Amano Pikamee

Amano Pikamee (天野ピカミィ) was a female Japanese Virtual YouTuber under VOMS Project.

Personality
Pikamee is very energetic, fairly sassy, and often laughing at the smallest things. Despite this, she is very reserved and shy in real life. She frequently jokes about having "no friends," although she also occasionally recounts stories involving her friends.

She is known to use Japanese phrases like "sousousou", "dayo", and "dakara," even when speaking English. Though her verbal ticks spans even in when speaking Japanese which leads her mixing both language from time to time.

Her usual greeting is "Ohao!" and her sendoff is "Otsupika!" (a combination of "otsukare," meaning "thanks for coming," and "Pikamee.")

Background
Her Twitter account and YouTube channel were created on 7 February 2020 although she did not start her activities on YouTube until her first stream on 19 March.

2020
On 13 April, she reached 20,000 subscribers and making her first ever milestone stream.

On 25 April, her channel was finally eligible to monetize.

On 27 May, she released her first ever non stream video, thanking and celebrating her 100th stream.

On 6 July, she reached 50,000 subscribers and announcing that she'll have a membership in her channel.

On 12 July, she celebrated her first birthday stream.

On 19 August, she reached 100,000 subscribers, first among her colleague.

On 18 September, she reached 200,000 subscribers where she celebrate along side her 100,000 subscribers milestone on 17 October.

On 11 November, she reached 300,000 subscribers.

2021
On 3 March, Pikamee announced that she would have to take a break from streaming due to her pet cat contracting a mutation disease.

On March 13, she announced her pet cat's recovery and that she would be resuming streaming activities the following day.

On 19 March, to celebrate her first anniversary stream, she got a new outfit and also a minor update on her usual clothing.

On 29 March, she had her first Twitch stream playing Red Dead Redemption 2.

On 18 April, she reached 400,000 subscribers.

On 7 July, her channel monetization got revoked, only to get re-monetized the following day.

On 13 July, during her birthday stream, Pikamee received a new hairstyle and 2 new facial expressions to go with her new outfit.

On 20 August, she reached 500,000 Subscribers.

2022
On 19 March, as part of VOMS Project's 2nd anniversary, Pikamee debuted her new 2D outfit. She wears a black jacket that goes below her waist, with her name (PIKAMEE) written on the top portion of the jacket. She also wears white sneakers with long black socks, matching wrist bands that extend to half of her forearm, as well as a matching black baseball cap. Her hair becomes messy in this outfit. The following day on 20 March, she gained new accessories for her black outfit, a yellow light stick on her left hand and a gas mask covering her face.

On 26 March, Pikamee introduced "Isekai Pikamee," a radically different 2D model designed by Shiratama. The costume has 2 versions, she debuted one on YouTube, and the other on her Twitch channel the same day.

On 25 September, she debuted her fifth 2D costume, a thunder type monster.

2023
On 1 March, Pikamee announced that she would be retiring by the end of the month, and that all content (including membership perks) on her YouTube channel would be privated after her final stream.

On 31 March, Pikamee held a now-privated graduation stream attended by over 50,000 viewers. Her YouTube channel reached 700,000 subscribers on that day. She received well-wishes on Twitter from numerous major VTubers, including Kson, Zentreya, and Pomu Rainpuff.

Discography

 * Main page: Amano Pikamee/Discography

2020

 * On 28 June, Pikamee, Monoe, and Tomoshika were interviewed and appeared in the Village Vanguard Magazine Vol. 72 for future goods collaboration.
 * On 18 July, Pikamee, Monoe, and Tomoshika were interviewed and did a collaboration with the clothing brand Vanquish on new merchandise.
 * On 2 August, she participated in Vtuber 最協決定戦 Apex Competition alongside 馬犬 (BKN) and insideMK2 as Team PUI.
 * On 26 August, Pikamee, Monoe, and Tomoshika were interviewed again regarding the follow up on the Village Vanguard collaboration which appeared in the Village Vanguard Magazine Vol.74
 * On 11 September, Pikamee was invited to represent Japan on AMD Streamer Challenge 2020 that spans till mid December.
 * On 26 September, Pikamee was invited as a guest of honor in Kurocon 2020
 * On 28 September, she participated in Vtuber Fall Guys Party alongside Shigure Ui, Mochi Hiyoko, and Natori Sana as Team E/ Genki EEEEPpai.
 * On 27 December, Pikamee, Monoe, and Tomoshika did a promotion and collaboration for Vanquish and Gonoturn

2021

 * On 27 March, Pikamee and Tomoshika were two of the hosts for the niconico Spring Vtuber Game Festival 2021
 * On 28 May, Pikamee and Tomoshika were announced as two of the featured characters to collect in VTuber Chips 3
 * On 8 June, Pikamee and Tomoshika announced they'll participate in the VirtualReal03 collaboration album by usagipro. They will release their own original song in collaboration with KOTONEHOUSE on 31 July.
 * On 2 September, Pikamee and Tomoshika were invited to perform live and have a session at the USAGI Production VirtualReal Best01 release event

Fans

 * Her fanbase is referred to as the "Pikarmy."
 * Her Members fanbase is known as the "Pikair Force".

Mascot & Friend

 * She has an affinity for wooden spatulas. Her favorite is an Ikea spatula which she often keeps next to her while streaming. This spatula was dubbed "Tomoe," a combination of her VOMS co-stars' names, Hikasa Tomoshika and Jitomi Monoe. Tomoe has become a mascot of sorts, sometimes appearing next to Pikamee in streams, and often being depicted in fanart. She mentioned that Tomoe is Swedish (since it's from ikea) and its birthday is on 21 April. Tomoe has a bit of nibble on the top due to it getting bitten by her cat.
 * One time a spider appeared in her room, and after a failed attempt to capture it, the spider went missing in her room so she decided to keep it as a pet. She named it Emoto, as an anagram to her wooden spatula's name, Tomoe. Since that day, Emoto was nowhere to be found, and after she encountered a mantis in front of her house, Emoto is thought to be dead due to a run in with the mantis.
 * She has a Scottish fold cat named "Socks" (靴下/Kutsushita). She got the cat after finding out that she didn't have an allergy to cats through a blood test (she used to get bad flus as a kid; her parents pinned it on a cat allergy). The name was in honor of her Minecraft cat that died in her Minecraft series. She mentioned her cat's birthday is on 1 November.Agomee.png
 * Agomee (アゴ美) is a recurring individual on pikamee's stream. She's pikamee's real life close friend that has come to play or chat on her stream multiple times. She is known to have a cool personality and love for liquor. She mentioned being close to her due to having the same interests throughout the years. . Her appearance was drawn out of and by Pikamee's personal interest style. However, Agomee request having Joey Wheeler's chin.

Identity

 * She speaks English almost fluently and sometimes holds English only streams, along with mixed Japanese/English streams which tends to her self dubbing all her streams.
 * She easily gets dizzy or motion sick which leads to her rarely doing motion heavy games like Surgeon Simulator or driving for a long time, though she mentioned not having any problem riding a roller coaster.
 * She is known to be very conscious of her food/drink intake, considering both taste and calories. She used to always keep track using Fitbit, which she mentioned actually leads her to a bad diet since she starts drinking a lot of coffee, exceeding 5 cups a day, though she has managed to start balancing her diet better recently.
 * She has a fairly bad case of insomnia.
 * In Japanese, she has a hard time reading uncommon kanji and pronouncing つ (Tsu), while in English, she struggles reading long words and using articles and auxiliary verbs.

Lore

 * Pikamee has a Japanese mother and an American father and often talks about her life in Texas and Japan. However, trying to stay in-character, she refers to these locations as "Virtual Texas," "Virtual States," and "Virtual Japan." She mentioned that her parents got divorced and she lived with her mom who later remarried. She also mentioned having a German grandparent, which lead to her wanting to learn German after she is confident in her English.
 * She has worked at Subway, Taco Bell, 7-Eleven, a bike rental business, a clothing store, a waitress in a bar (Izakaya) (where she mistook serving sake instead of water), an unnamed black company, a car rental company (where she crashed a car), and many more.
 * She mentioned that the latest job she had before becoming a VTuber was a professional translator, though she still struggles both in Japanese and English. She still had another job while streaming every day in the first half of the year since her debut, though she did not specify what job she was doing at that time. She is now streaming fulltime, though she did mention having other jobs from time to time.
 * Her usual greeting "ohao" is a shortened version of "ohayo". Back when she could only speak English and not Japanese, she mentioned always pronouncing "ohayo" as "ohao". Though after some time, she forgot how to speak English and could only speak Japanese.
 * She was in a softball club, but she didn't like it because it was too tiring. She was also in a light music club, though she didn't specify what musical instrument she can play.
 * She is a college dropout.

In-Jokes & Nicknames

 * She tries to avoid swearing to keep her streams "family-friendly," although she sometimes lets swears slip and plays games that have explicit dialogue. Whenever this happens, her fans often tease her or make "family-friendly" jokes.
 * Her original streaming computer wasn't powerful enough to run some games. For instance, on her Apex streams, she resorted to using a still image instead of her Live2D character, as her computer couldn't run both programs at the same time. She began referring to her PC as Potato-chan.
 * On 29 May 2020, she tweeted "fuck this im selling meth!" This was a reference to an Akai Haato and Kiryu Coco stream where Haato attempted to translate English memes into Japanese. Due to the lack of context and the rare use of explicit language from Pikamee, this tweet quickly spread, receiving thousands of likes and retweets within hours. This lead to in-jokes with her fans about Pikamee selling meth.
 * Fans like to compare her laughing to a tea kettle or a dolphin, due to it having a high pitched squeak.
 * Due to bringing up spiders as a conversation topic a few times, both her and fans decided to call it "spider deck", as her trump card for when she doesn't know what to talk about.
 * The day before her debut, she noticed that she needed to make a waiting screen, so she played a recorder of the background theme she chose and made a rushed animation which referenced the "nice boat" meme as the waiting screen. She plays her recorder "horribly" on loop which lead one of her chat just complementing her boat animation again referencing the nice boat meme. A fan congratulated her on 100k subscribers by reanimating the nice boat scene which she still uses to this day.Giant Pikamee.gif
 * When she first started playing Minecraft, one of the viewers suggested she make a giant statue of the VOMS girls, specifically Pikamee herself. She misinterpreted this suggestion as the viewer wanting to see Pikamee's model in "giant form" or zoomed. She screamed "giant Pikamee" as she enlarged her model, though she quickly realized that she had misinterpreted the viewer suggestion afterward. This leads to chat sometimes asking to see giant Pikamee from time to time and she creatively plays with her model as she enlarges or shrinks it.
 * When reading the name of superchat donators, if she encounters a username that's not safe for work (by her standards), she will read the superchat donator's username as "voldemort" ("He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named").

Likes & Dislikes

 * She hates bugs, especially flying ones. Their buzzing sound makes her uncomfortable, but she had a family of spiders living in her bicycle. The spider family were reported dead due to the heat of the Summer, but new spiders were showing up.
 * Her favorite anime of all time is Spice & Wolf, which led to her doing a cosplay as Holo at an anime convention once.
 * Her favorite movies are Shaun of the Dead and Taken. She mentioned liking to watch movies multiple times which usually starts with subbed and, if she likes the movie enough, she'll watch the dub to see the localization of jokes or lines.
 * Her favorite color is purple.
 * Her favorite music artist is Maroon 5, with "Misery" by Maroon 5 being her favorite song.
 * She loves donuts & Reese's and is often depicted eating them in fanart. Though, overall, she's fairly picky when considering foods or drinks.
 * Her favorite alcoholic beverage is a brandy-based cocktail named Denki Bran because of the movie "The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl".
 * She mentioned her most prized figurines are Riamu and Sachiko from idolm@aster.
 * Her favorite season is Halloween.
 * She likes horror stories. She's mentioned watching horror videos every night before going to bed.

Other

 * The chat convinced her to eat vegetables and go out, and as of 2021, eating vegetables seems pretty natural for her.
 * She leaves a few Easter eggs on her channel playlists sometimes.
 * She's known to have the worst luck in gacha, despite really enjoying it. All the gacha rolling she has streamed somehow hit the pity roll before getting what she wants. This has happened in Genshin Impact, Apex Legends, and Princess Connect! Re:Dive.
 * The default pose for her first model (when face tracking is interrupted) was to stare straight at the camera with a closed-mouth smile. This was famous for happening when Pikamee was frustrated at a difficult game and she stood up out of her chair.
 * Notably, Pikamee actually had trouble closing her model's mouth on purpose, as it required scrunching her face up to the point it became hard to breathe.
 * The flute heard in her intro was played by herself.
 * It's not known whether she or Gyari made her first outro, but as of 24 April 2021 she is now using new outro that a fan made for her new outfit debut.
 * She has a small series called pikatomo, where she does miscellaneous things from just talking about a topic she is interested in to doing challenges. It was designed to be a 30 minute to 1 hour short stream for people working to watch during lunch break in JST.
 * Pikamee's Isekai model shares the same illustrator with Emma★August of NIJISANJI and Muri of VirtuaReal.

Media

 * 天野ピカミィ. Pikamee - YouTube channel
 * Amano Pikamee's profile on VOMS.net
 * @amanopikamee - Twitter account
 * PikameeAmano - Twitch channel
 * @amanopikamee - Marshmallow account

Twitter hashtags

 * #pikatube - Stream talk
 * #pikart - Fan art
 * #pikask - Questions
 * #pikameme - Memes

Further readings

 * 天野ピカミィ - Unofficial VOMS Wiki
 * 天野ピカミィ - Nicovideo Encyclopedia
 * 天野ピカミィ - Pixiv Encyclopedia
 * 天野Pikamee - Moegirl Encylopedia
 * 아마노 피카미 - Namu Wiki