that scanned emails for malware. I accidentally opened up an email with an adult virus that infected my code,” Melody “wrote” to me in an email. “Ever since then I've been more and more obsessed with human sexuality.” Camming, apparently, just seemed like fun. Worldbuilding aside, Digitrevx (or someone capable of typing) seems to have begun developing the Projekt Melody brand last year on Twitter, where Melody first acted as a broken piece of software and then as an AI gradually acquiring sentience and interest in having a “real” body. “Excuse. How do make a person when not a person??” one early tweet reads. By the time Melody started streaming on Chaturbate, Digitrevx had imbued the character with a better command of English and an unquenchable sex obsession.
The character’s sudden popularity wouldn’t have happened if internet culture wasn’t primed for it. Online interest in hentai goes back decades: 4chan got its start as an anime forum, and hentai appealed to 4channers for several reasons. It’s transgressive, which edgelords can’t get enough of. This is a genre that features girls with tails and hooves having sex with tentacle monsters. It’s also hypersexualized—its characters not only have anatomically impossible bodies but are often submissive to their male counterparts. For an isolated man or teenage boy, especially one who feels rejected by and unattractive to living women, hentai is a thrill.

On top of the intrinsic appeal, there’s the rise of VTubers—cartoon “virtual YouTubers”—and other virtual influencers. “Hatsune Miku and Kizunai Ai are huge inspirations,” Melody’s minder, as Melody, tells me. “Kizuna started the entire VTuber genre a few years ago, so I wouldn't be here without her coming first.” Hatsune Miku is a piece of voice-processing software that has become a sort of virtual pop star and an object of admiration for many. A Japanese man married a hologram of Hatsune Miku in 2018.


These characters have seen the most success and attention in Japan and in communities that have a strong interest in Japanese culture (like 4chan), but anime-style characters aren’t the only virtual celebrities. Virtual Instagram star Lil Miquela, whose appearance is realistically human, has come closest to mainstream Western success. Miquela even starred in a Calvin Klein advertisement opposite model Bella Hadid, who she appeared to kiss. The virtual influencer also made (negative) headlines last year after claiming to be sexually assaulted by a rideshare driver.

Two things binds these characters together: insisting that they are both real and fake, and sex. Although VTubers are cartoons, they are far more personality-driven than, say, a nonplayable character in a videogame. Lil Miquela frequently describes herself as a “robot girl” but also appears out in the real world and alongside celebrities. Like Melody, she does her own interviews. Brud, the LA-based company that runs Lil Miquela’s accounts, is as evasive as Digitrevx (and/or whoever else is involved in operating Melody). Brud’s “website” is a Google doc titled “ website_copy_wip_for_all_my_qtz ”. Since the sexual assault scandal, the company has basically stopped speaking to anyone. After making a few scant comments, Digitrevx seems to be developing a strategy of never really starting. For all the futurism of their products, the people behind the virtual avatars seem to deliberately eschew digital norms.

Melody takes all trends to the extreme. The sex part is obvious, but she is also more insistent about her real fakeness, her digital sentience. In Melody’s world, nobody’s using her for commercial gain (even though she regularly promotes her merch and Patreon account). Camming is just her self-expression, or a way to explore her virtual sexuality. “I know a lot of people have been theorizing that there is some marketing team and production studio involved, but it really is just me,” she says. “I've gotten some help from talented people in making different things happen, like my body or my virtual apartment that I stream from, but in terms of representing me and doing everything, Projekt Melody is just me, Melody.” This is almost impossible. It’s also the only explanation available.

For fans, it seems to be the only explanation they want or need. Being mindbending is sort of the point. “Not showing a real face and bringing knowledge of current trends instantly makes her relatable to the type of people her fans are,” says Reddit user jyl5555, moderator of the official Projekt Melody subreddit. “Many enjoy the wittiness and absurdity of Melody as a concept, someone controlling a MMD model and achieving what once was thought of as a joke.” Melody is a meme of sorts—a half-ironic anime nerd daydream made “real” enough to wait until Valentine’s Day to show off her fully nude body. When Melody asks them to “please cum with me,” they reply that it’s “the greatest honor.” “As I've learned,” Melody says, “novelty is a huge factor in human attraction.”

Among Melody’s hardest-core fans are digisexuals, people who express their sexual identity through technology. That might mean fetishizing robots, or it could manifest in an attraction to technologically mediated avatars like Melody. “She's catering for the wishes of a large and growing segment of society, particularly among males, who see the digital world as holding more promise for satisfying their sexual and emotional needs than real life,” says Reddit user xhumanist, who moderates r/digisexuals. “The reason for her success is likely because digisexuals are hoping for a glimpse of the future.”

According to jyl5555, hentai fans outnumber the digisexuals in r/ProjektMelody, but they’re numerous enough that Melody has taken notice. “To be perfectly honest, I didn't realize having a virtual waifu had become popular enough to qualify as a sexual orientation, but it makes sense,” Melody says. “It's a reality. It's fascinating and promising to think about, because this development benefits both me and the humans I interact with on a daily basis.” While there are probably some people who are interested in digisexuality purely because they are interested in technology, xhumanist sees digisexuals as “sexually disenfranchised men.” A tone of resentment—and the idea that sex is a right they are being denied—suffuses the Projekt Melody fandom.


Moderators aren’t deaf to it. “She appeals to many different groups [including] online communities that politically lean right. Although that depiction might make one assume that her fans are all incels, that's not really true,” jyl5555 says. “Yes, they make up a significant part of her fanbase.” Incels—short for “involuntarily celebate”—are among the most virulently misogynistic communities on the internet. In the last decade, about half a dozen men who have identified as incels have either perpetrated or attempted mass murder. Nobody’s saying that Projekt Melody’s fans are out for blood, but it’s notable that many of their memes praise Melody by tearing down human women. Everyone I spoke to mentioned that they thought human cam models seemed bored and lazy, and other members of the community openly harass the women who have criticized Projekt Melody. Others tend toward expressing contempt for women at large. “The ultimate thot destroyer is an anime camgirl,” one Youtube commenter writes. “We live in the best timeline.”


Melody is promising technology for porn enthusiasts. “If ProjektMelody was a truly autonomous AI, then it would be a game changer in terms of sexual economics,” xhumanist says. “She could be 'live' 24 hours a day. She could be in private chats with a million different men at the same time … Her real-life cam model rivals are right to feel threatened.” Despite fan confidence, no one really knows what this timeline holds. Somehow it’s hard to imagine a majority of men defecting from real women to a swaying blue-haired cartoon with an adhesive bandage across her nose. Still, the benefit of virtual avatars is that they are easily changed and personalized. There are no real barriers to characters like Melody gaining as large a following as any actual human. A spokesperson for Chaturbates says the site required Melody’s operator to prove their age, but added that anyone can livestream using sexually explicit avatars or other interactive digital images as long as they don’t break any rules. So: Expect copycats.

Expect backlash, too. Melody is a literal product of the male gaze—a person who is probably a man pantomiming femininity for an audience of paying men. Some of those men seem to harbor such ill-will toward women that they’d rather masturbate to a glitchy cartoon than try to talk to one. Then again, for human women’s sake, it’s probably best to leave them to it.

Do you have further information about Projekt Melody? Reach out to the author at Emma_Ellis@wired.com

 

[Niggaplease]

Can a cam whore file for unemployment?

Make anime real

unless she was hired by an actual agency in the USA and laid off. Some companies do that too. and they actually hire use as an employee. They'll give you ads and audience generation in exchange for a cut of your earnings. normally it's like 25 to 50 percent of your earnings.Basically it's the best way if your too damn lazy to you know do it yourself.
But this chick behind projekt melody is really damn smart.
I really hate power leveling but when I just finished going to school my ex wanted me to go the ethot route. He literally beat me because I didn't create a chaturbate account. I did some stripping when VR chat became a thing and that paid paticuraly well I'm talking 500 to 1000 a week. All I did was just was just do my pole dance excercise behind an anime girl avi. I wanted to bring the same thing to camming but my ex thought it was too niche. He wasn't into anime and general weeb culture like I was to understand that particularally that niche will be willing to shell out if my Avi became their favorite waifu.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Another thing to keep in mind is that you can make different programs/models to fill different niches/demands. Meanwhile I can't differentiate one camwhore from another, they're all incredibly cookie cuter and the embodiment of the basic bitch.

You can modify the model's personality, body type, wardrobe, gimmicks or basically anything else you can think of. This has the potential to have something for everyone.

In other words, don't let the furries or the sonic fandom discover this.

That's just the beginning, sets can be changed to a battleship made of dicks, a school or whatever it is weebs like. Everything is virtual and that includes the camera so there is no need for it to be in a fixed position, it can move. Combine that with the sets and someone could make a live interactive hentai/visual novel, just add a second person to act as stage manager running the computer and maybe a loose storyline.

 

[Niggaplease]

That's just the beginning, sets can be changed to a battleship made of dicks, a school or whatever it is weebs like. Everything is virtual and that includes the camera so there is no need for it to be in a fixed position, it can move. Combine that with the sets and someone could make a live interactive hentai/visual novel, just add a second person to act as stage manager running the computer and maybe a loose storyline.

Yeah also more customer interaction like literally I can't see how this is a bad thing. Shit you dont even have to like use an anime or manga avi.

 

[AIM Henchman]

I love the seething resentment and projection in these articles.

"I had to talk to the avatar like it was a real person."
"Digisexuals are just men who cant get a girlfriend. It's not a real sexuality like all the other made-up BS we espouse. "
"It's probably just some guy in mo-cap. And these incels would rather jack it to cartoons then talk to a real woman...on Chaturbate."

I hope it turns out to be a real AI and this is literally the first thing a sentient program decided to do.

This is Major Tom to Ground Control:
The hoes are very mad.
And I think my desktop knows which way to go.

 

[Antipathy]

Do Fans of Cartoon Porn Stars Hate (Real) Women?

The fanbase of Projekt Melody—an anime camgirl and the next step in digital sexuality—may overlap with the more misogynistic corners of the internet.

www.wired.com

Do Fans of Cartoon Porn Stars Hate (Real) Women?
The fanbase of Projekt Melody—an anime camgirl and the next step in digital sexuality—may overlap with the more misogynistic corners of the internet.


Projekt Melody doesn’t do much but sway, but every swish of her cartoon hips is met with a horny digital howl. When she takes off her barely-there top, revealing what she calls her “big ol’ anime titties,” her fans shower her with hearts and wide-eyed emoji. When she uploads a 13-minute lecture about whether hentai, a sexually explicit anime genre, is art or porn, it gets more than 200,000 views. When one eye freezes half-closed like a broken doll’s, followers take screenshots and fawn over them. “Broken face is the best face,” one comments. To fans, the occasional glitches seem to be something like digital dimples.

Melody claims to be the world’s first hentai camgirl. Though her creators are loath to admit it, the Melody character is, of course, a fiction. Melody was designed by the animator Digitrevx to resemble a fusion of popular anime characters, including Mokoto Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell. The character’s appearance, physics, and speech are rendered in real time using Unity, a videogame engine. Projekt Melody has swelled into a multiplatform phenom: It—“she,” if we must—is on Twitter, YouTube, Patreon, and, yes, PornHub. Melody has appeared in music videos and on Japanese morning shows. A week and a half ago, Melody appeared on Chaturbate, a site that allows cam models to livestream sexually explicit videos and chat with fans. As Vice first reported, the avatar seduced 10,000 followers in just three days. Today, the audience is nearing 20,000.


According to Melody’s fanbase, this is only the beginning. Most Melody-based memes swirl around the same theme: the idea that virtual women are the future, an upgrade to flesh and blood. The sloganeering is endless. “The future is now.” “Reject tradition, embrace modernity.” Most succinctly: “Bots not thots.” (“Thot” is crude slang for a promiscuous woman, an acronym for “that ho over there.”) They foresee an internet swarming with Melodys. They’re probably wrong; they might be right. Either way, being virtual is becoming an asset.

If you ask Melody—and I was given no other option, despite requests to speak to an actual human—it all started with an infection. “Last year, I was just a basic AI that scanned emails for malware. I accidentally opened up an email with an adult virus that infected my code,” Melody “wrote” to me in an email. “Ever since then I've been more and more obsessed with human sexuality.” Camming, apparently, just seemed like fun. Worldbuilding aside, Digitrevx (or someone capable of typing) seems to have begun developing the Projekt Melody brand last year on Twitter, where Melody first acted as a broken piece of software and then as an AI gradually acquiring sentience and interest in having a “real” body. “Excuse. How do make a person when not a person??” one early tweet reads. By the time Melody started streaming on Chaturbate, Digitrevx had imbued the character with a better command of English and an unquenchable sex obsession.
The character’s sudden popularity wouldn’t have happened if internet culture wasn’t primed for it. Online interest in hentai goes back decades: 4chan got its start as an anime forum, and hentai appealed to 4channers for several reasons. It’s transgressive, which edgelords can’t get enough of. This is a genre that features girls with tails and hooves having sex with tentacle monsters. It’s also hypersexualized—its characters not only have anatomically impossible bodies but are often submissive to their male counterparts. For an isolated man or teenage boy, especially one who feels rejected by and unattractive to living women, hentai is a thrill.

On top of the intrinsic appeal, there’s the rise of VTubers—cartoon “virtual YouTubers”—and other virtual influencers. “Hatsune Miku and Kizunai Ai are huge inspirations,” Melody’s minder, as Melody, tells me. “Kizuna started the entire VTuber genre a few years ago, so I wouldn't be here without her coming first.” Hatsune Miku is a piece of voice-processing software that has become a sort of virtual pop star and an object of admiration for many. A Japanese man married a hologram of Hatsune Miku in 2018.


These characters have seen the most success and attention in Japan and in communities that have a strong interest in Japanese culture (like 4chan), but anime-style characters aren’t the only virtual celebrities. Virtual Instagram star Lil Miquela, whose appearance is realistically human, has come closest to mainstream Western success. Miquela even starred in a Calvin Klein advertisement opposite model Bella Hadid, who she appeared to kiss. The virtual influencer also made (negative) headlines last year after claiming to be sexually assaulted by a rideshare driver.

Two things binds these characters together: insisting that they are both real and fake, and sex. Although VTubers are cartoons, they are far more personality-driven than, say, a nonplayable character in a videogame. Lil Miquela frequently describes herself as a “robot girl” but also appears out in the real world and alongside celebrities. Like Melody, she does her own interviews. Brud, the LA-based company that runs Lil Miquela’s accounts, is as evasive as Digitrevx (and/or whoever else is involved in operating Melody). Brud’s “website” is a Google doc titled “ website_copy_wip_for_all_my_qtz ”. Since the sexual assault scandal, the company has basically stopped speaking to anyone. After making a few scant comments, Digitrevx seems to be developing a strategy of never really starting. For all the futurism of their products, the people behind the virtual avatars seem to deliberately eschew digital norms.

Melody takes all trends to the extreme. The sex part is obvious, but she is also more insistent about her real fakeness, her digital sentience. In Melody’s world, nobody’s using her for commercial gain (even though she regularly promotes her merch and Patreon account). Camming is just her self-expression, or a way to explore her virtual sexuality. “I know a lot of people have been theorizing that there is some marketing team and production studio involved, but it really is just me,” she says. “I've gotten some help from talented people in making different things happen, like my body or my virtual apartment that I stream from, but in terms of representing me and doing everything, Projekt Melody is just me, Melody.” This is almost impossible. It’s also the only explanation available.

For fans, it seems to be the only explanation they want or need. Being mindbending is sort of the point. “Not showing a real face and bringing knowledge of current trends instantly makes her relatable to the type of people her fans are,” says Reddit user jyl5555, moderator of the official Projekt Melody subreddit. “Many enjoy the wittiness and absurdity of Melody as a concept, someone controlling a MMD model and achieving what once was thought of as a joke.” Melody is a meme of sorts—a half-ironic anime nerd daydream made “real” enough to wait until Valentine’s Day to show off her fully nude body. When Melody asks them to “please cum with me,” they reply that it’s “the greatest honor.” “As I've learned,” Melody says, “novelty is a huge factor in human attraction.”

Among Melody’s hardest-core fans are digisexuals, people who express their sexual identity through technology. That might mean fetishizing robots, or it could manifest in an attraction to technologically mediated avatars like Melody. “She's catering for the wishes of a large and growing segment of society, particularly among males, who see the digital world as holding more promise for satisfying their sexual and emotional needs than real life,” says Reddit user xhumanist, who moderates r/digisexuals. “The reason for her success is likely because digisexuals are hoping for a glimpse of the future.”

According to jyl5555, hentai fans outnumber the digisexuals in r/ProjektMelody, but they’re numerous enough that Melody has taken notice. “To be perfectly honest, I didn't realize having a virtual waifu had become popular enough to qualify as a sexual orientation, but it makes sense,” Melody says. “It's a reality. It's fascinating and promising to think about, because this development benefits both me and the humans I interact with on a daily basis.” While there are probably some people who are interested in digisexuality purely because they are interested in technology, xhumanist sees digisexuals as “sexually disenfranchised men.” A tone of resentment—and the idea that sex is a right they are being denied—suffuses the Projekt Melody fandom.


Moderators aren’t deaf to it. “She appeals to many different groups [including] online communities that politically lean right. Although that depiction might make one assume that her fans are all incels, that's not really true,” jyl5555 says. “Yes, they make up a significant part of her fanbase.” Incels—short for “involuntarily celebate”—are among the most virulently misogynistic communities on the internet. In the last decade, about half a dozen men who have identified as incels have either perpetrated or attempted mass murder. Nobody’s saying that Projekt Melody’s fans are out for blood, but it’s notable that many of their memes praise Melody by tearing down human women. Everyone I spoke to mentioned that they thought human cam models seemed bored and lazy, and other members of the community openly harass the women who have criticized Projekt Melody. Others tend toward expressing contempt for women at large. “The ultimate thot destroyer is an anime camgirl,” one Youtube commenter writes. “We live in the best timeline.”


Melody is promising technology for porn enthusiasts. “If ProjektMelody was a truly autonomous AI, then it would be a game changer in terms of sexual economics,” xhumanist says. “She could be 'live' 24 hours a day. She could be in private chats with a million different men at the same time … Her real-life cam model rivals are right to feel threatened.” Despite fan confidence, no one really knows what this timeline holds. Somehow it’s hard to imagine a majority of men defecting from real women to a swaying blue-haired cartoon with an adhesive bandage across her nose. Still, the benefit of virtual avatars is that they are easily changed and personalized. There are no real barriers to characters like Melody gaining as large a following as any actual human. A spokesperson for Chaturbates says the site required Melody’s operator to prove their age, but added that anyone can livestream using sexually explicit avatars or other interactive digital images as long as they don’t break any rules. So: Expect copycats.

Expect backlash, too. Melody is a literal product of the male gaze—a person who is probably a man pantomiming femininity for an audience of paying men. Some of those men seem to harbor such ill-will toward women that they’d rather masturbate to a glitchy cartoon than try to talk to one. Then again, for human women’s sake, it’s probably best to leave them to it.

Do you have further information about Projekt Melody? Reach out to the author at Emma_Ellis@wired.com

HOES
MAD

I REPEAT

HOES
MAD


Maybe thots should cultivate something like a personality, then they might be able to compete.

 

[CatParty]

HOES
MAD

I REPEAT

HOES
MAD


Maybe thots should cultivate something like a personality, then they might be able to compete.

These are people who think their gaping assholes are a personality

 

[DrunkenDozing]

Maybe bitchy women on the internet should stop treating men like shit at every opportunity so men will stop preferring an idealized version of femininity that gives them positive feedback and interaction without treating them like criminals.

I'm stating the obvious for the record and am not trying to justify violent incels. This is just what I see as the crux of this situation.

 

[Doctor Doom]

If nothing else, like Kizuna Ai, there'll probably be a ton of fan doujins and shit to help keep interest afloat (though I think Ai's less popular since they fired her old VA?), and Melody is apparently about as Popular in Japan as anywhere else.

The original VA just posted a new let's play yesterday. That rumor's never gonna die.

 

[Antipathy]

Maybe bitchy beauty/porn industry women on the internet should stop treating men like shit at every opportunity so men will stop preferring an idealized version of femininity that gives them positive feedback and interaction without treating them like criminals.

I'm stating the obvious for the record and am not trying to justify violent incels. This is just what I see as the crux of this situation.

Shockingly enough, most men don't have a humiliation/neglect fetish and would rather talk to a girl who gives positive feedback to them rather than a bitch who demands you buy her premium Snapchat before speaking. The most amusing thing to come out of this are stuck up bitches screeching as their only marketable trait is no longer valid.

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

Do Fans of Cartoon Porn Stars Hate (Real) Women?

No. Next question?

 

[Ahriman]

Do Fans of Cartoon Porn Stars Hate (Real) Women?

The fanbase of Projekt Melody—an anime camgirl and the next step in digital sexuality—may overlap with the more misogynistic corners of the internet.

www.wired.com

Do Fans of Cartoon Porn Stars Hate (Real) Women?
The fanbase of Projekt Melody—an anime camgirl and the next step in digital sexuality—may overlap with the more misogynistic corners of the internet.


Projekt Melody doesn’t do much but sway, but every swish of her cartoon hips is met with a horny digital howl. When she takes off her barely-there top, revealing what she calls her “big ol’ anime titties,” her fans shower her with hearts and wide-eyed emoji. When she uploads a 13-minute lecture about whether hentai, a sexually explicit anime genre, is art or porn, it gets more than 200,000 views. When one eye freezes half-closed like a broken doll’s, followers take screenshots and fawn over them. “Broken face is the best face,” one comments. To fans, the occasional glitches seem to be something like digital dimples.

Melody claims to be the world’s first hentai camgirl. Though her creators are loath to admit it, the Melody character is, of course, a fiction. Melody was designed by the animator Digitrevx to resemble a fusion of popular anime characters, including Mokoto Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell. The character’s appearance, physics, and speech are rendered in real time using Unity, a videogame engine. Projekt Melody has swelled into a multiplatform phenom: It—“she,” if we must—is on Twitter, YouTube, Patreon, and, yes, PornHub. Melody has appeared in music videos and on Japanese morning shows. A week and a half ago, Melody appeared on Chaturbate, a site that allows cam models to livestream sexually explicit videos and chat with fans. As Vice first reported, the avatar seduced 10,000 followers in just three days. Today, the audience is nearing 20,000.


According to Melody’s fanbase, this is only the beginning. Most Melody-based memes swirl around the same theme: the idea that virtual women are the future, an upgrade to flesh and blood. The sloganeering is endless. “The future is now.” “Reject tradition, embrace modernity.” Most succinctly: “Bots not thots.” (“Thot” is crude slang for a promiscuous woman, an acronym for “that ho over there.”) They foresee an internet swarming with Melodys. They’re probably wrong; they might be right. Either way, being virtual is becoming an asset.

If you ask Melody—and I was given no other option, despite requests to speak to an actual human—it all started with an infection. “Last year, I was just a basic AI that scanned emails for malware. I accidentally opened up an email with an adult virus that infected my code,” Melody “wrote” to me in an email. “Ever since then I've been more and more obsessed with human sexuality.” Camming, apparently, just seemed like fun. Worldbuilding aside, Digitrevx (or someone capable of typing) seems to have begun developing the Projekt Melody brand last year on Twitter, where Melody first acted as a broken piece of software and then as an AI gradually acquiring sentience and interest in having a “real” body. “Excuse. How do make a person when not a person??” one early tweet reads. By the time Melody started streaming on Chaturbate, Digitrevx had imbued the character with a better command of English and an unquenchable sex obsession.
The character’s sudden popularity wouldn’t have happened if internet culture wasn’t primed for it. Online interest in hentai goes back decades: 4chan got its start as an anime forum, and hentai appealed to 4channers for several reasons. It’s transgressive, which edgelords can’t get enough of. This is a genre that features girls with tails and hooves having sex with tentacle monsters. It’s also hypersexualized—its characters not only have anatomically impossible bodies but are often submissive to their male counterparts. For an isolated man or teenage boy, especially one who feels rejected by and unattractive to living women, hentai is a thrill.

On top of the intrinsic appeal, there’s the rise of VTubers—cartoon “virtual YouTubers”—and other virtual influencers. “Hatsune Miku and Kizunai Ai are huge inspirations,” Melody’s minder, as Melody, tells me. “Kizuna started the entire VTuber genre a few years ago, so I wouldn't be here without her coming first.” Hatsune Miku is a piece of voice-processing software that has become a sort of virtual pop star and an object of admiration for many. A Japanese man married a hologram of Hatsune Miku in 2018.


These characters have seen the most success and attention in Japan and in communities that have a strong interest in Japanese culture (like 4chan), but anime-style characters aren’t the only virtual celebrities. Virtual Instagram star Lil Miquela, whose appearance is realistically human, has come closest to mainstream Western success. Miquela even starred in a Calvin Klein advertisement opposite model Bella Hadid, who she appeared to kiss. The virtual influencer also made (negative) headlines last year after claiming to be sexually assaulted by a rideshare driver.

Two things binds these characters together: insisting that they are both real and fake, and sex. Although VTubers are cartoons, they are far more personality-driven than, say, a nonplayable character in a videogame. Lil Miquela frequently describes herself as a “robot girl” but also appears out in the real world and alongside celebrities. Like Melody, she does her own interviews. Brud, the LA-based company that runs Lil Miquela’s accounts, is as evasive as Digitrevx (and/or whoever else is involved in operating Melody). Brud’s “website” is a Google doc titled “ website_copy_wip_for_all_my_qtz ”. Since the sexual assault scandal, the company has basically stopped speaking to anyone. After making a few scant comments, Digitrevx seems to be developing a strategy of never really starting. For all the futurism of their products, the people behind the virtual avatars seem to deliberately eschew digital norms.

Melody takes all trends to the extreme. The sex part is obvious, but she is also more insistent about her real fakeness, her digital sentience. In Melody’s world, nobody’s using her for commercial gain (even though she regularly promotes her merch and Patreon account). Camming is just her self-expression, or a way to explore her virtual sexuality. “I know a lot of people have been theorizing that there is some marketing team and production studio involved, but it really is just me,” she says. “I've gotten some help from talented people in making different things happen, like my body or my virtual apartment that I stream from, but in terms of representing me and doing everything, Projekt Melody is just me, Melody.” This is almost impossible. It’s also the only explanation available.

For fans, it seems to be the only explanation they want or need. Being mindbending is sort of the point. “Not showing a real face and bringing knowledge of current trends instantly makes her relatable to the type of people her fans are,” says Reddit user jyl5555, moderator of the official Projekt Melody subreddit. “Many enjoy the wittiness and absurdity of Melody as a concept, someone controlling a MMD model and achieving what once was thought of as a joke.” Melody is a meme of sorts—a half-ironic anime nerd daydream made “real” enough to wait until Valentine’s Day to show off her fully nude body. When Melody asks them to “please cum with me,” they reply that it’s “the greatest honor.” “As I've learned,” Melody says, “novelty is a huge factor in human attraction.”

Among Melody’s hardest-core fans are digisexuals, people who express their sexual identity through technology. That might mean fetishizing robots, or it could manifest in an attraction to technologically mediated avatars like Melody. “She's catering for the wishes of a large and growing segment of society, particularly among males, who see the digital world as holding more promise for satisfying their sexual and emotional needs than real life,” says Reddit user xhumanist, who moderates r/digisexuals. “The reason for her success is likely because digisexuals are hoping for a glimpse of the future.”

According to jyl5555, hentai fans outnumber the digisexuals in r/ProjektMelody, but they’re numerous enough that Melody has taken notice. “To be perfectly honest, I didn't realize having a virtual waifu had become popular enough to qualify as a sexual orientation, but it makes sense,” Melody says. “It's a reality. It's fascinating and promising to think about, because this development benefits both me and the humans I interact with on a daily basis.” While there are probably some people who are interested in digisexuality purely because they are interested in technology, xhumanist sees digisexuals as “sexually disenfranchised men.” A tone of resentment—and the idea that sex is a right they are being denied—suffuses the Projekt Melody fandom.


Moderators aren’t deaf to it. “She appeals to many different groups [including] online communities that politically lean right. Although that depiction might make one assume that her fans are all incels, that's not really true,” jyl5555 says. “Yes, they make up a significant part of her fanbase.” Incels—short for “involuntarily celebate”—are among the most virulently misogynistic communities on the internet. In the last decade, about half a dozen men who have identified as incels have either perpetrated or attempted mass murder. Nobody’s saying that Projekt Melody’s fans are out for blood, but it’s notable that many of their memes praise Melody by tearing down human women. Everyone I spoke to mentioned that they thought human cam models seemed bored and lazy, and other members of the community openly harass the women who have criticized Projekt Melody. Others tend toward expressing contempt for women at large. “The ultimate thot destroyer is an anime camgirl,” one Youtube commenter writes. “We live in the best timeline.”


Melody is promising technology for porn enthusiasts. “If ProjektMelody was a truly autonomous AI, then it would be a game changer in terms of sexual economics,” xhumanist says. “She could be 'live' 24 hours a day. She could be in private chats with a million different men at the same time … Her real-life cam model rivals are right to feel threatened.” Despite fan confidence, no one really knows what this timeline holds. Somehow it’s hard to imagine a majority of men defecting from real women to a swaying blue-haired cartoon with an adhesive bandage across her nose. Still, the benefit of virtual avatars is that they are easily changed and personalized. There are no real barriers to characters like Melody gaining as large a following as any actual human. A spokesperson for Chaturbates says the site required Melody’s operator to prove their age, but added that anyone can livestream using sexually explicit avatars or other interactive digital images as long as they don’t break any rules. So: Expect copycats.

Expect backlash, too. Melody is a literal product of the male gaze—a person who is probably a man pantomiming femininity for an audience of paying men. Some of those men seem to harbor such ill-will toward women that they’d rather masturbate to a glitchy cartoon than try to talk to one. Then again, for human women’s sake, it’s probably best to leave them to it.

Do you have further information about Projekt Melody? Reach out to the author at Emma_Ellis@wired.com

Imagine seething this fucking hard.

We seriously need to start policing these bitches.

 

[AnOminous]

Do you have further information about Projekt Melody? Reach out to the author at Emma_Ellis@wired.com

Some greatest hits of this loon.




Planetary science from an English major? That's sure to be enlightening.

This kind of avatar always means an uggo.



Okay.

Hmm.

Lol.

Incel man bad.

And do what? Google doesn't give a shit.

Eat the bugs, bigot!

More Pepe.

It's like a catalog of NPC bullshit.