The State of The VTuber World - January 1, 2024
Earthquake Update
Well, I did hear that 2024 would be a weird and bad year, but what an auspicious start to the year. That was the first Magnitude 7 earthquake in Japan in the VTuber era, since the last one was in April of 2016. Hopefully the damage doesn’t seem to be too damaging.
Earthquake during New Year’s, huh? Wonder what further disasters 2024 will hold.
End of Year - Hololive and VShojo
I just watched AsaMoco. The fact that the 3rd Gen of HoloEN, whose debut was more than two years after Coco graduated, more than Coco’s entire time as a Hololive member, made such a loving tribute shows how Hololive still feels indebted to Coco. There might be no one who had such an impact on an agency, although Lulu, who graduated around the same time Coco, seems to have at least some impact on Nijisanji, mostly in the form of doujins, but still…
AsaMoco comes as a strange contrast to Kson’s recent backpedaling after Nazuna, formerly Rushia and now Mikeneko, left VShojo. As a side note, I am flabbergasted how Mikeneko is falling upwards, like she is some white dude? Like she is voicing a pretty major character in a televised anime of sorts, starting next week? How, given all the hullabaloo?
Anyway, Kson has and has not been doing so hot. I mean she got into Yakuza, which is a dream that even Coco at her greatest height didn’t think was possible. In some sense, the big worry about Kson losing her influence was false, but what Kson did lose was the luster that she had.
Now, this might not be a bad thing. The worship of Coco basically left Coco, but still hangs in the air, I mean look at the first paragraph of this section. But this worship was clearly over-exaggerated by her graduation and her moves after shows she wasn’t the brilliant mind that saved Hololive as people talk about her sometimes. But again, that’s fine.
Then as I said before, the worship is still there, and I think Hololive’s move in 2023 indicated just so, whenever Hololive bucked away from Coco bible, the result hasn’t been great. Of course, unlike Nijisanji, which I’ll get to in the next section, this was never an indictment of Cover or Hololive but merely the vindication of ‘Hololive’ as it exists in the public mind.
So, in some sense, 2023 was Hololive kowtowing with this public concept of ‘Hololive’. And I think this got emphasized with two of the biggest talents giving assurance to ReGloss members - Marine saying to Raden that Hololive people look after each other, this sense of community, and Suisei saying Hololive is about streaming to Kanade, which is kind of a jab against ReGloss being this return of INNK Music, which Suisei is obviously skeptical about.
Ultimately, Hololive is just experiencing the problem of inflated expectations, (which would be a future bonus topic because this is actually a major reason why the modern world sucks). Like there is too much expectation for the talents to hold that to themselves, but if the corporation takes over then you get other problems like mis-calibration and so on. Hololive learned this year that while the expectation of collabs is very big, it has to be up to the talents themselves. They have to brunt the damage if they want to shift that expectation. Cover cannot really help Kronii and Ririka deal with that anger except your typical remedies, in the end you just have to take the brunt and hope that the anger cools down after a while. That’s a lesson Cover learned.
This is something that oddly Nijisanji is more well prepared for, if ANYCOLOR actually understands what they are doing, but that’s something that I will in the next section.
Now I just watched the Hololive Year-End stream, which surpassed Coco’s Graduation stream in terms of concurrent viewers, which at the time was unthinkable. Okay, that’s a lie, I just wanted to have a bookend, but I will end with why I did not watch that, and end with why I started to lean towards Nijisanji and also VSpo to a certain extent.
To cut it short, because this is long since it’s the New Years special, I just lost interest in a music-based performance lately. It just falls right in between not engaging enough and something that I can just tune in on the side. Tournaments are more engaging, and tournaments are my favorite types of content, so naturally you lean towards Nijisanji and VSpo.
So, that's the most personal level in which I lean toward Nijisanji, speaking of which…
End of Year - Nijisanji and Brave
To quote a reaper and goddess, Nijisanji got some villain vibes, and they can’t seem to get rid of it. I mean sure Nijisanji has been more troublesome than the EN counterpart, but HoloEN wasn’t without troubles! Two members of HoloStarsEN left due to irreconcilable practices and Kiara almost quit because of production issues on their side, and don’t forget about Gura, although looking at the frequency of her streams, you would be forgiven to forget her.
But no one thinks HoloEN is going to go up in flames anytime soon. I mean Advent helped, although I think the best part of NijiEN was also their new members. Krisis was one of the best trios I’ve ever seen and TTT isn’t half bad either. So, what gives?
To give an answer for today, I want to go back, and I want to talk about a different agency.
If you look at the Riot Music’s official reddit page, there is this one user-generated post and it’s a post from an anti, never forgiving them for what they did during the Game-bu era. It’s nearing 4 years since the Game-bu incident and the effects are still reverberating to this day.
I want to give a different take, because I have talked about the incident several times in the past. And to do that, I’m going hop in the further past and then do a long skip further back.
Kizuna Ai was designed as an animated character in real life. The blurring of lines between fiction and real life in the internet space has been a thing for a long time. In fact, that also started with an A.I., the Speilberg movie that is, and the ARG that accompanied that movie called ‘beast’ that was in April of 2001. Soon, other games followed and with the rise of user-generated media, we got our next evolution with lonelygirl15 which was 2006.
Fictional vlogs have been done with real actors - compare something like Lizzie Bennet Diaries or Sexy Nerd Girl - but with Kizuna Ai, we added animated components, which is another strand that I and others documented. It was a convergence of these two streams that created the VTuber known as Kizuna Ai. But soon after the idea of VTuber as stated started to fall apart.
I think I brought up Sexy Nerd Girl, because I didn’t realize for the longest time that this was a ‘fictional’ series. I really thought the person existed, and many other people did too… So why did the facade break, especially since it should be easier to break with an animated character?
I think it’s this uncanny valley once more. It’s just so hard to accept an animated character that we demand an extra authenticity from the talent. Animated character doing anime stuff in reality just breaks immersion too much. Actually, I need to develop this thought a bit further.
So, the fourth wall. It's a thing. It exists. It can be broken. But it’s never really broken. There are two different ways the fourth wall can be broken. First, it can be enveloped. The audience can enter into the story, right, the fiction becomes interactive. This interaction can only last for a moment as a point of levity and leverage, or it could become the driving force of the story.
The other way is that it can be made transparent. The character might recognize the audience, but they recognize them as an audience, as something beyond this world, and therefore there is basically no interaction. Just tip of the hat sometimes. Going to that Innuendo Studio video about Community - I think with the advent of social media, it’s clear that this second way of breaking is just how… people live these days. We always perform for some audience that might be there, because someone might have a camera, someone might tell this story in a public setting somewhere, and so we always look for an audience but the audience is not there yet, so we can’t really interact, you know use them for levity or leverage.
Basically all VTuber works are kind of reverse isekai, and in those stories, it’s more about the animated character becoming real… and therefore we start with the animation and characterization but we expect the streamer to become ‘real’ in a sense. Because it’s almost aggravating for a character to try to change the environment. Because we’re part of the environment, and therefore we are an obstacle to their modus operandi and we can’t do anything about, we can’t be anime! So, in the end, this initial goal only serves to harass us, which is not fun to watch, so we just unconsciously reject that paradigm.
So, by the second Kizuna Ai appeared as Dennou Girl Siro, the fictionality of the character started to fade as an avatar of the personality behind the character, and the other lineage, one that goes to people like Ami Yamato and VRLive because the ‘true’ lineage.
By the time Nijisanji arrived and heralded the streaming era of VTubers, riding the first wave of VTubers, the well-polished and largely closed nature of Kizuna Ai was no longer warranted. And it was some after that that Game-bu arrived, but still retaining this old way of thought.
Hence all the controversies, including using professional players as the character during online competitions. Again, why not use parts of someone else to portray a character that is distinct from anyone else? That was the point of Kizuna Ai and VTubers as they dubbed it.
And why not simply swap out actors when the actors who started to protest regarding this thought? They are not in control of the characters, the production was… right?
It is odd, because by the end, the actors really were the reason people flock to Game-bu. As the actors started to explore the character in their own ways, the skits became more demented but also more interesting. If the production simply submitted to the changed meta, then there would be no need for controversy. Later Game-bu would make more sense if the people there were actually not very good at video games, but still very enthusiastic about the art, personally.
The immense outrage at the incident basically put the coffin on the character-driven nature of VTubers. Sure, there are plenty who might still pursue the art as such, but scope of this would be limited or done out of the passion of the person behind the mask.
Unlimited became Brave Group, they hired new people and eventually quietly pivoted to Riot Music until the memories of Game-bu were no longer in the minds of the public.
Then they sprung back into the action, acquiring the newly rising VSpo and the virtual idol group, Palette Project. Two very different groups with two very different directions but overall getting to the spirit of what Brave Group was at the height of the Game-bu era.
Since then Brave Group has been going all out, expanding to NA, EU, China and now Thailand, and further acquiring Studio LaRa, company behind HIMEHINA, and now partnering with idol Corp as well. V4Mirai has perfected what was tried with Project Kawaii, a quick 3D turnaround leading to a convention and event circuit, which is now eyed by others.
Much like Hololive after 2020, Brave looked at their mistakes and corrected and then progressed beyond in the corrected direction, and now they are looking like they might be the next big thing, which would have been unthinkable even two years ago.
So, what does this tell us about Nijisanji? Well, it’s clear that the major difference between Hololive’s trouble and Nijisanji’s troubles is that Hololive’s troubles are external while Nijisanji’s troubles are internal. But is that really true? As I talked about in the beginning of the section you can internalize the problems of HoloEN this year, and in 2020, a lot of people did blame Cover for their troubles, so Cover wasn’t immune, but the answer comes from the previous section.
The difference is that Hololive understands there is this concept of ‘Hololive’ that exists in public’s mind and Hololive has been struggling with the concept of ‘Hololive’ and we can appreciate that, meanwhile ANYCOLOR just simply does not know the concept of ‘Nijisanji’ that exists in people’s mind, and in some sense, they are too deep into the books.
I mean this is a typical problem in modern companies, it’s kind of an autistic turn in a sense. Like this is a problem that people with autism know and are frustrated with but they canonically do not know what the other people think about themselves. Since they do not know, their actions are always on a limb, their mind constantly goes ‘Am I okay for doing this? Would people get upset if I do this? Is this okay, is this in line with expectations?’ In here, however, ANYCOLOR seems not really care, because the numbers are always okay.
Strange as it sounds, ANYCOLOR is still in an economic honeymoon phase, but there is a term called ‘thermocline’, and originally it was meant for a tech company, but where I heard it was regarding Disney, because the biggest problem Disney has right now is that they basically lost the dance for at least a decade, if not more, and the thing is that if this continues, the whole thing would collapse very quickly, and that is basically what happened in NijiEN.
There was someone who asked me about NijiID and I haven’t been talking about ID not because I lost interest, but because talking about ID makes my heart hurt, so it’s not good for my health so I have been avoiding it. But just let’s repeat myself once more here…
SEA is the most important region right now, kind of geopolitically but definitely in the VTuber world, because the fanbase is the bridge between JP stuff and EN stuff. They are the stewards of the hype - Millie was once a head steward and she feels that she can work that magic again, but not with the power that you have - your power is still locked, Millie. ANYCOLOR has binded you. (EN lore reference, what am I? SteveSekai? That is the farthest from myself)
But that doesn’t appear in the numbers, so ANYCOLOR simply closed that bridge, which is basically the cause of the thermocline of the company, at least in the EN branch. Once more, there is a reason HoloID is still being heavily promoted despite percentage-wise making the same money as NijiID did at their end. HoloID was designed as a bridge to HoloEN and it is still a bridge, a commitment really, to the fans in SEA. I mean what more can you say?
So, once more, why did I bring up Nijisanji? Basically, I think the only way for NijiEN to get over this thermocline is to have a complete overhaul of the decision-makers involved, but that requires a really big problem to surface, but NijiEN has only been getting a long series of medium-sized problems - serious problem but none that would anger the audience to the point of CEOs running with their pants down. This would be a classic case of a thermocline and that means NijiEN would just close its doors, hopefully with a merger.
In some sense, there was already an internal merger, so this would not be bad. It would be closer to what happened with KR than in ID. That is a bit of a relief.
Honestly, I think all the other successful agencies are the correct answer to ‘what is wrong with ANYCOLOR and how do you fix it?’ Hololive, you are correct! Brave Group, you are correct! Phase Connect? You’re correct! V&U? Bingo, right on the nose! I guess, in a sense, ANYCOLOR is like EA of the VTuber World? I don’t know what the comparison is.
That might be a good time to end this section, and move onto Part 3!
End of Year - Seven English Sisters
I talked about V4Mirai before and their very interesting strategy of getting 3D out very early, 2nd Gen already had a 3D concert, and getting quickly to that convention circuit. In fact, I expect NijiEN to do a similar thing, given that new technology they showcased.
And according to Mya, the 3D schedule for this year is already filled, which likely would indicate a slew of EN 3D debuts, although JP has quite a slate of 3Ds to debut as well.
But back to the Sisters, V4Mirai’s strategy is first done by Project Kawaii, although being a small company, their try was beset with problems from beginning to finish, losing a member in the Kickstarter phase and then eventually losing an entire gen due to a failure of follow-up, although that 3rd Gen eventually formed their own ‘agency’ called V-Dere, which has been oddly successful, although in the end they have their 3D and their lives, and eventually they got a JP company to back up their finances. And the new gen seems pretty well suited to the team.
One of the ‘old guards’ that aren’t doing so great is PRISM Project, who was the first of the Sisters to be partnered by a large JP corp, that being Sony. This didn’t pay off until this year when Agents like Shiki finally were able to get a deal with the music department. And they debuted a kind of second slate of people, although there were already two graduations from that new batch. Overall, it’s an uneasy steady state. It’s not like they are in trouble, just quiet.
Idol Corp, recently partnered with Brave which means Brave now has three EN groups under their belt, although considering Riro Ron, the nature of Idol as the new ‘darling’ of the Sisters has faded a bit, and we should caution if their partnership would be good, although considering the relative success of Brave in almost all of various groups, worry should be low. Idol, like Kawaii, had the perfect strike with E-Sekai, timing helped as well, and Endless was a good follow-up, although not as strong as the first. There is a kind of gentlemanliness to their strategy, they are not super aggressive like V&U but they are not un-savvy like PRISM.
Speaking of V&U, the Korean based company surprised me with their success. I thought the five member 3rd Gen would fall flat, but they managed to gain 10K within months, which is impressive, and they already have a 4th Gen, who isn't doing too badly either. Their aggressive strategy, they already put out a fifth Gen with notes on character design, which reminds of Nijisanji in ways, but they haven’t trip and fall like ANYCOLOR has been doing for a while.
But the main course of the sisters has to be Phase Connect, which has remained independent and now arguably is the strongest of the sisters in terms of reach. It’s always been a mystery considering how controversial the first gen members were in how big the success Phase Connect has been, and I think the secret is that Sakana has been playing his part safely.
Other than the Phase Invaders, which there were some hiccups in that department, Sakana hasn’t done some bizarre things like Nijisanji tends to do (remember, three failed idol projects) and kind of maintained a cool and collected approach and that works fine.
EIEN Project also surprised me with their comeback with the debut of their second gen. After the Riifu incident, the project was in hot waters, but the very successful debut of their 2nd Gen blew the concern out the water, and considering the recent Riifu news, maybe the EIEN project just managed to dodge a bullet instead. Certainly a rethinking would be warranted.
That is good enough for a review of the past year. Regular sections will return next week, I’ll likely talk about the Mahjong and the Mario Kart tournament and get some predictions.
Pages From Coco’s Playbook
I am going to further respond to u/LostinT because I want to be more specific about the Coco playbook and how it plays out in regards to how Hololive deals with struggles compared to Nijisanji, especially in the Western department.
1 - Pivot away from Twitter
Meme review was designed to pivot the western fandom away from Twitter and onto Reddit. I didn’t really touch deeper on this, even though I referred to this, although I should have considered how systemic I consider the world and in the end, medium is the message, right?
And the medium of Twitter has always been crap, even since nearly the start, and it only got worse but it was always bad. Twitter is filled with people who want to stir up trouble, its limited words makes misinterpretation more likely, and so on and so forth. Reddit is a much better alternative for community growth, although it also has gotten far worse, at least Twitter became much worse alongside this site.
Nijisanji is very proud to be on Twitter, even ID - Azura was famously known as VTwitter because her presence in Twitter was much stronger than on YouTube. So, it’s no coincidence that NijiEN would use Twitter far more frequently than HoloEN, which barely uses Twitter, pretty much famously or infamously so, especially someone like Gura, for example.
And I’m piggybacking on what the responder said because the fact that bad news in HoloEN is usually done in the superchat reading section of a long stream rather than on a tweet makes for far more visibility than it is necessary, and add to the fire in a sense.
2 - Portray Yourself as The Underdog
Hololive was The Underdog for the first three years of its existence, and this underdog nature is baked into Hololive’s philosophy, even with the success of HoloEN. HoloEN itself was billed as an underdog story, a Japanese company venturing to an unproven market, and the resounding success was much of a shock as it was a delight. While Nijisanji was big from the get-go, they came in like a storm and fundamentally shifted how VTubers are perceived. After the rise and takeover of Hololive, this usurpation has always been a pain in Nijisanji’s fans.
So in a sense, Nijisanji is always playing catch-up. They are not the underdog but a former champion trying to regain its title. It's a story full of regret and betrayal, and that peers through the audience. Every mistake is a chance to chide, while a mistake in Hololive is forgiven, because hey they are the underdog, underdog makes mistakes. But they sometimes win, and the way they win is almost always dramatic, because rare things are more exciting.
Even if every other agency sees Hololive as a top dog, Hololive sees themselves as the underdog in the greater entertainment industry. I also have this outlook for the entire VTuber industry, which is why I think I’m more forgiving of NijiEN’s misdeed than most fans.
I think that’s something that Coco tried to hold on, even if she had that instant fame. Coco was always kind of a man of the people, and that carries after her graduation.
Bonus - Top 100 VTuber Cover 2022 vs. 2023
Welcome to the bonus section, only available to e-mail subscribers. I will be doing various things, including more straightforward data talks, like this one.
I finally got the download working, unfortunately the files are pretty big, so it might download for a while.
2023 was a strong year for covers, especially from Nijisanji. Total of 4 cover hit 10 million by end of the year and three more entered the Top 100. The 10 million list is well over 60 Covers now, and we'll see if it cracks the top 100.
Top 100 cutoff is currently at 7.5 Million, with Ryushen being off the list for the first time in three or so years, which is odd considering they have the most covers over a million by far. Sakayume is rising fast enough though.
Other than that, there is not much to look at. Lilpa becomes the first non-HoloNiji member to rank in two solo covers since... YuNi, I guess.
It would be seen if Suisei's Phony will take the No. 1 spot. Unfournately, that cover got a drop in daily views, which means the cover won't reach No. 1 in 2024, although it will be No. 1 in Hololive and No. 2 overall.