State of The VTuber World – October 2024

Let me preface this by saying this will be my last post of the series. I will not be posting something like this here any longer. I will read comments, but will not respond to any for this post, so be as vile as you want, I guess. I might still post on r/NijiForums and I might browse this website now and then, but the State of The VTuber World is over. I’m done.

Five years ago, I decided to turn around my life. I got some help, took some pills, touched some grass, and generally I was doing well for myself, but then COVID happened.

My job was no longer needed, I fell behind on studies and eventually everything simply fell by the wayside. I also discovered VTubers at this time, much like a lot of people.

The Spring of 2020 was when the modern duopoly was starting to be fully established. There were other contenders from before – Nanashi, Game-bu, .LIVE but through a series of scandals and simple lack of interests, they all diminished and it was Hololive and Nijisanji who stood tall.

Back then, picking Hololive versus Nijisanji was a matter of preference. It was clearly understood by everyone that Hololive offered a different experience to Nijisanji. And while most western entered the VTuber world through Hololive, although perhaps by the way of growing Western VTubers that appeared around the same time, some moved onto Nijisanji, and no one fretted.

Around the same time, Hololive went through what I would call ‘idol-ification’ that happened in 2020 and 2021. Before the pandemic, Hololive was mainly seen as a sister agency to Nijisanji and they also kind of seen as the more lewd sister to Nijisanji as well. But that started to change as Chinese and western fans took the new ‘idol’ identification of Hololive and ran with it.

The problem was that while Hololive was accessible, the J-pop Idol culture was not readily understood by anime weebs. Even though they are both Japanese subcultures and there are Idol animes and manga and also otaku Idols, there is surprisingly little actual communication between the communities, and the result is that western Hololive fans took the idea of Idols and toxified them, fit them to their own somewhat nefarious purposes.

They emphasized the similarities – the tribal nature of waifu was translated to oshis, which was kind of a rare term in the idol sphere originally, then it was further driven by the supposed ‘seiso’ image of idols – for example, Sora was deemed to be the epitome of seiso, which wasn’t really the case before Hololive had made the idol turn. Before, Sora was mainly seen as a motherly figure, but Sora wasn’t above doing gravure photo shoots (or drawing shoots?) before…

Then Hololive fans did the strangest thing – they preemptively killed the best waifu debate by declaring Yagoo as the best girl. At first, this was simply a joke – akin to Cory in the House being an anime, but this time it went a step farther. It kind of became a call to deify the agency itself rather than supporting their fans. Yagoo as best girl came its own set of lores – Yagoo picking up the downtrodden to be angels of Yagoo’s Kingdom, the 13 knights, the Christmas miracle, the struggles of Miko and Suisei and so much more.

The sanctification of the myth came with the Taiwan incident. In some sense, this was a proxy fight of the New Cold War – two interests, one from China and other from the west – competing for one agency. Yagoo took the side of the West, throwing away a year’s worth of effort to court the Chinese audience, and this was the miracle Western fans to beatify Yagoo.

Nijisanji had their own struggle just around the same with the Roa-Meiro incident – late 2020 was a rough time to be a VTuber fan, but the drama made me interested in the VTuber world, not just as a hobby, but subject of study, and I started writing post like these on my own.

By the summer of 2021, I felt that I had enough knowledge to start disseminating my thoughts to the wider world, and I felt Reddit was the best place to do that (for some reason). So I started my account and started posting data and analysis.

At that time, NijiEN was just starting (it seems that NijiEN would be my companion for my Reddit journey, unfortunately) and I decided to take a niche that was unfilled and tried to copy Hololive data gathering for Nijisanji. It was there that I predicted ID/KR/EN to be included in 2021 Koshien and that was when I felt I could make this into something tangible. 2021 Koshien was also the beginning of dreams of truly international Nijisanji, which might have been more of a nightmare.

While I was writing analysis at this early stage, I was corrected by a kind stranger (whom I’m greatly indebted to in this endeavor) regarding the role of Coco in creating HoloEN. It was then I realized there were a lot of myths surrounding Hololive and I felt it was my duty to dispel them and provide a more nuanced understanding of Hololive to appreciate them better.

I felt this was a noble endeavor at the time – what I couldn’t foresee was that with Coco’s departure, the toxicity of the Western fandom would become so much worse.

At the end of 2021, Luxiem blew up and NijiEN started to look like an actual challenger to HoloEN. Back then, I warned the agency of the dangers of this endeavor and looking back, it was pretty prescient – I knew the differing audience would make the fight have a lot more baggage than it needed to, and that such a sharp rise would be hard to handle for anyone.

Looking back, I think HoloEN benefitted from the pandemic, since all their struggles could be forgiven through the fact that everyone was struggling at the time. NijiEN didn’t have that excuse, as they painfully found out during the AR Live cancellation. HoloEN was permitted to grow, NijiEN was not – and that made the difference between success and failure.

The Rushia incident in February of 2022 constituted a level up in my analysis and the Butterfly Protocol was the first step in providing a path for my series of thought going forward. I made the push to be more involved, working to provide posts for r/NijiForums and joining the 2434 Club.

There was not much to say about 2022 other than it was a grand year – I had fun charting the rise of Salome and started really getting into the various shenanigans of VTA – before I was merely reporting from the sidelines, but VTA was really when I became a fan of Nijisanji.

When the end of 2022 happened, many proclaimed the year as Nijisanji’s best, but I worried because I knew that if 2023 wasn’t even better than ‘22, then NijiEN would be dead.

In reality, NijiEN was already dead, as the head of the EN branch suddenly left for a NFT scam along with several other employees, leading to a massive hole in the agency just before takeoff that basically took a year to fill, and the consequence didn’t stop then.

Many pitied me in 2023, and I was angry and lashing out at times – I was banned from 2434 Club for ‘doomposting’ in July of 2023 and I never appealed – but the analyst and the journalist inside me was deeply excited, because a downfall is a lot more interesting than the rise.

I made several series detailing the impending fall of Nijisanji, including a detailed look at NijiEN’s missteps and the general failure of Nijisanji told through the lens of the Nijisanji Livers who debuted in January of 2019 called Kataribe’s Curse, but none of them got published.

What I did publish was the infamous HoloSummer post, which most of the readers likely know me from, and a post that I still think about from time to time. The main push of that post was this bizarre belief that Hololive needed a struggle to upend their godly nature, because honestly that was hurting me (and it would hurt me even more, as I would find out).

I did get my wish in a sense, however, with the botched release and progress of ReGloss. When I thought ReGloss was finally turning a leaf after that freakish 2.5 Million subscriber challenge with the announcement of a 3D live and an album, coincidentally marked with a considerable rise in interest (turns out people turn out for you when people know you will be getting stuff), Cover makes a sharp turn as ReGloss is denied an individual 3D debut. Ao had to do hers in VRchat, what is this? NijiEN in 2023? 

As with the joke, there was a turn in how people viewed Nijisanji. First a religion requires a savior, but then it requires an enemy, and Nijisanji was the perfect enemy. VShojo, which was railing against both Hololive and Nijisanji, started to shift focus to Nijisanji and turned their stance regarding Hololive. Around the same time, the other pillar of 2022’s success came falling down – what I affectionately called Five English Sisters – started to fall apart, only leaving behind Phase Connect as the dominant player and Project Kawaii being a shell of their former self.

What was a friendly tiff between the two duopoly became a moral crusade. Battle of Good versus Evil, and it was already a losing fight. There was a general mantra that I wrote before:

Hololive is Good, Nijisanji is Bad.

Of course, one does not have to believe this, but if one decides to challenge the theory – by pointing out the increasing flaws of Hololive or the misconception regarding Nijisanji’s evil doing – well, you get me. If all opposition to the idea is vandalized, then how could one say that the belief doesn’t exist? Its non-existence might as well be an expression of purest acceptance.

Hololive is Good, Nijisanji is Bad is so ingrained in the community that even my admittance feels ajar like fish reminding another that they are swimming in water. People read this post like they are medieval Europeans reading the God Delusion. There was no articulate atheism in the middle ages, so commenters think I’m just a conspiracy theorist or a grumpy Jew who was forcibly converted to Christianity. They don’t have the capacity to understand me.

And that was clear by the time of the Selen incident. And after the fallout of the incident, it was clear for me that I would have to leave at some point. I would stay for a while, just to see if the incident awaken enough people of increasing toxicity of the fandom, but of course, the toxicity only have gotten worse, and at this point, the only group of people who is capable of righting the ship, that is the people of Cover, would not clean up this toxicity, but likely would encourage the toxic fans, as they recognize their strength primarily comes from them.

So, I write this post now. Back in Spring, when I first made the decision to leave, I knew I was going to post in July then in October. Starting in May, I started work on the July post which was about difference in Hololive and Nijisanji – the goal being to explain how Nijisanji works differently to Hololive to the point they were really working for different industries, and that many of the seeming hate actually comes from misunderstanding how Nijisanji works – as in they are trying to grade a monkey by the way of the fish and get angry that monkey is not like a fish.

But as I was writing this, it was clear there was no explanation that would enlighten readers. There was no reason to point out what happened anymore. Honestly, my goal for that post wasn’t really trying to get people to not hate Nijisanji, but to answer a more descriptive question – Why does the Japanese audience tolerate Nijisanji if they are so evil?

The point is that the mantra cannot be held up to scrutiny, because even the slightest scrutiny would make the movement a lot more sinister. Just the question – Why does the Japanese audience tolerate Nijisanji if they are so evil? – would reveal so much. Either the commenter would have to pretend that Japanese people simply does not know the evils of Nijisanji (they patently do know, it’s the reason it was so easy to hate Nijisanji in the first place) or that somehow Japanese tolerate evil more easily – and simply just don’t think any further, because the practice will point out a flaw in their thinking.

So, faced with a block, I simply shelved that post, until I had an idea of a different post, which came out in September. It was me responding to the September post that I started to re-write what I wrote in May and June to be presented in October, but then I came across a different block. I didn’t really agree with what I wrote back then, or it didn’t feel complete enough.

But when I tried to write from a different perspective, my words kept failing. I think I realized what was going on when I tried to write about something else. For example, I was trying to describe VSpo and how they operated and in the end, all I could muster was that they were a smaller, more concentrated version of Hololive (perhaps a more faithful one, in a way).

I knew that basically in the West, every agency basically touts themselves as a localized flavor of the Hololive model, and that even in Korea, the top agencies frequently look to Hololive for inspiration but it was clear to me that Nijisanji simply acted differently. I think I realized I was hitting the same wall that I was feeling again. Here’s what I wrote before.

In the western world, Hololive has become the dominant significant in the Way of The VTuber. In other words, Hololive is the standard-bearer for practices within the VTuber world in the West. This leads to a very narrow perspective of what VTuber could be, and that leads to a smaller and more fragile market than what it is in Japan, who have a more robust understanding of the topic.

There are many small Western VTubers which see the VTuber in a different way than how Hololive sees VTubers. For example, there are many who see the VTuber as a leg up on their practice in internet communication and fame – a tool in the journey of identity within the internet world. Or perhaps a quite illustrative tool of who they are or what they do.

When these small VTubers enter the community, they are beset with a different expectation to their own expectation when they entered the community, and therefore they are frequently tuned out and become dispirited by the medium, and likely abandon not just the VTuber community, but the internet community in general, which limits labor supply in the market.

And that’s the point, isn’t it – there is this dominant belief that asks you to subscribe to a very specific set of thoughts and that is not a healthy way of growing your community. And it’s hard to even criticize this phenomenon, because the method of understanding has warped to only allow interpretation that fits with the belief system. It becomes hard to even speak.

Relatives of gun-related deaths in rural Missouri will go to these Anonymous meetings and all they could do is just be bewildered because they lost the ability to even comprehend what is happening because the foundational belief that dominates the town all but wiped their critical thinking skills. They can’t find solace in the world, because they can’t understand.

And that’s what I was finding out once more. The language developed to understand VTubers was mostly created by adherent of the Hololive Way, and therefore the words present themselves in a very specific way and therefore while I knew Nijisanji very well by this point, it was still impossible for me to express what I knew on the page because the language was simply not capable of describing Nijisanji. It was as if I was the protagonist of a Lovecraft novel, and perhaps this very post is the chapter that I go mad as I realize the futility of communicating with the world what I experienced. I cannot describe Nijisanji as I know them.

Lovecraft wrote these novels to explore his fear of the changing world. Lovecraft saw the new people around them arriving for a new chance of life as monsters and depicted them as such. They saw the people welcoming them as people transforming into the other, which is the fate of many of the protagonists of these stories.

And the transition that I have been going around this entire time. What was once merely different became immoral. And I saw that firsthand, when I commented on the Weekly Thread for the last time regarding HoloGTA. I said HoloGTA would be different to NijiGTA, and that preference may vary, and many interpreted that I said HoloGTA was somehow inferior to NijiGTA.

I wasn’t going to talk about HoloGTA, because I saw very little, but this clip confirmed what I thought about HoloGTA, and that my initial post was pretty much correct. Only regret was that I went ahead with a responder’s idea that Hololive has a CGDCT feel, which unless we count Nichijou as a CGDCT series was not true, even though I personally felt CGDCT was not the best description of the Hololive vibe, but I simply did not form a better word in my brain.

If NijiGTA was Nijisanji does GTA, HoloGTA was GTA does Hololive. STGR mods had a hand in this, the game was made a lot easier, perhaps because they were far less experienced people in the server than previous, and the experience of the host regarding GTA was a lot different. Kanae and Sara were fans of STGR and their initial goal with the project was to get more people in Nijisanji interested in STGR (which was a failure), but Suisei and Miko experience in GTA was of a playground where they could goof around – another venue in which the ‘Hololive vibe’ could be emulated. I read from STGR forums about the viability of that goal regarding GTA, but going through my head, I knew that GTA could accommodate well for Hololive shenanigans.

This was the initial push for the comment in The Weekly Thread. Once more, HoloGTA would feel different, but not inferior, as I wrote so with the word ‘different’ bolded, because that was the word that I wanted the reader to get out of the comment. But obviously people didn’t care, and I knew I was just being targeted, which was confirmed when the mod at r/NijiForum complained that people have been flagging data posts there as ‘harrassment’.

I was the only person making data posts over there, so I knew it was me. A perfect sign for me to put my hat on and quickly leave this place before people start to get hurt.

Honestly, the sign simply piled on when Amelia announced her non-graduation.

After carefully perusing Ame’s words, I feel I could provide a couple of precedents in regards to what Ame is trying to do, and also provide some intriguing possibilities.

First is from Nanashi, which has been a leading innovator of VTuber endings and non-endings. Oura Rukako went from a talent to a staff member of Nanashi in May 29, 2023. This was not said as a graduation, mostly because Rukako did leave completely on March 31, 2024, and that was billed as graduation with your typical graduation fare, including a return of Tsukinoki Tirol, who was not streaming for about two years – signaling her return on April 5th.

Second is from NoriPro, where Hoozuki Warabe announced her graduation on December 14, 2022 effective January 31, 2023, but Warabe actually continued to work alongside NoriPro as a video artist until the rebranding happened on January 4, 2024. While there was no mention of Warabe’s relation during the rebranding, Warabe seems to have ceased to be associated with them, although I could be wrong about that.

So the sign doesn’t look good for Ame, although if the approach works out, we would likely see more talents take this option rather than opt for full graduation.

And perhaps former talents might opt to take the Ame option. I felt that Coco wanted to do something like Ame when she graduated, but the language wasn’t there yet at the time. Of course, Kson is in VShojo now, but considering the rocky business VShojo had been in the past two weeks or so, the Ame option might look more attractive to Kson now.

It also makes it slightly likely that Aqua is going to go to some other agency rather than becoming indie, because Aqua had a lot of projects she was involved in that got canceled due to her departure… although again, it’s only probably a slight chance.

A-Chan / Aqua / Amelia. The Triple A departure marks an end of an era in Hololive, one that many fans don’t want to reckon with. The reaction to Aqua’s graduation was interesting…

My relationship to Aqua was a complicated one. At first, I saw all the Baqua clips and interpreted Aqua like Hima, someone who is very head empty but still capable of gaming. But when I watched Aqua through that lens, Aqua became very boring, and I didn’t like her for a while, then I realized I was watching Aqua wrong. That I should see her as a prototypical Idol character, with the emphasize on growth (not the breast contrary to what Gaou-papa thinks)

It was then I realized people understand Aqua wrong for the most part, and that showed directly with people’s reaction to her graduation. It’s quite amusing to see Suisei talking about what the troubles that Hololive is going through (which seems internal in my eyes) and people simply dismissing Suisei’s explanation, as if Suisei was not Aqua’s closest confidant and ally, and merely contested that Aqua left because she wanted to game and not be an idol.

Considering my memories of Aqua’s later years consisting of Aqua talking about her 3D lives getting constant delayed to the point I wonder Hololive simply did not see Aqua like Suisei or Marine, even though the fame of Aqua-iro Palette suggest Aqua had star power to be considered a top-tier talent, and she was for a very long time…

I wonder what Aqua thought if she saw Hinano’s 3D Live, which was an hour and a half filled with songs and guests with better quality video than Hololive for the full duration, considering VSpo is certainly defiantly not a Idol company focusing on singing and concerts.

And I also remember Nene’s manager pushing Nene to play more APEX and Nene responding by taking an indefinite hiatus, and we all know Ame’s lament about delays in her projects…

But all that doesn’t matter, right? Even if some in JP are grumbling about the exact things and more, like how Cover built this beautiful new 3D studio with more space and options and then proceeded to cut the number of 3D lives in half for talent’s health or whatever, Westerns don’t have care in the world, because Westerns just wants the kids to play in the playground and perform at their latest pageant. They just want to be entertained, and Hololive can give that.

Hololive is in the IP business, that means focusing less on the meaning and more on the spectacle – less lives but lives are flashier. Bigger numbers, but has the quality improved? Hard to know. We saw that Hajime was a great dancer, would have been nice if we saw more of that at her 3D debut, which would not happen… would gather more fans, one thinks.

It’s so amusing, the replies, because they always pivot back to Nijisanji. “Well, Nijisanji has it worse! Nijisanji is literally the devil!” As if they only care about Hololive as a token of superiority.

It’s funny because it’s so old and done now. There is no way NijiEN can ever be a threat to HoloEN ever again. NijiEN is to be ignored and forgotten, and yet they still want to bring up how terrible NijiEN is so I can do something about it. ANYCOLOR won’t do anything.

It’s a stalemate. NijiEN couldn’t care less. The question of merger has been a ceaseless quandary for the last year or so, my current answer is that ‘I have no idea’.

People know me for my optimism for NijiEN during the bad years, but that’s only half the story. My relationship to NijiEN, which whether I like it or not defines my ‘career’ here, has been one of conflict. One week I feel good, next week I feel bad, and that’s the case since the very beginning.

I have written optimistic posts about NijiEN but I have written some very cynical posts about NijiEN, which I think holds up very well, and something I reference all the time.

My favorite cynical post is one I wrote just after the announcement Pomu’s graduation. (I honestly think Pomu is overrated, especially with her behavior as Mint. I cut out a section about my gripes with Pomu but let it be known that I have a lot.) And I’m going to be explicit about what I implied at the conclusion of that post, which is that I am unabashedly pro-merger.

I don’t know why I did not make that clear, but I will do so now and I will give my reasons, and it goes back to the ID/KR merger, which was one of the big turning posts in this series.

Why waste money on them rather than cut them loose? was a line that I read, ironically it was a comment predicting that NijiEN will not merge, but I’m going to flip that around.

Currently, since there is a EN brand, ANYCOLOR has to pretend that there is somehow an EN market they they could service and they have to commit to some bells and whistles, any worthwhile investors knows that ANYCOLOR is toast, not just because of what they did, but what the fandom responded afterwards. It’s clear that the drop in merch is a protest, because the live service portion barely had any drop in revenue, and therefore any new merch is simply not going to be bought, and merch is the bloodline for branches, so…

Why waste money on merches that never will be bought and just cut them loose by the way of the merger, because ANYCOLOR is simply not going to release their IPs, again this is just one of their hard lines that they will keep until they are dead. Their method, as it was in 2022, was simply to merge and don’t care about them ever again. The only reason KR was able to get concessions was that KR was able to find an audience after the merger.

And the same thing will happen (or I would like to happen) to EN. That is the most merciful end to them. A merger would mean they are on their own, people who have a good JP audience likely would get support, but the rest would simply stream less until they leave, much like what happened in KR, much like what happened in ID.

And merging will not drag on JP’s finances, because they are not going to merge the finances. How do I know that? They never merged ID/KR numbers with JP. You can read it out in the tables, so in the next quarterly report, I would know directly how much of the ID puppet they sold and how likely will ID be able to regain some level of support from ANYCOLOR.

It’s much more likely EN would be shunted to the Other category, and since ID/KR is so much smaller than EN, EN’s finance would likely be shown on their own for the rest of time.

Seriously, people in the Weekly Thread have no actual knowledge of ANYCOLOR and how they operate, and it’s honestly hilarious to see them making such simple mistakes with confidence.

Because it doesn’t matter. They know very little of how Cover operates and they know even less about how ANYCOLOR operates. It’s just sports. Morality as sports.

There’s a famous quote made by Ian Danskin riffing on a famous adage, which goes ‘In the game of patriarchy, women is not the opposing team, but they are the ball’, by saying actually womens and minorities aren’t even the ball, but the newspaper kiosk that get wrecked when the home team loses or wins, for that matter. And my biggest learning experience from the 3 and a bit years of writing for this god-forsaken website is a renewed understanding of what it is like to be that newspaper kiosk. (Yes, I am a non-binary person of color living in America)

Because as I implied before, the reason that I got so deep into analysis of this little corner that I call the VTuber World is that this little corner feels like a good toy model for the world at large. And as I see the toxicity develop and metastasize, I see more clearly how similar structures develop in larger context and in my most heated moment, I might have slipped a bit of that.

What people have seen as progress of the last fifty years or so is simply a mirage as the different games, like patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy, slowly merged into a much larger game that shunts all of reality as akin to the newspaper kiosk.

It doesn’t matter what the changing climate would do to your homes or how it would displace billions of people and induce more war and aggression that further push reality into the realm of the cars and light poles and newspaper kiosk. In fact, there aren’t really players in this game anymore… not really. Just balls that pretend they are players. Game of pure fiction.

And that’s something I don’t want to live in anymore.

But the best I could do is to leave the little leagues. Thank you all for reading, even the haters and losers. The last three years were a distressing but enlightening experience. I would now like to enjoy the VTuber world in a more peaceful state.

There is the Himenons 3D debut today, which ends VSpo’s journey of full 3D, which is an important moment for all agencies. There are two announcements for Nijisanji today, and a Valorant tournament coming up, although I suspect there will be more.

I’m going to leave you with one last news item, because it feels wrong to end this post without at least one last dig at Re:AcT, because even though people see me as a Hololive hater, I’m really a Re:AcT hater and unfortunately for a while it seemed like Re:AcT was doing okay.

Um, if you don’t know Re:AcT, you might have heard it as the agency that fired a person who eventually committed suicide before her re-debut, and some of you might have negative feelings about that. Let’s just say, Re:AcT wasn’t wrong in firing Mikoshi Taran. Taran might have the most bizarre singing of any VTuber that I ever knew, and I have listened to thousands of VTubers singing because of my Cover project, which I am sad to leave behind. And her bizarreness goes far beyond that – I might have been the only outlet to talk about Mikoshi Taran when she was active in Re:AcT so if you want more news about various small JP agencies (did you know IchiPro is debuting their 4th Gen, and did you know their 1st Gen all left in unison after a firing of one of the members?), you won’t get one because this is my last post.

But disregarding that, Re:AcT has been doing pretty well for most of 2024, many people got new 3D models that actually look decent, they have been doing concerts and meet-ups. Amakawa Hano left the brand but not the agency, but she’s doing okay, so don’t worry about it.

And then they throw the biggest curveball I have ever seen by debuting a freaking KR branch! Not an EN branch, not an ID branch, not even an ES branch, but a KR branch! What are they even thinking, how did they have this idea about KR? Only KR fans that I know are people who secretly want to see the Re:AcT fall flat on their face like I am, and they are not receptive to KR branches of JP companies at all. But I guess we'll see in November.

And with that, I guess… I head on to the great unknown. See you there, I guess.