Here is an interview from a month ago where he talks about the future of Hololive post-Breaking Dimensions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUhYPvYGepE
This is an interview aimed at Japanese college students talking about what Hololive is and what to expect as part of Hololive's staff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pLPaeA3K5w
Here is an interview done with Anime News Network where he talks about Breaking Dimensions, talent-manager interactions and exposure of Hololive to normies/the mainstream audience: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interview/2024-10-04/bringing-hololive-to-the-u.s-an-with-motoaki-tanigo-ceo-of-cover-corp/.215676
On a side note, outside of Hololive, VShojo's Matara Kan is now a member of a mainstream talent agency, William Morris Endeavor: https://x.com/MataraKan/status/1846340762495004849
This is the same Endeavor that owns WWE and UFC, so the mainstreamification of vtubing is all but inevitable in my opinion, it's up to the current audience to not allow tourists to ruin it.
E-thots and Twitch already hate vtubers, and doing what they can to ruin it
They'll probably do it if they pull a Steam:
Have their own platform and watch as rivals Bury themselves.
Nijisanji which used to be number 2 imploded, Vshojo, Phase Connect and those close to being like them are more doing their own thing and then you have the ton of independents. They have a good structure so all they need to do now is stop any leftist infiltration and they win.
I believe that they are planning to make their own platform, but they are very slow at development. They've been working on a 3D world game(?) HoloEarth for a while and that seems to be going nowhere with very little actual clear direction.
I think they have enough of a following to have success on their own platform considering their talents have tens of thousands of live viewers regularly, but I don't expect it to be an easy or simple transition.
Just think of it as a talk show with a live action anime character.
The reason why I watch Japanese content in the first place is I want to get away from western political shit every now and then. If I watch western channel, it's inevitable I have to listen to politics and also I like to hear contents that aren't filled with dirty language which Japanese vtubers seem to mostly fill the gap. With western e-celebs, it gets tiresome to listen to sometimes.
I stopped watching western tv shows and movies because I couldn't stand hearing same smug actors making tired old jokes, so I turned to western content creators, a lot of them seem to be largely the similar kind of smug people who hate hearing disagreements from their audience. Yes, I'm including Razorfist there. As good as his contents are, even he has that insufferable opinions he won't change no matter how petty they are and easily they could disproved. Lastly watching Japanese contents are great for multitasking for me.
Well yes, like I said it's basically legal pimping. I doubt they care about their customers so to speak, nor should they. Any value they have is based on what amusement you can derive from them if any, and what value you bring them is from income.
Personally I'd say they're among the less vile parasociality that I know of. And clown world certainly seems to hate them.
Funnily enough, Yagoo cares more about their male streamers (holostars), to the point he was their manager
Might as well listen to a chatbot talking. In fact AI/LLMs will be doing all of this soon and will become good at it.
Rip u/lethn who would chime in to tell me not to buy into the doomsday AI hype. :'(
Eh, the only cause AI will take over is that most of it is not any good. That and the increasing retardation of people ensure standards are low.
When I say "doing all this" I mean there will be AI versions in all fields: vtubers, streaming, ethots, etc. Not that AI will replace all vtubers. Sheesh.
Its streaming, but instead of a face cam its an anime girl.
That's it. If you don't watch streamers, you won't get into vtubers. If you don't like anime, you won't like vtubers. And if you like both, it double dips on your parasocial attachment.
Then it'll never really make a lot of sense to you, but you understand how that entire dynamic works.
You can get your waifu to react to your comments in real time while she plays your favorite game, its crack for lonely weebs.
My teenager daughter's perspective:
Some of them are hot irl, some of them are decent at videogames and some of them are actually pretty good comedians.
Besides that, it's either simping or else their own chats roasting them for various things. Sometimes they play collaborative games and troll each other, etc.
My perspective: this Yagoo guy has figured out how to make pimping legal. He's pulled a Deuce Bigallow, because it's not illegal to get lonely people to pay you to be their friend. I applaud him.
By that logic employment is slavery
That makes no sense whatsoever dude.
Yeah it does, if you consider soliciting parasocial relationships as prostitution than surely your definitions are expansive enough to consider working a job as slavery.
No, I consider it taking money from lonely men without actually having to provide sexual services. If anything he's found an even better scam than pimping.
Vtubing can't go any more mainstream than anime itself is because it requires being "cool with" anime to begin with to accept the models they use for all of them.
And I think anime has reached its peak mainstream already, which is still not much, so vtubing has a pretty low ceiling to reach and it'll be hard doing so because the parasocial and "want to fuck" angle is very important to all vtubing audiences (no matter what they tell you) whereas lots of anime can break into the mainstream because of the lack of that.
And vtubing is one of the most rampant industries in the West for trannies. It allows them to stream as the hot anime slut they always wished to be. Its worse than anime itself (which is also filled with them) and they are a far bigger obstacle to preventing tourists and the denigrating of the industry than any Corpo bullshit.
I also think that you probably need to be more than casually into the mainstream anime to be into Vtubers. It's like owning a Great Dane or other giant breed, you can't just like dogs, you have to love dogs or you'll end up being annoyed by them.
You do, its why despite enjoying anime plenty I've never really gotten into it beyond some funny clips I've seen and enjoying the awesome stupidity that is Mori's rapping.
But that's the point, vtubing is a sub interest under anime. Which means it can't exceed anime's mainstream appeal period, and needs a lot to even catch that low ceiling. And right now anime's mainstream is huge relatively but still niche and wierd to most people, so vtubing is miles from that.
Maybe it’s just me because I don’t watch that many indie vtubers, but I’m not sure there’s that many MTF vtubers out there, but maybe with all the various sub-100k YouTube channels, there’s plenty of MTF vtubers there