You're racing to class in the labyrinthian halls of Hogwarts and look up on the wall to see a framed portrait of an anime girl doing the 🥺 emoji. That's right, Hogwarts Legacy has VTubers now.
The Moving Frames - Anime VTubers - Hololive mod replaces the school's magical, moving paintings with GIFs and clips of popular Hololive VTubers, streamers who use animated 2D avatars.
According to modder xBloodTigerx, history's legendary witches and wizards pale in comparison to VTubers like Inugami Korone, Usada Pekora, and Amelia Watson. The anime girls known for streaming games and occasionally performing at concerts can entertain you while completing door puzzles and exploring in the game's central location.
You'll need a Nexus Mods account to install the VTuber mod. xBloodTigerx recommends backing up the Atlas folder where the game is installed on your PC. The default location should look like this: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Hogwarts Legacy\Phoenix\Content\Movies\Atlas. Once you've done that, download the zip file, then unzip it in the game's directory to replace the existing Phoenix folder. The default location for that should resemble this: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Hogwarts Legacy.
xBloodTigerx has a video that gives you an idea of which VTubers are included in the mod. It looks like it's an assortment of stars from Hololive's global roster, many of whom have also started streaming the game on their YouTube channels. Most of them appear to show up on the walls, but a screenshot on the Nexus Mods page has one in place of the goblin in the Daily Prophet newspaper. If you don't have time (or a second monitor) to break for a stream, you can remember they exist in-game, I guess.
People are already suggesting VTuber clips to add to the mod. xBloodTigerx says they're gathering more to include, but they need GIFs and clips at a high fps. As a VTuber fan myself, I would urge xBloodTigerx to include the viral dance from Houshou Marine's I'm Your Treasure Box music video (slight NSFW warning for the content of the song). The animation of the pirate VTuber shaking her hips to the beat exploded on TikTok last year, and the rumor is that Undertale composer and Pope Francis' favorite musician, Toby Fox, produced the song under the pseudonym U.Z. INU.
Our Hogwarts Legacy review, by associate editor Morgan Park, praised Hogwarts Legacy for the whimsical details in Hogwarts castle: "You can't walk 10 feet without a part of Hogwarts castle coming alive: books reorganize themselves on shelves, suits of armor salute passersby, hedges trim themselves to perfection, ghosts float around telling jokes, textbooks flutter above passing students, and paintings animate or conversate as if the MOMA switched to the .gif standard." xBloodTigerx is simply suggesting to Morgan that VTubers could fit on that list.
Hogwarts Legacy's story may take place in the 1800s before anyone could even conceptualize computers, let alone anime girls streaming Minecraft, but what are VTubers if not moving paintings, really? Let's just say a Seer accurately saw our anime future and call it canon.
