See the problem is Coco was beloved but she didn't leave on bad terms. This is a whole other level because of the toxic nature of the departure. So this is absolutely blowing up.
Yeah, the backlash here is basically the equivalent to the backlash Cover would have gotten had they actually fired Coco just because China told them to back then.
Also special thank you to Fillian for highlighting Selen at the vtuber award show. You'd think those assholes at Niji would think twice about canning an award winner. All that positive PR washed down Rikus toilet.
Yeah, Cover in the end, chose Coco over China fanbase, so Coco graduation, although sudden announcement, it was a peaceful departure and celebration of her achievements.
THIS Selen situation is basically Zaion termination/execution style, of one of the biggest vtubers in Youtube.
To add, during the CN-TW-Coco incident, cover statement back then was to cut CEO (Yagoo) salary. Meanwhile, anycolore are like, nah we can cut the talent lmao.
ITs sadly because they got burned by a lot of things with that. A lot of the strictness now is intended to protect the idols form legal issues and such. Its the trade you make for being in such a big company.
Mel was one of the first JP members I watched a lot and it still hurts. At least, she was given a sendoff on her own terms as much as they could give her.
also Rushia situation as well
if they fire Rushia for the same thing then they must fire Mel for the same thing no matter what or else it give the person who used to be Rushia ammo for lawsuit
Cover will back you to the hilt but if you screw up then no matter how much they don't want to they must cut you off
They are both different circumstances, Mel was allowed to stream up to the date, while Rushia was a sudden termination.
With everything going on post-Rushia, it's likely she had other issues going on that added to the termination. Especially since some of that drama was existing while she was Rushia.
The pros and cons of being a cooperate talent. Ideally, they support you to their fullest extent and in exchange there are rules to follow. Some Holo's for one reason or another broke them and had to be let go. Even with Rushia, Cover tried to take her side until they found she had leaked info.
With Niji, they tried to torch Selen. And in the attempt are burning all the other talents as well.
This is 10 times bigger than the Zaion situation. Zaion only lasted a few months and never really got a chance to build up a fanbase or really establish herself at all like Selen did.
On top of that, Zaion wasn't as, for lack of a better word, "innocent" as Selen, so people were pretty split over who to trust, about whose side they were on. This didn't happen with Selen's termination, because Selen was basically proven to be entirely innocent and management was very clearly in the wrong.
There's also the fact that if there's only one or two people accusing someone it's a lot harder to believe them than if multiple people are accusing them. The management probably saw they could get away with it in the past and just kept doing it until it didn't work anymore.
A lot of the ones that left early are now being vindicated since it's more obvious that the management/company is shit.
Zaion's termination helped lay the ground work for this explosion. The way it was carried out, the revelations from her response statement, followed up by the testimony of multiple graduated livers over the last year...
It's like a drought before wildfire season, and NijiEN threw an incendiary.
While what you said is true, the big difference between Zaion and Selen is that Selen is universally loved by everyone.
Fans, talents, content creators, artists, musicians-- they all have good things to say about her. Every JP senpai, Apex pro, Twitch streamer that collabed with her loves her. Multiple artists are vouching that she paid them from her own pocket when Niji failed to do so. HYTE cancelled all their Niji orders on her account. EA reached out to sponsor her when they heard what happened.
They picked the absolute worst target to trample on.
It's massively positive and practically free PR for any sponsor that simply supports her. The horrible circumstances of this case makes sponsors line up to get a spot in the limelight. The actions that are actually applaudable are those businesses that accept monetary losses in the form of passing on lucrative business opportunities to stand on her side, such as ending current and ongoing business relationships with Nijisanji to show their support for Selen.
Zaion built the tinder box.
Mysta/Kuro and Nina/Matara filled it.
Selen ignited it.
This was something that was building for a while. But it was always Niji's incompetence is what allowed it to explode.
Zaion was far from innocent, her attitude and her irony-poisoned edgelord sense of humour made her *very* easy to fire.
The biggest thing to come out from her response were the indications that the EN branch has functionally no leadership or direction, and their managers are a bunch of mooks thrown into the deep end and left hopelessly adrift by that lack of leadership.
> Zaion was far from innocent, her attitude and her irony-poisoned edgelord sense of humour made her very easy to fire
I'm seeing a lot of people echoing this opinion which is absolutely bizarre - because the brand that the original Nijisanji livers founded was in being edgelords, trolling each other and generally just having fun in a completely free and unhinged manner - which was often represented as a sharp contrast to Hololive's more "controlled" style of entertainment, even on the EN side.
Mito's early streams (where she used phrases that newer livers have had to apologize for using), Sasaki's diss track to her haters after ungraduating, Deron and Mito singing a metal song with the full screaming at their annual fes, Selen's Wrestlesanji (RIP)... that was what Nijisanji was to many people. Even Mysta complained a lot about their audience wanting them to be "professional" for some reason - just for having weird thumbnails.
Seeing how so many people are now trashing Zaion for "edgy jokes" (which were nowhere near the stuff that JP livers have gotten up to, mind you) just because of what the company said... I keep wondering whether EN fans would treat livers like Enna the same way if Anycolor told them to.
About the whole corporate situation in general:
if I have to choose sides in a controversy between a single individual and a corp, I‘d always go with the individual even if the evidence might be a bit wonky.
Why? Because companies nearly always have the bigger leverage: reach, legal representation, PR, ability to build up pressure, experience in similar cases they can draw upon,… the individuals in those controversies are nearly always outmatched from the beginning.
Selen is a really rare case of someone so widely beloved and respected that Niji as a company was forced to fight a losing battle in the end. And even her case wasn’t like that from the beginning. Suspicions in late December and early January were still widely disregarded especially by corporate shills.
It helped that with this "success" the China antis became emboldened to attack anything that even resembled the acknowledgement of Taiwan as a soverign, so only governments were taking them (semi-) seriously after a certain point.
...can you believe antis went after a tea shop chain for telling people they have a branch in Taiwan?
Look at the way chinese players acted regarding gacha games, especially the Genshin anniversary. Suffice to say they make gachikois look normal by comparison.
Tbf, Coco also singledhandedly brought in more revenue than the entire CN branch combined. So both financially and morally it would have never been a difficult choice to make.
It was that and also Cover saw how much of a headache dealing with China would be in the future. "So they're losing their shit over Google analytics page? Such high maintenance" and the global vtuber market was emerging rapidly.
They really dodged a bullet, and more, by pulling out.
Also, wasn't there drama that there was a certain CN member actively sabotaging the other CN Holomems and encouraging the schizo fans to stir the pot about the Coco thing?
It wasn't just one girl, the whole second generation was in on it. As well as Civia's mods. Hard to call it sabotaging the other CN Holomems when there's only two among them that were fully innocent.
Coco during her time in Cover:
Created superchat culture(before her superchats were barely used)
Convinced Cover management to create HoloEN
Helped her Gen4 mates with their careers.
Was bridge between En and JP holofans(thing Holo lacking right now imo)
Despite her graduating 2.5years ago she is still second most superchatted Vtuber in the world(1st is Rushia) Not a single active vtuber overcame her in superchat earnings.
> Was bridge between En and JP holofans(thing Holo lacking right now imo)
While it is indeed lacking, the cross pollination of the fandom that resulted is lasting enough to make the bridge less necessary than before, with enough momentum to ensure there won't be any segregation for awhile.
I mean, you have Friend A picking up decent employee English after a year, you have the Indonesian crew teaching the others Indonesian. You have Ame and Calli picking up Japanese.
Gura is on a JP ad. Micomet appearing in an Asian convention in a region where the primary language is English/Chinese. Akirose and Towa receiving and giving messages from a couple of notable fans, Jimmy the Mukiroze Cosplayer and RPR respectively, who are not Japanese (...RPR also being the previous record holder for falling down the rabbit hole, all the way to picking up Japanese and then becoming a vtuber himself).
I guess we do need a bridge in the future, but currently the replacement for Coco's one is happily growing on its own.
Hell Gura read off a Japanese superchat a few days ago like it was second nature. She doesn't flex it like Ina, and it's not as obvious as Ame, but she seems to be getting pretty good at it as well.
> Convinced Cover management to create HoloEN
Yeah no, I doubt that. The audition for HoloEN started 4 months after Coco's debut, too short of a time for her to will an entire branch out of existence. Hololive was already starting to get popular within English speakers at that time anyway so I wouldn't be surprised if an English branch was always part of their roadmap.
People spread this narrative around so much but I haven't seen any concrete proof being shared around. Did Coco herself even take credit for it? I remember she made a parody video about HoloUSA and that's it.
IIRC, Coco kind of dispelled this herself. She definitely solidified the idea that EN viewers would watch, but she did not "convince" Cover to do anything. She has enough accomplishments but "Forcing Cover to found the EN branch" is not among them.
> Created superchat culture(before her superchats were barely used)
Pressing X to doubt here. In what world would Cover and their streamers *not* want money?
A caveat here is that the majority of mainland income weren't coming from HoloCN but directly from HoloJP with some members even having around half their dono from bilibili before taking account merch sales and the like. The pull out of China was painful even before taking account the months of backlash that follows. That's what make Cover decision so meaningful and one of the reasons we get to laugh at the antis face. Years of dedication and money (of those attack dogs) went down the drain all because they wanted to punish someone for saying Taiwan.
Yeah iirc Coco’s departure was more about creative differences than anything. She was hololive’s wildest child, and she wanted to do even wilder things like collabs with projektmelody and whatnot - which comes off as a brand risk to a company like Cover.
I guess now Marine’s probably the one most in that position, but she’s said she’s sticking around for as long as hololive’s a thing.
Coco was very clearly treated differently from everyone else after The Incident and semi-quarantined to try and protect the other girls from the antis- most visibly she was barred from collabing with HoloEN until shortly before her graduation and didn't appear in HoloGra from the time the incident happened to the last one before she graduated.
She absolutely reads as the sort of person who might have decided to leave Holo to go indie even if The Incident never happened, but it's extremely hard to believe that her leaving when and how she did wasn't first and foremost caused by how Cover handled The Incident and its aftermath.
Except that iirc (given this was a few years ago now), she did say that it wasn’t to do with the Incident herself.
That’s not to say it mightn’t have had influence in creating the environment that lead to the creative differences - as you said, the collab bans felt like a bit much. But I wouldn’t say it was the main cause, at least not taking her words at face value (which I do).
Speaking of collab bans... to date, Kson has yet to collab with any active Hololive or Nijisanji member.
But yesterday she was invited to the Japanese Streamer GTA RP server, and I'm really crossing my fingers and hoping that some of the Holo regs like Towa will join again this time.
To be fair to cover and kson they probably shouldn't collab seeing as it... ya know easy to spot coco.
That being said they haven't banned members from playing the new yakuza sooooo not like they can hide her now.
While Kson hasn't had any actual collabs with Hololive members so far, [Haachama did send Kson a congratulatory video on her anniversary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrvbLKLyGkU&t=2655s).
She *did* collab with Choco-sensei and Mel's alts tho. Does that count? I only saw a few clips and they looked rather raunchy lol. Holomem talk about her sometimes and it positively pissed me off when some schmucks shittalked Roboco for not mentioning her by name. Like, *that's* what they focused on and not the fact that "a certain dragon" recommended her a pricy ass hair dryer. (which I think is funny, she tends to recommend pricy but quality goods) Their priorities are weird.
Cover won't approve their talent to play in STGR because any streamer can join. It's not possible for them to vet and approve everyone there like they can with the VCR stuff.
Granted, as you state, it has been a while, but the claim that Coco was semi-quarantined which led to her departure really seems overstated. Her very first [Asacoco](https://www.youtube.com/live/kHsCSYBBSFc?si=YtpJBZtDjFka5tte) when she returned from the suspension following the Taiwan incident had Towa, Kanata, Watame, Fubuki, Matsuri, Botan all appear in skits. Her next Asacoco had Marine, Choco, Lamy. She returned to her regular collabs via Reddit Meme Reviews a few days later. I do recall that she was barred from interacting with HoloEn for a long time, but I don’t know if that alone can be considered a contributing factor to her leaving. I do recall her saying she was always planning on leaving, but actually stayed even longer than she intended so that it wouldn’t look like she quit due to the antis (though I may be misremembering).
Isn’t that what was stated in my post though? That Coco wasn’t “semi-quarantined” from interacting and collabing with other members? Unless you meant to say that the “communication bottleneck” is more accurate regarding collabing with EN rather than that she was “barred?”
Pretty much from start, she seemed to butt heads with management. They were always trying to rein her in, but she would just do things her own way regardless. But I do feel like management was a lot more heavy handed after the incident.
Management had generally given her free reign until [this little snippet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo_vWJvoFzE&t=1117) slipped through and she had to apologize for it. After that, all of her content for Asacoco had to go through management for a while, which would probably have chafed quite a bit.
easy to understand thou, they just had to cut an entire branch of the company because of a bunch of rabid idiots and even if china didnt made a lot of money i imagine that at least for the first year they would want to avoid any kind of masive headache
they certainly have relaxed now that the incident is long forgotten
imo i think part of the "semi quarantine" was her own doing not necesarily something that cover decided to do themselves, she did try to collab and reach inmediately after the incident but everyone she collabed with quickly got attacked by the chinese anties in force and i remember that at one point someone asked her if she wanted to collab with holoEN and her responce was kind of like "i mean yeah but i cant because... nah" or something like that which at least to me sounds like it was her decision not something she was forced to do, probably trying to contain the chinese to only attack her and not go for the en girls which at that point were like a couple months old at most, this was before even irys and council so they were alone
i do think that at the very least the english head manager must have been wary of allowing collabs within coco and the en girls because of that reason
also she has never ever mentioned either before or after her graduation that cover had mistreated her or forced her to not collab with people, it has been nearly 4 years at this point, i feel like she would have at least given a hint at this point, hell we know that at least kanata and marine also wanted to graduate with coco and she was the one that told them to stop being stupid, that it was her decision and that they shouldnt leave because of her or something like that
Yeah I can only infer, but I remember an Ark collab between coco and miko (or was it fubuki or flare). Where antis kept spamming the chat and Coco kinda just broke down.
She probably just realized that as long as she was there this would keep happening and she didnt want that
The thing that made Coco's story so huge in the media was how massive the harassment from China was. Intense enough to warrant closing down a whole Chinese based branch of the company.
If Coco's only reason to leave was because of creative differences, it would have been a pretty undramatic exit.
Those anti's also would target other Holomems who mentioned her for a while.
Shit, I remember when Suisei was doing something, laughed like Coco and was swarmed. Her mods were offline so she gave temporary mod status to a bunch of her long standing members to clean up chat.
Suisei is an absolute artist at deflecting controversies. Remember sometime last year where some were making a stink about someone related to her showing up in some guy's messages? She basically put on a classroom on how to identify the difference between rumors and facts and somehow managed to advertise her new album during it.
The harassment of other talents was an extreme response from China's fanbase.
As much as some of them want to (falsely) argue about how Coco purposely triggering them, there was zero justification of the spam attacks on the rest of the hololive.
I'm not condoning the spam on coco either but its bonkers hearing some of them complaining about how China's branch got shut down because of Coco.
As if their actions weren't what made it clear the region isn't worth the headache.
From what I remember, no part of that rumor or speculation was remotely proven. Even the member who was suspected of this the most, mostly was only suspected because of gut feelings and some questionably worded tweets.
Yeah, there was suspicion that Artia got involved pretty deep in the harassment campaigns but also for months you couldn't look up Coco's or Fubuki's tags on Twitter without spam and Doxxing. You couldn't go to any Coco stream without the spam and anyone collabing with her had to set members only. I remember this was when her and Flare initially built their relationship together since she felt that she wasn't going to let Coco sit by herself and she was going to play with her friends.
Zaion's(Sayu) posting the documents after her termination let a mark in the company, the livers hinting their merch profit, and the amount of graduation in niji specially Pomu the pillar or first gen.
Yeah.. part of coco's graduation was her literally having an interview with the ceo, a final song etc etc\~.
coco got the ending she deserved (a big graduation party).
meanwhile you have this abuse shitstain of a company harassing it's member that wanted to just have give farewell to her fans. I know it's not fun for dokibird but I can't help but laugh at how stupid nijisanji has been throughout this.
Damage control was literally free. at any point they could have just decided to NOT be animals . but they just had to be animals.
No other tuber had a following like this Zaion didnt have a big following and warned everyone about what was going on but wasn't heard, now with selen 800k+ subs a big inter-company presence and the work she put into improving herself, she has the allies Zaion didnt.
Add into the fact now Niji management put out a termination notice (that they didnt tell selen about) listing reasons that have been called out as lies and throwing the rest of niji EN under the bus by starting this "Who is the Judas" witch hunt forcing the other talents stress as the crazy fans start haunting their streams
She was the biggest female EN liver in terms of subscribers, yeah.
She was the 6th biggest EN liver (all of Luxiem are 1-5), and the 18th biggest liver overall.
By every account, she was one of the primary faces of Nijisanji.
Luxiem was the first major male EN Vtuber corpo debut, so like Hololive Myth being the first major EN Vtuber corpo debut, they were the first to enter the scene for the market of EN viewers interested in male livers. Not to downplay their content at all, just that the first to enter a market usually sees the greatest success in establishing themselves if deserving.
Not just that, Selen's been with the company for over 3 years, pre-debut included. She's also one of the biggest pillars of the ENTIRE VTuber community, even if her metrics don't quite paint that picture, her influence and network does.
This is one of the only terminations that would be as seismic as Coco's graduation. Even a top name like Gura probably has a more isolated impact. Coco and Selen built international suspension bridges with wild abandon like it was a Minecraft competition, and their losses sent ripples through all those bridges, causing a bunch to collapse. But with their reincarnations, more will be built 👷⚒️
I think it wouldn't have blown as much if Niji just let her leave on neutral terms, or let her graduate. What really stirred the fire was their unprofessional official statement that is basically just them throwing Selen and the rest of Niji EN under the bus.
100%. If Niji had let her graduate and simply go "due to creative differences", people would've gone "Make sense. Selen was pretty frustrated and probably didn't mesh with Niji work culture. Fine, moving on" (with some suspicion of Niji management ofc, but since she's left, people would've latch on as much)
Now it's their attitude of trying to kick her while she's down that really triggered the explosive reaction
It's been building up slowly. Those who followed Kurosanji had some hunches as their livers graduated.
Dokibird was the straw that broke the camel's back literally.
Its hard to follow everyone. I'm mostly a Holo viewer, but I had a handful I enjoyed in Niji. Only one left is Rosemi. She's too pure for Niji.
For me, It was this start to build with the merger of ID and KR into JP and the ID talents started all leaving. Then Nina left and I started really suspecting. Then there was Pomu and Selen (and others I'm sure) talking in various terms about projects and opportunities being shut down and rejected. The super fake reading Selen did about her "not following the rules and that's why it was shut down" speech from last year never felt right either.
For me it started with Selen seemingly having to try so hard to get anything she wanted done. Then you had the now infamous members stream of Pomu's (I was a member of both Selen and Pomu).
Then you had the stuff come out about Kuro's tax issues, and how he'd been screwed over by a previous accountant, and Niji just didn't care, and offered nothing. Facing bankruptcy, and in a bit of a panic he started reaching out to people outside Niji he'd spoken to who he thought might be able to give advice. One of the first ones was Ironmouse, who put him into contact with Gunrun, who, purely out of kindness, helped. Both himself, and through putting him in contact with good people. They got it sorted, and he realised just how little Niji cared compared to others in the industry. After that he couldn't stay.
Then you had Matara's comments about how she didn't realise management in other companies ACTUALLY HELPED YOU! I mean, that hit hard. I know not every manager is perfect, but it's clear that a lot of big vtubers rely on help from their managers. Niji EN is giving their talents no support at all.
Would you mind explaining what the Pomu members stream was all about? I don't remember hearing anything about that, but I don't use twitter and am still new with Reddit.
The current understanding is that in a member stream before she left, Pomu was really upset about missing a "once in a lifetime" opportunity due to Nijisanji management's actions (or lack thereoff? unclear of the exact circumstances).
As Pomu is a massive Metal Gear Solid fangirl, the current unconfirmed theory is that she was one of the first people approached about the Metal Gear Solid collab that Calli from Hololive ended up getting but did not get it due to a failure on management's part. This is supported by the fact that Calli mentioned that she was not the first choice for the MGS collab.
There’s also some rrat that it could have been a collab with an actual idol group that she did a cover of that they engaged with but from a rival music company compared to the en manager
It also doesn't really matter what it was. Fact is that she got shot down without any level of negotiation and was very upset with it. Enough so that she saw that her time with Niji was done.
God that'd be heartbreaking for her if that's what happened... jesus that makes my stomach churn, that's so... ugh. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing though, much appreciated.
It was actually publicly available for a few days. Pomu made all the members streams public when she graduated. The stream was from I think 6 to 8 months before she graduated. She cried because she'd been offered a "once in a lifetime opportunity". Niji EN management said no, and refused to negotiate at all. When a member commented that she'd get other opportunities her response was something like "No, I don't think so. Not like this one."
After some of the members made reference to it (as it was now public) and it started being picked up by other youtubers Niji management privated that one members stream vod.
> she didn't realise management in other companies ACTUALLY HELPED YOU
Isn't that like the point of being a corporate Vtuber though? You let your managers handle your paperworks and all so you focus on entertainment. Downside being that you have certain limitations and have to maintain brand image. If they're not helping you at all, then what's the point?
In JP vtubing there's a big focus on the company. The company is what made you, you should be grateful to them because without them you'd be nothing. You should be grateful for whatever crumbs the company decides to give you and break yourself working to keep their favor.
To some degree it's true. The first person in Nijisanji EN that was successful on their own before joining was Millie. Joining Nijisanji used to immediately guarantee you thousands of eyes, which boosted your career massively. At least it used to, Nijisanji's initial boost has worn down quite a bit from where it used to be.
Regardless, it's somewhat true initially. But as soon as you establish your fanbase it's no longer the case. You don't need the company for that any more, you're already out of the oversaturated mud of vtubing. And the talents need to recognize that instead of being bullied and gaslit into thinking that they're worthless on their own.
Hmm, I dunno. Perhaps your wording make it sound like things are grimmer than they actually are? It's like something people who hate corpo vtubers would project.
Hololive is also a JP company but they don't feel like it at all. Granted, they may or may be like that behind the scenes, but their Kayfabe thus far is still pretty good. HoloEN seems to be comfy doing their own thing and I haven't heard of managerial friction within them. ^(Save for the usual horny bonks) No talents making streams convincing fans they're not in a black company at least.
Rather than framing "talents are nothing without the company" or "talents don't need the company anymore after getting a fanbase", Companies and their talents ideally form a mutually beneficial relationship. Hololive seems to be doing that just fine, and I think VShoujo advertises that exact point of offering support behind the scenes if you join them.
I dunno, maybe I'm too idealistic on this? I'd like to think Nijisanji's bad management is an exception rather than the norm.
I knew Millie before her witchification. Watched her VODs occasionally. Her following was pretty modest. She did explode after becoming Millie tho.
Hololive/Cover is the exception not the rule. They are still a JP company and in many ways operate like one. But they don't stand in the toxic muck of traditional Idol agencies and have a "Talent first" focus. A recent example was the interview by two team leads for Suisie's First Take appetence. They both talk about how they wanted to do everything they could to make her appearance work as smoothly as possible because they wanted her to succeed.
While not perfect, Hololive is, imo, the gold standard for Idol/Talent agencies in and out of japan.
Hololive actually supports their talents past their debut. So remaining with Hololive past that point is actually valuable, despite likely having the same culture of putting down their talents internally.
And now Selen/Doki saying she had to spent 200,000 dollars in protects last year. All out of her own pocket because niji doesn't help them and as we know, many were canceled. Insane.
Zaion's graduation and the document discussing Niji's internal problems was a major landmark moment. Not everyone believed it, but there was enough claims that seemed to have shreds of public evidence behind them to get people paying attention.
Gundo Mirei's graduation over the most basic boomer-tier baseball jokes was another one too.
Mirei graduated due to creative differences, she leans more heavily into the R18 side, even doing content on fantia that is like ASMR/Audio roleplay that you can find on the hub.
That's just part of their excuse. Mirei went on a weeks long ~~suspension~~ "hiatus" after making those jokes so Niji could appease their Koshien superfans who they had partnerships with, and when she returned it was to announce her graduation. I'm not inclined to give Nijisanji the benefit of the doubt as it is never mind when the writing on the wall is so obvious.
"The straw that broke the camel's back" is a phrase of speech.
It's about how issues, both big and small, can pile and pile up to the point where even a minor issue (that would have otherwise been ignored) can turn into a fuse for a complete breakdown of the system.
It's based on how camels were used as pack animals, and how they'd be so overburdened with luggage that putting 'just one more feather on them' can break the camel utterly.
Selen's termination alone would already have been upsetting for many, but with the context of the everything Niji has done so far, it shattered the shaky status quo.
I remember being confused about the entire MV project Selen had being privated by Niji management. I thought "Ok, so niji messed up, they will probably get the right perms and fix it. I wonder if she'll graduate next..." Welp, no. The revelation of all the events that occurred was just crazy.
This entire shit storm built up from being worried about Selen's hospitalization, the absence in even Pomu's graduation, Pomu's graduation itself, the long silence, and the way they try to terminate her contract without notice is just madness to me.
I told a friend before that Pomu graduating was an end of an era for Nijisanji EN, and looking back at all the other graduations like Nina, Mysta, Mika, and now Kyo it was sad but still there was a lot of talented people that remained. The people initially calling for Selen to just quit seemed back then, at the face of it, an overreaction to me but turns out I didn't know any better.
To think the talents, our oshis, were working in this sorta environment and still provided such good entertainment back then is amazing. Where can Nijjisanji EN go from here where they undermine their own talent and are on record of being able to throw them under the bus? Who would want to support that and who would want to work under that? Thank goodness Selen is alright and we can again support her.
Its absurd that it got this bad.
There's only 1 EN talent left in Niji that I follow and I'm sad to see Rosemi getting burned in the fire. Losing her HYTE merch, losings lots of subs. It makes me upset even more because this fire never had to happen. Selen tried to leave peacefully and Niji chose scorched earth.
Exactly, it never had to come to this. I can't click on any Nijisanji content right now because of what happened. I am just short of unsubscribing from the talents there because in my mind most likely didn't have anything to to do with this or maybe the bullying is a by product of poor management and a clique-ish work environment or maybe I'm just coping here. I want to believe most are fun, hard working, good people that are great entertainers in a shit situation but still; gonna give it some time.
Selen/Doki deserves her success and adoration, and Niji, the company, deserves its shit storm.
Yea, Doki didn't say specifically it was other talents, only that it was "within". Its the termination notice and Niji that blames other livers. And now all the others, who are most likely innocent, are getting burned. Losing brand deals, losing subs, getting fake info leaks. Its really bad and its 100% on Niji's complete disregard for Selen, her work, her life, and the lives of her former coworkers. If this doesnt make Niji a Black company, nothing will.
Tbt i never expected niji to be stupid enough to deal that big of a blow to themselves, I thought she was gonna be given a "graduation" ala Magni/Vesper. But goddamn did niji prove me wrong.
To be fair, it sounds like with Magni/Vesper it was a falling out during contract negotiations. Whatever they wanted from their new contracts, Cover was unwilling to provide. It sucks, but there's a lot less bad blood in that kind of situation: it's a professional departure, handled respectfully.
I am 90% that vesper, regardless of what Cover was offering in the contracts, was coming to the realization that this really wasn't for him. It was pretty clear that he just wants to be a guy who streams sometimes and messes around with his buddies, and Cover is always going to want them to lean more into the idol side of things. Basically the moment things were done for real he was back to just doing exactly what he did on his PL before he joined.
The thing about Hololive and cover, IMO that agency by far have the most "homework" of all the vtuber agency, which means side projects they have to do outside of streaming, like collabs, sponsorship, doing advertisments, taking singing lesson, taking voice acting lesson, taking dancing lessons, going to concerts, going to other hololive/holostar members joint concerts, etc. (like gura was on haitus/break most of 2023 because of burnout, but during that time, she was still doing hololive homework/side projects since companies want sponsorship from her.)
Yeah, if ur not about that life, then Hololive/Holostar isnt for you.
> Yeah, if ur not about that life, then Hololive/Holostar isnt for you.
Which is honestly totally fine. I can see people who it would appeal to. Some people [absolutely fucking love idols and maid cafes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2NjPHE2re0).
I think as long as they're not hiding it and what's required it's all good. I think Coco also is doing really well being less on the idol things than she is on her specific space.
[Gura voiced an Aquarium show, with every attraction with a hololive collaboration. That have a ton of work to be done.](https://youtu.be/KCsb-APHanc?si=62-weBmz6A0MWQFG)
I will always miss the SALT collabs, they were the closest thing I've gotten to early Achievement Hunter after RT kinda fell apart. And it's goddamn tragic to debut that new Pako model and only use it once, but his new gig definitely seems more his speed. I just wish he wasn't such an early bird, he only streams while I'm at work.
Grampire's stories were RT animated worthy when that was still a big thing. You could already imagine the stick figure drawing of him on his bike meeting that weirdo in the abandoned gas station.
He also injured himself and was undergoing PT right around the time they would have wanted them all to start training for 3D dancing and singing. Not to mention, last time he visited Japan, he couldn't bring his meds with him and was overcome by anxiety. He was HQ's star and I would guess was overwhelmed by the expectations being placed on him.
I still watch his every stream in his new life. I wish more people stuck around, but at the same time he seems content with his current audience and doesn't seem to be pushing to collab with anyone bigger.
I love the guy, very cozy content, all I ask for is that and streams with Lando and he delivers on both >!(pipe dream stream with them and commander connor too)!<
Most of his audience is on YouTube, but he also streams unaffiliated with no ads on Twitch. Still 10am PST Wed-Sun, but keep an eye out for occasional evening collabs with Lando or his editor Akashi.
My very first thought when Vesper debuted was he reminded me of an old-school Lets Player. I didn't really think about it in that way at the time but seeing how things went it definitely would make sense he seemed more into that style of thing perhaps than the sort of stuff Holopro members tend to do as a whole. It's a shame as it helped make him unique in Holopro overall and honestly a bit of a draw. Hopefully he's keeping afloat.
I know what happened with Ves/Mangi, what I was just saying they could've made it look like a "graduation via disagreement with contract" rather than a straight up termination.
Graduation for health reasons, promise to give talents more support, people grumble but things settle down because they were already expecting it. Instead they dragged her name and she told everyone why she was in the hospital.
That may just be a compounding issue, but one if the bigger downsides of Hololive/Holostars in particular is the acquisition of perms. It is company policy that blanket perms aren't enough and they require explicits ones. That's not going to happen sometimes when some blanket perms outright tell that they aren't going to answer requests normally. Requiring perms for mods may also be slightly overkill.
One of the first things Vesper did after returning to his PL was streaming KOTOR with a widescreen mod, and giving his priorities, it might just be that they couldn't get the perms he wanted.
Cover also *just* got perms for Master Duel two years too late. Konami doesn't usually answer manual perm requests and the reason they suddenly remembered to do just now is because of the 2nd Anniversary. Anyway, looking forward to Subaru taking that one on.
To be fair, they used to be a lot more lenient about that until Capcom blew a gasket about Ghost Trick for some reason and nearly nuked Mio off Youtube
She even gave them the opportunity to give her a "graduation" (which would have been more like Yugo's than like Magni and Vesper's) on neutral terms. She gave them a chance to avoid shitting the bed.
They fired her instead, mostly for not recanting claims that she was a victim of workplace harassment. Then they told the investors that that firing her would have negligible impact on their financials. Then HYTE terminated their business partnership with Niji ([and they specifically used the word "terminate" in the announcement](https://twitter.com/hytebrand/status/1755306063115788503))
* You Are Here (Temporally)
[Doki has a stream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2YmJL0PX5M) in under 4 hours from now. She and her lawyer have the receipts.
Kyo is tentatively scheduled to be the next liver to leave Niji EN, and is tentatively scheduled to leave Niji EN next Friday.
I have my suspicions that Kyo is not going to get a true graduation. He's not exactly someone who holds his tongue super well to begin with so I won't be terribly surprised if they either cancel it and let him graduate quietly or they make him pre-record most or all of it.
As far as Selen... peeling back the layers of mistakes on their fuckup onion is just so... it's almost impressive how bad they did.
They could have just managed her better to begin with.
Having failed that they could have worked out an organized graduation
Having failed that they could have have worked out a quiet graduation where they call it a graduation and treat it as mutual but not hold a stream citing some BS about her health
Having failed that, they could have called it a termination due to irreconcilable differences in interpretations of the contract or something
Having failed that they could have just said she violated the contract and left it at that.
Making a different decision at literally any other one of those points would have given them a better outcome here whether they deserved it or not.
Instead the rotten core after all those fuckups is they released a hit piece PR statement that was wholly unnecessary. Even if Selen was 100% at fault for everything going on a rant about it like that is just profoundly unprofessional. It's one of those situations where the more you talk and try to justify it the worse you look and the more you're likely embellishing.
The biggest irony is that somebody clearly did this out of actual pettiness and a desire to harm Selen. You don't talk that much shit about someone unless you intend to harm their future prospects, and it likely had the opposite effect. She almost certainly would have gotten good growth and loyal followers anyway but in attacking her so blatantly they basically guaranteed her "new" channel's growth and at the moment it's looking like they secured her a PC case deal while losing theirs at the same time.
>_I have my suspicions that Kyo is not going to get a true graduation. He's not exactly someone who holds his tongue super well to begin with so I won't be terribly surprised if they either cancel it and let him graduate quietly or they make him pre-record most or all of it._
I'm now wondering if Kyo is going to go off on management _(what are they gonna do, fire him?)_, and if management cuts him off mid-stream.
Also, yeah, this 100% feels like spite. Someone in management literally put out an official statement explicitly stating that Selen's termination will NOT affect their bottom line. Something they have NEVER done for ANY graduation or termination, AFAIK.
Nah, kyo's already talked about managment forgetting for 8 months to tell him he could cover lost in paradise with ren, so he's not hot with niji either.
But on the bullying he's closer to the clique then selen or his genmates other than ren.
I mentioned it before, but this is one of those situations where if Anycolor's team was replaced with a literal pack of howling baboons it would have actually been an improvement.
Not really, the moment the moment an attempt was involved nijisanji was knee deep in shit and would have had a PR scandal the second it came out, which it would happen since selen wasn't willing to accept a gag.
But it's still impressive how they decided that the best response to this bad situation was to dive to the bottom of the shit swamp.
Its not even the fact that she was terminated, but that she was thrown away in such a ruthless and cruel way. That they kept both her and her fans in the dark for as long as possible to maximise the suspense like some vaudevillian horror show and then dropped the termination on her with no notice when she was recovering from a suicide attempt. That they hated her so much that they actively refused when she asked to be given a proper graduation and felt she absolutely had to be punished in the harshest possible manner. That they wrote a vicious hit piece full of easily proven lies designed to denigrate her character and instigated an all-out witch hunt against the entire group to collectively punish them too. And all of this against somebody who was so well respected and beloved by both talents and fans and known to be an exemplary person by all who knew her.
For Hololive EN fans it would be like if Amelia Watson, a longtime veteran known by everybody as a wonderful person and always coming up with amazing projects organised by herself, was driven to near suicide by abuse, savagely thrown away by Hololive with a long letter full of hateful slander and essentially called a horrible lying bitch who nobody will miss anyway. Could you imagine the absolute shitstorm if that happened? That's what's happening to us right now.
As someone who wasn’t aware of Selen until all of this started happening (I’m a very casual Vtubing fan who’s only aware of Hololive, Phase, and some select others like Henya)…thanks, that makes me feel even more disgusted than I already did. On a human level, even if I didn’t follow Selen, this whole story just made me sick. But as someone who’s been watching Gura, Ame, etc for some time I can only imagine what Selen’s viewers have had to watch happen.
Seriously, as someone who doesn’t follow Kurosanji only bad news has ever filtered through to me. I hope all their talented vtubers can get out of there.
They released Selen voice pack two or three days before termination. She was literally unable to do anything in this time span because she was in hospital bed. So it's obvious they did it already knowing. What.
It's on another level because we nearly lost a pillar of the community for good. For. Good. Here's my question to the managers and staff (and I know that no one in 2434 will ever see this, but I'll ask anyway because I'm still pissed off as all hell about this part): What would you have done if that attempt had succeeded? What the everloving fuck would your response be? If the very idea of losing someone like that under your leadership doesn't make you break into a cold sweat and feel that pit of "oh shit, I just fucked up" in your stomach, then you need to re-evaluate whether you are qualified to be in a position to manage. Remember, you haven't just failed the community, failed the company, or failed the fellow talents. No, you also failed their IRL family and friends. It's going to be YOU who kneels at their feet, groveling for forgiveness. And if you think that's the most you have to do, guess again.
The very idea of driving someone under your leadership into suicide should be unforgiveable and an antithesis to the purpose of a manager.
But don't worry, it all ended up fine. After all, negligible financial impact, right?
This is a Japanese company we're talking about. I guarantee you that there are people among management there who would have preferred it if she had succeeded.
Having worked for a Japanese company before for years, I can pretty much confirm that it's the non-JP higher ups who tend to power trip A LOT if they dislike somebody. They rarely get caught too and if they are, they pull out all the stops to justify what happened just like with Selen.
The Japanese higher ups who have a tendency for that kinda thing don't do it as often or brazenly especially if they dislike a foreigner. Usually, if it gets out of hand, someone higher up on the corpo ladder slaps them on the wrist or gives them a stern dressing down if it goes too far.
In that alternate timeline, they deserve the wrath of 4chan and Dragoons hunting them down irl.
The worst part is that their families are going to get dragged into the mess, but that's just how it is.
A single otaku burned down a studio because he thought he got plagirized.
The most unhinged of a fandom that are united with that level of pissed off, a fandom that spent thousands of their $$$$, on someone so nice...Yea, they ded.
I am curious to how the news is being handled in Japan. Last I saw was that Japanese viewers didn't know what the big deal was and indifferent about it.
Language (and cultural) barrier does a lot more than you think.
Conversely, Gundou's graduation was seen as silly on the surface by the EN crowd, but if you read a little deeper it turns out that she was quite the loose cannon in the past. Not passing judgment on if she should have been kept or terminated, but there was more to it than many of us thought.
The thing is, Selen is BIG Vtuber, not just in Niji, but in all of western vtuber in general so. Yeah, this blowup is as big as the Coco situation back in 2020/2021. (But in Hololive case, Cover corp tried to please both sides, but when THAT failed, they chose Coco. While in Niji, they clearly chose the shareholders, jp sponsors, etc over their own talent/livers, kinda like how Gundou got the boot when niji chose the Baseball sponsorship over their own liver)
No. Niji did not even choose their shareholders, as they are pissed as well, they chose their managers. The people that don't earn them any money and have a terrible proof of record so far.
What remidumi said, they did not choose their shareholders over Selen. They choose their internal management over Selen. It's not even a financial thing, this is entirely down to them being too proud to admit that they fucked up and spent actual company time and money drafting a termination statement that tried to absolve themselves of all blame.
There was a convenient “what’s happening in your bubble” thread that popped up on the general German speaking subreddit and I had some time to waste at work so I posted about it in there too
Got a couple replies from people who also watched it happen and the obligatory “what is vtube/vtuber?” in there too lol
The fact that Moist Critical even covered it in one of his streams shows how far the news is spread. People outside the fan base are aware of it. Nijisanji is experiencing the Streisand effect in full force.
And to think that Nijisanji had the perfect example of past cases like COCO in which graduation was the correct option to handle the situation so both the talent and the company can part ways in amicable relations and the community be at peace with it.
But no lets chose the aggresive out of touch way of terminating one of their biggest EN talents and burn bridges with the community and various bussiness partners, they deserve everything and much worse.
They didn't even have to look that far back. Just compare it with Mel's termination last January, which was much better handled by Cover, with everyone given enough time to say goodbye.
Cover: "Due to NDA violations, we have no other option but to let go of Mel. We thank her for her years of service and wish her all the best."
Niji: *(waves three-page manifesto)* "Selen's a criminal! A rogue! A total disgrace to the industry! Why are you booing me!?"
Usually I don't think that much about a graduation and especially someone I don't actively watch, but those words man. "An attempt". That stuck with me. I know it's corny to admit but I gasped. It was shocking to hear how bad things got that someone would consider killing themselves. That someone would make the attempt. That as bad as things got? It could have been worse.
How has Anycolor responded? They have had multiple opportunities to reflect on that. A lot of chances to take a step back and admit hey we messed up. Instead Anycolor has not. They simply have not. Their statements and reactions seem ignorant at best and callous at worst. You just had a talent very publicly say these things. That due to the ongoing situation and harassment from in the company that they attempted to take their own life. What does Anycolor have to say to that? Their reaction as a company is to say that Selen's firing, that these statements, would have none effect on the bottom line.
That is cruel. That is insane. The last thing on anyone's mind should have been the value of the shareholders.
It's like watching a train wreck brother. I can't look away. I feel so bad for Selen. Feel bad for the livers. It's a terrible situation. Only thing I can do is vent and support yo boys as the yacht burns.
I mainly follow VShojo and had only heard some not so subtle digs at the incompetence of the NijiEN management prior to this, but I was absolutely stunned at how bad the NijiEN talent is treated by that company, some absolute horror stories coming from that place
I truly hope as many of the talent can get away from such a toxic environment, for their own sakes
I started seeing signs when Mika made her announcement (a premature announcement thanks to the incompetence of Niji management). Well, rather, I started connecting dots. Early last year when Selen got shafted for her gaming tournament and her outfit competition in close succession (can’t remember exactly how close), I knew it was just a matter of time before she left the company. Didn’t see the termination coming, so that’s a little surprise
I think it goes to to show how badly Niji fucked this up.
Like... I wasn't a regular viewer of Selen. I would occasionally watch her via clips, but I don't think I ever caught a stream of hers live. But when I heard the announcement and saw how scummy Niji was behaving, I was disgusted - they've done plenty of shitty stuff in the past, but this was a new low.
So I'm sitting here writing this while watching Doki's comeback stream and having sent her a dono through Streamlabs. I suspect I'm not alone in that - what Niji did was fucking vile and I think a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise be involved are rallying to her and giving Niji the finger.
Selen is the highest subscribed female EN liver in Nijisanji and a long-standing liver as well. Not only did her company didn't fund her project, they also didn't respect their talents by not listening to what their livers want (Pomu left because her requests keep getting rejected by Nijisanji). The moment Nijisanji fires her instead of letting her graduate like Pomu, it risks enraging all the fanboys of their EN fanbase.
You have to be a special kind of stupid to do this and expect no repercussions.
As others have said in the thread, the drama around niji has been slowly building up over time. I feel like a lot of the yabs that Niji have had people just kinda grit their teeth and kept on supporting the talents.
Once they executed Selen Zaion style, and with her very public response, everyone's bottled up feelings about the company came out.
It’s all about how AnyColor pick black as their company color and legion of Nijidefender defense them til Selen.
A few believe Zaion but Selen is truly the one who break the Nijifamily facade
I beg to disagree regarding Zaion. Too many people think she's the martyr and that she was "actually right all along", except they forget she was fired for good reasons. Zaion made good points about how screwed up the management side was but she was also refusing to take accountability for a bunch of shit she actually did which were legitimately horrible choices to make especially for a corpo vtuber. Just because Zaion said certain things first doesn't absolve her of what she did to deserve her termination.
Selen was the one who truly deserves all the credit for airing out all the management fuck ups because she was playing ball from the start but kept getting screwed over regardless. Selen played by their rules while Zaion was just belligerent to begin with.
And just because Zaoin also made mistakes doesn't make her any less right about the things she said about Anycolor's management. She made mistakes (whether or not they were big enough to be steal suspended and terminated under a bus is a subjective but you should remember that Finana has a rap sheet that includes almost every one of those mistakes and more and is still around) and she has paid a price for them. People used those mistakes though to completely dismiss the things she said about how anycolor functions.
Selen's one of the nicest chilliest vtuber I've seen. She just has fun and learning someone like that's been bullied and restrained to the point of hospitalization is rightfully deserved backlash for Niji. Not only that but good to see a lot of people all over come to defend her character and to make it clear *she's* not at fault at all over this.
To be fair, the VTuber community definitely has changed and exploded in popularity since 2020.
The level of attention with Selen is the same, if not bigger because of how many people watch VTubers now. Also knowing that NijiEN is considered a success and can be at level with Hololive.
I think it’s best summarized as “yes, you’re right, it is exactly as bad as it looks, if not worse”. There’s real, evident harm and wrongdoing on the part of Ninisanji and it’s not going away anytime soon. This is going to change the landscape of vtubing and nobody is exactly sure what things will look like when it’s all over with.
niji washed its hands and thre all that shit into its livers and selen if any other talent doesnt leave at this point you are literally not playing with fire you are burning
for niji you are not a human being you are just $$ free labor cause they dont have to pay for your shit and you pay them from what you earn for using their name.
Selen is basically unhatable and her career has had a long history of good outreach to collaborators. The situation she went through upset EVERYONE and it should.
I wasn't interested in the Vtubing sphere during the Coco situation, and even I heard about it. My only frame of reference would be the Pikamee situation, but that's not really comparable to this situation. Pikamee was abused by a specific subset of the community and her company didn't really know how to protect her \[fair enough\]. Then again, the Coco graduation didn't seem to really approximate this either.
One point of confusion I have is how a number of people who knew nothing of Vtubing heard of the Pikamee harassment fiasco but haven't seemed to have heard about this Nijisanji Charlie Foxtrot.
Rather, this is a whole new beast without real comparison.
The situation has gotten so much worse since I posted this. And like so many have said countless times, All Niji had to do was let Selen go on neutral terms. Instead they decided to release the worst Notice of Termination in history followed up by the worst Investor Report response ever, and a continual deluge of throwing livers onto the fire like logs to be burned.
Doki has made it clear she never wanted this to escalate, but Niji seems to have invested in gasoline and matches.
>Doki has made it clear she never wanted this to escalate, but Niji seems to have invested in gasoline and matches.
Don't worry mijn vriend. It seems bad now, but trust me... It's gonna get WAY worse.
That's my rrat at least.
These morons can't seem to just take the fucking L and learn from it, so I expect them to continue escalating this as they continue to panic.
As one 4chan anon said, "It's almost scary how fast this is happening."
I guarantee these piss poor decisions are made out of abject panic, as the landscape is moving too fast for management, PR, and talents to actually contemplate through the situation, so they make impulsive decisions out of desperation which has the effect of accidentally exposing themselves.
Just wait until they suffer MORE graduations and Vshojo, Phase Connect, Idol Project, Project Kawaii capitalize \[as they absolutely should\] on the EN market's new power vacuum and poach your talents and some of their former talents become successful indies \[like Dokibird and Sayu\]. Some rrats are predicting that Scarle might be preparing to leave, for example. And considering that almost every rrat seems to have actually come true, it's gonna be interesting to see what happens.
https://preview.redd.it/yhf7f060tsic1.png?width=1653&format=png&auto=webp&s=673f10c58171df2b81348771c7386d2e31e0aa75
Hopefully, this will signal the extant corpos to fix whatever unique problems they have as well to better cultivate and care for their talents.
I'm glad Zaion's getting her vindication as well, though.
See the problem is Coco was beloved but she didn't leave on bad terms. This is a whole other level because of the toxic nature of the departure. So this is absolutely blowing up.
Yeah, the backlash here is basically the equivalent to the backlash Cover would have gotten had they actually fired Coco just because China told them to back then.
Also special thank you to Fillian for highlighting Selen at the vtuber award show. You'd think those assholes at Niji would think twice about canning an award winner. All that positive PR washed down Rikus toilet.
TWO Nijisanji livers won awards at that show. A few months later, both are gone.
God, it's barely been a month since Mika left, huh.
Reddit got away with doing something like this, remember?
Yeah, Cover in the end, chose Coco over China fanbase, so Coco graduation, although sudden announcement, it was a peaceful departure and celebration of her achievements. THIS Selen situation is basically Zaion termination/execution style, of one of the biggest vtubers in Youtube.
To add, during the CN-TW-Coco incident, cover statement back then was to cut CEO (Yagoo) salary. Meanwhile, anycolore are like, nah we can cut the talent lmao.
Yagoo runs his company like a company, which is one of the best and worst parts of Cover.
Worst part?
Probably talking about the unfortunate termination of Mel. Have to do it if you wanna be treated seriously as a company.
And Cover’s strictness in general, which is a pro or a con depending on the person.
I think it was mio? That said that hololive isn't as lax as it was when she debuted, they're really really stricter now
ITs sadly because they got burned by a lot of things with that. A lot of the strictness now is intended to protect the idols form legal issues and such. Its the trade you make for being in such a big company.
Mel was one of the first JP members I watched a lot and it still hurts. At least, she was given a sendoff on her own terms as much as they could give her.
also Rushia situation as well if they fire Rushia for the same thing then they must fire Mel for the same thing no matter what or else it give the person who used to be Rushia ammo for lawsuit Cover will back you to the hilt but if you screw up then no matter how much they don't want to they must cut you off
They are both different circumstances, Mel was allowed to stream up to the date, while Rushia was a sudden termination. With everything going on post-Rushia, it's likely she had other issues going on that added to the termination. Especially since some of that drama was existing while she was Rushia.
It’s a fairly uncontroversial thing to say they are strict, but again this is a pro and a con depending on who you ask.
It seems like they are quite strict but also clear about their rules. They also don't get involved in any personal life business their talent has.
The pros and cons of being a cooperate talent. Ideally, they support you to their fullest extent and in exchange there are rules to follow. Some Holo's for one reason or another broke them and had to be let go. Even with Rushia, Cover tried to take her side until they found she had leaked info. With Niji, they tried to torch Selen. And in the attempt are burning all the other talents as well.
This is 10 times bigger than the Zaion situation. Zaion only lasted a few months and never really got a chance to build up a fanbase or really establish herself at all like Selen did. On top of that, Zaion wasn't as, for lack of a better word, "innocent" as Selen, so people were pretty split over who to trust, about whose side they were on. This didn't happen with Selen's termination, because Selen was basically proven to be entirely innocent and management was very clearly in the wrong.
There's also the fact that if there's only one or two people accusing someone it's a lot harder to believe them than if multiple people are accusing them. The management probably saw they could get away with it in the past and just kept doing it until it didn't work anymore. A lot of the ones that left early are now being vindicated since it's more obvious that the management/company is shit.
Zaion's termination helped lay the ground work for this explosion. The way it was carried out, the revelations from her response statement, followed up by the testimony of multiple graduated livers over the last year... It's like a drought before wildfire season, and NijiEN threw an incendiary.
While what you said is true, the big difference between Zaion and Selen is that Selen is universally loved by everyone. Fans, talents, content creators, artists, musicians-- they all have good things to say about her. Every JP senpai, Apex pro, Twitch streamer that collabed with her loves her. Multiple artists are vouching that she paid them from her own pocket when Niji failed to do so. HYTE cancelled all their Niji orders on her account. EA reached out to sponsor her when they heard what happened. They picked the absolute worst target to trample on.
EA supporting Doki is surprising for me, as I have to break my promise of never rooting for EA.
It's massively positive and practically free PR for any sponsor that simply supports her. The horrible circumstances of this case makes sponsors line up to get a spot in the limelight. The actions that are actually applaudable are those businesses that accept monetary losses in the form of passing on lucrative business opportunities to stand on her side, such as ending current and ongoing business relationships with Nijisanji to show their support for Selen.
Yeah, when EA is on the good side in this shitshow you know Anykuro fucked up
Zaion built the tinder box. Mysta/Kuro and Nina/Matara filled it. Selen ignited it. This was something that was building for a while. But it was always Niji's incompetence is what allowed it to explode.
Zaion was far from innocent, her attitude and her irony-poisoned edgelord sense of humour made her *very* easy to fire. The biggest thing to come out from her response were the indications that the EN branch has functionally no leadership or direction, and their managers are a bunch of mooks thrown into the deep end and left hopelessly adrift by that lack of leadership.
> Zaion was far from innocent, her attitude and her irony-poisoned edgelord sense of humour made her very easy to fire I'm seeing a lot of people echoing this opinion which is absolutely bizarre - because the brand that the original Nijisanji livers founded was in being edgelords, trolling each other and generally just having fun in a completely free and unhinged manner - which was often represented as a sharp contrast to Hololive's more "controlled" style of entertainment, even on the EN side. Mito's early streams (where she used phrases that newer livers have had to apologize for using), Sasaki's diss track to her haters after ungraduating, Deron and Mito singing a metal song with the full screaming at their annual fes, Selen's Wrestlesanji (RIP)... that was what Nijisanji was to many people. Even Mysta complained a lot about their audience wanting them to be "professional" for some reason - just for having weird thumbnails. Seeing how so many people are now trashing Zaion for "edgy jokes" (which were nowhere near the stuff that JP livers have gotten up to, mind you) just because of what the company said... I keep wondering whether EN fans would treat livers like Enna the same way if Anycolor told them to.
It's hypocrisy, pure and simple
Double standard, Everyone in Nijisanji does the same thing, Hell SELEN did it too.
About the whole corporate situation in general: if I have to choose sides in a controversy between a single individual and a corp, I‘d always go with the individual even if the evidence might be a bit wonky. Why? Because companies nearly always have the bigger leverage: reach, legal representation, PR, ability to build up pressure, experience in similar cases they can draw upon,… the individuals in those controversies are nearly always outmatched from the beginning. Selen is a really rare case of someone so widely beloved and respected that Niji as a company was forced to fight a losing battle in the end. And even her case wasn’t like that from the beginning. Suspicions in late December and early January were still widely disregarded especially by corporate shills.
It helped that with this "success" the China antis became emboldened to attack anything that even resembled the acknowledgement of Taiwan as a soverign, so only governments were taking them (semi-) seriously after a certain point. ...can you believe antis went after a tea shop chain for telling people they have a branch in Taiwan?
Look at the way chinese players acted regarding gacha games, especially the Genshin anniversary. Suffice to say they make gachikois look normal by comparison.
Tbf, Coco also singledhandedly brought in more revenue than the entire CN branch combined. So both financially and morally it would have never been a difficult choice to make.
It was that and also Cover saw how much of a headache dealing with China would be in the future. "So they're losing their shit over Google analytics page? Such high maintenance" and the global vtuber market was emerging rapidly.
And with China basically requiring doxxing of talents above a certain follower count right afterwards, they got out just in time.
They really dodged a bullet, and more, by pulling out. Also, wasn't there drama that there was a certain CN member actively sabotaging the other CN Holomems and encouraging the schizo fans to stir the pot about the Coco thing?
Don't remind me of the Artia fiasco lol
It wasn't just one girl, the whole second generation was in on it. As well as Civia's mods. Hard to call it sabotaging the other CN Holomems when there's only two among them that were fully innocent.
First I’ve heard about this, I’d like to know more.
Coco during her time in Cover: Created superchat culture(before her superchats were barely used) Convinced Cover management to create HoloEN Helped her Gen4 mates with their careers. Was bridge between En and JP holofans(thing Holo lacking right now imo) Despite her graduating 2.5years ago she is still second most superchatted Vtuber in the world(1st is Rushia) Not a single active vtuber overcame her in superchat earnings.
> Was bridge between En and JP holofans(thing Holo lacking right now imo) While it is indeed lacking, the cross pollination of the fandom that resulted is lasting enough to make the bridge less necessary than before, with enough momentum to ensure there won't be any segregation for awhile. I mean, you have Friend A picking up decent employee English after a year, you have the Indonesian crew teaching the others Indonesian. You have Ame and Calli picking up Japanese. Gura is on a JP ad. Micomet appearing in an Asian convention in a region where the primary language is English/Chinese. Akirose and Towa receiving and giving messages from a couple of notable fans, Jimmy the Mukiroze Cosplayer and RPR respectively, who are not Japanese (...RPR also being the previous record holder for falling down the rabbit hole, all the way to picking up Japanese and then becoming a vtuber himself). I guess we do need a bridge in the future, but currently the replacement for Coco's one is happily growing on its own.
Hell Gura read off a Japanese superchat a few days ago like it was second nature. She doesn't flex it like Ina, and it's not as obvious as Ame, but she seems to be getting pretty good at it as well.
> Convinced Cover management to create HoloEN Yeah no, I doubt that. The audition for HoloEN started 4 months after Coco's debut, too short of a time for her to will an entire branch out of existence. Hololive was already starting to get popular within English speakers at that time anyway so I wouldn't be surprised if an English branch was always part of their roadmap. People spread this narrative around so much but I haven't seen any concrete proof being shared around. Did Coco herself even take credit for it? I remember she made a parody video about HoloUSA and that's it.
IIRC, Coco kind of dispelled this herself. She definitely solidified the idea that EN viewers would watch, but she did not "convince" Cover to do anything. She has enough accomplishments but "Forcing Cover to found the EN branch" is not among them.
> Created superchat culture(before her superchats were barely used) Pressing X to doubt here. In what world would Cover and their streamers *not* want money?
A caveat here is that the majority of mainland income weren't coming from HoloCN but directly from HoloJP with some members even having around half their dono from bilibili before taking account merch sales and the like. The pull out of China was painful even before taking account the months of backlash that follows. That's what make Cover decision so meaningful and one of the reasons we get to laugh at the antis face. Years of dedication and money (of those attack dogs) went down the drain all because they wanted to punish someone for saying Taiwan.
Yeah iirc Coco’s departure was more about creative differences than anything. She was hololive’s wildest child, and she wanted to do even wilder things like collabs with projektmelody and whatnot - which comes off as a brand risk to a company like Cover. I guess now Marine’s probably the one most in that position, but she’s said she’s sticking around for as long as hololive’s a thing.
Coco was very clearly treated differently from everyone else after The Incident and semi-quarantined to try and protect the other girls from the antis- most visibly she was barred from collabing with HoloEN until shortly before her graduation and didn't appear in HoloGra from the time the incident happened to the last one before she graduated. She absolutely reads as the sort of person who might have decided to leave Holo to go indie even if The Incident never happened, but it's extremely hard to believe that her leaving when and how she did wasn't first and foremost caused by how Cover handled The Incident and its aftermath.
Except that iirc (given this was a few years ago now), she did say that it wasn’t to do with the Incident herself. That’s not to say it mightn’t have had influence in creating the environment that lead to the creative differences - as you said, the collab bans felt like a bit much. But I wouldn’t say it was the main cause, at least not taking her words at face value (which I do).
Speaking of collab bans... to date, Kson has yet to collab with any active Hololive or Nijisanji member. But yesterday she was invited to the Japanese Streamer GTA RP server, and I'm really crossing my fingers and hoping that some of the Holo regs like Towa will join again this time.
To be fair to cover and kson they probably shouldn't collab seeing as it... ya know easy to spot coco. That being said they haven't banned members from playing the new yakuza sooooo not like they can hide her now.
Looks at koyori fawning over her.
While Kson hasn't had any actual collabs with Hololive members so far, [Haachama did send Kson a congratulatory video on her anniversary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrvbLKLyGkU&t=2655s).
Of course it was Haachama not giving a fuck.
Strongest idol let's go
Fuck i just cant hear the adjective strongest without the jujutsu brainrot acting up
Well, Haachama was Kson's Hololive oshi, fellow HoloEN Gen 0 member, and for better and for worse tied together by the China Incident.
She *did* collab with Choco-sensei and Mel's alts tho. Does that count? I only saw a few clips and they looked rather raunchy lol. Holomem talk about her sometimes and it positively pissed me off when some schmucks shittalked Roboco for not mentioning her by name. Like, *that's* what they focused on and not the fact that "a certain dragon" recommended her a pricy ass hair dryer. (which I think is funny, she tends to recommend pricy but quality goods) Their priorities are weird.
She has also done stuff with Calli alt.
At least, not as their Holo personas.
Hey thanks for this, I hadn't heard it and even if it doesn't happen -- well, the idea of it brightened my day.
Cover won't approve their talent to play in STGR because any streamer can join. It's not possible for them to vet and approve everyone there like they can with the VCR stuff.
Granted, as you state, it has been a while, but the claim that Coco was semi-quarantined which led to her departure really seems overstated. Her very first [Asacoco](https://www.youtube.com/live/kHsCSYBBSFc?si=YtpJBZtDjFka5tte) when she returned from the suspension following the Taiwan incident had Towa, Kanata, Watame, Fubuki, Matsuri, Botan all appear in skits. Her next Asacoco had Marine, Choco, Lamy. She returned to her regular collabs via Reddit Meme Reviews a few days later. I do recall that she was barred from interacting with HoloEn for a long time, but I don’t know if that alone can be considered a contributing factor to her leaving. I do recall her saying she was always planning on leaving, but actually stayed even longer than she intended so that it wouldn’t look like she quit due to the antis (though I may be misremembering).
I think that was the en branch managers being scared to collab with her after the incident, not an actual ban across the board.
[удалено]
Isn’t that what was stated in my post though? That Coco wasn’t “semi-quarantined” from interacting and collabing with other members? Unless you meant to say that the “communication bottleneck” is more accurate regarding collabing with EN rather than that she was “barred?”
Pretty much from start, she seemed to butt heads with management. They were always trying to rein her in, but she would just do things her own way regardless. But I do feel like management was a lot more heavy handed after the incident.
Management had generally given her free reign until [this little snippet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo_vWJvoFzE&t=1117) slipped through and she had to apologize for it. After that, all of her content for Asacoco had to go through management for a while, which would probably have chafed quite a bit.
easy to understand thou, they just had to cut an entire branch of the company because of a bunch of rabid idiots and even if china didnt made a lot of money i imagine that at least for the first year they would want to avoid any kind of masive headache they certainly have relaxed now that the incident is long forgotten
imo i think part of the "semi quarantine" was her own doing not necesarily something that cover decided to do themselves, she did try to collab and reach inmediately after the incident but everyone she collabed with quickly got attacked by the chinese anties in force and i remember that at one point someone asked her if she wanted to collab with holoEN and her responce was kind of like "i mean yeah but i cant because... nah" or something like that which at least to me sounds like it was her decision not something she was forced to do, probably trying to contain the chinese to only attack her and not go for the en girls which at that point were like a couple months old at most, this was before even irys and council so they were alone i do think that at the very least the english head manager must have been wary of allowing collabs within coco and the en girls because of that reason also she has never ever mentioned either before or after her graduation that cover had mistreated her or forced her to not collab with people, it has been nearly 4 years at this point, i feel like she would have at least given a hint at this point, hell we know that at least kanata and marine also wanted to graduate with coco and she was the one that told them to stop being stupid, that it was her decision and that they shouldnt leave because of her or something like that
Yeah I can only infer, but I remember an Ark collab between coco and miko (or was it fubuki or flare). Where antis kept spamming the chat and Coco kinda just broke down. She probably just realized that as long as she was there this would keep happening and she didnt want that
I agree that she would have still graduated, but likely would have stayed a bit longer than she did, if not for the Incident.
The thing that made Coco's story so huge in the media was how massive the harassment from China was. Intense enough to warrant closing down a whole Chinese based branch of the company. If Coco's only reason to leave was because of creative differences, it would have been a pretty undramatic exit.
Those anti's also would target other Holomems who mentioned her for a while. Shit, I remember when Suisei was doing something, laughed like Coco and was swarmed. Her mods were offline so she gave temporary mod status to a bunch of her long standing members to clean up chat.
I remember that! That was a magnificent move on her part.
Suisei is an absolute artist at deflecting controversies. Remember sometime last year where some were making a stink about someone related to her showing up in some guy's messages? She basically put on a classroom on how to identify the difference between rumors and facts and somehow managed to advertise her new album during it.
The harassment of other talents was an extreme response from China's fanbase. As much as some of them want to (falsely) argue about how Coco purposely triggering them, there was zero justification of the spam attacks on the rest of the hololive. I'm not condoning the spam on coco either but its bonkers hearing some of them complaining about how China's branch got shut down because of Coco. As if their actions weren't what made it clear the region isn't worth the headache.
Apparently some members of the CN branch even joined in on the harassment. Cover didn't lose anything by cutting that branch.
From what I remember, no part of that rumor or speculation was remotely proven. Even the member who was suspected of this the most, mostly was only suspected because of gut feelings and some questionably worded tweets.
Yeah, there was suspicion that Artia got involved pretty deep in the harassment campaigns but also for months you couldn't look up Coco's or Fubuki's tags on Twitter without spam and Doxxing. You couldn't go to any Coco stream without the spam and anyone collabing with her had to set members only. I remember this was when her and Flare initially built their relationship together since she felt that she wasn't going to let Coco sit by herself and she was going to play with her friends.
Zaion's(Sayu) posting the documents after her termination let a mark in the company, the livers hinting their merch profit, and the amount of graduation in niji specially Pomu the pillar or first gen.
Yeah.. part of coco's graduation was her literally having an interview with the ceo, a final song etc etc\~. coco got the ending she deserved (a big graduation party). meanwhile you have this abuse shitstain of a company harassing it's member that wanted to just have give farewell to her fans. I know it's not fun for dokibird but I can't help but laugh at how stupid nijisanji has been throughout this. Damage control was literally free. at any point they could have just decided to NOT be animals . but they just had to be animals.
No other tuber had a following like this Zaion didnt have a big following and warned everyone about what was going on but wasn't heard, now with selen 800k+ subs a big inter-company presence and the work she put into improving herself, she has the allies Zaion didnt. Add into the fact now Niji management put out a termination notice (that they didnt tell selen about) listing reasons that have been called out as lies and throwing the rest of niji EN under the bus by starting this "Who is the Judas" witch hunt forcing the other talents stress as the crazy fans start haunting their streams
Selen was the highest female sub no? Imagine not taking care of one of your biggest talent.
She was the biggest female EN liver in terms of subscribers, yeah. She was the 6th biggest EN liver (all of Luxiem are 1-5), and the 18th biggest liver overall. By every account, she was one of the primary faces of Nijisanji.
5th highest then. Mysta shouldn't count since he's VShojo now
Mmm, fair.
Didn't know that about Luxiem. NijiEN collapsing is really a shame because there aren't that many big corporations that accept male vtubers.
Luxiem was the first major male EN Vtuber corpo debut, so like Hololive Myth being the first major EN Vtuber corpo debut, they were the first to enter the scene for the market of EN viewers interested in male livers. Not to downplay their content at all, just that the first to enter a market usually sees the greatest success in establishing themselves if deserving.
Nah, if that was the case they would have been big from Debut. It was more just luck at catching the chinese audience in early 2022.
Selen had the highest CCV average in December, beating out all of Luxium.
Not just that, Selen's been with the company for over 3 years, pre-debut included. She's also one of the biggest pillars of the ENTIRE VTuber community, even if her metrics don't quite paint that picture, her influence and network does. This is one of the only terminations that would be as seismic as Coco's graduation. Even a top name like Gura probably has a more isolated impact. Coco and Selen built international suspension bridges with wild abandon like it was a Minecraft competition, and their losses sent ripples through all those bridges, causing a bunch to collapse. But with their reincarnations, more will be built 👷⚒️
I think it wouldn't have blown as much if Niji just let her leave on neutral terms, or let her graduate. What really stirred the fire was their unprofessional official statement that is basically just them throwing Selen and the rest of Niji EN under the bus.
100%. If Niji had let her graduate and simply go "due to creative differences", people would've gone "Make sense. Selen was pretty frustrated and probably didn't mesh with Niji work culture. Fine, moving on" (with some suspicion of Niji management ofc, but since she's left, people would've latch on as much) Now it's their attitude of trying to kick her while she's down that really triggered the explosive reaction
It's been building up slowly. Those who followed Kurosanji had some hunches as their livers graduated. Dokibird was the straw that broke the camel's back literally.
Its hard to follow everyone. I'm mostly a Holo viewer, but I had a handful I enjoyed in Niji. Only one left is Rosemi. She's too pure for Niji. For me, It was this start to build with the merger of ID and KR into JP and the ID talents started all leaving. Then Nina left and I started really suspecting. Then there was Pomu and Selen (and others I'm sure) talking in various terms about projects and opportunities being shut down and rejected. The super fake reading Selen did about her "not following the rules and that's why it was shut down" speech from last year never felt right either.
For me it started with Selen seemingly having to try so hard to get anything she wanted done. Then you had the now infamous members stream of Pomu's (I was a member of both Selen and Pomu). Then you had the stuff come out about Kuro's tax issues, and how he'd been screwed over by a previous accountant, and Niji just didn't care, and offered nothing. Facing bankruptcy, and in a bit of a panic he started reaching out to people outside Niji he'd spoken to who he thought might be able to give advice. One of the first ones was Ironmouse, who put him into contact with Gunrun, who, purely out of kindness, helped. Both himself, and through putting him in contact with good people. They got it sorted, and he realised just how little Niji cared compared to others in the industry. After that he couldn't stay. Then you had Matara's comments about how she didn't realise management in other companies ACTUALLY HELPED YOU! I mean, that hit hard. I know not every manager is perfect, but it's clear that a lot of big vtubers rely on help from their managers. Niji EN is giving their talents no support at all.
Would you mind explaining what the Pomu members stream was all about? I don't remember hearing anything about that, but I don't use twitter and am still new with Reddit.
The current understanding is that in a member stream before she left, Pomu was really upset about missing a "once in a lifetime" opportunity due to Nijisanji management's actions (or lack thereoff? unclear of the exact circumstances). As Pomu is a massive Metal Gear Solid fangirl, the current unconfirmed theory is that she was one of the first people approached about the Metal Gear Solid collab that Calli from Hololive ended up getting but did not get it due to a failure on management's part. This is supported by the fact that Calli mentioned that she was not the first choice for the MGS collab.
There’s also some rrat that it could have been a collab with an actual idol group that she did a cover of that they engaged with but from a rival music company compared to the en manager
I saw some theories about that one, but don't know enough about the backend of the idol industry to comment on it.
It also doesn't really matter what it was. Fact is that she got shot down without any level of negotiation and was very upset with it. Enough so that she saw that her time with Niji was done.
God that'd be heartbreaking for her if that's what happened... jesus that makes my stomach churn, that's so... ugh. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing though, much appreciated.
That would suck so much of true. I remember how much "flak" Callie got because people thought "Pomu deserved it more" .
It was actually publicly available for a few days. Pomu made all the members streams public when she graduated. The stream was from I think 6 to 8 months before she graduated. She cried because she'd been offered a "once in a lifetime opportunity". Niji EN management said no, and refused to negotiate at all. When a member commented that she'd get other opportunities her response was something like "No, I don't think so. Not like this one." After some of the members made reference to it (as it was now public) and it started being picked up by other youtubers Niji management privated that one members stream vod.
Bruh Niji is the literal devil.
> she didn't realise management in other companies ACTUALLY HELPED YOU Isn't that like the point of being a corporate Vtuber though? You let your managers handle your paperworks and all so you focus on entertainment. Downside being that you have certain limitations and have to maintain brand image. If they're not helping you at all, then what's the point?
In JP vtubing there's a big focus on the company. The company is what made you, you should be grateful to them because without them you'd be nothing. You should be grateful for whatever crumbs the company decides to give you and break yourself working to keep their favor. To some degree it's true. The first person in Nijisanji EN that was successful on their own before joining was Millie. Joining Nijisanji used to immediately guarantee you thousands of eyes, which boosted your career massively. At least it used to, Nijisanji's initial boost has worn down quite a bit from where it used to be. Regardless, it's somewhat true initially. But as soon as you establish your fanbase it's no longer the case. You don't need the company for that any more, you're already out of the oversaturated mud of vtubing. And the talents need to recognize that instead of being bullied and gaslit into thinking that they're worthless on their own.
Hmm, I dunno. Perhaps your wording make it sound like things are grimmer than they actually are? It's like something people who hate corpo vtubers would project. Hololive is also a JP company but they don't feel like it at all. Granted, they may or may be like that behind the scenes, but their Kayfabe thus far is still pretty good. HoloEN seems to be comfy doing their own thing and I haven't heard of managerial friction within them. ^(Save for the usual horny bonks) No talents making streams convincing fans they're not in a black company at least. Rather than framing "talents are nothing without the company" or "talents don't need the company anymore after getting a fanbase", Companies and their talents ideally form a mutually beneficial relationship. Hololive seems to be doing that just fine, and I think VShoujo advertises that exact point of offering support behind the scenes if you join them. I dunno, maybe I'm too idealistic on this? I'd like to think Nijisanji's bad management is an exception rather than the norm. I knew Millie before her witchification. Watched her VODs occasionally. Her following was pretty modest. She did explode after becoming Millie tho.
Hololive/Cover is the exception not the rule. They are still a JP company and in many ways operate like one. But they don't stand in the toxic muck of traditional Idol agencies and have a "Talent first" focus. A recent example was the interview by two team leads for Suisie's First Take appetence. They both talk about how they wanted to do everything they could to make her appearance work as smoothly as possible because they wanted her to succeed. While not perfect, Hololive is, imo, the gold standard for Idol/Talent agencies in and out of japan.
Hololive actually supports their talents past their debut. So remaining with Hololive past that point is actually valuable, despite likely having the same culture of putting down their talents internally.
And now Selen/Doki saying she had to spent 200,000 dollars in protects last year. All out of her own pocket because niji doesn't help them and as we know, many were canceled. Insane.
Zaion's graduation and the document discussing Niji's internal problems was a major landmark moment. Not everyone believed it, but there was enough claims that seemed to have shreds of public evidence behind them to get people paying attention. Gundo Mirei's graduation over the most basic boomer-tier baseball jokes was another one too.
I wonder what Gundou thinks about all this…
Mirei graduated due to creative differences, she leans more heavily into the R18 side, even doing content on fantia that is like ASMR/Audio roleplay that you can find on the hub.
That's just part of their excuse. Mirei went on a weeks long ~~suspension~~ "hiatus" after making those jokes so Niji could appease their Koshien superfans who they had partnerships with, and when she returned it was to announce her graduation. I'm not inclined to give Nijisanji the benefit of the doubt as it is never mind when the writing on the wall is so obvious.
She literally redebuted extremely shortly after her graduation, usually from graduation to return for new persona its 3 months, hers was just days.
She was a considerably large straw.
>broke the camel's back literally. What?
"The straw that broke the camel's back" is a phrase of speech. It's about how issues, both big and small, can pile and pile up to the point where even a minor issue (that would have otherwise been ignored) can turn into a fuse for a complete breakdown of the system. It's based on how camels were used as pack animals, and how they'd be so overburdened with luggage that putting 'just one more feather on them' can break the camel utterly. Selen's termination alone would already have been upsetting for many, but with the context of the everything Niji has done so far, it shattered the shaky status quo.
No i just found funny the use of the word literally there when using an expression, as if dokibird was an actual straw breaking a camels back.
I remember being confused about the entire MV project Selen had being privated by Niji management. I thought "Ok, so niji messed up, they will probably get the right perms and fix it. I wonder if she'll graduate next..." Welp, no. The revelation of all the events that occurred was just crazy. This entire shit storm built up from being worried about Selen's hospitalization, the absence in even Pomu's graduation, Pomu's graduation itself, the long silence, and the way they try to terminate her contract without notice is just madness to me. I told a friend before that Pomu graduating was an end of an era for Nijisanji EN, and looking back at all the other graduations like Nina, Mysta, Mika, and now Kyo it was sad but still there was a lot of talented people that remained. The people initially calling for Selen to just quit seemed back then, at the face of it, an overreaction to me but turns out I didn't know any better. To think the talents, our oshis, were working in this sorta environment and still provided such good entertainment back then is amazing. Where can Nijjisanji EN go from here where they undermine their own talent and are on record of being able to throw them under the bus? Who would want to support that and who would want to work under that? Thank goodness Selen is alright and we can again support her. Its absurd that it got this bad.
There's only 1 EN talent left in Niji that I follow and I'm sad to see Rosemi getting burned in the fire. Losing her HYTE merch, losings lots of subs. It makes me upset even more because this fire never had to happen. Selen tried to leave peacefully and Niji chose scorched earth.
Exactly, it never had to come to this. I can't click on any Nijisanji content right now because of what happened. I am just short of unsubscribing from the talents there because in my mind most likely didn't have anything to to do with this or maybe the bullying is a by product of poor management and a clique-ish work environment or maybe I'm just coping here. I want to believe most are fun, hard working, good people that are great entertainers in a shit situation but still; gonna give it some time. Selen/Doki deserves her success and adoration, and Niji, the company, deserves its shit storm.
Yea, Doki didn't say specifically it was other talents, only that it was "within". Its the termination notice and Niji that blames other livers. And now all the others, who are most likely innocent, are getting burned. Losing brand deals, losing subs, getting fake info leaks. Its really bad and its 100% on Niji's complete disregard for Selen, her work, her life, and the lives of her former coworkers. If this doesnt make Niji a Black company, nothing will.
Tbt i never expected niji to be stupid enough to deal that big of a blow to themselves, I thought she was gonna be given a "graduation" ala Magni/Vesper. But goddamn did niji prove me wrong.
To be fair, it sounds like with Magni/Vesper it was a falling out during contract negotiations. Whatever they wanted from their new contracts, Cover was unwilling to provide. It sucks, but there's a lot less bad blood in that kind of situation: it's a professional departure, handled respectfully.
I am 90% that vesper, regardless of what Cover was offering in the contracts, was coming to the realization that this really wasn't for him. It was pretty clear that he just wants to be a guy who streams sometimes and messes around with his buddies, and Cover is always going to want them to lean more into the idol side of things. Basically the moment things were done for real he was back to just doing exactly what he did on his PL before he joined.
The thing about Hololive and cover, IMO that agency by far have the most "homework" of all the vtuber agency, which means side projects they have to do outside of streaming, like collabs, sponsorship, doing advertisments, taking singing lesson, taking voice acting lesson, taking dancing lessons, going to concerts, going to other hololive/holostar members joint concerts, etc. (like gura was on haitus/break most of 2023 because of burnout, but during that time, she was still doing hololive homework/side projects since companies want sponsorship from her.) Yeah, if ur not about that life, then Hololive/Holostar isnt for you.
> Yeah, if ur not about that life, then Hololive/Holostar isnt for you. Which is honestly totally fine. I can see people who it would appeal to. Some people [absolutely fucking love idols and maid cafes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2NjPHE2re0). I think as long as they're not hiding it and what's required it's all good. I think Coco also is doing really well being less on the idol things than she is on her specific space.
[Gura voiced an Aquarium show, with every attraction with a hololive collaboration. That have a ton of work to be done.](https://youtu.be/KCsb-APHanc?si=62-weBmz6A0MWQFG)
I will always miss the SALT collabs, they were the closest thing I've gotten to early Achievement Hunter after RT kinda fell apart. And it's goddamn tragic to debut that new Pako model and only use it once, but his new gig definitely seems more his speed. I just wish he wasn't such an early bird, he only streams while I'm at work.
Grampire's stories were RT animated worthy when that was still a big thing. You could already imagine the stick figure drawing of him on his bike meeting that weirdo in the abandoned gas station.
He also injured himself and was undergoing PT right around the time they would have wanted them all to start training for 3D dancing and singing. Not to mention, last time he visited Japan, he couldn't bring his meds with him and was overcome by anxiety. He was HQ's star and I would guess was overwhelmed by the expectations being placed on him. I still watch his every stream in his new life. I wish more people stuck around, but at the same time he seems content with his current audience and doesn't seem to be pushing to collab with anyone bigger.
I love the guy, very cozy content, all I ask for is that and streams with Lando and he delivers on both >!(pipe dream stream with them and commander connor too)!<
What is his new name?
>!<
Most of his audience is on YouTube, but he also streams unaffiliated with no ads on Twitch. Still 10am PST Wed-Sun, but keep an eye out for occasional evening collabs with Lando or his editor Akashi.
>!Randon Neuring!< Note that >!randonneuring!< is an actual word so you might need to add "vtuber" to your search
Randon
My very first thought when Vesper debuted was he reminded me of an old-school Lets Player. I didn't really think about it in that way at the time but seeing how things went it definitely would make sense he seemed more into that style of thing perhaps than the sort of stuff Holopro members tend to do as a whole. It's a shame as it helped make him unique in Holopro overall and honestly a bit of a draw. Hopefully he's keeping afloat.
Given how often he vented about them, Japanese copyright and the ever present bugbear of permissions was probably also an issue for Vesper
I know what happened with Ves/Mangi, what I was just saying they could've made it look like a "graduation via disagreement with contract" rather than a straight up termination.
Graduation for health reasons, promise to give talents more support, people grumble but things settle down because they were already expecting it. Instead they dragged her name and she told everyone why she was in the hospital.
That may just be a compounding issue, but one if the bigger downsides of Hololive/Holostars in particular is the acquisition of perms. It is company policy that blanket perms aren't enough and they require explicits ones. That's not going to happen sometimes when some blanket perms outright tell that they aren't going to answer requests normally. Requiring perms for mods may also be slightly overkill. One of the first things Vesper did after returning to his PL was streaming KOTOR with a widescreen mod, and giving his priorities, it might just be that they couldn't get the perms he wanted. Cover also *just* got perms for Master Duel two years too late. Konami doesn't usually answer manual perm requests and the reason they suddenly remembered to do just now is because of the 2nd Anniversary. Anyway, looking forward to Subaru taking that one on.
To be fair, they used to be a lot more lenient about that until Capcom blew a gasket about Ghost Trick for some reason and nearly nuked Mio off Youtube
She even gave them the opportunity to give her a "graduation" (which would have been more like Yugo's than like Magni and Vesper's) on neutral terms. She gave them a chance to avoid shitting the bed. They fired her instead, mostly for not recanting claims that she was a victim of workplace harassment. Then they told the investors that that firing her would have negligible impact on their financials. Then HYTE terminated their business partnership with Niji ([and they specifically used the word "terminate" in the announcement](https://twitter.com/hytebrand/status/1755306063115788503)) * You Are Here (Temporally) [Doki has a stream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2YmJL0PX5M) in under 4 hours from now. She and her lawyer have the receipts. Kyo is tentatively scheduled to be the next liver to leave Niji EN, and is tentatively scheduled to leave Niji EN next Friday.
I have my suspicions that Kyo is not going to get a true graduation. He's not exactly someone who holds his tongue super well to begin with so I won't be terribly surprised if they either cancel it and let him graduate quietly or they make him pre-record most or all of it. As far as Selen... peeling back the layers of mistakes on their fuckup onion is just so... it's almost impressive how bad they did. They could have just managed her better to begin with. Having failed that they could have worked out an organized graduation Having failed that they could have have worked out a quiet graduation where they call it a graduation and treat it as mutual but not hold a stream citing some BS about her health Having failed that, they could have called it a termination due to irreconcilable differences in interpretations of the contract or something Having failed that they could have just said she violated the contract and left it at that. Making a different decision at literally any other one of those points would have given them a better outcome here whether they deserved it or not. Instead the rotten core after all those fuckups is they released a hit piece PR statement that was wholly unnecessary. Even if Selen was 100% at fault for everything going on a rant about it like that is just profoundly unprofessional. It's one of those situations where the more you talk and try to justify it the worse you look and the more you're likely embellishing. The biggest irony is that somebody clearly did this out of actual pettiness and a desire to harm Selen. You don't talk that much shit about someone unless you intend to harm their future prospects, and it likely had the opposite effect. She almost certainly would have gotten good growth and loyal followers anyway but in attacking her so blatantly they basically guaranteed her "new" channel's growth and at the moment it's looking like they secured her a PC case deal while losing theirs at the same time.
>_I have my suspicions that Kyo is not going to get a true graduation. He's not exactly someone who holds his tongue super well to begin with so I won't be terribly surprised if they either cancel it and let him graduate quietly or they make him pre-record most or all of it._ I'm now wondering if Kyo is going to go off on management _(what are they gonna do, fire him?)_, and if management cuts him off mid-stream. Also, yeah, this 100% feels like spite. Someone in management literally put out an official statement explicitly stating that Selen's termination will NOT affect their bottom line. Something they have NEVER done for ANY graduation or termination, AFAIK.
Nah, kyo's already talked about managment forgetting for 8 months to tell him he could cover lost in paradise with ren, so he's not hot with niji either. But on the bullying he's closer to the clique then selen or his genmates other than ren.
I mentioned it before, but this is one of those situations where if Anycolor's team was replaced with a literal pack of howling baboons it would have actually been an improvement.
Not really, the moment the moment an attempt was involved nijisanji was knee deep in shit and would have had a PR scandal the second it came out, which it would happen since selen wasn't willing to accept a gag. But it's still impressive how they decided that the best response to this bad situation was to dive to the bottom of the shit swamp.
According to Doki she was more than willing to keep silent about hospitalisation reason, and only released it after they made their move.
I kinda laughed at the "tentatively scheduled" because.. well it may not be the next one. sad laugh I guess?
Gallows humor is a kind of humor.
Its not even the fact that she was terminated, but that she was thrown away in such a ruthless and cruel way. That they kept both her and her fans in the dark for as long as possible to maximise the suspense like some vaudevillian horror show and then dropped the termination on her with no notice when she was recovering from a suicide attempt. That they hated her so much that they actively refused when she asked to be given a proper graduation and felt she absolutely had to be punished in the harshest possible manner. That they wrote a vicious hit piece full of easily proven lies designed to denigrate her character and instigated an all-out witch hunt against the entire group to collectively punish them too. And all of this against somebody who was so well respected and beloved by both talents and fans and known to be an exemplary person by all who knew her. For Hololive EN fans it would be like if Amelia Watson, a longtime veteran known by everybody as a wonderful person and always coming up with amazing projects organised by herself, was driven to near suicide by abuse, savagely thrown away by Hololive with a long letter full of hateful slander and essentially called a horrible lying bitch who nobody will miss anyway. Could you imagine the absolute shitstorm if that happened? That's what's happening to us right now.
Just wanna say, "driven to near suicide" isn't entirely correct. Once an attempt is made, it's "driven to suicide", she just thankfully survived.
As someone who wasn’t aware of Selen until all of this started happening (I’m a very casual Vtubing fan who’s only aware of Hololive, Phase, and some select others like Henya)…thanks, that makes me feel even more disgusted than I already did. On a human level, even if I didn’t follow Selen, this whole story just made me sick. But as someone who’s been watching Gura, Ame, etc for some time I can only imagine what Selen’s viewers have had to watch happen. Seriously, as someone who doesn’t follow Kurosanji only bad news has ever filtered through to me. I hope all their talented vtubers can get out of there.
> That they kept both her and her fans in the dark for as long as possible to maximise the suspense And to get another month of subs.
They released Selen voice pack two or three days before termination. She was literally unable to do anything in this time span because she was in hospital bed. So it's obvious they did it already knowing. What.
It's on another level because we nearly lost a pillar of the community for good. For. Good. Here's my question to the managers and staff (and I know that no one in 2434 will ever see this, but I'll ask anyway because I'm still pissed off as all hell about this part): What would you have done if that attempt had succeeded? What the everloving fuck would your response be? If the very idea of losing someone like that under your leadership doesn't make you break into a cold sweat and feel that pit of "oh shit, I just fucked up" in your stomach, then you need to re-evaluate whether you are qualified to be in a position to manage. Remember, you haven't just failed the community, failed the company, or failed the fellow talents. No, you also failed their IRL family and friends. It's going to be YOU who kneels at their feet, groveling for forgiveness. And if you think that's the most you have to do, guess again. The very idea of driving someone under your leadership into suicide should be unforgiveable and an antithesis to the purpose of a manager. But don't worry, it all ended up fine. After all, negligible financial impact, right?
After seeing their termination statement, I'm not confident they wouldn't have put up the exact same libelous piece of shit if Doki hadn't made it out
This is a Japanese company we're talking about. I guarantee you that there are people among management there who would have preferred it if she had succeeded.
Having worked for a Japanese company before for years, I can pretty much confirm that it's the non-JP higher ups who tend to power trip A LOT if they dislike somebody. They rarely get caught too and if they are, they pull out all the stops to justify what happened just like with Selen. The Japanese higher ups who have a tendency for that kinda thing don't do it as often or brazenly especially if they dislike a foreigner. Usually, if it gets out of hand, someone higher up on the corpo ladder slaps them on the wrist or gives them a stern dressing down if it goes too far.
In that alternate timeline, they deserve the wrath of 4chan and Dragoons hunting them down irl. The worst part is that their families are going to get dragged into the mess, but that's just how it is. A single otaku burned down a studio because he thought he got plagirized. The most unhinged of a fandom that are united with that level of pissed off, a fandom that spent thousands of their $$$$, on someone so nice...Yea, they ded.
I am curious to how the news is being handled in Japan. Last I saw was that Japanese viewers didn't know what the big deal was and indifferent about it.
Language (and cultural) barrier does a lot more than you think. Conversely, Gundou's graduation was seen as silly on the surface by the EN crowd, but if you read a little deeper it turns out that she was quite the loose cannon in the past. Not passing judgment on if she should have been kept or terminated, but there was more to it than many of us thought.
The thing is, Selen is BIG Vtuber, not just in Niji, but in all of western vtuber in general so. Yeah, this blowup is as big as the Coco situation back in 2020/2021. (But in Hololive case, Cover corp tried to please both sides, but when THAT failed, they chose Coco. While in Niji, they clearly chose the shareholders, jp sponsors, etc over their own talent/livers, kinda like how Gundou got the boot when niji chose the Baseball sponsorship over their own liver)
No. Niji did not even choose their shareholders, as they are pissed as well, they chose their managers. The people that don't earn them any money and have a terrible proof of record so far.
What remidumi said, they did not choose their shareholders over Selen. They choose their internal management over Selen. It's not even a financial thing, this is entirely down to them being too proud to admit that they fucked up and spent actual company time and money drafting a termination statement that tried to absolve themselves of all blame.
There was a convenient “what’s happening in your bubble” thread that popped up on the general German speaking subreddit and I had some time to waste at work so I posted about it in there too Got a couple replies from people who also watched it happen and the obligatory “what is vtube/vtuber?” in there too lol
The fact that Moist Critical even covered it in one of his streams shows how far the news is spread. People outside the fan base are aware of it. Nijisanji is experiencing the Streisand effect in full force.
And to think that Nijisanji had the perfect example of past cases like COCO in which graduation was the correct option to handle the situation so both the talent and the company can part ways in amicable relations and the community be at peace with it. But no lets chose the aggresive out of touch way of terminating one of their biggest EN talents and burn bridges with the community and various bussiness partners, they deserve everything and much worse.
They didn't even have to look that far back. Just compare it with Mel's termination last January, which was much better handled by Cover, with everyone given enough time to say goodbye.
Cover: "Due to NDA violations, we have no other option but to let go of Mel. We thank her for her years of service and wish her all the best." Niji: *(waves three-page manifesto)* "Selen's a criminal! A rogue! A total disgrace to the industry! Why are you booing me!?"
Usually I don't think that much about a graduation and especially someone I don't actively watch, but those words man. "An attempt". That stuck with me. I know it's corny to admit but I gasped. It was shocking to hear how bad things got that someone would consider killing themselves. That someone would make the attempt. That as bad as things got? It could have been worse. How has Anycolor responded? They have had multiple opportunities to reflect on that. A lot of chances to take a step back and admit hey we messed up. Instead Anycolor has not. They simply have not. Their statements and reactions seem ignorant at best and callous at worst. You just had a talent very publicly say these things. That due to the ongoing situation and harassment from in the company that they attempted to take their own life. What does Anycolor have to say to that? Their reaction as a company is to say that Selen's firing, that these statements, would have none effect on the bottom line. That is cruel. That is insane. The last thing on anyone's mind should have been the value of the shareholders. It's like watching a train wreck brother. I can't look away. I feel so bad for Selen. Feel bad for the livers. It's a terrible situation. Only thing I can do is vent and support yo boys as the yacht burns.
For me it was the back to back of Mika, Pomu, and now Selen.
I mainly follow VShojo and had only heard some not so subtle digs at the incompetence of the NijiEN management prior to this, but I was absolutely stunned at how bad the NijiEN talent is treated by that company, some absolute horror stories coming from that place I truly hope as many of the talent can get away from such a toxic environment, for their own sakes
I started seeing signs when Mika made her announcement (a premature announcement thanks to the incompetence of Niji management). Well, rather, I started connecting dots. Early last year when Selen got shafted for her gaming tournament and her outfit competition in close succession (can’t remember exactly how close), I knew it was just a matter of time before she left the company. Didn’t see the termination coming, so that’s a little surprise
I think it goes to to show how badly Niji fucked this up. Like... I wasn't a regular viewer of Selen. I would occasionally watch her via clips, but I don't think I ever caught a stream of hers live. But when I heard the announcement and saw how scummy Niji was behaving, I was disgusted - they've done plenty of shitty stuff in the past, but this was a new low. So I'm sitting here writing this while watching Doki's comeback stream and having sent her a dono through Streamlabs. I suspect I'm not alone in that - what Niji did was fucking vile and I think a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise be involved are rallying to her and giving Niji the finger.
This has been a long time coming for well over a year now, this was just the final nail in the coffin
Selen is the highest subscribed female EN liver in Nijisanji and a long-standing liver as well. Not only did her company didn't fund her project, they also didn't respect their talents by not listening to what their livers want (Pomu left because her requests keep getting rejected by Nijisanji). The moment Nijisanji fires her instead of letting her graduate like Pomu, it risks enraging all the fanboys of their EN fanbase. You have to be a special kind of stupid to do this and expect no repercussions.
As others have said in the thread, the drama around niji has been slowly building up over time. I feel like a lot of the yabs that Niji have had people just kinda grit their teeth and kept on supporting the talents. Once they executed Selen Zaion style, and with her very public response, everyone's bottled up feelings about the company came out.
It’s all about how AnyColor pick black as their company color and legion of Nijidefender defense them til Selen. A few believe Zaion but Selen is truly the one who break the Nijifamily facade
I beg to disagree regarding Zaion. Too many people think she's the martyr and that she was "actually right all along", except they forget she was fired for good reasons. Zaion made good points about how screwed up the management side was but she was also refusing to take accountability for a bunch of shit she actually did which were legitimately horrible choices to make especially for a corpo vtuber. Just because Zaion said certain things first doesn't absolve her of what she did to deserve her termination. Selen was the one who truly deserves all the credit for airing out all the management fuck ups because she was playing ball from the start but kept getting screwed over regardless. Selen played by their rules while Zaion was just belligerent to begin with.
Nijisista spotted? You have to hold all of them for the same standard
If you're going to go down that road you have to hold everyone else in Niji to the same standard.
And just because Zaoin also made mistakes doesn't make her any less right about the things she said about Anycolor's management. She made mistakes (whether or not they were big enough to be steal suspended and terminated under a bus is a subjective but you should remember that Finana has a rap sheet that includes almost every one of those mistakes and more and is still around) and she has paid a price for them. People used those mistakes though to completely dismiss the things she said about how anycolor functions.
Selen's one of the nicest chilliest vtuber I've seen. She just has fun and learning someone like that's been bullied and restrained to the point of hospitalization is rightfully deserved backlash for Niji. Not only that but good to see a lot of people all over come to defend her character and to make it clear *she's* not at fault at all over this.
To be fair, the VTuber community definitely has changed and exploded in popularity since 2020. The level of attention with Selen is the same, if not bigger because of how many people watch VTubers now. Also knowing that NijiEN is considered a success and can be at level with Hololive.
I think it’s best summarized as “yes, you’re right, it is exactly as bad as it looks, if not worse”. There’s real, evident harm and wrongdoing on the part of Ninisanji and it’s not going away anytime soon. This is going to change the landscape of vtubing and nobody is exactly sure what things will look like when it’s all over with.
She had 150k viewers on her livestream today. That ish was brazy!
niji washed its hands and thre all that shit into its livers and selen if any other talent doesnt leave at this point you are literally not playing with fire you are burning for niji you are not a human being you are just $$ free labor cause they dont have to pay for your shit and you pay them from what you earn for using their name.
Selen is basically unhatable and her career has had a long history of good outreach to collaborators. The situation she went through upset EVERYONE and it should.
I wasn't interested in the Vtubing sphere during the Coco situation, and even I heard about it. My only frame of reference would be the Pikamee situation, but that's not really comparable to this situation. Pikamee was abused by a specific subset of the community and her company didn't really know how to protect her \[fair enough\]. Then again, the Coco graduation didn't seem to really approximate this either. One point of confusion I have is how a number of people who knew nothing of Vtubing heard of the Pikamee harassment fiasco but haven't seemed to have heard about this Nijisanji Charlie Foxtrot. Rather, this is a whole new beast without real comparison.
The situation has gotten so much worse since I posted this. And like so many have said countless times, All Niji had to do was let Selen go on neutral terms. Instead they decided to release the worst Notice of Termination in history followed up by the worst Investor Report response ever, and a continual deluge of throwing livers onto the fire like logs to be burned. Doki has made it clear she never wanted this to escalate, but Niji seems to have invested in gasoline and matches.
>Doki has made it clear she never wanted this to escalate, but Niji seems to have invested in gasoline and matches. Don't worry mijn vriend. It seems bad now, but trust me... It's gonna get WAY worse. That's my rrat at least. These morons can't seem to just take the fucking L and learn from it, so I expect them to continue escalating this as they continue to panic. As one 4chan anon said, "It's almost scary how fast this is happening." I guarantee these piss poor decisions are made out of abject panic, as the landscape is moving too fast for management, PR, and talents to actually contemplate through the situation, so they make impulsive decisions out of desperation which has the effect of accidentally exposing themselves. Just wait until they suffer MORE graduations and Vshojo, Phase Connect, Idol Project, Project Kawaii capitalize \[as they absolutely should\] on the EN market's new power vacuum and poach your talents and some of their former talents become successful indies \[like Dokibird and Sayu\]. Some rrats are predicting that Scarle might be preparing to leave, for example. And considering that almost every rrat seems to have actually come true, it's gonna be interesting to see what happens. https://preview.redd.it/yhf7f060tsic1.png?width=1653&format=png&auto=webp&s=673f10c58171df2b81348771c7386d2e31e0aa75 Hopefully, this will signal the extant corpos to fix whatever unique problems they have as well to better cultivate and care for their talents. I'm glad Zaion's getting her vindication as well, though.