English Dub Review: Tune Into The Midnight Heart “Lock the Door If It’s Embarrassing; I Can’t Smile In Front of the Camera; I Can’t Smile In Front of You”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Arisu turns his attention next to Iko, who requests his help in helping her revitalize her struggling V-Tuber career.

OUR TAKE

Huh, so I guess I was half right about the next episode not covering the other two girls at once…because instead it’s only focusing on one, Iko, the V-Tuber of the group. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s basically having an online cartoony personality, often designed as a cute girl, and playing games, watching funny vids, or just chatting with people who tune in to the stream. It’s still a relatively recent trend in pop culture, with the first breakout success of the genre, Kizuna Ai, occurring not even a decade ago at the time of this writing, and there have been several anime since that have referenced V-Tubing in one way or another ever since (there were already kinda similar concepts in anime prior to this existing but now they’re directly referencing the real world thing). And I guess Iko had a slightly more complex issue for Arisu to help out with, as it’s not as easy to resolve by simply letting things go as planned or schedule random auditions, as Iko’s problem is the kind that curses every artist: stage fright and low self-esteem. That’s something that’s gotta be fixed by her on the inside, though a harem protagonist like Arisu can probably lend a hand with getting there.

Part of that is getting pretty far into the weeds with what a V-Tuber needs to stand out among the likely tens of thousands of others active on the Internet today, like making sure her avatar is all rigged up to move and talk, having her voice be cute and appealing without getting annoying, and of course giving her the confidence to be able to basically perform a character to hundreds of people at once while keeping their attention. Regular streaming is already a bunch to juggle at once keeping lots of people entertained, but V-tubing adds another layer of aesthetic and bit commitment, making it potentially much harder. Luckily, despite almost bombing a stream, Arisu manages to get Iko to fully admit her passion for V-tubing and gain multiple new subscribers and viewers just by being more of herself, which makes her seem more genuine and gives people reason to stick around. And of course now she is definitely also crushing on Arisu, assuming she wasn’t already by being Apollo. And by process of elimination, that just leaves Shinobu, the aspiring radio announcer, who looks like she’ll be the last to get sole focus next episode!