LOS ANGELES — In the service of digging into what the Dodgers might be doing to entrench themselves as Japan's favorite major league team, I am interviewing an animated character.

"I'm a shark-girl from the lost city of Atlantis," Gawr Gura tells me. "I swam to the surface to hang out with you guys on land about 9,000 years ago."

Tell me more.

"I've been told I have a heart of gold and a head of bone," she says. "I have a long history of saying and doing ridiculous things on the internet."

This is the part where I tell you that Gura — she said I could just call her Gura — will be shouting out the traditional "It's Time for Dodger Baseball!" exclamation at Dodger Stadium on Friday.

Except, of course, that she won't be there.

She can't be there. She'll be displayed on a screen, where younger generations spend most of their lives. She is what is called a virtual YouTuber, or VTuber.

"You stream online, but you don't stream with your actual face. You stream with virtual avatars," said Max Kim, the U.S. sales and licensing director for Cover, the Japanese company that controls 85 such avatars, including Gura, that combine for more than 82 million worldwide subscribers on YouTube.

Gura is the most popular VTuber in the world. Her YouTube channel has 4.5 million subscribers. That is more followers than the Dodgers have on YouTube and Instagram, combined. (On the social media platform X, the Dodgers outscore her, 2.8 million to 1.9 million.)

Just the announcement of Friday's promotion, featuring Gura and two of her fellow avatars, generated 3.4 million views on X.

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