Fufu’s Seven Year Grind To Be Uncovered As VTubing’s Hidden Gem

As a Hidden Gem, it’s not enough to just wait to be uncovered. You’ve got to shine in the rough and draw attention, especially in the content creation sphere where there’s so many dazzling stars.

That was the philosophy Fufu took after she was nominated for the 2023 VTuber Awards in the aforementioned category.

“This was the most fitting category for me and I actively promoted it,” she explained. “When the nominees actually got announced, I couldn’t believe I was there. I had to check five, ten times if it was the right name. 

“Seeing me there also gave me a change of heart on promoting myself because I went really hard on promoting myself. I did a daily tweet and on that tweet I’d put the link on there. I’d do a TikTok and a YouTube short where I’d remind people to vote.”

It’s all part of a mindset change the veteran streamer has gone through over the last seven years. 

When she started out back in 2016, she was timid. So timid in fact that she ended her first stream as soon as someone messaged in chat out of pure nerves. She were scared of branching out too much ⁠— she racked up more than 8,000 hours in Dead By Daylight after streaming it practically non-stop for three years.

But when she discovered VTubing, everything changed, including her fortunes.

“Do you think I could start streaming?”

You can’t claim Fufu got here by pure luck. She knows better than most what the streamer grind is like.

For seven years she would go live multiple days a week. Sometimes there would be a few dozen people there. Others, just two or three. But rain, hail or shine, she was committed to making streaming a career.

It came from a deep seated passion in her to be like her idols. The only issue was she was far from being self-confident. But one spur of the moment decision changed that.

“I would always look at other people and think the world of them, like they’re the most awesome people for doing what they want to do. But I would look at these people and think there’s no way I could do this.

“One day, when I was walking to school, there was a random student next to me. We weren’t even friends. I would ask him randomly ‘hey, do you think I could start streaming?’ 

“He would look at me and the first thought was definitely ‘who is this again?’ And then he was like ‘yeah, sure, whatever, you can do it.’ What he didn’t know was that this was such a mind blowing thing to me.”

Streaming was a great way for Fufu to come out of her shell and even pick up some new skills. The German speaker learned English purely from streaming, and as chatters came in from across the world, she could use their engagement as practice.

Eventually the snowball rolled up big enough that she was able to get Twitch partner in 2019. The extra stability from that let her go full time and escape a less-than-ideal living situation. In that way, streaming “not only changed my life, but it also saved my life.

“That meant everything to me. I thought I would immediately get rejected but I was exactly at 75 average viewers and applied. That was the first step for me thinking I could stream full time. 

“I would be very scared of the future, if it would work out. [But] I had this small but loving and supportive community who would join me through thick and thin.”

VTubing inspiring Fufu’s creativity

When Fufu decided to branch out into VTubing in 2022, she didn’t really follow the sphere that much. However there was something about having this character for herself, that wasn’t just her face, that she wanted to take advantage of.

On her first debut, she took the ‘bit-by-bit’ reveal to its limits. She broke her model up into tiny pieces, revealing toe-to-top as goals were hit. It didn’t end there though, with Fufu sharing little details one-by-one: oshi marks, the model’s name, et cetera.

She changed it up for her second debut: “I had the full PNG of the new model and I cut it into puzzle pieces. After every goal was hit, I would roll for a number and once a number would get rolled, one puzzle piece would get revealed and it’d be like the left shoe of the model or one piece of the hair.”

Such is the creativity Fufu has found since starting out in VTubing that she didn’t even realize she was interested in. For the longest time she was just streaming herself playing games and that was that. But now she’s getting into more editing, writing, and just generally expressing herself.

“I would have this character I could create a persona around,” she said. “It was a character I could give my voice to. I could mix all of these science things together ⁠— I don’t really understand them but I think they’re cool and make little stories about them. 

“When I was streaming before I never did anything ‘inspiring’, I would go live and play games. With VTubing, and its creative sphere and community, I am finally able to start doing even more of the things I never thought I would do like writing and singing and video editing. I feel like even though I’ve been in this streaming community for such a long time, because of VTubing, I have started to really try to do everything I want to do.”

And so when the VTuber Awards came around, there was no better way to see if her hard work had paid off.

“There was no more of the depressing ‘why even bother trying,’ because we don’t do that here anymore. We’ll just try, even though there was little hope to win.

“Being nominated already made me feel like a winner, and actually winning was, for the lack of a better word, life-changing.”

Riding the wave

After her VTuber Awards win and 2.0 debut, Fufu’s following has increased significantly on both Twitch and Twitter. She just celebrated passing 25,000 followers on the former and 5,000 on the latter (triple what she had just a month ago).

“It was the confidence boost for me to be okay with being here in the VTubing community. It is possible for me to achieve great things like that. I’m able to get out there now and say ‘I’m proud to be here, and I have so many things I want to share with everybody.’”

You could see that in the immediate aftermath of the win where Fufu rode the wave of eyeballs to bring in as many other Hidden Gems as possible. She ran a ‘collab-a-thon’ where every day for weeks she would have one indie VTuber after another on stream. 

“Before winning, it wasn’t like that really because I would be hesitant to bring attention to myself. But with this huge confidence boost, I am really out there and trying to give people the similar or same feeling I had [winning the award].

“Surprisingly it was very hard to organize so many different collabs ⁠— every day was 2, 3, 4 collabs a day with different groups. But I’m not complaining about it because I’m having such a blast meeting all these new people and playing games with them. I don’t think I would have done that if I didn’t win the award.”

Her redebut couldn’t be any more perfectly timed either, just two weeks after the award ceremony. Clips of it were going viral, and she got another boost of engagement.

Now with a renewed sense of self, Fufu is determined to make 2024 her year and make good on the promise that she is truly a hidden gem.