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07 - Vtubers, part 1 - the Black Corpos, with errata
46 Plays2 months ago
Dave begins his descent into madness as he explores the sprawling world of vtubers, a multi-billion dollar industry featuring streamers who perform behind animated avatars. In part one, he investigates "black corpos," the unethical corporations notorious for exploiting talent and sparking endless scandals.
Sources and additional materials are available on the website at www.thewonderkamer.ca
Updated with errata.
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Transcript
Introduction to VTubers
00:00:22
Speaker
um The Wonder Cammer. Just like the song says. This is the Wonder Cammer. We are your three dilettantes ready to take you ah into our cabinet of curiosities and pull something off the shelf and show it to you.
00:00:37
Speaker
So I believe this week, as I always am, I'm your host, co-dilettante Jen Rempel. I'm here with... This week, I am Dave Powell. And I'm Tracy Anderson Powell.
00:00:49
Speaker
Temporarily. Temporarily. That's right. Same week as every week. And this week, I'm especially excited. Especially. Very excited. ah We are dilettantes, but don't let that fool you. We put a lot of time and effort into these episodes. And Dave has apparently put a lot of time and effort and madness into this episode. So I'm very curious. So much madness.
00:01:11
Speaker
Curious to hear the tale that will unfold. Dave, take it away. Okay, so Tracy had an exceptional podcast about sex work on the prairies.
00:01:22
Speaker
And although I had started working on that at the same time, this is kind of a sequel. Although this is not specifically about sex work, the industry I want to cover has similarities and certainly can involve sex work just in a kind of hyper modern sense.
What are VTubers?
00:01:40
Speaker
So come with me to hear the tale of a gold rush of the terminally online and chronically ill puppeteering only the finest of big titty anime girls.
00:01:51
Speaker
Oh, no. This is the story of VTubers. Have you ever heard of what a VTuber is, Jen? This is a world. OK, this is a world that I have seen glimpses of through other people's phones.
00:02:06
Speaker
And I don't... Didn't like what I saw. Don't especially have an interest in it. I don't even know. i know the barest outlines. So please, Dave, enlighten us.
00:02:19
Speaker
I'm scared. Well, my job is not necessarily going to be to make you like VTubers. My job is to make you respect them as as laborers. ah Now, that said, I have developed a bit of Stockholm Syndrome. I would not say that I am a gigantic fan of streaming, but I will get into what it is because I am ah speaking to this for an imaginary audience who have never heard of the term before.
00:02:45
Speaker
Speaking of Stockholm Syndrome, why don't you tell us a little bit about the coffee? I'm going to wait for that for part two, because this is a two-parter. The coffee is going to be a two-parter because I have opinions about the entire coffee situation. But that's a teaser, particularly for anybody who knows the
Hatsune Miku's Influence
00:03:04
Speaker
industry.
00:03:04
Speaker
Coffee? Teaser. So VTubers or virtual YouTubers are online entertainers who combine aspects of live streaming, Japanese idea of anime and idols, and degenerate internet culture.
00:03:18
Speaker
So they are online performers who perform through an animated model or avatar, which is rigged to their movements. So they're closely associated with. no Yes, I know what you're talking about.
00:03:31
Speaker
There you go. They're closely associated with anime and mostly display anime-style characters, but not necessarily. V-Tubing is of Japanese origin and is massively popular in Japan.
00:03:42
Speaker
It's a global export in the English-speaking world, and i if I sometimes refer to America, it's where most popular outside of Japan, but it's really... globally through language groups rather than nations.
00:03:54
Speaker
um And the word mostly is going to be used a lot here because every rule has an exception except for one I'll get to. And mostly means a 70-30 ratio, which is weirdly prevalent in the industry.
00:04:07
Speaker
Every time I say, well, how much of this is this and how much of that is that? seventy thirty So, yes. Now, I'll hand wave the history for time. VTubing came up with the rise of the Internet, but didn't catalyze until its current form until the late 2010s or so, thanks to surging improvements in virtual reality equipment and male loneliness.
00:04:29
Speaker
like go when' I'm in for a nightmare. Oh, you're going to love this, Jen. It kicked off wildly in the COVID-19 pandemic as everyone went home and VR chats made animated avatars up more normal to people and a little less ah strange and alien because these are puppets. And I really don't want to think of this as a form of puppeteering.
00:04:50
Speaker
Well, all I know is, Dave, I'm not a cat. but Now, that's a callback to COVID days, if anyone remembers. Yes, I do remember that. ah kind of Kind of the same vibe as like a Snapchat filter, but then turned up to the extreme.
00:05:06
Speaker
Yeah, that was right. So again, whole history, and I don't need to talk about it. Everybody knows who Hatsune Miku is
Cultural Interest in VTubers
00:05:13
Speaker
anyways. Mm-hmm. question though. The baffled expression on Tracy's face.
00:05:19
Speaker
I do because my sibling of mine specifically loves Hatsune Miku. And we went to a Hatsune Miku expo Vancouver last year. Yeah, and it was a big rip off because they didn't even have a holograms. It was just a big screen. Anyway, yeah, Hatsune Miku. I know who that is, but I would say the average person would not.
00:05:39
Speaker
You know so much more about this stuff than I already imagined because hologram shows are a big part of this. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Just to help Tracy, Patsune Miku is still a massive and even growing phenomenon.
00:05:54
Speaker
she is a She was originally a computer program and still technically is. There is a synth software called Vocaloid. And Vocaloid allows you to press a key, and then that key will be a person saying a syllable.
00:06:10
Speaker
Particularly with how Japanese works, you can play a song with a woman's or man's voice, singing an entire song according to the keys you play, and it actually sounds pretty great.
00:06:22
Speaker
It doesn't sound natural, but what it lets you do is perform and un compose really ah complex songs that are difficult for a normal singer to perform.
00:06:32
Speaker
And every sound bank with Vocaloid had a character associated with it, a very Japanese way of doing it. So this sound bank, like Woman Voice B, is Hatsune Mikko, this ah blue-haired girl.
00:06:44
Speaker
And she became this memetic sensation where she's like now a fully fictionalized character and people are fans of Hatsune Miku the fake character who has a like a woman behind there whose voice is being used to program the Vocaloid but it's it's a whole phenomenon and it is not VTubing because Hatsune Miku not a real person no matter how much people want that but She was vital in ah the creation of VTubing because a basic concept which is huge in Japan and is growing in the US is falling in love with fictional
Gender Roles in VTubing
00:07:24
Speaker
characters.
00:07:24
Speaker
Oh, yeah, that's so see, I like dark and ghoulish shit, but this is where I'm like, oh, god that's too dark for me Oh, we're getting into it. It's just sad.
00:07:36
Speaker
So, oh, God. Okay. Well, yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about it at this moment. Well, I tell you what I and I kind of knew in writing this that this would be something that would repel you both genuinely. ah And ah there is carried on with it anyways. Oh, it's such a story. I have to tell it. But I have an admiration for the craft. And also, as Tracy knows very well, an affinity for weird online stuff.
00:08:03
Speaker
Yes. Although I don't think I'm going to be settling in and watching four hours of VTuber streams every night or just putting it on as comfort food while I do something else. I like watching the clips and I'm conversant with some of the VTubers. can say I'm genuinely a fan of a few of them at this point. And hopefully I might be able to convert a couple of you. But if not, it's OK.
00:08:24
Speaker
You're allowed to not like something. And that's also going to be part of my rants throughout this. So, well, and that makes it more interesting. And again, frankly, it is I'm prepared to be like disgusted and disturbed, yeah mean which again, for me, it's kind of fun. Yeah. i We'll just see what level it goes to. Absolutely. You are going to be, by the way, this is a, this is not a happy story I'm going to tell.
00:08:45
Speaker
And you're going to be disgusted and disturbed a lot. But again, not necessarily by the performer. Although some get up to some weird stuff. No, that's not today's story. Yeah.
00:08:57
Speaker
It wouldn't be the performers I would be discussing. Yeah. So talking of the performers, and want to talk about the work they do. So ah streaming means you're live on camera and that there is an active chat of people watching your avatar and a few moderators who keep the chat in line.
00:09:12
Speaker
Almost all VTubers will stream themselves playing video games. That's the bread and butter of the work. Many, however, are singers who record, sing live and do hologram shows, usually doing ah J-pop style music.
00:09:26
Speaker
Hand cams are a popular alternate stream where you just show your hands like making food, reading tarot cards so that ah you're anonymizing yourself, but maybe showing a little bit so that you can mix it up. You're always looking for content because you need people to be engaged and paying you because they are doing this for a living.
00:09:45
Speaker
So the hand cam
Monetization of VTubing
00:09:46
Speaker
is not a fetish thing. I mean, it it can be. I'm not going to dive into that, but ah there I'll talk about it more in part two. Literally everything's a fetish thing to somebody, i feel. yeah Especially on the internet. It can be. It is not necessarily. If somebody is, ah but if someone's filming filming themselves cooking, there are definitely going to be people who are absolutely into the absolutely into the hands because their hands aren't like that. Other people are just happy to see their waifu, which is the Japanese term for
00:10:17
Speaker
the fictional person you're in love with doing something fun like cooking because cooking's entertaining to watch. Dave here in the editing room. I knew and know that VTubers are not waifus because VTubers are not fictional.
00:10:30
Speaker
The correct term is Oshi. I will continue to screw this up throughout all three episodes. And yes, there are three. VTubers also collaborate heavily, and you may see multiple on screen at any given time.
00:10:42
Speaker
Now, I'm going to show two of you a compilation of clips just in the first minute or so, so you can get a taste of what this is like. So I'm going to show you link a YouTube video here.
VTubing Industry Dynamics
00:10:56
Speaker
a few baffling moments later... down You're fucking glowing. You're glowing. You're fucking federal agents. Fuck you.
00:11:06
Speaker
Fuck the government. I don't trust any of you fuckers. You will harvest us. Your
00:11:19
Speaker
Hey, that's enough. Yeah, that's enough. Wow. I don't... So, there are things in the world that I have... First of all, I'm always amazed by how much of the world is a total mystery to me.
00:11:35
Speaker
Right. Things that's part of the fun. Yeah. Zero interest whatsoever. I do. I feel zero interest in watching more. No appeal whatsoever. So can you explain to me? mean, again, there's no accounting for taste, but I have just zero interest in kind of stuff. To me, it's just screechy, irritating mental illness.
00:11:54
Speaker
I mean, there's a lot of... I didn't have that at home by myself. Look, good points about the system, sure. but i that's not the voice I want to hear it in. I will i will talk about that last VTuber, Pipkin Pippa, extensively in part two, because she is fascinating. But ah Tracy, what he what did you think?
00:12:14
Speaker
Oh, boy. um i kind of enjoy watching people stream video games. ah that I did not enjoy. That's fascinating. so Like a walkthrough of the classic like Alone in the Dark. Oh yeah, I'd watch that.
00:12:32
Speaker
Love that game. not somebody commenting over it with a horrible voice being just mean and nasty. It's the immaturity. It's puerile. I guess it's yeah yeah a lot and it's interesting a lot of it is pure oil a lot of it kind of isn't and I had great difficulty trying to figure out a clip compilation to show you but a lot of it is very is up very pleasant voices is actually a big part of v-tubing and I'll get into that but Particularly in Japan, the ah very musical, sort of like soft, gentle and ah pleasant voices are a huge part of this.
00:13:07
Speaker
And I showed you people being really obnoxious because it was a funny clips compilation. But that was like a minute out of maybe a four hour stream. Sure. I'd like to point out how none of us laughed.
00:13:20
Speaker
Oh, I was dying at the conspiracy rant. ah But yes. I'm just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is again where it's, and I'll get into why people like this and explaining why people like this is actually kind of a part of this.
00:13:36
Speaker
Because, and this kind confirmed my thought, this is at best uninteresting and at worst actively repellent to the two of you. Which, again, and I want to stress to anybody who, ah if any VTuber fans or anyone in the industry watches this, it's fine. People don't have to like everything. Look, I'm ignorant, but I'm already feeling myself being a hater. So you
Anime Style in VTubing
00:13:57
Speaker
said we're going to see if I catch the Stockholm Syndrome.
00:13:59
Speaker
Beautiful. So let's explore video games a little bit. Video game streaming. So one of the reasons it's so popular is watching another play person play video game is kind of comforting.
00:14:10
Speaker
And a streamer themselves can be ah appealing, funny, entertaining, a good hang, ah really good at video games, or just like unhinged and kind of a delight to watch the car crash.
00:14:23
Speaker
Streaming is also a boys club with most Twitch streamers, the primary platform for streaming in the US being men and most fans of Twitch being men as well. So it's men performing for men.
00:14:35
Speaker
Never goes awry. Oh, God. As I get further into this, I also want to underline that VTubing is an insane rabbit hole. This is hideously complex. There's an ecosystem of streamers, artists, fan conventions, live shows, merchandise, a whole genre of news tubers who I am very grateful for their work, who provide the news and drama because there is so much gossip.
00:14:57
Speaker
And it is wild gossip. And that's part of what we're talking about here. And the fans are online fans and ah anybody who is in any kind of fansphere online knows that fan bases are terrible and are in constant conflict with everything, anything associated with the industry.
00:15:16
Speaker
If we do not get any hate mail from a VTuber fan, I have failed. Okay, we welcome their hate. You can send that hate mail to contact at thewondercamera.ca.
00:15:28
Speaker
Thank you, Tracy. I'm going to talk a little bit about ah what I'm calling anime style with air quotes here as well, because there isn't a good word for this, which fascinates me. and But people know what I mean when I refer to it.
00:15:41
Speaker
And it's an artistic... I don't think genre's right. It's a movement ah of anime, manga, or comics, and video games from Japan that have the anime look and the anime conventions.
00:15:53
Speaker
And I mean, conventions as in tropes, not conventions as ah as in the live event. They have those too, though. So people know anime style by its character design. Big eyes, strong lines, and hugely exaggerated features.
00:16:08
Speaker
The style... dave Let it be known that Dave was doing the gigantic... guys yeah Yeah, that's the thing. And that's what repels me to like basketball. like It drives me insane. And I'm not going to get my feminist rant right now. But anyway, I'll let you continue. But yeah, well, i' I'm getting into this. This is a feminist story.
00:16:24
Speaker
Very explicitly. This is a very youthful style as well. It's common for the protagonists to be teenagers and most of the fans and the basic fans are teenagers. But because it is this um anything goes style of animation and art, stories of any kind are told, which means it can be massively popular with adults.
00:16:45
Speaker
with telling very adult stories. And I don't necessarily mean like sexual. I can mean like transgressive, dark, disturbing, grown up, weird, et cetera, in ways that- Stories about doing your taxes. Exactly. There's tragic yaoi manga about doing your taxes.
00:17:01
Speaker
And tied into this are character conventions and storytelling conventions.
Challenging Cultural Norms
00:17:06
Speaker
And there were names and definitions in Japan that categorized these conventions in a way that just doesn't exist out here.
00:17:13
Speaker
So, for example, there's a trope of a beautiful love interest who becomes obsessive and deranged as you get to know her. Right? Yes. I read a lot of manga, graphic novels in Japan. Oh, there you go. So, you know. Not like the series, but yeah. it's And I have a hard time with it because it is so, like, just I just roll my eyes at so much of it.
00:17:32
Speaker
Right. And so, Jen's familiar with this. And for Tracy, there's a word. But there's a word for this trope, and it's called yandere. okay right And so there is a giant categorical list of different character types where not only implies the type, but even the story arc just with a single word.
00:17:48
Speaker
Same way there is the word isekai for the a story where the protagonist is transported to a fantasy world, which is something we're familiar with. But in ah anime style in Japan, there's categorical terms for this. And fans kind of put together these terms like Lego blocks searching for the perfect manga.
00:18:07
Speaker
Right. So and again, it's it feeds into that comfort food thing, which is why this associates so well with streaming, because ah not only can be artistically challenging, but a lot of it is just familiar and validating and finding a yandere streamer, which I'll talk about, might be the exact so itch that a fan needs scratch.
00:18:29
Speaker
Voices are also hugely important because VTuber ah performers, they puppeteer models and the voice work is vital. These voices fit character types and your typical youthful anime girl, which is the default, tends to have a breathy, high-pitched voice.
00:18:43
Speaker
People also mix it up, though, because as you saw in that clip, we saw just a normal woman's voice ranting insane conspiracy theories about the government. That wasn't a cute cutesy, high-pitched voice, but that's part of her charm and she upends the style.
00:18:58
Speaker
And models can also get really weird with a voice that deliberately doesn't match the model as part of the fun. Okay, that I'm a little more interested in. i'm just imagining like a tiny little waifu being like...
00:19:10
Speaker
and I'm here to serve. Okay, one sec. I actually cut this clip, but I'm going to show it to you now. like that ah fun I'm going to show you a clip of Tonkatsu Sinclair, who is the first VTuber I became familiar with.
00:19:27
Speaker
So I'm just going to find the clip. It's going to be very short. says dave ah When you see Tonkatsu Sinclair, you'll understand what I'm talking about. okay There's a video, and we'll just click on it because it'll open pretty quickly.
00:19:38
Speaker
And it's short. Surprise motherfucker! Yeah, you thought you were getting some spank material, but you're getting a reality check, homie. Look at you, skulking around the internet in the middle of the night looking for anime girls saying, Ara Ara. You want some Ara Ara? Okay, you Ara Ara creepy weirdo, and you oughta, oughta be ashamed of yourself, you fucking degenerate. Go.
00:20:01
Speaker
Go to Weaboo jail. Go sit in the corner and think about what you did. You have dishonored your family. Take a shower. Stop looking at anime titties and get a girlfriend, for Christ's sake, you disgust me.
00:20:14
Speaker
Like and subscribe. That's good. Only one you need. That's so yeah you to watch. Great. ah right That I can get behind. Love it. Yes. Okay. Tonkatsu Sinclair is hilarious.
00:20:26
Speaker
Bad takes on Amber Heard, but whatever. Nobody's perfect. Yeah. I'll actually talk... Weirdly prescient. Anyways. So I want to talk about gender in anime because it is wildly important. And I want to kind of talk about why do anime girls look like they do?
00:20:42
Speaker
Anime style comes with a paradox. So Japanese culture is famously strict and particularly so for gender expectations. It's a great deal of homophobia.
00:20:53
Speaker
And because there is a this is a very strict culture with a lot of reinforcement, not from above, but from the community
Misogyny in VTubing
00:21:00
Speaker
as well. And when we talk about fans, fans reinforce this like nothing else.
00:21:05
Speaker
There is a rebellion against those social norms. And the Japanese stuff I like is all from that rebellious side of things. I really like ah rebellious Japanese music, for example.
00:21:16
Speaker
And I think some of the weirdest and best transgressive art comes from Japan, from people ah who are saying, no, I'm not going to be contained by this. And what's interesting is that although they very strictly reinforce these social norms, the culture industry of this ah rebellious art is huge and widely exported.
00:21:40
Speaker
So what we have is we have a ah heteronormative space where women and men have to be exactly just so but at the same time there is an entire industry of gay manga uh like yaoi and yuri where most queer people i know under 40 yaoi is the term for uh erotic man on man love yuri erotic woman on woman but okay and most queer people i know particularly under 40 consume boatloads of the stuff
00:22:11
Speaker
okay And it's from ah of this from this homophobic culture. so it's And both of these come at the same time and intermingle. And so the art style, character tropes, and all of that is still very much affecting the queer transgressive side of things.
00:22:30
Speaker
Like everybody knows about how absolutely wild hentai gets, ah which is ah which is sort of the pornographic side of anime style, and how it breath breaks every possible boundary boundary of even remote taste.
00:22:45
Speaker
And that's because you can because it's cartoons. and And so they do that in this transgressive way, even though these extremely strict heteronormative forces play down upon it.
00:22:58
Speaker
And this all intermingles in this very complex cocktail of gender. And that affects V2 being massively. Well, here's the thing I'm coming off as a massive prude. I don't dislike sexual content, erotic content. That's fine. I love Julia Gaffer, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, comic artist. Lots of erotic content, very explicit, but it's not misogynist.
00:23:19
Speaker
And it's original and it isn't buying into these tropes and it maybe it is sometimes playing with them, playing with ah gender roles and stuff. But to me, it's not the erotic content that bothers me. it' it is It's the misogyny. No, and there's so much of it. like I have nothing against you No, like I like some of that myself. I support a lot of artists who produce erotic content and it's fine. It's just, yeah.
00:23:43
Speaker
gets again it's good to be challenged and it's good to feel squicked out I think but the misogyny is a huge thing and it's also it bothers me too and one of the reasons I only go so deep and again the misogyny isn't in everything although that is It's intrinsic to the style, but also there's the backlash at the same time.
Gendered Labor in VTubing
00:24:05
Speaker
And you have to understand the rebellion and backlash against the misogyny because most of the, again, most of the music art and I'm a huge pro wrestling fan. As you two know, um i love female Japanese pro wrestling.
00:24:19
Speaker
And a lot of it is unbelievably violent, which is again, something pretty little girls aren't supposed to do. It's rebellious. Right. I love that rebellion. And so that's a part of it.
00:24:31
Speaker
But these strict, strict gender roles are also a part of it. And there's this kind of dialectic play going on. h Meanwhile, Tracy, I'm a prude. Yeah, yeah i I'm going to say that erotica never comes up in what I read or interesting.
00:24:50
Speaker
So what wow what we need to do is get Tracy some properly horny, non-misogynist manga. So now yeah we can find that. Oh, absolutely. You can find anything in manga. It's just it's kind of ah you have to search, which is why there's a million different keywords and terms. Right.
00:25:09
Speaker
i that ken Yeah. Oh, yeah. The Walking Man. Yeah. It's a graphic novel, I believe, from the 80s or 90s. The Walking. I forget who did the art, but it's just a guy walking around Tokyo with his dog. And it's beautiful. I love that. So VTubing is gendered labor.
00:25:23
Speaker
And this is the thing I really want to play at here. And this has the dual forces of male fans and the companies involved in VTubing, which is the entire point of this podcast. And we've barely got into it.
00:25:35
Speaker
ah Enforcing patriarchy. It is women employed by men for the pleasure of men. Yeah, ah that's the problem. Yes. and both the companies and fans will enforce these norms to ensure women behave like they want them to behave.
00:25:52
Speaker
But there is also a really queer underbelly to VTubing. Because if you can get some motion capture equipment, get a model design, you can go on and present yourself, ah present your gender and perform your gender in any way you want.
00:26:07
Speaker
So that is tremendously freeing to a lot of people. Yeah, that makes sense. And there's an and and ah most VTubers perform independently. And I'll talk about corporate and independent VTubers right away.
00:26:19
Speaker
But um they're not the big money makers and major names in the space for the most part.
Male VTuber Stereotypes
00:26:26
Speaker
And that means female VTubers, particularly most of the big names, are exaggeratedly feminine.
00:26:33
Speaker
And that is, in in fact, an expectation and convention of anime style because of all these forces playing on it. So your default popular female VTuber will have a breathy high voice in a pleasant manner who will have ah moments of being an unhinged gremlin. they And with the women, they vary in look and have a few common types of model, right? So there's like types um with obvious major exceptions.
00:26:59
Speaker
And As I said, in VTubing, there's exceptions to every rule except for one. The one rule in which there are no exceptions is there are male VTubers and every one of them is a vampire twig.
00:27:11
Speaker
Of course. Oh, boy. Every one of them. I'm going to show you our first picture. our first picture And it's going to be of the various generations of um male VTubers in a major, major VTubering company I'm going to cover in great detail called Hololive.
00:27:31
Speaker
Let's just put that here. Nope, that didn't work. How do I upload a file again? And so this is the wide variety of different men that the biggest VTubering company in the world show you.
00:27:42
Speaker
Arguably the biggest. Everyone's like, I'm still copying the link. How long does it go on? Does it work? i would say Oh, I see what's happening here. One second. Bang, bang. It's not a hyperlink. It's no, no, no. It's a link to my desktop. I realized what happened. Oh, well there's a problem.
00:27:59
Speaker
Oh, I see it, though. There we go. Open link, new tab. Open image and new tab. There we go. Copy image. So let's try this again, Jen. Oh my God, this is a train wreck. I i had assumptions about Vcast Zencasters capabilities, which were incorrect.
00:28:16
Speaker
Not like this isn't our like our seventh episode or something. Bang. Try that link. Okay. You know what? Seventh episode. We're still we're still podcasting babies. And again, we're dilettantes. So, you know, all like i say yeah we're not allowed to be good at anything. Just interested.
00:28:29
Speaker
yeah we have to just be interested and, you know, flakes about it. Okay. This is okay. So this is top to bottom early to now. ah Yeah, the way VTubers work is they are released in waves, kind of like boy bands, right? Or girl bands, where they're all kind of collaborate within their own wave.
00:28:45
Speaker
ah They collaborate outside of it, but they're meant to be a team. And so and I'll get into idol culture and how that ah works very shortly. But if you look at them, they're all vampire twinks. yeah And so I want to be clear to any of listeners we have.
00:28:59
Speaker
If anyone wants to point out a male VTuber who is not a vampire twink and say, Dave, you're obviously wrong. Here are the exceptions. No, fuck you. I will fight you in a Denny's parking lot and slim slam your fucking face into the pavement.
00:29:14
Speaker
All male VTubers are vampire twinks. Okay, good. Now. Yeah, my sim who likes Miku, i'll I'll ask them. Do you... you know of any VTubers who aren't vampire twinks? There you go. That's what they say.
00:29:27
Speaker
So this is where, ah so the gender spiel goes into why VTubing is big with female performers.
Safety and Anonymity in VTubing
00:29:33
Speaker
h Twitch streaming and other forms of online streaming, because in Japan, video game streaming is mostly done through YouTube, is like a shield against ah much of the harassment women face. Not all of it. They get a lot of harassment, but you're not showing your body.
00:29:49
Speaker
You don't have your real name. You don't have identifiable features that can have the creeps and weirdos go after you in the same way. So, yeah, I'm sorry. So so there they're women performing as vampire twinks. No, no, no. Sorry. i My mistake.
00:30:04
Speaker
I'll actually talk about that. Most of the time, a male VTuber model is going to be performed by a man. And a female VTuber model will be performed by ah ah by a woman. And I mean, cisgender on either side.
00:30:19
Speaker
However, there are very much cases of like with Tonkatsu Sinclair, where it's a bit. um That is very much a man performing a ah woman's model. And in some cases, it is deliberately and unclear and androgynous and gender bendy.
00:30:34
Speaker
There is one VTuber I know where their actual, the gender of the performer is, it's like a double bluff where let's say I'm a man pretending to be a woman online who's pretend who's playing a man, that kind of deal. okay And if you can do the voice work, you can do whatever you want, right?
00:30:50
Speaker
Hmm. so again, it is this bar way of like entry into this world of entertainment. Also, frankly, for people who aren't like, cause it's so essential for a woman online, like conventionally beautiful, right? If you don't look like a magazine model or like an ideal e-girl, uh, you're going to get hate online. And so because of that, you, Oh, even if you look like an ideal. Well, yeah. No, you get a different kind of hate. ah You get hate no matter what. Right.
00:31:16
Speaker
But then that's a huge part of this is because it's performance for men and the large online groups of men. And again, for anyone listening, if you hashtag not all men thing, you're going, I'm taking you down to the Denny's parking lot.
00:31:30
Speaker
Obviously it's about the force of a large group of people where you will have a enough of that number in any population who are harassing psychopaths. And that's a guarantee for any woman who's at performing online.
00:31:43
Speaker
It's not about you. It's about the cohort, the larger group. So yeah this guy anyway, yes. And of course, because this is entertainment of women for the pleasure of men, B-tubing can get really sexualized. Models are often designed to show skin.
00:31:58
Speaker
And it's more like naughty a lot of the time, or even just a little implied. Some VTubers are extremely chaste and openly like asexual and completely uninterested in sex. And that's part of the thing. And legitimately so.
00:32:13
Speaker
However, many are extremely lewd and they were outright pornographic VTubers, which is a whole weird world. yeah It's the entire thing is because and and so it's anything for content and success.
00:32:25
Speaker
To give an example, when I was looking up different VTubers, I found one VTuber social media and the first thing I saw was a woman's foot in a bowl of ramen. Oh, God. I assume it's only that. Like, honestly, if we're being honest, is it not 99%? I mean, no it it's, it's, fact it's, it's a lot, but it's, it's not as much as you'd think, even though there's a lot.
00:32:48
Speaker
um Okay. Cause I think there was a lot. Yeah, like, for example, lewd tubing or adult tubing, that kind of stuff. um Many of the major names just don't do it. And in fact, I'd only say one is really well known for, it which is Project Melody.
00:33:03
Speaker
We'll talk about in part two. The industry is also accessible to people who might have difficulty finding work elsewhere. It is a it it genuinely has saved the lives of some chronically ill people or people who are otherwise disabled.
00:33:16
Speaker
And I don't think I'm speaking out of class when I say most VTubers are mentally ill, sometimes extremely. um Some of the top VTubers on the planet are, and I say this with utmost love and admiration, deranged shut-ins.
00:33:32
Speaker
Like the kind of people who never leave their room, this is a job they can do, right? And there are people who do that for all sorts of different reasons. I mean, particularly in Japan, there's a word I don't recall for it.
00:33:43
Speaker
Hikikomori? Yeah, Hikikomori,
Challenges of Being a VTuber
00:33:46
Speaker
exactly. Is that Yeah. Yes. of One of my favorite wrestlers, Mayu Watani, was Hikikomori. Really? Oh, yeah. she's Again, another podcast where God help Tracy, when he info dump about that.
00:33:58
Speaker
So and the top workplace hazard in V-tubing is psychological because this is about labor and this is a labor story. So because of all these factors, anonymity is fiercely guarded.
00:34:10
Speaker
Fans can be dangerous, whether whether through like positive obsession or becoming aunties, a kind of negative obsession where oh god I'm in the fan space and I want to destroy you. Anties are huge problem.
00:34:22
Speaker
That is terrifying because what you're describing is a bunch of, for the most part, mentally ill shut-ins interacting and becoming obsessed with other mentally ill shut-ins. yeah And then it's not a good cycle. that's And said that without judgment. People need assistance. And if somebody wants to be a shut-in, that's their choice. But it's a scary dynamic that sounds like it's building here. That's exactly it. And there is, ah and I want to be clear, loads of VTubers touch grass, loads have no choice. But ah look again, there's like people who just chronically ill and have this and have this as a kind of way. I don't, when I say mentally ill, shut in. It's not necessarily pejorative.
00:34:59
Speaker
It just means that like, it's and i like, it it's an insult meant with love. Right. um yeah And also the economy is such as it is that looking ways online to make money is a huge thing, particularly for women.
00:35:14
Speaker
Hence the explosion in only fans. And I, again, I want to be clear. um Although plenty of VTubers engage in sexual content, I think even a majority don't, that might be wrong. Someone can correct me on that. I'm sure I'll get corrected on everything.
00:35:28
Speaker
So the other thing I do want to mention... Contact thewondercamera.ca ah We welcome your corrections and your hate. And because I keep talking about pro wrestling, I do want to underline that VTubing is so similar to pro wrestling.
00:35:42
Speaker
The characters they portray are a performance-level version of their own personalities normally, although someone pulled on entire gimmicks ah with complex lore and pages of backstory that nobody will read. Well, wait, wait.
00:35:56
Speaker
Are you saying the Iron Sheikh wasn't actually sheikh? i was but he wasn't even... No, he was actually was Iranian. it Was ah was he really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. the kid and Oh, God, what the heck was his name? There was a famous Russian wrestler who wasn't Russian in the 80s, but he definitely wasn't a sheikh. Wild though. Undertaker?
00:36:16
Speaker
he's not an Undertaker. Was and is still alive. a Complete lie. P.O.S., though. Oh, my God. ah Yeah, that dude should have never retired and opened his mouth. So but the key thing here is VTubers use wrestling terms. The term kayfabe is used constantly, which is the incense. Yeah. And it's ah the insider wrestling term for maintaining the illusion. So this is a labor story.
00:36:40
Speaker
And so the question is, what's the job? So VTubers operate independently mostly, but the bigger names are hired by talent agencies, which I'm going to go into great detail in because even though we're basically, ah we're probably, I don't know a half hour, 45 minutes into the final recording, I'm about to start the actual stuff I'm talking about. This is all preamble. well Yeah. Well, you know, got to have context. I can't dive into the stories without without understanding why this is and what this is.
00:37:11
Speaker
So the the job of of a VTuber is extremely complex. And part of it is going to be managing your affairs. Because at first, you rig up a model, you go online, play some video games, and you act a little wacky.
00:37:25
Speaker
There. Okay, you're good. Well, what happens if you get successful? What happens if you actually get what you want? You have work to do. And this includes, but is not limited to, commissioning art. VTuber models are very expensive, particularly the high-end elaborate ones with fancy rigging.
00:37:42
Speaker
They take a long time. And the art industry attached to VTubing is massive. You got to hunt down sponsors. You got to moderate your chats. Normally done by... yeah Can you explain the rigging? So yeah what you're saying is, because I've seen images of people with like, and so they're using motion capture and then having an artist create an avatar that they can use as an overlay. Is that what we're talking about? Yeah. ah So rigging like...
00:38:06
Speaker
The very basic model you could do in the very least is, ah and I haven't looked into the rigging too much, but my understanding is you can rig a, so you can get a headset that you attach a cell phone to.
00:38:18
Speaker
And the cell phone, like with a Snapchat filter, will track your eyes and mouth and head movement. And then that at the very minimum, you can, you can rig onto your anime avatar who will then have their head. I will, will capture your voice. And then the mouth and eyes move and you hit turn your head and you can also move backwards and forwards.
00:38:39
Speaker
ah You can then, and it's common enough to rig up your hands, either by holding, i forget the term for it, but holding stuff, ah but holding like devices to track your hand movement. And then most and more elaborate VTubers will, ah their entire body will be captured in a motion caption hardware.
00:38:57
Speaker
So a very famous ah VTuber, Philean, rather than like a 2D avatar playing a game, she is entirely in 3D and is normally pacing around her room doing backflips and ah just being wild. So it does vary, but the the rigging is all over the place. So you can do it really cheap, but if you want nice rigging, it'll be thousands of dollars worth of it. Sure.
00:39:21
Speaker
There's a scale here, but it's yeah achievable for many people with an internet connection then. Mm-hmm. Dave in the editing room, I got a lot wrong here. Rigging is its own art form where most VTubers use a two-dimensional model which is then cut up and pieced back together with specific moving parts rigged to move per motion capture.
00:39:41
Speaker
The tracking is normally done through a good webcam or ideally a new iPhone. Three-dimensional rigging also exists for certain types of VTubers or for big events and it requires a completely different animation process.
Role of Talent Agencies
00:39:53
Speaker
Yes, exactly. The bar of entry is reasonable, but the technology is a huge part of it. Not only do you have to work with your technology, you have to work with pain in the ass software like OBS.
00:40:06
Speaker
Tracy and I dabbled briefly in video game streaming and just setting it up is a nightmare. Yeah, interesting. And up market research on what you should be doing, dealing with your fans, organizing collabs, dealing with other VTubers when nobody knows how to run a business and a lot of people are not well.
00:40:23
Speaker
Sorting out your presence in VTuber like live conventions, designing, sourcing, distributing merchandise. This is a logistical little empire attached to you. You have to compose and perform music if that's your thing.
00:40:35
Speaker
So VTubers try to delegate as much as they can. And many of them, in fact, most of them will hire a manager as soon as possible. And there is usually a little industry surrounding each successful independent VTuber of paid and unpaid labor, which is unless you're, and again, the really good ones do know how to operate their business.
00:40:55
Speaker
But a lot of the mid-level ones, it can be chaos with like, my partner is my manager and ah he's saying things to other people that don't represent me because he's kind of a dick. Lord, that's not a story I'm covering this podcast, but massive dramas surrounding that. But the point is, is that there's an enormous logistical bureaucratic overhead to the work of being a VTuber.
00:41:18
Speaker
And so in this high stress, emotionally draining job, you know there is a lifeline for some people. And these are the corpos, the great talent agencies which hire VTubers, pay for everything, set them up with a major brand and a guaranteed audience and do all of that logistical work, which gets in the way of just playing video games and talking to chat.
00:41:38
Speaker
There, they can stream to their heart's content. If the corpo is a big one, make good money and be part of a team of colleagues with guaranteed collaboration. And getting into a big corpo like Hololive or Nijisanji is like getting a full ride scholarship to an Ivy League.
00:41:53
Speaker
It is insanely thought after and very, very hard to get. It is a dream for most, not all, but most independent VTubers. And this lets me move into the actual topic of the podcast.
Idol Culture and VTubing
00:42:07
Speaker
ah Okay. Which are the talent agencies or corpos. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yes. I'm going to, because this is a labor story and who is exploiting the VTubers for their labor. That's what this is about.
00:42:21
Speaker
And so I have set the table with context and now we shall die. Okay. Itadakimasu. Yay. We're going to talk about Hololive first. Now, Hololive is owned by Cover Corporation and is one of the top two VTuber talent agencies in the world.
00:42:38
Speaker
They have branches in Japan, America, Indonesia, and run enormous live events and produce a ton of music. They are in a close competition with Nijisanji, who will be my second one I'm covering.
00:42:49
Speaker
Now, within Corpos, there is an actual company which will have a a standard staff structure and ah so a bunch of employees and subsidiaries and international branches, depending on how big they get.
00:43:02
Speaker
Like wrestlers, the talent are not employees. They are independent contractors. Oof. I know who are in some form of profit sharing model with the agency where the agency will ah it varies all over the place. Some of them take a cut of everything. Some of them say you get everything from your subscriptions and your kind of tips ah through you, which and YouTube.
00:43:26
Speaker
But we handle sponsors and merchandise. It varies. Sure. um HoloLive, I think, just takes a cut of everything. And so i'm going to so when I say talent, that's a contracted VTuber.
00:43:37
Speaker
When I say employee, that is a staff member working for the company under Salad. Okay. So HoloLive is very closely mapped on idol idol culture. Are either of you familiar with idol culture?
00:43:49
Speaker
Hmm. Vaguely. It's just, you know what? You got to explain it. Okay. The name's familiar, but. No, I have no clue. Wonderful. So odd do you know what K-pop is or J-pop?
00:44:02
Speaker
Yes. K-pop was the first thing I thought of in terms of idols. That's exactly it. It originates in Japan, but I'd say K-pop has kind of overtaken J-pop as an international phenomenon. Yes. So idols are performers who are marketed for their appearance, personality, and talent.
00:44:19
Speaker
And they famously perform songs, either singly or in groups, that I can only describe as pop music on crack. um A real thing that I find fascinating about the entire thing of idols is the music is so much more complex, both melodically and and just like i'm a musician and technically a composer.
00:44:42
Speaker
They're just going harder than what are fairly simple pop songs in the US. You compare K-pop to like ah Taylor Swift. You're going in completely different things. K-pop is engineered to be like candy.
00:44:54
Speaker
um taylor swift is boring i mean in general i find but i couldn't imagine listening to like a k-pop track and then putting on whatever kind of boring taylor swift thing that came out recently no thanks to her i wish her well in that i don't wish her any specific harm just kidding i don't have any feelings towards her either way but i find her music bland so yeah you put her against some k-pop tracks it's yeah like you say candy to broccoli I do like broccoli, but I think I'll take a candy. Well, do too. like broccoli too, but not as much as like a freaking O. Henry something.
00:45:29
Speaker
Yeah, true. ah Any Taylor Swift fans who want to write in abuse specifically towards Jen? What's the email address again, Tracy? Contact at thewondercamera.ca For the record, I'm like, but there's a few Taylor Swift songs I kind of like. I think she's very good at what she does.
00:45:46
Speaker
um And what she does is not make music for 45-year-old men. Anyways, it's not for me. Yes, exactly. Again, all due respect, not a fan. So idols are a cultural staple of Japan. And although what makes its way over here is mostly music, idols entertain in any way you can think of hosts, online personalities, brand representatives. They can be like the official idol for like a town or region, influencers, actors, artists, models, soft core models called gravure.
00:46:14
Speaker
um adult video work and my personal favorite of course which is female professional wrestling or joshio joshio pirarusu who many companies use an idol style presentation they also commonly work in groups and for example bts which are probably the most famous idol group in the world are well they're an idol group Talent agencies employ idols and it's an industry with an infamous dark side, which is an entirely different podcast.
00:46:42
Speaker
And I mean, podcast, let alone individual episode. um Especially I will say for women, Korean pop industry. You get a lot of suicides. Oh, yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. it's It's brutal. And let's say as somebody who lived in Korea, it is a very, this is a generalization from quite some time ago. But when I was living there, it was extremely looks focused culture. it is very, people are very obsessed with how you look and your personal appearance, being slim, having all this stuff. It's very, very, you put your photograph on your CV, right? When you apply for a job.
00:47:15
Speaker
Oh, wow. Plastic surgery is through the roof. Like it's very intense. Very intense. Yes. oh You wait until you see ah the face of ah one of the people I'm going to talk about shortly. ah So and yeah. And so this cultural pressure that Jen's talking about is intense on idols.
00:47:37
Speaker
And VTubing, because it is inherently Japanese, HoloLive and Nijisanji use an idol-style talent agency business to employ them. And idols, like VTubers, are subject to a lot of controls.
00:47:51
Speaker
So with VTubers, the corporations normally own the intellectual property. When you join and at an agency, they will create your model for you, usually according to what you want.
00:48:01
Speaker
You pick your name and your model, but they own it. When you leave, you have to start with a fresh name and model, which is a huge deal, right? yeah it's And ah they also will be subject to very strict and NDAs, which is going to come up a lot. Rules on who you can and can't collaborate with, how they deal with sponsors, et cetera.
00:48:20
Speaker
Dating, personal relationships. yeah that you have a boyfriend or not? yeah You jumped on my next sentence, Jen. Exactly. Oh, no, no, no. you're This is going into my first story. Idols are legendary for the implied no dating rule, just as you said.
00:48:33
Speaker
And although this is, as far as I can tell, not a legal contract restriction, it is something which is fiercely enforced by not just the companies, but especially the fans.
00:48:45
Speaker
And so the companies enforce it because the fans enforce it and they want happy fans. Now, the job of an idol is to foster parasociality and a parasocial relationship, ah which I'll explain for any fans who don't know it, is a psychological bond of a fan to a media figure.
00:49:04
Speaker
It is a one sided form of being enamored, which can escalate into outright love. But if you're a fan, if you're a fan of us, we love you and we want you to be our fan forever.
00:49:17
Speaker
I am single and will date you, and so is Tracy. Yeah, we're all single. We're all available to be dated. Yeah, I've never been touched by a woman, and I've never interacted with a woman before.
00:49:28
Speaker
um Let's talk about Brave Bird. ah And by the way, fans, if you happen to hear ah whiny dogs in the background, it's because our dogs have decided they're more important than the podcast. ah We will ah put dog pictures in the show notes.
Parasocial Relationships
00:49:42
Speaker
So although in fandom, it is natural to foster parasocial relationships, as we hope to do with our fans. It is cultivated by idols and VTubers, certain types of VTubers.
00:49:54
Speaker
Idols want you to think that this gorgeous, perfect person who evokes The specific, like, highest standard of these extremely strict gender norms I was talking about previously, previously the ideal woman or man is available, single, virginal, and just there for you.
00:50:14
Speaker
In no way associated with the opposite sex. Fans who genuinely fall in love are called gachakoi. And along with them is another term, unicorns. Fans who insist that that illusion, that kayfabe, can never falter.
00:50:29
Speaker
So these are the ones who lose their minds if they find out that an idol is dating. God, you can't. Oh, God. The idols are in a constant pressure cooker with a boiler on each side.
00:50:40
Speaker
Fans have their demands and management want to make those demands happy. They have to keep the balance going on between both sides. Now, in VTubing, Hollow Live does not have a dating ban.
00:50:52
Speaker
But the romantic lives of their talents are never discussed by the company and the sexes do not intermingle. but if Or if they do, they're rarely like hollow live and hollow stars of the female male branches of the company. And they do their own thing.
00:51:05
Speaker
That is interesting. Yeah, you don't tend to see intragender pop groups, K-pop, J-pop. You really don't actually. No, you absolutely don't. ah And again, there are exceptions to everything. And there is underground idol work, which I'm sure does all sorts of neat stuff.
00:51:19
Speaker
I don't really know about it, just that it exists. And also in Japan, this matters way more than it does in the U.S., Okay, yeah. American fans, like, although there's always stories of, like, celebrities getting death threats because they start dating, um it's nothing like what it is in Japan. Yeah, women crying because Paul McCartney got married or whatever. That's the same And just baffled me. It's like, you don't have a chance.
00:51:43
Speaker
But it's the illusion. It's about that fantasy. And that fantasy can be deliberately cultivated. This is particularly true for VTubers who are romantically inviting as a part of their shtick. Again, Pipkin Pippa is not romantically inviting.
00:51:58
Speaker
ah Our conspiracy theorist ranter we talked about on show previously. ah However, somebody ah who is meant to be romantic, that's going to foster that parasociality on that level.
00:52:10
Speaker
So I'm finally going to tell our first actual story. So enter Iruha Rushia. And if you want, you can let me just see if I can find a quick image of her.
00:52:22
Speaker
So Ruxia. It's not showing me anything. It's not. Yeah. Image not working. You know what? Yeah. Ruxia Hollow Live. All right. So Ruxia offers girlfriend experience. This means that she has a romantic patter meant to draw streamers into an obsession with her. Obsessive fans pay big.
00:52:40
Speaker
And that means Hollow Live was happy to let her do her thing. And this, again, is interesting. risky because there's one thing to know you have obsessive fans. It's another thing entirely to deliberately stoke that obsession.
00:52:54
Speaker
nothing I can't see anything good coming out of that. Sorry, Tracy, go ahead. Oh, just saying that that seems dangerous. Yes. ah so The ethics of GFE and BFE, the boyfriend experience, similarity to that, are subject to a lot of debate in the VTuber sphere because on one hand, consenting adults. On the other hand, casinos are run by consenting adults. Gachakoi are addicts, right? and So this is...
00:53:19
Speaker
And ultimately, the bad guy here, I'm going to say, is complex and isn't necessarily hollow life in this, except that they let it happen. So Rushiya is an incredible voice actor, and her streams are noted for portraying that anime trope I talked about earlier, Yandere, which is a portmanteau of the Japanese words for sick and love struck.
00:53:40
Speaker
So her bit is to do a sweet girl with this musical voice who would reveal herself to be deranged and manipulative and obsessive. She'll go from like banter to blood curdling shrieks in seconds and even does like performances of like begging the fans not to leave her stream and like acting manipulative in a way they're aware of.
00:53:59
Speaker
It's like a fantasy toxic relationship. That sounds hideous. Yeah. Beverly Hills. Who have warped understanding. They're eitherre extraordinarily repressed and have warped views of what a relationship is.
00:54:12
Speaker
Because to me, that's fine. Carry on. Sorry. No, no. Again, I would say that most people that I have, ah because I've read a lot of discourse on VTubing and watch 80 million news tubers.
00:54:26
Speaker
Most people don't talk about Gachakoi in a positive manner, right? It's not healthy. It's really not healthy. ah But there's money to be made. So February 11th, 2022, Ruxia is streaming and she gets a pop-up notification on her desktop From Discord.
00:54:46
Speaker
VTubers all use Discord. It is like the ah default mode of communication they have. And it's a tech it in Japan and America because Ruxia is Japan. He's in Japan odds and performs in Japanese.
00:54:58
Speaker
It's a text message from a popular singer named Mafu Mafu. And Mafu Mafu performs Utaite, which is covers of Vocaloid songs. So when I talked about Hatsune Miku and layers and layers of right, right. And it's a it's a it's a whole subculture ah because Utaite singers ah are like kind of do virtuoso style singing because Vocaloid songs are notoriously hard to sing because they're on keyboards.
00:55:26
Speaker
So ah and they stream online a lot. Right. And Mafu Mafu offers boyfriend experience. And now I'm going to show you what he looks like. ah Notably, he hit his face for quite a while.
00:55:39
Speaker
But this is what his face looks like ah because he is an astonishing looking human. Did he do a face reveal? ah Basically, yes. at some point and everyone was stunned.
00:55:49
Speaker
Yeah. Face reveal, by the way, are a huge thing. One second. I'm verifying I'm a human to look at this goddamn picture. Oh, my God. Whoa. I mean, it's interesting.
00:55:59
Speaker
Vampire twink. He looks like a lizard. So this is not a human in makeup. This is digital. Here's the deal. I can't tell if that image is human to makeup or digital, but he really does look like that.
00:56:10
Speaker
That's scary. wow This is a human being. Yes. I originally had a clip of him performing, but you can look that up if you so wish. This is basically his appearance and manner. And i there is a lot of After Effects...
00:56:22
Speaker
heavy makeup. yeah And for the fans at home who weren't keeping up with all the images, he has really exaggerated, sharp, sharp features in a way that is like Michael Jackson going too far kind of deal.
00:56:36
Speaker
And is that kind of... yeah Vampire twink and the eyes look creepy. And if you listen to our episode and on anatomical specimens, the eyes remind me of the Punished Suicide because they're kind of bloodshot.
Real-life VTubing Scandals
00:56:49
Speaker
Oh, yeah. so I'm like, ah and the pupils are very if you zoom in, the pupils are all weird, too. this is a very creepy to me, very disturbing image. Yes. and And again, the big thing here is that when we talk about this feedback loop about appearance, ah here's another picture of when because we talk about the anime girls and how. maybe Yeah, that I think that's a more naturalistic picture of what he actually looks like.
00:57:12
Speaker
ah which is but which isn't like exaggerated, photoshopped and over made up, but that is still like you get unique. It's kind of like how giraffes have really long necks, right? Giraffes have really long necks because of evolutionary pressures to get the tastiest leaves because that's a food source nobody else was getting.
00:57:28
Speaker
And so the pressures of fans and companies lead into this feedback loop where you get these kind of exaggerated appearances. Uh-huh. And also fans loving it because he did boyfriend experience. So he is this dreamboat singer who looks like an ethereal fairy ah singing these beautiful songs. Women are obsessed with him and men are obsessed with Ruxia.
00:57:53
Speaker
And he sends her a text message that pops up on her stream by accident. Here's the text translated to English. I'm finished with my streams and I'm getting ready to come home, Michan. And Michan is a pet name.
00:58:05
Speaker
Fans lose their fucking minds. Yeah. Accidentally popped up on the screen. Oh, this I genuinely will see. It might not have been accident ok with Ruxia, but i I believe it was an accident. But oh, OK, this gets weird.
00:58:19
Speaker
This was seized upon as proof that the two were in a relationship, which, of course, broke kayfabe. Complete, catastrophic emotional breakdowns. The fan groups went nuts and flooded the images of merchandise being destroyed, as well as playing sleuth and trying to see, like, hand cams and various streams like that to see if they had the same set of cups in the house.
00:58:42
Speaker
Because that's proof they live together if they both have the same cup. So I'm going to show you another video. And once it's up there, just three, two, one, click.
00:58:52
Speaker
yes yeah yeah um so This is a fan reacting to the to the discord message. I shot enough of that. Yeah, no that's enough of that. You get the picture. The thing I love him is you can see everybody in discord muting themselves as this poor guy is losing his fucking mind because his wife who got a text message.
00:59:13
Speaker
That's distressing, actually, to hear. oh no. I find it It's devastating. It's devastating, right? Yeah. And so it's... i get I think most people would say that although the Japanese cultural industry is one of the best cultural industries in the world, genuinely...
00:59:35
Speaker
At the same time, there are cultural forces within Japan which are deeply unhealthy. Like with us, but Lord knows, we're not speaking for a point of privilege, but deeply unhealthy in a very different way than we'll find in Canada.
00:59:49
Speaker
And this obsession with this this anime puppet being romantically available to me is just wild. so because these are grown people these are yeah grown adults oh yeah absolutely yes and it's and it's again it's a whole cultural phenomenon in japan ah with a concept of ah i i originally had like a like a page on moe which i won't get into but obsession and love uh for fictional characters or these uh
01:00:21
Speaker
mythologized figures of the perfect man or woman who is just there for you while everybody is so lonely and there is yeah it's just a whole thing so we have this in our culture too right we oh absolutely we do we do it it displays very differently but again as I ah be tubing in male loneliness epidemic I have you ever seen a more iconic duo so Mafu Mafu denies the relationship and Ruxia decides to make everything worse Because her this is a long weekend and long weekends are important, her manager is not available.
01:00:55
Speaker
So she decides she needs to act independently to get ahead of the story and contacts a notorious gossip streamer. Oh. Kore Kore. And Kore Kore blabbed everything she told him, burned her as a source. That is, I think she wanted to be anonymous and he named her immediately and shared internal details about how HoloLive operates.
01:01:15
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Hollow Live immediately fires Ruxia for breaking her NDA. Sure. And Ruxia goes to ground. Mafu Mafu, who genuinely throughout all of this, comes across as a very sweet person who was like a kind of weird, lonely guy who is trying his best through this and trying to be a gentle person.
01:01:34
Speaker
Pulls through a very tough time, but then it gets weirder. Oh, no. So this drama took place in 2022. January 24, a celebrity gossip magazine publishes an expose on Mafu Mafu. 2024. Yes. So two years later. i Like a year and a half.
01:01:51
Speaker
um Yes.
Emotional Risks for VTubers
01:01:52
Speaker
Showing he had been married for one year. divorced and was suing his ah his ex-wife, who was certainly Ruxia. Worse, the celebrity gossip magazine showed that Ruxia was horrifically abusive. mafu Mafu comes clean publicly and admits to the marriage and shares some fairly horrifying details of verbal and financial abuse.
01:02:15
Speaker
Ruxia was was ah cheating on him. They had a honeymoon set for Christmas and she no-showed to cheat on him. And all sorts of like bizarre, obsessive controlling behavior. In wrestling, there is the term work, which means to work your work to the audience and shoot, which means, oh, I actually hit you for real because I hate you. I'm shoot punching. you Right.
01:02:37
Speaker
So working is the illusion. a shoot is going to re making it too real. And if you work yourself into a shoot, it means you buy so much into the fantasy. You become the fantasy.
01:02:48
Speaker
Hulk Hogan is notorious for this. Ruxia was a work yandere and turned into a shoot yandere. So the pleasant and then extremely manipulative controlling wife.
01:03:01
Speaker
So one of the most bizarre allegations is they bought a house, which she then got into and refused to let Mafu Mafu get into. and once they And he finally divorced her because of the cheating, which meant that she didn't get to keep the house because of the fault in the in the marriage.
01:03:17
Speaker
He found the house was full of garbage and trashed, and the only thing left was her dead cat's urn. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. So, all I mean, here's the thing. because you say Okay. This is a because, yeah, these are real human beings. These are real human beings walking around.
01:03:33
Speaker
But no, they're just people. They're just people. Right. And so it's very easy and maybe correct to paint Ruxia as an unapologetic villain here. But my job is to point the finger at the boss. Ruxia is self-admittedly extremely mentally ill.
01:03:49
Speaker
But she was a money machine for HoloLive. She was ah one of their top earners
Corporate Challenges in VTubing
01:03:54
Speaker
and one of the top earners of ah a tip system called Super Chats on YouTube, where you pay to get your chat featured so she'll read it out loud on stream. She got more than anyone else in the world one year. um Really? Yes. And so ah my primary source for this particular story is a news tuber called de Depressed Newsagi.
01:04:11
Speaker
um He might not actually call himself a news tuber, but he covered the story. And doing GFE or BFE work is not only disastrous for the fan, it's bad for you. It's very poor for your mental health.
01:04:23
Speaker
You are farming a toxic relationship and you have somebody who is sick engaging in in a job that does nothing but make her mental health worse. And Hollow Live let this go unchecked until it blew up and it kept blowing up.
01:04:38
Speaker
russia uh and russia claims she never disclosed her marriage to mafu mafu due to the implied no dating rule which just made everything worse so this is about how vtubing is a risky job you expose yourself to extremities of human emotion writ large successful vtubers can have a thousand people in chat at once spamming adoration while at the same time someone's found their home address and is sending them death threats So I've been more on hollow life. And again, one thing I want to stress here is hollow life are far from the bad guys in the VTuber scene.
01:05:14
Speaker
They're not a horrible company insofar as any company is horrible. I would say they're big, they're financially focused, and they're kind of soulless. So ah next story is about Hololive really failing to protect talent.
01:05:28
Speaker
Hololive tried to expand into China because VTubing is huge in China, which is often seen through their YouTube equivalent, Billy Billy. Two of the Japanese talents, Kiryu Coco and Akai Hato, mentioned one word that you never say in front of a Chinese viewership.
01:05:44
Speaker
Taiwan. 731. Oh, sorry. Now, they said this in Japan to Japanese streamers. One was like looking at a YouTube analytics and said, oh, hey, I get a lot of views in Taiwan. And the other one, probably being a little shit disturber, mentioned Taiwan again.
01:05:59
Speaker
And the Chinese nationalists found out while HoloLive is expanding in China. hmm. So this kicked off a firestorm because the nationalist antis, again, ah the anti-fans, immediately became dedicated to the destruction of the personalities and the company.
01:06:18
Speaker
Hololive immediately suspended both of them and made two conflicting statements, one in English and ah that I'm aware of. There's probably one in Japanese, I don't know. But the statement in Bilibili was that they respected China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
01:06:32
Speaker
In English, they suspended the two for divulging confidential information. right And it's the internet. People translate. Everyone got pissed off. yeah And although both talents returned from suspension, the antis kept hounding them.
01:06:44
Speaker
And there's a huge rabbit hole story I'm skimming over, but it's likely Hollow Life's Chinese talents, or a couple of them, were with the antis and in fact were deranged nationalists themselves.
01:06:55
Speaker
And so we're exacerbating the harassment and in fact may have been leading it. So Hololive are getting it from both the fans of the Chinese government and it completely destroys their Chinese branch.
01:07:06
Speaker
Kiryu Coco returned with a giant fuck you to her haters before graduating, which is the idol and VTuber term for leaving on good terms, usually with a celebration. And Akai Hato is still streaming.
01:07:19
Speaker
Do you mean leaving in terms of quitting the industry or leaving the company for something else? Leaving the company. ah She might be streaming under a new name, but I didn't check into that. Editing Dave here. Coco now streams as K-Sawn, who I speak about in part two. She's extremely cool and a very successful voiceover artist.
01:07:36
Speaker
Most VTubers continue VTubing, but they will start up under a
Gargura's Journey
01:07:41
Speaker
new name. The last Hololive story is, have you heard the tale of Gargura? So Gargura is the most famous VTuber of all time at this point.
01:07:50
Speaker
She debuted in 2020 with Hololive's new English branch with a young model in a shark onesie. And you can just Google Gargora. They look the same. They're just little kids, little children. They look creepy. ah Some of them, ah some of them are very, very adult. Some of them are very, very, very adult looking. ah She, um like,
01:08:10
Speaker
Covered up in a shark onesie, it is a different look than the giant tittied anime girl. There are other things with that look I refuse to go into, but it's a whole thing.
01:08:21
Speaker
So Garagura was an instant sensation. She's silly, joyous, very smart, and endearingly boneheaded. So smart but dumb at the same time. People love that shit. Classic bimbo. Mm-hmm.
01:08:35
Speaker
Well, and like a very, a very quick witted smart bimbo, but also a klutz. And people find that endearing and horribly bad at math, that kind of stuff, which absolutely feeds into like what men want in women.
01:08:49
Speaker
Yes, I want to make. it Wait, this person is clumsy, bad at math, annoying, know-it-all, and I'm still single. Ha ha.
01:08:59
Speaker
I think annoying know-it-all would be the incorrect term. I would say quick-witted and ah quickwitted and funny. yeah I like to think I am. Yes, you are. ah good all you need to be it's filed down that's i got to do i guess yeah And you need to wear a shark Okay, then it'll get me a that relationship. Absolutely. If you are interested in a parasocial relationship with Jen, contact at thewondercamera.ca.
01:09:24
Speaker
Yep. Please, yeah. You gotta be careful putting that out there because somebody will contact me and I will be like, okay. Anyway. You guys gotta get the applications. Yeah, that's right, Trace. So Gargora was a sensation. I cannot stress how popular she was. Hundreds of thousands and then millions of subscribers in record times.
01:09:43
Speaker
What year is this? 2020? 2020 leading into 2021-22. Sure. Okay. So ah she launches during COVID and this continues on and her her like giant fame kind of peaks in this past year, which is where the story of sort of...
01:10:01
Speaker
crests. Here's a quote from Skuchan, Skuchan. I don't know how pronounce the name. I normally look that up. Apologies, a Hungarian VTuber on Gargura.
01:10:12
Speaker
Gura is the face of it. I feel like when Gura debuted, that was the thing. That was the thing that boosted Hollow Life into actual insanity. There was something about Gura that just hit the spot with literally everything. She was perfect.
01:10:23
Speaker
She was the right amount of cheeky, the right amount of funny. Her design was perfect. You don't know why her design was perfect? Dude, why do you think everyone is trying to become a fish now? She started the fish meta. Before Gura, no one was fish. Everyone was a cat. And she debuted. It was a beautiful silhouette and everyone became a fish.
01:10:39
Speaker
Oh my God. I yeah, I guess. Yeah. The VTuber Gold Rush was built on Gargura's back, who's a well-known hard worker, and got this level of mainstream attention from her association with the most hated sports team in Canada right now, the LA Dodgers.
01:10:55
Speaker
Oh, I thought you're go to say the Calgary Flames. Nope. Well, behind that, the Florida Panthers. But click on the YouTube video. Oh
01:11:16
Speaker
So this is Gargora singing Take Me Out to the Ball Game at a la at Dodger Stadium. And she, for a while, was kind of a team mascot. So this is a star who was bigger than the industry itself. She was kind of the Hulk Hogan of VTubers, except she wasn't a racist piece of shit.
01:11:34
Speaker
And then in April 2025, she abruptly quit. This shocked everyone, including me, who at the time didn't know anything about VTubers. And her reason for resigning was vague.
01:11:45
Speaker
and broadly stated disagreement with management. No great expose came, but what became apparent is that Gargora was this gigantic cash cow for Hollow Life, and they were mercilessly grinding her for every dime they could get and pushing her more and more into being this international superstar when she wants to do video game streaming, right?
01:12:05
Speaker
so And it apparently was destroying her health. And although she left amicably, her animosity to the company was strongly implied. The graduation song at Hollow Live was a big event and the lyrics were entirely themed about burning down something she had created.
01:12:20
Speaker
you know, not only her own brand, but likely hollow life. So, you know what though, what I would say good for her. like we talked about Kurt Cobain last time, Kurt Cobain. It's the same thing. It's capitalism is kind of the final boss in these stories where again, management may have had some care for him, but it is get back on the road, go touring, make us money. This is what you're here for. You're here to make us money and push, push, push. And apparently, i don't know, you know, Avicii,
01:12:44
Speaker
and musician. we i was say Oh, yeah yeah. Also, same thing. Push, push, push to go on tour. You'd burn out and commit
Corporate Culture Comparisons
01:12:50
Speaker
suicide. So good for Wargura. As a heads up for the remainder of this, I am absolutely shocked that although I will be talking about attempts, none of these stories about someone who who like killed themselves. And I am shocked by that ah because it's going to get a lot worse.
01:13:05
Speaker
So Hollow Live are the the reason I'm telling the Hollow Live story is to sort of frame the standard that other people measure themselves to. So Gargora has relaunched under a new name, Simeco Saba, also fish themed, and appears to be enjoying a relaxed life as merely very successful rather than the most important person in the space.
01:13:26
Speaker
Hollow Live is still a juggernaut and frankly, pretty well thought of by fans, despite the above, because it only ah gets worse. They're very professional, very corporate.
01:13:37
Speaker
Their CEO is not like some young money-waving around Playboy, which is very common in the other agencies. However, the problems persist. At the end of October, ah streamer Hachama, also known as Akai Hato, had a complete breakdown on stream, sobbing hysterically through the stream she had to do, sharing stories about being extremely isolated and burning out.
01:14:00
Speaker
beach And so the and the fans view is just like, oh, my God, this person is crumbling in front of us. And she's put out there to perform. And like, and the VTuber grind can be brutal.
01:14:11
Speaker
But this is the nicest story I'm going to tell for the rest of this podcast, as we're going to move on to the black company. Black companies are a Japanese term for companies which are cruel to their staff. Oh, God.
01:14:22
Speaker
And with that, I mean, you'd think it' be all of them, but, you know, wow well, again, the fact that there's difference is disturbing. Hollow Live is cruel. Sorry, Hollow Live is indifference.
01:14:33
Speaker
Right. It is. Our money is the only priority and you have to keep up, which is very standard in corporate culture. And again, Japanese corporate culture is famous, but Lord knows Silicon Valley startup culture. And anyways, um it's capitalism.
Nijisanji's Reputation
01:14:48
Speaker
But now we're going to move on to Nijisanji. Nijisanji is owned by Anycolor and debuted and started 2018 before Hollow Live. They were the first major corporal on the scene. There might have been smaller ones.
01:14:59
Speaker
They've been in competition since. And during the VTuber boom in the 2020s, early 2020s, their English branch, which is our focus, had a pretty good reputation with fans.
01:15:10
Speaker
They were respected and trusted and seen as a more ethical agency than Hololive. It's not the case today. So I'm going to start with a major 2023 controversy, which is the firing of Zion Lanza.
01:15:21
Speaker
And this is an amuse-bouche before we get to the really meaty one. So like Zion Lanza debuted in 2022 and was a properly successful streamer and singer. Not their biggest talent, but successful.
01:15:32
Speaker
She was suspended by the company and companies will normally do public suspensions if the stream schedule gets interrupted and then explain why to the fans. She was suspended for repeated misconduct and noncompliance with the company directed directive and was then terminated in March.
01:15:49
Speaker
Nijisanji turned the fans against Zion because she was the new kid and Nijisanji had a good reputation. The fans saw her as betraying something they loved, and she was severely harassed and doxed down to her home address being shared.
01:16:03
Speaker
Eventually, while she was suspended, in fact, so her suspension caused the fans to go after her even before the termination.
Zion's Challenges with Nijisanji
01:16:10
Speaker
Eventually, a friend of hers shared a Google Doc which detailed her side of the story.
01:16:15
Speaker
and i've And again, in my day work, I am i do a lot of union work. And I've seen these kinds of impassioned defenses of somebody who feels they've been wronged by the company.
01:16:25
Speaker
And what it does is it shows Nijisanji is obsessively controlling and importantly, hostile to VTubers who try to launch their own creative projects. Remember that a part of VTubing is I can't just play video games all day.
01:16:38
Speaker
If I want to be interesting, I have to be creative. And her attempt to be creative got coldly shut down by Nijisanji. She was constantly also penalized for violating small rules.
01:16:49
Speaker
This Google Doc reads like somebody who did not thrive straight up. And every day she was stumbling into some new rule that she had no idea existed in the first place. hmm.
01:16:59
Speaker
And some of them are ludicrous. She got a copyright breach for covering another talent's song as a gift to them. They both work for the same company who owns the copyright. Off comments were wielded against her. Like she said a game had a difficult user interface and this was a comment which would be considered offensive by the rights holder. like You kind of can't win with that.
01:17:20
Speaker
No, yeah like you can't complain about the game you're playing, which is kind of part of streaming. You're supposed to be the critique. It's called critique. And everyone's favorite, she was in trouble for falsely claiming she was sponsored by a brand.
01:17:33
Speaker
The brand was Deez Nuts. Oh my God. And she was like these commissioning D E E apostrophe S nuts merchandise as like a recurring bet.
01:17:43
Speaker
And so this was partially a English to Japanese translation issue, but also it was in my opinion, reading this as kind of a labor thing, somebody who was stumbling right out of the gate with the company rules and the company looked for anything they could, they could do to hit her with and just made things worse. Mm-hmm. When Nijisanji suspended her, they posted public statement declaring they would act against the harassment and doxing.
01:18:08
Speaker
They didn't tell her they were doing this and, of course, did nothing. While dealing with all of this, she was suffering from horrific chronic depression, isolation, and even her cat died. When she had her say, this started to turn fan opinion against Nijisanji, and she vanished from the scene, likely streaming under a new name.
01:18:28
Speaker
But this then leads us to the the most famous Nijisanji story, which is termination of Selen Tatsuki, who is currently known as Doki
Selen Tatsuki's Experience
01:18:37
Speaker
Bird. Selen was a very, very popular streamer from Nijisanji, and to this day is one of the biggest VTubers in the world.
01:18:45
Speaker
She encountered Zion's same issues with Nijisanji's coldness to her creative ideas. So, for example, she wanted an art competition for a new model because Nijisanji had like a token she won which would let her get a new model, which are very expensive, and thought, oh, let's have fans pitch concept concept art.
01:19:03
Speaker
But Nijisanji refused to endorse this, wouldn't give a price to the competition, and enforced absurd timelines on it, basically making it pointless. She tried to get international events going, ah which, again, would have been huge for the company and her.
01:19:17
Speaker
Nijisanji, no interest, only work with other talent in the company. Then Selene did something horrible. She made a music video. This was a cover song of a cozy little song on YouTube called Last Cup of Coffee by a Lily Pichu.
01:19:33
Speaker
um She had a vision for it, which involved bringing in past Nijisanji talent to our friends as this big celebration. Nijisanji refused to pay for it, so she self-funded it for $15,000.
01:19:45
Speaker
December of 2023, she posted the video on Christmas and Nijisanji took it down. She then very co posted a very careful but heartbroken message about the video being taken down.
01:19:56
Speaker
And again, the reason the video was taken down is Nijisanji apparently did not clear the inclusion of former talent. So then things got weird because she went quiet. She then posted a strange message about being in the hospital after an accident.
01:20:10
Speaker
And fans noted that the apostrophe in it was not an apostrophe you find on English keyboards. guessing it was written by her management team. Because Selene is not in Japan, but Nijisanji is. Let's go to ask, where is this occurring geographically? Selene is American.
01:20:27
Speaker
She's Canadian. And she works for Nijisanji EN, or English branch. But the English branch, I'm not sure where people are located on the English branch in America or the US.
01:20:37
Speaker
And I would say that when I talk about Nijisanji, I'm mostly focused on the English branch here, which is where the real horror stories come from. Oh, interesting. This is occurring in the States. Yes, but I think Nijisaji's staff are in Japan is at the same time. I see. But there's a, um again, it's a subsidiary of a bigger company.
01:20:55
Speaker
It always gets complex, but Selen is an English language region and part of their English branch. So fans start to panic because she is beloved. And Nijisaji then took everything of hers offline.
01:21:09
Speaker
and then terminated her, firing her for breach of contract.
Nijisanji's PR Disaster
01:21:13
Speaker
The termination letter was near incoherent because of translation issues, I think. But again, it was clear it was because it was the music video, which again was self-funded and endorsed by the artist.
01:21:25
Speaker
But the termination letter gets weird. It first notes that Anycolor, Nijisanji's owner, was attempting to work with her emergency contact in a vaguely defined sensitive situation.
01:21:36
Speaker
It then says that Selene had legally threatened the company and for whatever happened and that they had destroyed her ability to continue her livelihood. And furthermore, mentioned that Selene claimed abuse and harassment by her management and other talent at the company.
01:21:51
Speaker
They published this to the fans. Wait, yeah, that the company did? Yes. This is the company's statement to protect themselves. So I think Nijisanji thought they could do the same thing they did with Zion because all the fans turned on Zion.
01:22:08
Speaker
But the fans had become wiser. And this is something we see as a trend in VTubing, where they are less inclined to believe in the goodwill of the corpos. And the fans turned against the company instead. yeah and Importantly, by saying Selene was being harassed by other, they used the term livers for their VTubers. So livers, the fans went on a witch hunt.
01:22:27
Speaker
Who hurt Selene? We're going to get you, right? And start massively harassing the other talent, trying to find out who was bullying their favorites. like spectacular act of self-sabotage. Only a boss could be that dumb.
01:22:41
Speaker
h And then, so, yeah I mean, and then Selen now Doki bird finally posts on Twitter because all of this is taking place on Twitter. I will not be silent. Yeah. Oh yeah. I know.
01:22:54
Speaker
Uh, I've had to go on that damn site a lot. Uh, Doki Bird, I will not be silenced anymore. On December, I was hospitalized for an attempt on my life, which was caused by a buildup of bullying from within and being in a toxic and poor environment for numerous months that led to my breaking point.
01:23:10
Speaker
I requested to leave first, but on more neutral terms on the 26th of January. So... To recap, she paid for her own video, Nijisanji took it down, and in the fallout, she attempted suicide.
01:23:21
Speaker
Their response was to take over her social media account, block her access, and then impersonate her online, and then say they did all of this. Oh, wow. So, and they' just sucked this is a PR disaster for a major company.
01:23:35
Speaker
Well, yeah. Fans start harassing everybody and talents start going on hiatus with weird messages that, again, look like they were written by management. And Nijisanji's reputation continues to collapse. Nijisanji defends themselves in the following way, which is my favorite thing.
01:23:53
Speaker
On February 5th, 2024, Anycolor made the decision to terminate our affiliation with the Nijisanji EN liver, Selen Tatsuki. The impact of this decision on our financial results will be negligible.
01:24:06
Speaker
Well, that's that's the thing. that's That's what matters. Their stock fucking collapses. but So, Selene gets a hero's welcome returning to her old alias, Doki Bird, and immediately makes more money than she ever made in Nijisanji.
01:24:20
Speaker
She revealed that she didn't make any money in Nijisanji because she spent $200,000 in the past year for projects Nijisanji refused to greenlight. Yeah.
01:24:32
Speaker
So what's the point then of signing up with these corpos? It seems like... It it it does it does vary, right? Because ah I think some of this is Selen. I think most Nijisanji talent make a pretty good living, actually. Because if she had $200,000 to spend, yeah still... that come from? yeah right well and that She had that money to spend, which meant she made no money, implying she probably made that much a year anyways.
01:24:57
Speaker
Still, it's an indication that as she's trying to grow her career, the company cannot accept a talent doing something that isn't their idea. Yes. Which is something anyone who works for a living is probably familiar with. Mm-hmm. So Nijisanji decide to do their move.
01:25:14
Speaker
Everything has collapsed for them. They need to save face and recover ah what ah the second biggest PR disaster in VTubing. Biggest one will be part two. um So what happens in February of 2024, three major Nijisanji talents who I'm not going to name because I'm going to shit talk them post with very short notice that they will go live for a majorly important live stream on YouTube.
01:25:38
Speaker
It was notably launching at the same time as one of Doki Bird, formerly Selene's, big stream. So it's competition with her. In this stream, which is almost entirely black video and is now called the Black Stream as a part of VTuber lore, they read what is very clearly a pre-written message in their best concerned HR voice.
01:25:59
Speaker
The stream host stressed that these are their own words and they wanted to do this and they actually believed them. h And ah there's no indication to this date that anyone was coerced into this.
01:26:12
Speaker
Very shortly after this episode was recorded, one of the Black Stream members who graduated Nijisanji and now goes by Zandu publicly apologized and made up to Selen. He implied he did not have the full story and that he was pressured.
01:26:26
Speaker
And the clip's a long, tedious listen, so I'm not going to subject you to it. But the short version is that Selene's lawyer sent a document over to Nijisanji summarizing her complaints.
01:26:37
Speaker
Nijisanji shared that to the people in the stream who reviewed it thoroughly. This is lawyer to lawyer, and then it's being shared with her former colleagues. And according to them, the document showed she was threatening to dox them, had secretly recording one of them, and that she had a history of failing to follow protocol and ah blowing up publicly in response to failing to follow a protocol.
01:26:59
Speaker
Selene's defense was that the document was written as an info dump for her lawyer, was never meant to see the light of day whatsoever. And her lawyer finally asked her to send it over to Nijisanji because they were refusing contact.
01:27:11
Speaker
The lawyer thought, let's just send this over to them and see if they will ah they'll bite. And their response was to see that it made Selene look bad and immediately share it with her former colleagues to turn them against her.
01:27:25
Speaker
Selene also mentions she had two suicide attempts. The second a couple weeks after the first was mentioned. And again, in this, they're talking seriously about Selene's health. We never want this to be about her health, et cetera, et cetera.
01:27:37
Speaker
But like to rant briefly, this is heinous. I can't us see how fucking gross it is that her colleagues went out to basically call her a crazy bitch in public in order to defend the company name.
01:27:51
Speaker
So i I've dealt with horrific harassment in my union work, and employers love to imply, we've done nothing wrong, this person's just a crazy bitch. When really, it's they've driven the person to such an extremity. Right. And here's the thing. Some cases where they explode, or they freak out, or whatever happens, and then they go, oh, well...
01:28:11
Speaker
Look how crazy they are. And Selene might not be innocent here, right? Like, Selene could have entirely blown up in public, had, like, oversized reactions to things, and manufactured her own problems by doing things she knows she couldn't do again and again.
01:28:25
Speaker
That is entirely possible. It doesn't matter. You don't sell somebody out like that. Because when it's your fucking co-workers doing it for the company, one of them is going to be next. Like, you have to have each other's backs. You all have the same relationship to your boss.
01:28:40
Speaker
So it was just heinous and it failed spectacularly. The fans are now bloodthirsty with rage and on a witch hunt for Selen's bullies. Nijisaji is dead to the fans.
01:28:52
Speaker
And her termination, again, tanks their stocks. They lose sponsors. They lose business partnerships. And Nijisaji English has continued on and is slowly trying to recover its shattered reputation.
01:29:03
Speaker
Right. They're still
Wachter's Rise and Fall
01:29:06
Speaker
going. Well, again, this is the English branch of a very large business in a billion dollar industry. But still, this was a massive blow to Nijisanji and they handled it badly.
01:29:19
Speaker
Nijisanji has a million more stories of less major news kind of deal, of bad treatment of talents, controlling behavior, and just shitty managers. They're considered a black company as compared to Hololive, who again, Hololive are coldly professional.
01:29:36
Speaker
Nijisanji, kind of evil. Right. Are you ready for it to get worse? Oh, no. It's going to get so much worse. mean, Oh, bring it on. Sure. A talent attempted twice, and the company's response was to get her co-workers to publicly name her as a backstabber.
01:29:52
Speaker
But now we're going to talk about a smaller company called Wachter. W-A-C-T-O-O-R. I really want to call it Wachter, but it's Wachter. It's like a new Wachter. Yeah. rewa So they start in 2018. It's a small agency out of Japan and hit upon a real moneymaker.
01:30:11
Speaker
They had Spanish speakers. So when 2020 hit and everyone goes inside and the VTuber gold rush kicks off, they become the only market with Spanish speakers, particularly in Mexico.
01:30:22
Speaker
And they keep hiring more. And they have this corner of the market to themselves. They become one of the top agencies in the world. And now we're going to see why that fell apart. So She No Lila, who now goes by Eileen Noir, but She No Lila is the name we're working with.
01:30:38
Speaker
Multilingual VTuber. Again, most of them speak Japanese and Spanish because this is a Japanese kindf ah company. Is their big star. or one of them. So they're riding high on the success of them and they suspend her.
01:30:51
Speaker
So their post on Twitter indicated a vague breach of contract, which was followed by five months of radio silence as fans grew increasingly panicked about where the hell she went. Because again, VTubers follow her schedules. And when you've got your waifu on every Tuesday night at eight, you are glued in, ready to go, right?
01:31:09
Speaker
And she vanishes for five months. The only sign of life was that she posted, i would like some cereal in Spanish. Which just made people feel weirder. It's going to be extra creepy. It's more cryptic. Although i have to say, there are some podcasts I like where like they'll stop posting for a while and I'm like, did they die?
01:31:26
Speaker
and then they'll come back and I'll be like, well, who knows? Well, that's, yeah. And your parasocial relationship to these podcasters, not going to be like VTubers for all the reasons we discussed. No, this is much more. I don't even check. I'm like, meh, if they're dead, they're dead. What am I going do? No, just kidding. There's other podcasts. Yeah. I don't like go searching, though. So her contract apparently lapsed.
01:31:49
Speaker
Wachter decided to dox her. They published her full name with the allegations she had committed an unforgivable sin, which was running a separate private stream, ah like rather than a formal one under the company.
01:32:03
Speaker
In the fraca that followed, Shino claimed she attempted to resign from Wachter, who did not respond to her resignation letter and instead suspended her, leaving her without pay for months.
01:32:14
Speaker
So she runs a private stream to make any kind of income. They then suspend another VTuber, a Karari Rose, for attempting to resign. So somebody gives notice they're not going to renew their contract.
01:32:26
Speaker
They cut off their pay. hmm. And then throughout 2022, talent begin publicly graduating or vanishing without comment. Like there is like these disappearances of these popular VTubers.
01:32:38
Speaker
Now I'm going to talk about Miss Oha Hino, who ah her entire brand was like being a good hang. Introverted Japanese talent who learned to speak Spanish because of a Paraguayan friend.
01:32:48
Speaker
and far and above their biggest star. Most VTuber agencies have their top star who really brings them in. They got like that one where it's like Gargura with, ah formerly with Hollow Live, Iron Mouse with Vishojo, which is all over part two.
01:33:04
Speaker
Good Lord. ah But she's the big star. In November 22, walked her post, she's not feeling well, and she starts a mystery hiatus. They screwed this up. The serial thing was not actually up Eileen Noir slash Shino.
01:33:17
Speaker
It was actually Missoua Hino who posted Estohoro Antoya cereal. I crave cereal. but She was the one who said that. Right. February 15th, 2023. Shit hits the fan.
01:33:29
Speaker
Three Wachter talents all post on Twitter at the exact same time. Missoua Hino posted on a private account stating she was no longer with Wachter due to a collapse of trust. She knew Lila,
01:33:40
Speaker
our former odd talent, a year after she's left, post she repeatedly tried to contact Wachter because they were threatening a lawsuit and she wanted to know if they were suing her. Meanwhile, Kurari Rose, another talent they had fired, post Wachter is actually suing me and she's fighting him. But the big thing here, which I love, is three talents coordinate and do a direct action.
01:34:01
Speaker
They all post against the boss at the exact time and the exact place, in like all together. Wachter- Sounds like they need to union. ah No kidding.
01:34:12
Speaker
Wachter was dealt a a massive blow to its public perception and credibility, right? Obviously. It responded as one would expect. And that because they control the social media for all their talents, right? They have, when you control the IP, you also have the password to their social media, which is why you had those weird management written social media posts from Nijisanji.
01:34:33
Speaker
They decide to dox Masora Hina in a way I've never heard of before. They share her full name, address, and social insurance number. Oh my god. Now, Wachter, they're... Japanese. It's actually the Japanese government ID. Same deal.
01:34:48
Speaker
my god Right? now Well, okay. Elon Musk's X.com decides this actually has breached our terms of service, which is astonishing because you could just be a Nazi there.
01:35:02
Speaker
And they take it down. Wachter immediately posts again with a link to a YouTube video, which has the same information. YouTube takes it down. And then Wachter posted as a comment in like a self comment in their YouTube channel.
01:35:17
Speaker
like a community note. And that gets taken down, which might be the first time YouTube's taken something like that down. Because not only are they trying to dox her, they're really trying to dox her.
01:35:27
Speaker
Oh my God. This is gross. This is trolls upon trolls upon trolls. It's wild. oh These people are 12 years old. You look at some of the CEOs for them. This is disgusting. No, Wachter's CEO was very much a douchebag rich kid.
01:35:41
Speaker
And ah my last story is going to be about the biggest douchebag rich kid. And we are nearing that. But yeah, douchebag rich kids with these startups is a huge thing in VTubing. Oh, it's such a lovely industry. Oh, it's it's great. Misora Hino shares afterwards that she believed Wachter did this because she is half Japanese.
01:36:00
Speaker
And when you are half Japanese in Japan, it's a problem. And she was bullied severely when she was younger, ah to the point that she had attempted suicide multiple times.
01:36:11
Speaker
She did note she no longer lived in Japan. But it's not only that they doxed her, they went out of their way to like demonstrate, I forget the term, but that she's a half Japanese, specifically to encourage more harassment. Ooh.
01:36:24
Speaker
Now, she moved on to a new career as Meika and Wachter kept at it. By September 23, they had four active VTubers and had hired 40 people in 2018. So they do what you do when your product is destroyed. They're rebranded as 910 Inc.
01:36:39
Speaker
Apparently, it kind of looks like ah something cute in the Japanese characters. It's it's a pun that doesn't work. The four remaining VTubers then all quit at once, blasting the company over inhumane treatment.
01:36:51
Speaker
I'm going to read ah one of their notes ah from Himuragi Ageha. Himuragi Ageha, am ready to inform you that I've been the victim of the following dealings by the agency.
01:37:02
Speaker
Forcing me not to to do work that was not included in my contract. False hire. The amount of work was not proportional to the salary. Intimidating and high-pressure behavior. Sexual and power harassment.
01:37:13
Speaker
Forced to express opinions which are not my own. instructions prohibiting me from taking pre-written psychiatric medication. Oh my God. ah Until now I had not pressed charges because I owed my agency the money I needed for my activities.
01:37:28
Speaker
However, I ended up finding myself in a situation where I was under the absolute psychological control of the agency's executive staff for a long period of time, which pushed me to my psychological and physical limits.
01:37:39
Speaker
More specifically, I suffered severe withdrawal symptoms when I stopped taking my psychological medication, which led me to repeatedly self-harm and dependent and depend develop a dependence on alcohol.
01:37:51
Speaker
Finally, in March of last year, 2023, I made a failed suicide attempt. And despite this, the executive staff ordered me to continue my normal activities. I am now suffering from conversion disorder and will be hospitalized in the future as I have difficulty walking and speaking.
01:38:07
Speaker
Because of the of this, I come to the conclusion it's no longer possible for me to maintain a trusting relationship with my agency. As for the above accusations... Yeah. Sorry.
01:38:18
Speaker
And the last sentence is, last sorry Lastly, i am sorry to have troubled everyone in this way. These may be my last words, but I genuinely love from the bottom of my heart all the fans who have supported me thus far.
01:38:30
Speaker
So, as a move to... Yep. Thankfully, again, everyone's still alive. I don't know how. good Genuinely. Unbelievable. Yeah. For what? Oh, my God. Anyway. There's money to be made.
01:38:45
Speaker
Yeah. It's money, right? And this is a gold rush, right? Although, yeah was right I will say, if you go to Twitch right now and look for live streams and sort for VTubers, the vast majority are going to have zero people watching right now.
01:38:59
Speaker
Because it's like any entertainment. Most people are doing it for the love of the game. Everyone's got big dreams and very few succeed. yeah Any kind of entertainment. I say this as a musician who makes pennies.
01:39:11
Speaker
Thankfully, I have a day job. But yes. So their entire roster quit. Everyone resigned this in this company. But they kept on. And I'm going to leave the Wachter story with ah a real downer. In a good guys don't always win moment, it was exposed that four unnamed talents lost lawsuits against Wachter and were ordered to pay 10 million yen back to the company, roughly $68,000. Yeah. sucks. And the reason for this, one of them is in Japanese courts, public damage to a company's reputation is illegal.
01:39:48
Speaker
no matter how warranted it may be. And what's wild is only two of the lawsuits were in Japan. was One was in Spain and one was in Paraguay, which leads me to believe that Masora Hina, whose fucking social insurance number was doxed by Wachter, was one of the people who lost out here.
01:40:04
Speaker
I have one more story to share ah before we move to part two where the stories change. And it's going to be about Cometa.
Kometa's Exploitation Issues
01:40:12
Speaker
So ah I'm going to talk briefly about sources here because i actually had an edit of this where I named a bunch of sources throughout.
01:40:19
Speaker
And then that edit was lost. But I am primarily working for sources on the work of news tubers and then going to original sources and ah the VTuber wiki, which is indispensable in order to get timelines right and some details, and just looking at VTuber discourse over ah places like Reddit i in order to get a sense of the community.
01:40:40
Speaker
But the Newstubers are essential because they bundle everything together. The Newstuber industry is its whole thing with the problems of a nascent news startup where journalistic ethics or chasing the big story or trying to fill content can become issues, but I will shout out at channels like Mujin, Arena Evenstar, and some other channels like that, which have been kind of essential.
01:41:05
Speaker
This one, Cometa, is built on the work of newstuber Rima Evenstar because it's kind of a smaller company. But I think I want to talk about the startup fever with VTubers desperate to get into talent agencies and rich kids with money to throw around and what that can lead to.
01:41:23
Speaker
Always good things. That's what I found. you give rich kids money. Particularly that ever happens. no Men hiring women to entertain men. ah And so Kometa was a Filipino corpo started by Dean Estarucco, but we'll call him Jira, which is his online name.
01:41:42
Speaker
He's a Nepo baby with dreams of being an internet celebrity. Wanted to be a big deal. He started VTubering and during that time ingratiated himself to another VTuber named Terumi.
01:41:53
Speaker
He is strung her along with big talk of using his uncle's absurd amount of money to start a talent agency. And then, while talking to her, started talking about his dream of using his power to intentionally be creepy to the talents he managed, and even got her to sexually roleplay a power dynamic of a VTuber working for him that he was sexually extorting.
01:42:17
Speaker
He got to launch Komeda and then refused to hire her. just ah Yeah, unbelievable. This is just, yeah. ah thats all This is ultimately what it's about, though, isn't it?
01:42:27
Speaker
Oh, my God. Sexual exploitation. Ultimately, this stuff seems to me. But and I know there's nuances. Well, and it's again, it's it's an industry. The money's there. And one thing I do want to stress is most VTubers really do love doing this because they get to play video games and act wacky online and look like a cute anime girl.
01:42:45
Speaker
They like that. Right. It's fun. It's genuinely fun. It is work that people love doing and people love participating in. But there's this enormous dark side and these wildly exploitive core companies taking advantage of this.
01:42:59
Speaker
but So our thing or not in understanding the all sorts of gender politics within anime style and VTubing and all that, most people really love doing it. It's just that the ah the structure around it, the structure around it, and also the grind and the lack of protections for anybody doing this work. The lack of protections is huge. So this is a small company with three talents, Virgil, Miria, and their top talent, Elaine.
01:43:25
Speaker
So Terumi, the woman he was talking to previously, kept hanging out with the talent because the Filipino VTuber space is small and was eventually just blacklisted. So she couldn't have associate with the company at all, completely shunted off to the side.
01:43:39
Speaker
h And so he didn't run the company. Rather, he worked to become an internet ah celebrity playboy while the talent had to manage their own affairs and do everything by hand on their own, which is the entire point of working for a corporation. what's Yeah, what's the point then? yeah Notably, he posted a weird amount on social media. And I need to find one of these pictures for you because, and I'm sorry, Jen and Tracy, you're going very unhappy to see this picture, but it's important.
01:44:07
Speaker
Well, you know, I'm always showing you guys unhappy pictures, too. So, you know, it's I gotta you got to, you know, take in kind. I wonder how I can get this. I want to say I'm going to send this to you over Facebook because I can't think of an easy way to do it.
01:44:23
Speaker
I can't get it. i don't i don't have Facebook. My phone's over there. oh get your phone, Jen. We'll take a second. It's important. OK, are you ready? Yes. Yeah. I'm coming.
01:44:34
Speaker
Am I going to scream? Oh, no. Well, it's too small to read. So what he's saying here, the past couple of days were a lot of fun. i had lunch at Dintai Fung with the talents. The food was so good.
01:44:48
Speaker
The next day, staff and I went to cosplay Matsuri at Ikea, who brought home essential. Pick related. I should this so should have shown this a long time ago, but the staff's actually very tall. heap and think To describe describe this for the audience, Jen.
01:45:03
Speaker
look, it it's a guy. He's wearing a glasses and a mask. Looks like a little dorky loser. It's a picture of him with arm around a woman. And the only thing you can see of her is his head is nestled above her ample bosoms.
01:45:16
Speaker
Yes, I would say. So it's a picture of a woman's bosom. He took so many of these pictures of this guy taking selfies with his. And again, this is his in the boobs. This is his staff member.
01:45:28
Speaker
Yeah. like Who is calling Minchan or something like that. And he just keeps on taking selfies with her tits. Wow. Yeah, it's loser shit. And like joking about like, well, we sure had some exercise earlier, like that kind of stuff.
01:45:43
Speaker
Oh, I hate this guy. 12 years old. It's disgusting. Like, yeah Yeah. So the talent are going on with no funding or support and broken promises while Jira is out there taking tit selfies.
01:45:56
Speaker
And even like in one case, ah like being subjected to public mockery if the owner felt it funny enough. The dam finally broke when their top talent, Elaine, graduated for multiple health issues.
01:46:09
Speaker
And this is really common in VTubing. And I want to stress something that's really gross. They disclosed all of her health issues. And they always do this. And I don't know why it is not that the company should not know your health issue, right? If you're a VTuber listening to this, for the love of God, don't tell your boss why you're sick. Just get a medical note.
01:46:29
Speaker
Even if you're an independent contractor, unless it's in your contract saying you have to disclose your health issues to us, which is probably a violation of the law. Just say you're sick. Your boss has no reason to ever know why you're sick.
01:46:43
Speaker
Right. Part of the drama. Right. I'm sure. ah so yeah Everyone wants to know. you have all these fans who want every last detail. You know, and to them, I don't care. Well, again, it's a form of protection of the talent, right? And the trick is, is that the fans want to know, but the company doesn't have to tell them, but they always do.
01:47:00
Speaker
They disclosed that she had ah pre-diabetes, escalating into diabetes type 2, schizoaffective disorder, hearing loss. So the fans are united behind Elaine with support. And she then did a weird thing. And I forgot to mention this with Walk.
01:47:16
Speaker
During all of the Walkter drama, they started having auditions to replace the talent, but keep the models. Now this is an insane thing in VTubing because it's not the model that you love.
01:47:33
Speaker
It's the person. Yes. And it is like if Joshi sensation he think actors on a soap opera. Right. Or it's like Joshi Sensation, the Dark Phoenix Sayakamitani, was replaced with some guy. We'd all be furious.
01:47:48
Speaker
We'll say Aunt Viv and viv on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Exactly. it's It's the same thing, except that you're in a parasocial relationship with this person. Yes. And obsessed with that personality.
01:48:00
Speaker
So fans hate this. Huge blow against Wachter and considered a cardinal sin. So cardinal, no one even thought of doing it before. And then Elaine holds a stream where she talks about how she's going to help choose her replacement to carry on the model, which everyone hates and is weird.
01:48:17
Speaker
So when she's doing this, the fans explode into infighting. There's a petition to not replace Elaine with a Elaine Mark II. And while the fans are tearing everyone and each other apart, Jirai holds a strange stream where an anonymous friend is hanging out with him.
01:48:36
Speaker
who turns out to be Elaine, who, like ah like, a few months after graduating, I believe. I don't have the timeline written here. One of the other VTubers, Miria, completely breaks down and posts that she just started sobbing at work because she found out that Elaine was now still working with Jira.
01:48:53
Speaker
Elaine then tries to cover it with a heartbroken voice note about how she wanted everyone to stop fighting. She just kind of wanted to, like, see the scene a little bit, but wasn't regularly streaming. But The entire company ends up quitting. Miri and Virgil, that is.
01:49:07
Speaker
ah Leaving Colmeadow without any talent. Everything blows up. Everyone's angry about this. And the Discord staff, because there's a big company Discord, revolt in public because they feel that everyone's attacking them because they're the access to the company and the company's left them out to dry.
01:49:24
Speaker
And now people are like, wait, what's going on with Elaine and Jira and start doing the matching objects thing and seeing the same wooden spoon and hand streams and things like that. Okay.
01:49:34
Speaker
Hmm. So the company technically continues existing, but then Rima Evenstar, the news tupper I'm using as my primary source for this specific story, releases a video and that kicks off all hornets nests because she's covering what's happened to date.
01:49:50
Speaker
And formal talent finally starts speaking up. Virgil, one of the three talents, resurfaces under a new name, Moggy, and calls out Jira for being an egomaniacal rich kid and a sex pest, who, importantly, relied on extortion and what they'll i and what I'm calling mafia-style threats to coerce talent into doing whatever he wanted.
01:50:10
Speaker
Because what he'd say is, my rich uncle has connections and he's going to get you. And he was so out of control with threatening, coercing his talent and losing money and acting like the biggest asshole in the world.
01:50:22
Speaker
His rich uncle stopped bankrolling him. And then finally, yes. Wow. And Nepo baby faced consequences. Yes. man And I know. And Elaine, who at this point is not a, is seen as somebody who is, because it's, are you pro Jira or anti Jira? That's the way the fans frame everything. Right. Are you on the side of the devil or are you virtual? You know, people always do dichotomies.
01:50:46
Speaker
Elaine, who is seen as a pro-Jira pariah and traitor, speaks up. She shares that after being hired, Jira heavily romantically pursued her, using her physical and mental vulnerability and eventually pushed her into relationship by ingratiating himself such that her entire life was dependent on him.
01:51:06
Speaker
So, and again, this is somebody who has escalating diabetes, schizoaffective disorder, and a very difficult job that doesn't that doesn't help with mental health.
01:51:17
Speaker
He then forced her to use birth control because he doesn't like condoms, which she was not supposed to continue because they worsened her mental health and her diabetes. The birth control thus caused her to get diabetes type 2 and destroyed her mental health severely.
01:51:32
Speaker
She had a stroke during all of this. Oh my God. She clarifies she never actually lived with Jira, even though there was that relationship. There were images from like a third location they use for streaming.
01:51:43
Speaker
So here's a final quote from her.
Hope for Industry Improvement
01:51:46
Speaker
God knows the amount of breakdowns, attempts to take my life and heavily medicating myself with painkillers alongside the medications for my brain just to numb myself so I can keep going and stream.
01:51:56
Speaker
I never wanted to be in such a disgusting state again. I wanted to leave and I wanted to rest. I never should have agreed to the relationship the CEO put me in. This should have never happened. It cost me my health, my life, my friends, and my will to continue to do what I love.
01:52:10
Speaker
I would like to apologize to the former co-meta and joyous for hurting you with the choices I've made in the past. You were part of my journey as Elaine, and i'm still happy I was given the chance to meet you. If you would like to still give me a chance, please find me.
01:52:22
Speaker
To my gen mates, I never meant to hurt you. I know you already know this, but please know I didn't know the whole story. Once I was told, I'm very sorry. Kometa, thankfully, completely collapses. And Jira tries to defend himself, but goes to ground. His dreams of being an internet celebrity destroyed.
01:52:40
Speaker
And not a post on his Twitter account in quite a while. Well, good. So, that finally- This a happy ending, kind of. You know what? I mean, God is just dessert. So I have a million more stories about black corporations I could tell.
01:52:56
Speaker
These VTuber agencies that find vulnerable young women, promise them everything, and destroy it all in a fit of hubris and idiotic business decisions. However, I wanted to split this podcast into two parts because none of these stories are the ones I wanted to tell in the first place.
01:53:14
Speaker
Really? Because when you see a giant soulless corporation like Hololive and its evil twin in Nijisanji and then exploitative startups everywhere, there's a gap in the industry.
01:53:27
Speaker
And into that gap is going to enter a nice guy. Really? A real nice guy? Or an internet nice guy? Why don't I trust this nice guy? Next episode, we're going to discuss the VTuber agency V Shoujo and its great promise of talent freedom.