ProjektMelody is a virtual avatar of a woman who claims to be the world's first hentai camgirl. When she's not on YouTube, she gives regular, live shows on the camming site Chaturbate, where she dances and fondles herself for tips. She's not real, but there's a real person in there somewhere, moving her arms and speaking into a microphone to any of her 14,300 followers currently in the live chat. She only started streaming three days ago.

"I think there's a higher demand for the odd and the fantastical," she says. "With art, it's flexible, you're allowed to explore your sexuality. And with real titties? No offense, but it's bound to the cruel weight of science, gravity, and bones that only go one way."

A 3D anime woman with a black strap across her nipples is giving a lecture on YouTube about whether hentai is art or porn.

On Chaturbate, her location is listed as "Virtual Little Tokyo," and under smoking and drinking preferences, "literally impossible." Her birthdate is listed as July 7, 2000, but more accurately, Melody came into the world in July 2019, when ProjektMelody joined Twitter.

In the last three days since her first stream, Melody has gone from 700 Twitter followers to more than 20,000. The "more rooms like this" tab on her Chaturbate page returns an error: "Sorry, we don't have any rooms similar to projektmelody yet." That's because other cam models are human. Her sudden rise in popularity has made some who aren't working behind a full-body avatar question what place an anime avatar has on the platform.

Cam model Lennox May has been doing live shows for three years, but has been in the adult industry for the last 10. She watched one of Melody's recent streams.

"From a technology standpoint I can't argue that the technology and creation of the character is definitely made by someone with talent," May told me. But she wonders if something like this belongs on its own designated platform for avatars, separate from the flesh-and-blood models.