VTuber Weekly (or so)

Good Riddance, VShojo There is only two reasons to be an EN corpo now. Either you have some legal issue that needs protections (like KURO) or you are wading to a pursuit filled with red tape like Music (so, AmaLee). Any other promises that EN corpo has made is now false. Ironmouse should have known this when Nyatasha left. I personally think she was kind of gaslighted in that contract decision, because of VShojo was desperate to hold onto to her because she was the last real crowd-bringer left. I'm sad that being stiffed out of a huge charity was the catalyst... Well, they still have their remaining members, although who knows if the company will exist... I'm With Husband There is a reason Nimi is so goddamn hated by Hololive fans - her residual success is part of this, but I did want to write this exactly when Fauna left - but it felt too brash. But I have this now, so... Ceres Fauna left because she hated 'Hololive', not the nominal Hololive of the talents - I do thin...

 (Writing it here, because it's somewhat about VTubers but not really, and I'm in the Writing Zone right now... I will be out of it soon, don't worry. Still might post this sometime later) Back in the 2000s, the technologist as I will call them, had great hopes of this process called 'democratization'. The idea was that if you 'free' up the tools, make the tools for creating 'stuff' cheap and accessible then it would create this everlasting feedback loop that usher in a new Golden Age. What didn't quite work about this was that while people did make 'stuff' because it was cheap and accessible, most of them was bad. And shifting through the bad stuff to find the good stuff was pretty much insurmountable. There was no quality control, and that meant communities went amok. And that led to a degradation of the arts rather than a renaissance. What this experiment showcased was that quality control - institutialization - was a vital part in mai...

  Preview for what is coming up in this blog. We'll see what happens.

 Fauna's Graduation and Dependency This Friday is Fauna's graduation. Um, Fauna is interesting. How I see Fauna is through her love of Northernlion. The streamer is an epitome of an archetype of the rugged individual - someone who is flexible in moral substance but strict in moral structure. Fauna exhibits similar behaviors and I like her for that sense of humor that those people have. But Saplings are a different kind of beast. I think when Fauna was first debuting, people saw Rushia. Rushia is the epitome of the person who crave dependency and in the worst way possible. It's not like you can create a somewhat stable dependency - I think Okayu is the perfect example of that. Like, Okayu is a pure dominatrix - she has an uncanny ability to control people who wants to be controlled. But she loves attention, Rushia craves attention. But Fauna is not like Rushia or Okayu - she does care about dependency at all! What we have a classic mismatch and that's going to be a probl...

 What? If I thought objectively, Sakamata Chloe really did... nothing. I had no idea what Chloe was going to do... But the thing is that... when you see someone in that state, the agency usually puts you somewhere. Rion-sama wanted to leave but the agency asked her for do more projects and hang out with people, or they go for a six month break (which is what Shion and Nene has done in Hololive)... But just to leave... (provisionally) feels like a failure. It doesn't feel like Chloe had any ill will to the company, unlike what I could see from Aqua or Ame. It feels like she left due to boredom. I mean I know Chloe very little, but I feel like her graduation is even bigger indictment against Hololive than the previous two. Difference in career could describe the previous, but this is more like 'lack'. I am... reeling right now. This is... bad. Like, seriously bad. Also the Affiliate thing... I suddenly feel a sense of gratitude for Sasaki Saku, because of what she did, gradua...

Hololive The Olympian Year seems to be especially tough for Hololive. The struggles of 2024 pales in comparison to the struggle of 2020, but I think they come from the same place. With the Western Wave of March/April 2020, Hololive suddenly became the co-dominant player in the VTuber field, along with Nijisanji. Hololive rely on their small nature for the most part, and those parts had to be reexamined. They had to take down and re-up their streams because they were now prominent enough to have to ask for permission. They suddenly couldn’t just hang out with friends anymore. Scuff needed to be scrubbed out and they needed to think big, really big. And the same kind of growing pains seems to be shown for this year. All the odd twists in ReGloss’s journey and the Triple A departure both represented an agency in adolescence. Unsure of the next step but hopeful they will carry through. Much like how 5th Gen and HoloMyth assuaged the latent fears that Hololive might not live up to the task,...