It's been a while since I made a V-Tuber news post, but the events of the past two days made it pretty clear that doing so now is necessary.
Sakamata Chloe, a member of Hololive JP's sixth generation, 'Secret Society holoX' (usually just called holoX), will be 'concluding her channel activities', similarly to Amelia Watson, on January 25th, 2025. Laplus Darkness, another member of holoX explains that she understands why Chloe is leaving, because even she says the amount of work that she expected from Hololive is a lot more than she previously expected, and that workload is a lot of why Chloe has chosen to leave.
The big news that got me to want to make this post today is that Ceres Fauna, a member of Hololive EN's second generation 'Council' (now 'Promise' with the graduation of Sana Tsukumo and addition of IryS to the group), will be graduating from Hololive on January 3rd, 2025. She isn't planning on leaving the door open with the affiliate status, like Amelia and Chloe are/have, once she leaves, that is the last that we will see of the Ceres Fauna persona. She specifically states that her reason for graduation is 'disagreement with management, and that she liked being an idol, that she was getting more comfortable with singing. This is notable because with Amelia and Minato Aqua, who have both left, Aqua choosing to graduate, their reasons for leaving were moreso for the sake of their creativity, as Amelia, now dooby3D, has an entire motion capture studio in her home that she mostly wasn't allowed to use in Hololive, and Aqua's problems were with the workload outside of streaming, which leads to something that I actually didn't know until last night.
Cover Corp went public this year, and Motoaki Tanigo, also known as Yagoo, was essentially forced to make Cover go public or be forced to sell the company. Cover was originally a tech company that only started the V-Tubing aspects of things because the person behind Tokino Sora wanted to become a virtual idol. This was done with the help of venture capital money, and because more people are learning this, a large portion of the viewerbase is blaming this new string of graduations and leaving on the investors pushing the girls to lean more and more into the idol aspects of being a vtuber, when a large portion of the fanbase mostly watches streams, and doesn't really care about the concerts. Who knows where this will take us, but Cover Corp going public, and Fauna graduating when there weren't any real signs that she was having problems is going to stain Cover for the foreseeable future. If the investors try to push Cover towards Nijisanji's route, I think everyone will simply be pissed out of their mind and the company will crash and burn for the sake of investors' short term gain.
I have seen conflicting reports of Sakamata Chloe's PL, but here are both of Fauna's channels. The non-ASMR channel has exploded in subscriber count within the past 18 hours since her announcement, as it started at 71k subscribers and has exploded to over 200k subscribers since the announcement of her graduation.
Asking this because that’s why the feds are doing this to Alex Jones and it’s been so long that I honestly only remembered that because of the posts from earlier.
In the other thread, there was no discussion going on other than complaining about Js, so I'm trying to figure out what those two leading it actually means. Linda McMahon was previously the administrator of the Small Business Administration under Trump, and is the wife of Vince McMahon, former CEO of WWE and one of Trump's closest friends. I very much am hoping that nothing about Trump comes up during the investigation of Vince, but outside of that, Linda being a part of his transition team already makes perfect sense.
Who is Howard Lutwick? Does him being the head of a primary dealer of the Federal Reserve automatically make him awful? What are his policies, who does he know, how does he know Trump? All of these are honestly 1000000x more important than the fact that he is a member of the "Triple Parentheses Gang", so because I've never heard of him before today, why would Trump have chosen him?
Edit for original thread link: https://kotakuinaction2.win/p/199hSZOad3/meet-the-new-cochair-of-trumps-t/c/
From my understanding of how tariffs as a whole work, the government(s) of the country the imports come from do not pay the tariffs, the company actually importing the good does, and the vast majority of companies will simply hike the price of a product up so they make the same amount of money, and pass the tariff onto the customer. This is one year where I honestly completely checked out of policy, so I'm not sure what tax incentives or other incentives that Trump said he would implement so that companies won't just keep using the cheap foreign labor and raise the prices on American customers. What are those incentives, because I highly doubt that companies are going to all of a sudden pay Americans decent wages for the labor just because of the tariff.
Not only did Trump win, but by quite a margin.
Your accelerationism doesn’t work, if it worked, people would’ve fedposted IRL due to the lockdowns, so I’m glad that last night was able to get the message out that yes, voting does in fact matter.
For those who do not know what happened, yesterday was the Xfinity 500 at Martinsville Speedway, which was one of the most blatantly corrupt races I've ever seen, but to give a TL;DR of the situation:
Chevrolet told several of the teams that drive its cars to make a blockade in order to guarantee that at least one of its drivers, this time William Byron, would be able to make the Championship 4 race happening this Sunday. This blatant collusion was recorded on several drivers' radios being communicated by their spotters and crew chiefs, which is bringing into question the validity of the current 'playoff' format.
It sucks, and god I wish we went back to the full season format, or at max, the 10 race Chase, because the 'playoffs' don't even boost ratings, which I'd imagine is NASCAR's goal.
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.