Been a while since I did one of these, but that's mostly because there's been way too much that's happened since I did one, so I'll try to focus on some of the bigger things that's happened since then, starting with the debut of dooby3d, who is the rebranded PL account of Amelia Watson of Hololive English's first wave, Myth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyB0b3V88w
In this stream, she revealed that before Hololive, she used to be a foley artist for several different studios. A foley artist is essentially someone who is in charge of creating sound effects for a show using actual props, and not only did she do that, she also listed off her credits, which lead to people finding her real name, and she said that she's perfectly okay with that. The biggest 'shock' to people in this is mostly people trying to figure out how in the world the person behind Amelia Watson had any free time at all, but the actual point of the debut was not just to reveal that information, but that she is launching a consulting business as well. She has a motion capture studio in her home with equipment totaling a cost of over $19,000 in order to do this with, but if you think that's expensive, the 3D studio that Cover has in Japan for its talents to do their 3D debuts in dwarfs that cost by orders of magnitude.
Pivoting to Nijisanji, Victoria Brightshield, the Vtuber who was in the most recent Sajam Slam, that was forbidden from interacting with Dokibird due to the termination of Selen Tatsuki and whose oshis (industry term for favorite vtuber) were Selen Tatsuki and Pomu Rainpuff (now Dokibird and Mint Fantome), will be graduating from Nijisanji on November 9th. Her PL/indie account is MoguGhost, this is her Twitch, this is her YouTube, and she has already done collab streams with her recently graduated genmate (term for members of the same generation/wave), Kunai Nakasato, who is now indie vtuber SunnySplosion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxbLtDAoQNI
In Victoria's graduation announcement stream, and several streams afterwards, she specifically blames the company and her treatment within the company as her reasons for graduating, feeling like she's disappointing her fans. Nijisanji's shills (Nijisisters/Nijisanji Defense Force/NDF) started blaming the fans, but everyone knows at this point that it's the company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_71bhU7P4-w
notNamie/nambarimasu, the person formerly behind Sana Tsukumo of Hololive English's second wave, Council, streamed for the first time in over a year on the above link, and people were going crazy because all of a sudden within the course of a week, three different formerly corporate vtubers began streaming with their independent accounts, and this isn't the last one. One of the main reasons she doesn't stream as much is because she doesn't want to be linked back to Sana publically because she works as an illustrator for Chinese gacha game Arknights, and because of the Taiwan situation a few years ago, that's obviously an issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgF0QVWZDRw
This one is by far the biggest one in terms of her former viewership. Yuuki Sakuna, formerly Minato Aqua of Hololive's second generation (the early generations of Hololive do not have names), debuted last week and is about to break the record for fastest vtuber to one million subscribers, and quoting someone from Reddit, October was supposed to be Halloween but it's Easter now..
There's more news on the negative side, like indie Vtuber Camila having a stalker trying to break into her house while she was streaming, but I'll end it here before I get too long winded.
Well fuck on the last one, stalkers must be more terrifying for vtubers since usually there's that added barrier because of the avatar which usually gets enough people not to go full retard over a vtuber.
Can't help but feel all of this is kind of missing the entire concept of what a Vtuber actually is in the first place... Especially the dooby thing.
Meh, all a vtuber is, is a streamer that uses an anime avatar instead of facecam.
There a lot of indie vtubers (mostly voice actors) where the explicit point of their channels is that they are who they are behind the screen, for example, Cy Yu being Alejandro Saab/KaggyFilms and Monarch being Amanda Lee/AmaLee
Not really. They were originally supposed to be more of a "character" than the person behind them, though obviously there were a few times when companies were dumb enough to think that was the ONLY thing that mattered like with Kizuna or the Game Club Project. It's mostly just western bandwagoners that don't get it that I've seen that use that "streamer with an avatar" card before, especially those VAs you mentioned. I specifically remember Amalee for instance making fun of Vtubers and the people who watched them right before they blew up in the west, then she magically changed her opinion on them and said she was always a fan. Even then she still just does it ironically though.
Seems like a failure in gatekeeping.
Speaking of those, I actually brought them up in this post here, I'm not sure if you've seen it before, but as things have developed, there's both now, where there are vtubers who do lean a lot more into the character than others, ala Fuwamoco, and there are others who do the 'streamer behind an avatar'.
I don't think it's a failure in gatekeeping at all, as for example you'd have to say Mori Calliope existing is a failure in gatekeeping because she used to shit on idol culture constantly as DemonDice and now look at her, she's even made a good four or five songs about that journey from hating it to doing what she does now.
If you happen to have a link I'd love to see this, mostly because diving through Youtube Shorts and clip channels is time consuming, but I think the difference with her is moreso that a bunch of her IRL friends became vtubers, like I was looking through this history a while back, but LilyPichu was running a group of cover artists back in the day and a lot of those cover artists are now vtubers, including Amalee and now Nerissa Ravencroft. It's very understandable to change your stance when a bunch of your friends are now vtubers as well.
I also think that the termination of Selen Tatsuki made the EN scene value who the person behind the screen is way more than previously, because now there's motivation to know that so that things such as both of Dokibird's suicide attempts never happen again, and that vtubers know that their fanbases will follow them over towards their PLs, ala what happened with Dokibird and Mint. VShojo is literally a refugee camp for ex-corpo vtubers at this point, and I don't blame them either, Nijisanji doesn't deserve the talents that have left, and those talents deserve to keep their fanbases.
VShoujo doesn't care about their talents or prospective talents... Which is significantly better treatment than Nijisanji. They're a loose corporate shell meant for legal department only, more or less. No "manager drama", no Producer-sans, no think tank they all link up to... In a way, it's a refreshing change from the standard idol environment: actual apathy towards the talents. Of course, from the VShoujo grads, we know that some of the girls weren't fans of this uncaring unfeeling co-operative, and would be better off in a more traditional studio that helps them set up collabs, assigns them "friends"/"genmates"/whatevers, and the like.
I wouldn't say GunRun doesn't care at all, because from the way that their current talents talk about GunRun, and the reason that for example, K9Kuro went from being Mysta Rias to K9Kuro to begin with is because GunRun actually cares. For example, Nijisanji was refusing to pay the withholding part of Kuro s income tax and I forgot how, but he moved to Indonesia during this chaos and GunRun helped him renegotiate and pay off his tax debt.
It's just the image comics for vtubers, maybe some those ex vsho didn't realize what they signed up for and only got in because their friends were in
Aaaand people have already figured out Dooby/Amelia's real name because she gave out so much info.
Don't self-dox.
To be fair, she explicitly said immediately afterwards that she was more or less expecting that and she was fine with it, just don’t be an idiot and spam it or Amelia in chat.
Fair enough.
It'd probably help her getting into mainstream career linking her identities