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.
Congratulations Dodgers fans, I'm just upset that we not only fucked up the way that we did, but that we couldn't make most of the previous games competitive. Shit sucks but it is what it is.
This is hilarious
I’m a Yankees fan so I love it, but I understand how people will hate it because of how many championships we’ve won throughout the ancient history of baseball, but I’m curious if anyone here who isn’t a Yankees or Dodgers fan plans on watching it.
I know millions upon millions of Japanese people plan on watching it due to Ohtani, and it will probably be the most watched World Series of all time just because of Ohtani.
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.
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.
Just wondering because this is genuinely one of the most detailed games (in terms of how packed it is with content) that I've played in a very long time, whether that involves the story itself and all the various what-if scenarios within each character's path, the fact that the encyclopedia entails an hour of girltalk between Chi-Chi, Bulma and Videl (can't find the Japanese audio version), the fact that characters like Goku Black and Baby Vegeta have special interactions if you pick them in a match, I'm just having a lot of fun.
It already has an all-time peak of over 90,000 players on Steam, and this is still early access. The game doesn't even release for the people who bought the base game/are buying it later until 6pm EST tonight, so I can't imagine the concurrent players for the next few weeks.
Akira Toriyama's legacy will live on until the day life no longer exists.
The main reason I'm posting this is because I actually learned that there is a name for the phenomenon of people getting used to something, and having to do more and more extreme variants of the same thing in order to get the same reaction they used to get out of the less extreme variant: hedonic adaptation.
It comes to mind because it just seems that a lot of people in Hollywood fall victim to this, and a lot of the rich as a whole as well, or that the wealthy simply see the common person as lesser, hence the 'own nothing and be happy' group, but to bring this back to Diddy, all the crazy sex parties, all the drugs, the power tripping, abuse, etc just makes it clear that something in Hollywood just makes the majority of people who live in it do insane shit, and the exceptions are for whatever reason I don't know.
I don't hate the rich, I hate rich people who are active detriments to society, ala the 'own nothing and be happy' group, or people like John Fisher, owner of the Oakland Athletics, who has failed in every endeavor he has taken in his entire life and the only reason he can exist the way he does is because his parents founded GAP and Old Navy, as examples.
Are leftists right about rich people as a whole? Not at all. I do however understand them from the perspective of 'the vast majority of wealthy individuals are completely out of touch with the common person and have no idea how they behave'. It seems like as an overall group, only athletes have any idea how the average person lives because without sports, they'd be the average person and many athletes are self-aware about that.
Mainly thinking about this because of some of the comments in this post here, but I do think while what we currently have right now is way too much regulation.
Some examples of 'good regulation' in my opinion would be the existence of drivers' licenses, 'right to repair' laws, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and building codes.
While some notable 'bad regulation' is anything to do with 2A restrictions and the modern health care industry.
Overall, I'm just trying to gauge what is good vs bad regulation.
There are multiple anime voice actors who are in unions, for example Troy Baker, the English voice of Naruto's Madara Uchiha as an example, but I think something even bigger is that getting a traditional actor to come and voice act is very, very expensive to begin with, and one of the biggest examples that comes to mind is Keanu Reeves for Cyberpunk 2077.
One of the biggest reasons that the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 went the way it did was found out to be because simply getting Keanu Reeves to be in the game, paying him and his portions of the game were a large portion of the budget, which ended up making the game run absolutely terrible on PS4 and XB1, but in general, even hiring the voice actors that are on cartoons is pretty expensive, as although someone like Tara Strong has been in dozens upon dozens of American kids' cartoons, there is no anime or Eastern animation in her filmography at all.
Speaking of voice actors however, there's three voice actors who are members of Hololive's English branch. Ouro Kronii, who is Dottovu; Nerissa Ravencroft, who is Caitlyn Myers; and lastly, Elizabeth Rose Bloodflame, who is Eileen Montgomery/EileMonty.
But aside from that, it just makes sense that anime can't get the top tier actors or even some of the most prolific VAs for American cartoons, because anime for many of those top tier actors is seen as weird, as well as not paying enough for many of them to see it as worth it. I'm just not sure the clique situation with current English voice acting for anime will be able to change without the studios either deciding to hire dual language VAs in Japan or actually putting good money in for better voice actors, as I do understand why many people say that English voice actors suck as a whole, even if I disagree.