This should be obvious considering the downfall of Nijisanji and its English branch after the termination of Selen Tatsuki, now Dokibird and the entire controversy that it caused and the research into Nijisanji that it triggered, but reading the comments of yesterday’s thread as well as some more news, I wanted to post this because it’s pretty informational.

AI for vtubers is a thing that exists, as there is an AI vtuber by the name of Neuro-sama, which is managed by a man whose username is Vedal, and the reason that the vtuber community doesn’t care about Neuro-sama is because Vedal isn’t trying to replace human vtubers, Neuro-sama is pretty openly just a fun project for him and the collab streams he does with human vtubers is pretty interesting just because of how he filters her.

Back to the point of the title, 910inc, formerly known as WACTOR, is recasting for the channels of their graduated vtubers, and has already done so with Mitsurugi Lia. This company is known as the black company of all black companies, as the list of their controversies before today includes, but is not limited to:

• Two of their talents attempting suicide, one of which being the original person behind the Mitsurugi Lia channel
• Putting the cost of the model on their talents and making them pay it back
• Blackmailing their talents and forcing them to perform sexual acts to pay off debts
• Doxxing one of their talents after she graduated, publishing her full name, her country and ID number in that country along with what province she lives in, in that country, via the description of her YouTube channel

Not only has WACTOR done all of this, but now it wants to do the one thing that is unacceptable in vtubing, recasting for a model, or “getting a new soul”, as it’s come to be called.

The first instance of a vtuber being recasted was pre-COVID, in the form of Brave Group’s (then called Unlimited) “Game Club” or “Game-bu”, where the four talents were replaced, because as Unlimited put it, the four were “character YouTubers”, and they started to hemorrhage subscribers because of it. Here is the story of Game Club explained better than I did.

The more notable instance is Kizuna AI, the very first vtuber, was replaced during the ‘race’ to three million YouTube subscribers between her and Gawr Gura, and was replaced with four different vtubers, as the lore of Kizuna AI is that she has a ‘voice provider’, but all in all, her replacement after leaving her original agency, upd8, and creating her own business fell completely flat and essentially stalled all growth of the channel. She eventually came back and did a final concert stream which started her current hiatus, but by then the damage was done.

Story told within various comments on these threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/VirtualYoutubers/s/XF3e9vX4Rk

https://www.reddit.com/r/kurosanji/s/NiFsmyMRs6

As much as people think that the avatar is what people latch onto, the only group that I can say for certain would even remotely accept that are Nijisisters, as they have blindly accepted what Nijisanji is and openly defend it.

To finish this post, I’ll mention a few things I saw in the thread from yesterday that I’ll respond to here.

Yeah, but if it's a woman, which a lot of them seem to be, none of them have anything worthwhile to say. Women aren't really capable of actually having good ideas. I watch Razorfist Arcade and I can at least understand why someone would want to ask him a question about a political or cultural issue as he has interesting views and well researched opinions, all while watching a cool game. But watching an anime character just kind of stand there, with a woman behind it, seems utterly pointless. I can't imagine actually caring what a woman has to say about anything, and since she's not actually doing anything itself entertaining, what's the point?

People as whole disagree with the premise that “women have nothing to say and aren’t capable of having good ideas”, which I mean if that’s what you think, I absolutely understand why you wouldn’t like vtubers because the majority of them are girls, but later on in the comment linked here, it goes on about how vtubers couldn’t care less about their audience, and I disagree mostly because of their actions, at least a lot of the bigger ones anyway.

A lot of the bigger indie vtubers make frequent appearances in-person at conventions, and for the most part, the fans of those vtubers have reported good behavior, them not being rude even if they’re just walking around, whereas several celebrities are total assholes where in real life they show disdain towards their fans, the vtubers that make IRL appearances show thanks towards their audience, knowing that they’d be nothing without their audience liking them.

The termination of Selen Tatsuki, now Dokibird in February essentially made it very clear to the vtuber community how important it was to know the PLs (past lives, the industry term for non-corporate accounts) of vtubers as a ‘life raft’, for when they graduate (leave the company on good terms), and in addition, made it very clear how to tell when a vtuber is being disingenuous, as everyone’s reactions to Dokibird’s termination laid down lines for everyone.

Vtubers in general need to put at least a portion of their real personalities into what we see on stream, otherwise what they do doesn’t work, so for the most part, I do believe vtubers at least somewhat care about their audience, most of the bigger ones anyway.

I’ll cut this post here because it’s way too long, but I just thought all this information was pretty important.