Mai Nguyen Since PLAVE’s debut a month ago, the five-member virtual idol group has been regularly holding livestreams to interact with fans. While they’ve been doing everything from performing song and dance covers to ranking food preferences and playing horror games, the group has only broadcasted livestreams of up to three members at a time. On April 25, PLAVE held their first ever five-member livestream. Kicking off the stream, the group performed their title track, “Wait For You,” and took some time to briefly celebrate earning a YouTube Silver Creator Award for garnering over 100,000 subscribers.
While some may wonder why it’s taken so long for a five-member stream, it isn’t a simple technological feat to livestream motion capture (mo-cap) of five people at once. With that said, it’s no surprise that there were technical difficulties, though many fans are familiar with and even enjoy the scuffed moments. It’s worth mentioning that the glitches are easy to overlook considering how funny they can be.
The group also played “Passing Around the Bomb,” in which they played a word game that requires players to come up with words that begin with certain letters for each syllable before they can pass the bomb to another member. While there isn’t an English equivalent of this word game, it is somewhat similar to the game, “Train.” Whoever is caught holding the bomb when there’s no time left on the clock will have the bomb explode in their hands. The use of virtual effects added urgency to the game, as those left holding the exploding bomb would have their hair blown messily from the impact and cover their face in soot.
A game that’s perfect for international audiences was “English Speed Quiz,” in which the group played Charades, but instead of explaining words through actions, they could only use English to describe the chosen words. On the flip side, they also played a distinctly Korean game called “Yaja Time.” It’s important in Korean culture to respect your elders, even those who are slightly older than you, and “Yaja Time” reverses that practice for the duration of the game, allowing the youngest to become the most respected and to comfortably and jokingly “speak down” to those who are older. The youngest of the group, Hamin, was more than ready to take this opportunity to air any grievances and quickly asked, “I’m the king now, aren’t I?” He immediately told everyone to be quiet and went straight for the oldest of the group, Noah. The usually reserved and soft-spoken Hamin told Noah to stop gaslighting him and deciding what they eat when Hamin is easily swayed by his suggestions, which had Noah crumpling to the floor. Hamin piled on top of that, telling Noah to stop burdening him because it caused him to get nervous and make a mistake earlier, earning laughter from the rest of the group. Meanwhile, Eunho teasingly told Bamby to stay more focused, while patting his head, which had Bamby noting, “This isn’t that different from how he usually treats me.”
Games aside, PLAVE treated viewers to spirited vocal covers of BSS (Seventeen)’s “Fighting” and Blackpink’s “Pink Venom.” Unfortunately, Noah was unable to sing as he was recovering from an illness, but the members mentioned that they’ve prepared other songs for the full group to sing so fans can look forward to that in the future. Ending the stream with a performance of their song “Pixel World,” PLAVE proved through the fun-packed stream how inviting the “pixel world” can be with the five-member group at the center of it.
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