It's Faunover

Is the hololive English dream truly over?
Ceres Fauna has just declared her leaving of hololive English while I was at church this morning.

Doomposting aside, I think that there are quite a few things at play that probably few of us truly comprehend.

For one, the Cover Corporation that we knew of is not the same one anymore. Their stable of talents are aplenty, they had gone public, and have invested in stupid big amounts of money in a fancy studio to support their 3D media offering.

Their senior management has also changed, with an old director on the hololive English side being replaced, and their longest supporting director (A-Chan) having left the company earlier this year.

There has also been lots of collaborations with other companies, and many other steps had been taken to monetise the hololive IP, or at least put things on a firm enough footing that the hololive IP is kept in a form that is at least legally defensible as such.

But in the VTubing sphere as a whole, Nijisanji English has collapsed, and a ton of other small corpos have shuttered up, even as the world gets increasingly more dangerous with many rather hard-headed attempts to force things to the way they were before COVID-19 changed how we lived, worked, and played.

Third spaces have been lost, yet we find that people are starting to find alternative ways of leaving their COVID-19 shells of solace. This is especially so due to the backlash from how social media has absolutely fucked up a lot of things that matter to people a whole lot, from elections to jobs, and everything in between. Generative AI lurks in the background, providing large companies with an excuse to splurge money on some nebulous ``AI'' concept that is loosely powered by these generative AI models---the return of investment is seemingly even higher than that of the previous technological hype of the blockchain.

All in all, the world's a mess, and people seem to pine for the ``good old days''.

Unfortunately, VTubing wasn't a part of that ``good old days''. And so when big [old] money gets involved, it seems inevitable that they would force their ways of doing things down---after all, if they weren't smart, they wouldn't be the ones holding on to the capital that the company so sorely needs as ``investment'', right?

That is hard to say.

If the old ways were truly the best, then there would be no reason for evolution into the new ways. And luck does play an unbelievably large role as well, even if it isn't always the most dominant.

VTubing flourishing during the COVID-19 years was happenstance meeting some form of preparation. But whether it is something that can make it into the mainstream media as a consistent revenue stream... is something to be seen.

I mean, who can forget the sitcom era of the 1990s, and then the reality TV era of the 2000s? They eventually fell off the radar, and became niched topics at some point.

Maybe VTubing is heading to that end state.

But what I do want to say is, there's a time for everything. Every peak must be surrounded by troughs; otherwise it wouldn't be a peak. VTubing has probably hit a peak about 2 years ago, with Cover Corporation leading the pack.

And maybe it is time for a trough.