Goodbye hololive's #1 Detective!

Ah...

So I spoke about hololive English -Myth-'s fourth anniversary recently, and said:

I'll miss this group of amazing ladies the day that they decide to retire from being HoloEN Myth.

Well, it happened.
Amelia Watson just announced that she was leaving in a ``not forever'' sort of way.

How do I feel?

Well, the usual sense of loss, which really shouldn't be anything new nowadays---God knows how many different times I have lost people. Not the dead, mind you, but the kind of loss where they were a big part of one's [daily] life for quite a while, and then suddenly they are no longer a part of one's life any more.

Like eulogies, praise of Ame's innovation and hard-headedness in hard-carrying HoloEN Myth (especially from the early years) have come out once more from all corners of the fandom. When that announcement was first made, many thought she she was transferring into a more managerial role, but within a few hours, Ame put rest to that and pointed out that she was indeed leaving her full-time streaming duties, and not becoming staff.

If anything, the official hololive Production announcement in Japanese makes it very clear (to the extent that it can be made clear) that Ame will remain as a talent, as compared to the vague-ass render in the English announcement, where the phrase ``an affiliate of hololive production'' raised more questions than answers.

The thing about getting older that no one will tell you, is that mortality and impermanence will forever dog you, intensifying themselves through ever increasing frequencies of appearance as one's experiences increases through the ever larger number of people we meet and interact with. And even though we always soothe ourselves by saying that ``we'll get used to it'', the truth is, we never do.

We just end up increasingly broken or numb at each loss.

If that is considered getting used to it, it is of little wonder why the older generations are almost always more jaded than the young.

But that is also the reason why as we age, we need to know how to temper our sharing of our life experiences to those who are coming after us. Yes, we know the world is heading to ruin, if it already hasn't, but amongst that narrow perspective that each of us has, there are unseeable alternatives that can either lead away from the current path of ruin, or even more optimistically take us towards something that is more wholesome and nurturing.

The young, who are fearless through freshness and a lack of enough setbacks, are the ones who take the charge to see these unseeable alternatives for us.

We, the old, ought to shield the young from the shit-fest that we can see, but we should also give them the room to explore a different path, let them learn through making mistakes, and providing them with a safety net to recover from.

It's not even about the old cliché about how a society is at its best when the old plant trees that they will never get to experience the shade of---it's about helping the young plant some new-fangled genetically modified heat-resistant AI-powered tree-hybrid that they come up with, despite us not knowing everything that goes into that, and knowing that there's a chance for them to fail, without discouraging them to try.

That is a much harder thing to pull off.

But back to Ame. She'll definitely make her mark in ways that will surprise us---I'm sure of it. After all, one of the reasons that she's leaving is to go do things that only she can do alone.

To use yet another cliché whose origins are murky as fuck, the way such things usually go:

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Amelia Watson is an explorer by nature, and after going far with what she has for now, there are new avenues to explore that she want to do, to fail/succeed fast so to speak.

Godspeed hololive's #1 detective! o7