This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-03-05 05:38:49.
TW: Bullying
Before we begin, a glossary of terms for those who may need one. In particular, 'graduation' (a voluntary retirement of a given VTuber identity, whether indie or corporate) will come up a lot; the other specific term is '[Virtual] Livers' (rhyming with 'divers'), Nijisanji's specific term for its VTubers.
Writing this in early March 2024, chances are that the name 'Nijisanji' will ring a bell if you have engaged with just about any online space with even the slightest connection to weeb fandoms in the last few weeks. The scandal resulting from the termination of Nijisanji English's Selen Tatsuki on 7 February has become a matter of considerable attention reaching well outside the VTuber bubble, and may well hang over the agency for the rest of its existence. But it's worth remembering that this was not the first scandal to rock Nijisanji, and especially not the first to revolve around its international branches. The recent blow-up has some rather older precedents.
Where did Nijisanji come from?
On 29 November 2016, tech startup Activ8 debuted Kizuna AI, voiced and acted by Kasuga Nozomi, as the first self-proclaimed 'Virtual YouTuber'. Unbeknownst to her creators, their apparent dominance of the medium was not to last. AI's time as the face of the industry was to end in flames in 2019, as Activ8's attempts to follow through on their original vision of the 'eternal idol' ran up against a fandom that had developed its own set of expectations about VTubing, driven by the proliferation of new VTuber personas that had become inextricably tied to the talents behind them. And at the arguable forefront of that movement was Nijisanji.
Nijisanji, officially styled NIJISANJI and often informally stylised as 2434 (ni shi san shi), is the brainchild of Riku Tazumi (born c.1996), who dropped out of his studies at Waseda University in 2017 to establish Ichikara Inc, and set to work developing a Live2D tracking app, offering a much cheaper and less labour-intensive alternative to the full-body studio 3D then in vogue. On 11 January 2018, Ichikara publicly unveiled Nijisanji, the name of its official app, and opened auditions; eight successful applicants debuted from 8 to 16 February. Nijisanji's bursting onto the scene with Live2D arguably kicked off modern VTubing as we know it, leading competitors like Cover to copy the format, and paving the way for an eventual explosion in the number of independent VTubers as the cost of entry continued to fall. Aggregator site Userlocal would claim that there were over 1000 VTubers by the end of March, and 6000 by the end of the year; 61 belonged to Nijisanji. (source).
We could get bogged down in early Nijisanji history forever, but the meat of this story requires us to leave Japan and 2018 behind and move away in both space and time. Before we get to that, though, why do Japanese VTuber agencies set up overseas operations, anyway?
Why expand overseas?
Even today, the exact limit of the Japanese market for VTubers is not really known, but from the very beginning, the industry has been keenly aware both of the eventual limits of the domestic space and the potential room for growth in foreign markets that will be receptive to Japanese cultural exports. Rarely has a media company sought to have less of an audience. But we also ought to account for the fact that a lot of VTuber agencies have their origins as tech startups, where you get a lot of initial funding and then need to find a way to become profitable before it runs out. Overseas expansion carries with it a certain amount of risk, but when there is only so much money before it all runs out, those are risks that may need taking.
Where to first?
If you look at the history of the major VTuber ventures, it is notable that their first priority of expansion has usually been China, then other Asian regions, and then finally the English-language market, if they ever get there. Regional markets are just easier logistically (both in terms of timezone difference and in terms of shipping for physical goods), and presumed to be more predictable in terms of spending, and historically, the largest of these markets has been the Chinese one. Activ8 did some limited English outreach with Kizuna AI, but their experiment with Multiple AI explicitly included one voice actor to serve as her Mandarin voice. Hololive's overseas expansion went in the order China -> Indonesia -> English. Brave Group, whose modus operandi has often revolved around buying up existing ventures rather than introducing its own, acquired the Chinese agency MUGEN-LIVE in 2022, and only started an English-language branch with V4Mirai the year after. What I'm saying is that we in the Anglosphere have tended to be a pretty distant, fourth-tier concern for the Japanese VTuber industry. Nijisanji would be no exception.
Only Nijixon could go to China
When I earlier wrote that Nijisanji debuted 61 Livers in its first 10 months, that was not entirely true. Nijisanji had licensed its app and its branding to a different company, who proceeded to launch Nijisanji Shanghai and Nijisanji Taipei, each of 8 members, at the end of August 2018. In other words, some 77 people signed on to become official Nijisanji talents that year.
Trying to find out what exactly happened to 二次三次虚拟主播企划 (er ci san ci xuni zhubo qihua, or 'Nijisanji Virtual Streamer Project'; evidently sometimes shortened to '"Nijisanji" Project') is tricky given the relative lack of attention from back in the day and the retroactive scrubbing of a lot of material. Thanks to /u/kirandra I was put on to this writeup concerning Nijisanji Shanghai, but this too is a rather later retrospective. Probably the only comprehensive timeline comes from the relevant page on Chinese ACGN wiki Moegirl.org.cn, which has no citations. So, bear in mind that the following is pretty dry and summative because I have to work with what I could find.
On 8 July 2018, a Facebook page for Nijisanji Taipei emerged, with a cover image featuring silhouettes of its eight members. The project would be formally announced on the 17th on Facebook (focussing on Taipei), Bilibili (focussing on Shanghai), and Weibo (ditto) with auditions open until the 27th. Over the course of the next few weeks, promo images would be teased until, on 24 August, both branches formally began debuting talents.
The debut announcement simply said that Nijisanji had partnered with unspecified 'local company/ies' (在地企業), something which may at the time have been seen as innocuous but which, with the benefit of hindsight, was a bit of a major red flag. Per the summary by Shitantan in the linked writeup, it very quickly became apparent that the quality of models in both instances was noticeably poorer than what was on offer from Nijisanji's main branch. Things got worse after debut, as rumour had it that agency management were abusive towards their talents, linked to a continual wave of graduations from the Shanghai branch which began in November with the exit of Siddel. By March 2019, only one of eight remained, Saitania Liun Linse, and her graduation had already been announced and scheduled for that June (in the event, she brought it forward to 10 May). In mid-February, Monmon would be the first Taipei member to graduate.
The news then came, in late March or early April 2019, that 'Nijisanji' Project's affiliation with Ichikara would cease, and the remaining seven members of Nijisanji Taipei, along with Saitania, would rebrand as VEgo. This was formally announced on 2 April on both Weibo (this was their final post on the site) and Facebook, although the process of rebranding had started a little earlier. VEgo trundled along for another year, but continued losing members until the final one, Talency, left on 31 March 2020, having been alone at the agency since the departure of Siarurin on 8 February. And so came the end of Nijisanji's first overseas foray. Whatever specific events behind the scenes caused all these exits may never be known at this point, but clearly neither the setup nor the management of the two branches was done with particularly great competence.
Tangent: It is commonly asserted across several sites, primarily wikis (including Moegirl, Chinese Wikipedia, and the Virtual YouTubers Wiki on Fandom.com), that Nijisanji's partner was the Japanese-owned, Taiwan-centred influencer and marketing firm, Capsule Inc., with considerable inconsistency over whether it was the 'core' business in Taiwan, its (now-defunct) Hong Kong subsidiary, ...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1b6wl7k/virtual_youtubers_chopped_livers_how_japans/