The State of The VTuber World - February 5, 2024
Hitting the Merger Button
If you have been following this newsletter, I have been pacing back and forth regarding the NijiEN situation. Most think I was in favor of NijiEN, probably because I deigned to criticize Hololive (although I always hint that Cover would likely solve these issues, or the issues will likely resolve themselves) and that is partially true. I would have liked NijiEN to come back to its force back in ‘22, but around the mid-2023, I was preparing for the worst.
In the back of my mind, I had some EN members back in my mind that if they were to graduate, I would move most of my emotional investment towards the worst. Kyo was one of them, and now that he will graduate, I’m officially taking the EN merger into consideration.
My current timeline is that the EN merger will happen in Spring or Summer 2025. It might happen earlier, or I might be wrong (hopefully) and EN will not merge but limp its way there.
I will take my cynical hat on, and present the recent events to support the current thesis.
Selen’s absence is now likely to have been long enough that whatever happened in the fall extravaganza is now not happening. Kyo has been part of Iluna’s JP activities since the very beginning, so I am going to assume Kyo was going to show up in a ‘new’ AR Live concert.
It could be the case that Kyo was thinking of graduating already, but now that the ‘new’ AR Live is not happening, Kyo will simply leave before the bus crashes completely.
Edit - Kyo's words looks like he was out for the AR concert and the 3D debuts. Of course, since Kyo has a sickness, he could easily chalk up to his disease for not participating but he probably still wanted to watch. The two paragraphs above are now deemed invalid, although I still think the AR Live is likely getting delayed due to the Selen situation.
Someone has posited that Selen’s contract will end in March. This does not fit with the evidence from before, in fact Selen would likely have extended her contract quite recently. But this could be a leak. I do not know where the one per month idea came from, considering literally two people in JP have graduated at the same time, but it could be the case that new rules have been implemented maybe only for the foreign branch, or for the agency as a whole.
One of those rules is regarding reincarnation. There used to be a six month waiting period between graduation and reincarnation. Bora to Tsuna is a famous example, where Bora simply disappeared for six months until she appeared as Tsuna right around that six month mark.
Mysta and Kuro jumped that gap. The transition was way too fast. Gundo also transferred quickly, but she was using a free model. I would believe the conflict was regarding merch and stuff so Gundo might be cheesing the rules, and indeed her ‘real’ model didn’t arrive until well after that six month period. But Kuro was a whole new ball game, and I wondered if VShojo was particularly vicious in their attack against Nijisanji. But Chihiro is reincarnating in 4 days.
I am not sure if this would be a Live2D model, likely not, but if it is, this would be a confirmation that sometime in ‘23, the rules regarding reincarnation have been lifted. Suzullan would be furious at this development, as her break of contract was precisely due to this rule.
(Yeah, I know different company, different rules. I was just making a reference)
Back to Selen. I will make a prediction that Selen will leave in March. My predictions have been only sort of wrong so far, so this might save Selen (maybe). If not Selen, I was actually thinking Ren would be the next to go, but it could be someone else, possibly.
‘But I thought they were hiring a new EN director?’
Someone from last week has said that while the old director left the post in late 2022 due to a promotion, there was a new internal director that we had no ID for, given the testimonies of people who debuted last year, presumably? If that was the case, why is this post now public?
I am thinking this is a classic case of the post being abolished but we’re saving face by pretending to hire a new director and then saying, ‘oh, we couldn’t find one’.
If this is true, the Spring of 2025 merger might be too late. Heck it could be as early as May of this year, if they were that hasty about throwing that terrible reputation.
‘But I thought EN was doing good? Kind of?’
The merger will not change anything about EN. I have suggested there was already an internal merger that happened last year, and so there would be very little changes if there is a merger.
The major thing that would change will be that there will be no new talents. And given the terrible performance of TTT with Asian oriented Luxiem/Noctyx market slowly becoming closed and the burgeoning EN market being wrecked by their terrible reputation, there is very little hope that the new talents will do half as good as the existing talents. Plus, I believe there is a bit of gatekeeping going on, which would make the new talents even harder to succeed.
ID7 and KR7 were in the works when their merger happened, and EN10 will suffer the same fate. Or it could be they will debut one last gen before heading into that great unknown.
The merger will likely not be better on the management side, at most it would be about the exactly the same. I will guess about half of the current talent will be leaving after the merger is complete, whenever that merger starts to happen.
I had the EN chart ready for quite some time, but I wasn’t sure when to publish it, but I think this would be the best time to do so. I will condense the chart since this section is long.
(I’m not putting Selen, because she is on a silent hiatus)
JP-transferable - Elira, Petra, Reimu, Luca, Ike, Shu, Alban, Sonny, Maria, Doppio, Meloco, Kotoka, Zali, Claude - These are people whose JP is good enough that JP-heavy collabs wouldn’t be too hard for them. There are some in-betweens, like Luca or Aia or Doppio, but I included them above because of their relations to the others. I would guess they will not graduate, but do not be surprised if they decide to leave. This is a rough sketch.
Half/Half - Finana, Rosemi, Millie, Enna, Vox, Uki, Fulgur, Aia, Scarle, Ren, Hex, Ver, Vantacrow, Wilson, Kunai, Vivi - In contrast, these people will have severe block in regards to their integration. Not all of these will graduate, some will stay, despite their no JP skills, much like Etna in the ID department. I am thinking Vox and Scarle will be a good contender for this role.
Edit - Kunai is returning this weekend. Kunai still has a long way to catch up.
You could probably shift some of the members, Millie and Enna can be in the category above, probably especially Enna… but I think this is a good sketch for now.
As always, the best case scenario is that Kyo will be the last graduate and that EN will have their 3D AR concert which would turn around the fandom, ushering in a new golden age will regular new gen starting in the summer of this year. This result should be what we are hoping for - NijiEN’s success does not mean HoloEN’s failure, it will be more likely that HoloEN will succeed more if NijiEN is successful, even more with HoloStars EN.
But we have to widen our options, blind hope is as bad as blind cynicism. We must be ready for whatever outcome ANYCOLOR and the World throws at us. Speaking of which…
From The Other Corners…
The silent schtick couldn’t last long for ARU as she will step down after their first concert. It seemed like the case when ARU stopped uploading covers. She never got much views as ASU. Wonder what ASU's future might be? I really hope she joins V.W.P.
Re:AcT continues to bleed talent with the termination of Mikoshi Taran, who might be one of the most bizarre corporate VTubers I have ever seen. Her myriad endurance singing streams has to be seen, although I would not fault you for brain damage if you do so.
I am interested to see where Taran would go. Fired Re:AcT members tend to have a good afterlife, Asumi Sena fits the description. Her Re:AcT persona was the Taurus representative (yes, originally Re:AcT had a Zodiac theme) with some big ass horns that I’m sure La+ swiped when she retired and joined Hololive. (Nice new outfit BTW, the flames are a nice touch)
IchiPro had a retirement, with one of their biggest talents strongly hinting her retirement. It’s a shame since the new EN group is doing solid numbers. Hopefully the group holds on.
Agency Like AKB48
Originally, this was supposed to be the main section, but I was going to postpone this to next week, because it clashes with my (overly) pessimistic take on the NijiEN situation, but I feel like postponing the section would be too late, so here is another ‘long’ section.
For a while, I’ve tried to articulate my unease with Hololive because I believe people think of Hololive and Cover too highly, as an agency that can do no wrong and is basically perfect. Probably the only other people that worries about the future of the agency as much as me might be people at Cover themselves, given their humbleness during that conference that I forgot the details because that was a few days ago, which is weeks in the VTuber world…
To give an example we can jump off on, I think Cover was slightly pessimistic at the projection of the overall VTuber market, and Cover’s willingness to jump into comics and video games indicates that Cover believes streaming to be an unsteady ground, which I agree with.
Cover’s presentation in general made me think back to AKB48, which Yagoo famously ‘said’ was what Hololive’s model was based upon, and their current troubles.
You see, AKB48 has long past its heydays in the beginning of 2010s, and has recently seen a spate of graduations. The biggest problem is that all the heyday talents are now leaving, and the newer generation are not prominent enough, because they haven’t been featured in singles, because people only care about the heyday talents, who are all now leaving.
Hololive, I believe, has more people who are attached to a single talent compared to Nijisanji, which means a graduation in Hololive hurts them more than it does in Nijisanji. But people get old and streaming is a hard business and so in the near future, as in a couple of years, people would have to leave because of stress and age. And when they do leave, the newer crop has to pick up the slack, and what happens when they can’t?
Fortunately, later gen have been, at least, more successful that their AKB48 counterparts. ReGloss had a bumpy start but seems to manage themselves okay, and the next two DEV_IS gen coming out 24/25 would be crucial to see if they can continue into the long future.
But beyond that, there are movements regarding Cover that want to mitigate this transition. The recent talent-driven outfit model is interesting because in most other companies the agency is almost always in between the talent and the designer, because of brand issues. Having the talent be closer to their model is kind of funny considering they recently kicked out their second talent due to an NDA breach, but it might be a response and a solution.
Perhaps there will be a kind of IP transfer with an exclusivity deal attached, which would mean while the talent control the IP, the agency still have ‘free’ reign over the character for usage in other media, which tracks with Cover’s latest pitch. This would definitely assuage the aging of the talents and the company somewhat. Huh, this wasn’t as cynical as I thought.
HOLY CRAP PART 2
They are going about this in the worst way, aren’t they? Well…
If you have been reading this newsletter, you know that I have ‘explained’ Selen’s problems in the past, and all of that is going to come back again. ANYCOLOR is a Japanese company.
It’s so Japanese that even Japanese people grumble about it. When Debi was asked to imitate ANYCOLOR in the recent new year’s dice game, they went something like ‘Oh, I think this is a good idea, but we might need to check the availability and so on…’ Right, this kind of deflection that Oliver-sensei has a good compilation of just rants regarding this.
I’m thinking, and I think this gets shown in the documents, that Selen did not take well to this.
Like, most of the three page document was regarding the fact that Selen was using third-party assets without approval. I think given some of the statements that ANYCOLOR has prioritized on honesty regarding their termination letters, considering the guffaw of their last one.
It could be, and it might be, that Selen was damaged beyond just not dealing well with the strict copyright system or the deflective nature of Japanese people, and if dokibird decides to sue, which she can, that would come into light, but I’ll give the benefit of the doubt here.
Because given what I said regarding Selen in the past six months, I am starting to believe that she took the overbearing copyright system leading to delays to her numerous projects as a personal insult and bullying to her. Of course, the problem is that this would still happen, for example, if she was in Hololive. Right, if ANYCOLOR is a black company solely for this reason, then well almost all Japanese companies, including Cover, would be a black company.
In fact, when I talked about HoloEN’s problem, I was thinking that Amelia has been less enthusiastic about her place in Hololive, because her projects have started to be delayed more and more as Cover becomes more tough on copyright and third party assets. Unlike Selen however, Amelia has kind of withered and accepted what is going on.
So, we ‘hope’ (emotionally) Selen’s grievances extend beyond this. Because if it doesn’t, then ANYCOLOR’s response is nothing. Like, basically this becomes a Selen problem, and well, problem for the world in general, but ANYCOLOR can’t do much about that.
Like, it should be reasonable given Selen’s response, that ANYCOLOR’s wrongdoing extends just beyond compliance to the current copyright system and being ‘too’ Japanese. But until Selen’s expose shows up, and a court case starts to be heard… I have no idea.
As some have said, this is half Nijisanji Damage Control Newsletter, and so my focus would be on what would be Nijisanji’s Damage Control after this news. And this would depend…
Is this going to affect ANYCOLOR’s reputation in Japan? Losing EN completely wouldn’t hurt ANYCOLOR if they hold onto JP. You can lose all of EN and maybe ID and still have 90% of their revenue intact, unless this story blows up internationally.
Will there be an EN merger? At this point, it’s not really about the continuation of EN as much as if the EN brand is so damaged now that they all need to be let off or could they salvage some of the members into the main branch.
Will there be a change in management? Remember that they are hiring a new EN director. The best case scenario is that there will be an internal investigation from the new director and they fire the people responsible for Selen and others. It could also be that investors might fire the board and replace it with a new one.
Will there be 3D in the future? They need to re-do (for the third time) the concert and/or the reveals because it is highly likely Selen has participated in the concert.
Will Selen, well now dokibird, pursue this legally? Heck, she could work with Sayu and Matara and maybe even some ID members to sue ANYCOLOR publicly. They will cover the costs because EN fans are very likely going to throw support here.
Pissy Director Theory
Okay, I know that many are pretty upset and the above analysis did not help. To recap, the above analysis is me saying Selen’s legal battle would be a losing one, because nothing NijiEN did was wrong legally. I’m not saying that what NijiEN did was right, not at all.
In fact, this theory is what I believe to be the best case scenario for Selen and everyone else.
Here is the timeline.
In November of 2022, the EN director (who actually was the director for ID and KR as well) was promoted. Why wouldn’t he? He literally presided over the golden year of Nijisanji EN. Then the management hired a new director.
The new director’s goal was simple. Focus on the JP audience. This made sense at the time, since most of the paying audience was JP or JP-adjacent. So, the bad director tried to turn NijiEN into a mini-JP. He bullied and fired the person who was messing that up the most - Yugo. (Again, one of the worst decisions from EN) and then continued, rejecting Pomu from a lifetime opportunity, likely involving some EN IP, since that would be not JP and the bad director does not like that. (Maybe a reach there)
Understandably, most people in EN did not like this. There was the incredibly rushed AR Live concert, trying to cram EN into a JP schedule like a bonehead, which led to two people leaving with a big fuss, which made the bad director even more angry.
Around the same time, unrelated to all of this, those JP audiences went through a kind of osmosis into JP. People discounted this when ANYCOLOR talked about this, but recently I’ve seen enough evidence that this was a true effect.
So the main management saw this and decided to shift the EN attention towards EN, which meant well the bad director had to go. The director is now really pissed.
The director starts to go after someone who was bothering them most. Selen, who is most forward about introducing EN celebrities into Nijisanji. The director takes down the Christmas video because it features the people who they think destroyed their career. Selen understandably flips out and things go down the wire after that.
The remaining members are understandably upset at the current situation, because they are now getting all the hate when they could have waited a few more weeks then the new director would have fixed everything, mostly for the better.
The conclusion is that if we wait just a little while, the new director would simply wipe the board clean and start actually focusing on the EN audience. Along with the new EN concert and the 3D debuts, this will likely turn heads around back to enjoying Nijisanji EN once more.
Isn’t that the best case scenario? All the people get justice, and everyone who was aggrieved is likely happy with the situation. So, this would likely not happen, wouldn’t it… Sigh.
On the Other Hand…
There was an expose from a former Nijisanji worker whose testimony is interesting.
The overly cheap cost from the project means the Livers have to run the whole thing by themselves, and then the fact that since the old management ran off to start a NFT company, meant the talents have to run the place themselves… again, really interesting.
I think the biggest question I have in my head is if this was specific to EN, or is this happening in JP as well? If not, then the merger might actually be the best solution, isn’t it?
At this point, I really hope there starts to be an external investigation into the working of ANYCOLOR, because this could be the start to the end here.
Bonus - A Little Tidbit
Since there are two parts this week, I want the bonus to be short. So, a tidbit.
So, there was a 6th Anniversary stream and one of the parts of a ProSeca event and Alban was one of the members, and I believe Alban choose (and it was selected) Alter Ego as one of the songs. Now, I always confuse Egoist with Alter Ego but Alter Ego is an interesting pick.
You see, Alter Ego is done by Misumi who is the producer of DUSTCELL and in fact there is an official DUSTCELL version of Alter Ego. Now the singer of DUSTCELL, EMA, was formerly a Nijisanji member. In fact, her departure and her debut as part of DUSTCELL is still seen as controversial, to the point that last year EMA actually went to court and all.
So, that’s the reason they can’t play the song on stream, because technically it will be a promotion of a former talent, and I don’t think that’s allowed. I wonder if Alban knew the peculiar relationship between this song and Nijisanji or was it a really odd coincidence?