State of The VTuber World - January 2025
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 problem for any streamer and usually it leads either a kind of collapse (what happened with Vox, for example) or a graduation (what happened with Hex, for example).
(Well, in Hex's case what happened was that he blindly went through the loud warning sign)
Mogu's Return and Corpo Benefits
Mogu returned - it took some time, but overall it's an average time for such return, and her words (I think) resonates a lot of people who are 'early' leavers.
There are vaguely two types of leavers, ones who leave early and one who leaves late. One who leaves early should be seen more as a dropout than as a graduate, at least in my concern.
The early leavers leave because they had different expectation about what the Corpo world was compared to what it actually is. The biggest problem is that the general perception of what corpo gives is not true BUT THAT'S NOT THE PROBLEM, the problem is that when people realize this, they don't accept that they were wrong but that they complain their perceived reality is not the actual reality.
The line of thinking behind this backlash is that they perceive their perceived benefit as the only justification for a corpo. But in reality, the justification is actually said by Mogu right beforehand.
Corporation are beneficial because they give connections, in two ways - they connect you to an existing audience associated with the corp and they connect you to other experts and like-minded peers.
This is why EN corps fell more quickly than the JP corps, because VTubing is much farther away from the main body of Western entertainment than of Japanese entertainment. ANYCOLOR has recently really emphasized their connective prowess (think about NijiEncounter for a good example) and has adjust to that including accomodations for late leavers, who leave because they found enough connections that they could stand on its own. And people who stay are basically liasions for newcomers.
