To start things off, last weekend, the first three generations of Hololive's English branch, Myth, Promise/Council and Advent held the second live concert for Hololive's English branch, Breaking Dimensions at King's Theatre in New York, to a sold out crowd of over 3,000 people. The reason that they performed at a smaller venue is because these venues are contacted six to nine months in advance, and while in Japan, V-Tubers are fully mainstream and getting larger venues is no problem, the people who own the largest venues in the US are mostly either non-anime fans or old people who don't even know what anime is, so Cover approaching James Dolan as an example to attempt to get Madison Square Garden as a venue as an example won't work unless they can show domestic interest.
The venue was sold out almost immediately once tickets were available a while back, and the line this weekend was almost two hours long, but that was mostly because the people working the venue weren't prepared to have this many people, just like the merch line at Dodger Stadium on hololive night during the July 5th game against the Milwaukee Brewers.
This is a Reddit thread of a tweet announcing things this weekend, with the setlist for both days in the comments. The concert itself went spectacularly, with one of the most memorable moments being at one point, Gawr Gura waved to the crowd and the camera panned to a little girl waving back at her. The reason this is even memorable at all is because Gura has said on stream that her inspiration for wanting to become an idol was Hatsune Miku and as you can see from the title of the post posting the image 'Hololive EN Gen 15 in the making', Gura could be this girl's inspiration. People were comparing this moment to a moment in My Hero Academia, where after All Might defeats All For One at the Kamino Ward and can feel himself losing the embers of One For All, when the camera pans to him, he says 'You can be a hero', knowing that Izuku Midoriya, the boy he passed One For All down to a year ago would be watching, with Izuku about to cry in the middle of the street.
Minato Aqua graduated from Hololive on August 28th. Direct link to the stream. Her stream broke the previous record of concurrent viewers during a graduation stream, previously set by Coco Kiryu, now Kson of VShojo, setting a new record of over 740 thousand concurrent viewers, compared to Coco's around 500 thousand concurrent viewers. She performed her final concert as well as took her time thanking everyone she's met for the past several years for the experiences and opportunities she's had. This is only the third graduation in the history of Hololive/Holostars/Cover Corp, with Coco Kiryu and Sana Tsukumo as the other two graduations instead of terminations.
In addition, Hololive will be celebrating its seventh anniversary from September 1-14. Direct link to the tweet.
Usada Pekora visited Hideo Kojima's studio today. Direct link to tweet. She replied to it, the CEO of Cover, Motoaki Tanigo, otherwise known as Yagoo, reposted it and on her sub Twitter, she said she was going to have a long, tense recording today so people have made the assumption that she will be making an appearance in Death Stranding 2 akin to Keanu Reeves' appearance in Cyberpunk 2077. I personally am hoping that was the case and believe it is, because again, V-Tubers are fully mainstream in Japan and I think the more positive exposure that V-Tubers get, the better.
Mori Calliope has reached the Billboard top 100 artists for the very first time on August 27th, hitting number 72, ahead of rapper 21 Savage among other names such as J-Cole, Imagine Dragons and Jack Harlow. I personally didn't expect her or any V-Tuber to ever reach this, but considering how good she is as an artist and the fact that Go-Getters is by far her most widely reaching song, being the ending theme of an anime that even normies have most likely seen, good job for her.
Kson recently bought one of those figurines of Coco Kiryu that you have to go and paint yourself. I just think this is moreso very funny.
Something I forgot last week is that Mint Fantome will be performing with V-Tuber charity group VFleet on the USS Hornet on October 5th. Direct link to tweet. The USS Hornet has been featured in various gacha games such as Azur Lane, so I'm not surprised, I'm just happy for Mint to be getting more opportunities.
Now onto the Nijisanji stuff. Fighting game commentator and streamer Sajam will be hosting another one of his Sajam Slams, where FGC streamers take other FGC streamers and non-FGC streamers and puts them into teams, to compete against one another over a period of time and have finals at an event. As you can see in this picture, Dokibird is on Brian_F's team, and if you see it, 'VBrightshield' is on Shine's team. 'VBrightshield' is Nijisanji EN's Victoria Brightshield, and this is the first time since the termination of Selen Tatsuki on February 5th and the chain of events after that that she and another Nijisanji V-Tuber have been in the same event.
Sajam originally didn't know about the events of the termination and why it happened. Discussion on Reddit, but after hearing about it, he talked to both because of course Nijisanji would have an issue with it, and Victoria told Sajam that Nijisanji didn't want her to have to face Dokibird or have any public interaction with Dokibird at all, and Sajam asked Dokibird if she would be fine with that, explaining if she wasn't then Nijisanji would have Victoria not participate.
The reason this is a big deal at all isn't just because of who it is, but because as Selen Tatsuki, Dokibird was Victoria's oshi (industry term for favorite V-Tuber), and Victoria only joined Nijisanji recently, as a part of Nijisanji EN's 9th wave, TTT ("These Three Troublemaking Adventurers from Another World are Actually a Comedy Troupe?!"), with the isekai-esque name being on purpose. Below will be several links to discussion and tweets about this issue, because by god does Nijisanji's existence as it is now annoy me.
This incident also confirms that Niji forbids talents from collaborating with ex-'Livers' (the term Nijisanji uses for its V-Tubers).
Discussion about Sajam trying to manage the issue: https://old.reddit.com/r/kurosanji/comments/1f2xqor/sajam_is_out_here_doing_his_best_to_make_both_of/
Discussion about the announcement the day it happened: https://old.reddit.com/r/kurosanji/comments/1f1yedf/doki_and_vivi_will_be_participating_in_the_next/
Discussion about the blacklisting: https://old.reddit.com/r/kurosanji/comments/1f2w2br/so_the_niji_forces_rules_threats_blacklists/
Discussion about Nijisanji shills on 4chan being idiots about this whole topic (the nicknames for Nijisanji shills are NDF/Nijisanji Defense Force and Nijisisters): https://old.reddit.com/r/kurosanji/comments/1f26knj/nijisisters_back_at_it_again_but_they_can_do/
Screenshot of a tweet of an FGC content creator about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/kurosanji/comments/1f41o18/how_some_of_the_fgc_view_nijifans/
More discussion about the 4chan posts: https://old.reddit.com/r/kurosanji/comments/1f2r89m/wtf_is_this_shit_trying_to_go_at_doki_again/
Doki's response was a proper class act. Hopefully the Nijihaters will respect Sajam's choice of letting Victoria participate, and respect that Victoria was brought onto Niji after most of Doki's drama. Clown on the corp, not the employee. Given Victoria's oshi was Selen, she's probably another tragic tale ex-Niji graduand in the making, so people, be nice.
It's weird that Nijisanji uses "liver" as a term for their talents, though. Holo-Live uses it because it's part of their name, so it makes a certain level of sense: Hololivers was shortened to livers. Nijisanji's shortforms should be Nijis, or Sanjis. Nijs?
Holo doesn’t, they just say idols, talents or vtubers, Niji was trying to do a Vince McMahon and cause an industry shift in terms of the terminology and that fell on its face