"All this fuss over a cartoon girl?" Yes, if you've been living under a rock since the pandemic started.
So many VTubers, so little headroom
Virtual YouTubers - or VTubers - aren't a new concept. The idea of an animated avatar stand-in as entertainment goes way back to the days of Max Headroom. With many countries locked down by COVID, more and more sought an escape through online video-streaming platforms.
This was perhaps the time many first encountered a world of online virtual entertainers.
Typically, a real person is behind each virtual avatar, manipulating it through motion tracking technology, like e-wayang kulit. Some movements can be programmed with software, like in videos where the VTuber dances. VTubers also entertain audiences with activities such as playing games, singing, and drawing, and even movie watch-alongs and chats with viewers.
Some virtual talents are independent, while some are part of agencies, with Hololive being the most well-known. Interactions such as collabs among talents within and outside their agencies can and do happen, subject to conditions. Being under an agency helps a great deal in terms of VTuber tech, sponsorships and branding, in lieu of a basic salary.
Income from VTubing generally comes from viewer donations, usually integrated into the streaming service. YouTube, for instance, introduced the superchat, where viewers pay to keep certain comments on screen longer than usual. Some VTubers show their appreciation by reading the names of superchatters after each segment.
Each avatar has its lore or background, which is revealed during their debut and expands over time. Eventually, boundaries between the avatar and the actor blur as their backgrounds meld and incorporates bits of the actor's daily life: family, school, work, and off-screen interactions with other VTubers, and the struggles faced in their VTubing careers.
All this creates a vibrant melting pot of inspiration as artists, musicians, video editors, and the like get in on the lore train with the fans, enriching it. The amount of VTuber-inspired output is growing, and in Japan the avatars are also featured on snacks, drinks, and on special occasions, billboard ads.
Well, this preamble went on longer than it should.
But what I'm saying here that VTubing has sort of bloomed as a form of entertainment, a career, and a PR strategy. You want facts and figures, go somewhere else. However, that brands such as Netflix and even Air Asia is riding the Vtubing surge, debuting their own VTubers as their corporate spokespeople, should be enough to shout that this trend won't be going away soon. Saturated, yes, but not going away. Is anyone aware that Malaysia has its own VTuber agency?
And among the figures driving this boom is a certain orange-haired half-dragon cartoon girl.
A virtual star was born...
Kiryu Coco debuted as a Hololive VTuber around December 2019 along with four other genmates, but she dropped into my YouTube recommendations near the end of the first MCO in Malaysia. She stood out even among her fellow VTubers, not just for her height and cup size. Who was this sassy bilingual lady with a distinctly American Southern drawl who uses "motherf—er" in her catchphrase?
At some point, however, she grew on viewers. With scores of clippers - people who subtitle and post segments of archived VTuber livestreams - that she and her fellow Hololivers spoke mainly Japanese was no barrier to getting to know her.
Coco's voice actress was born and raised American, which explains her accent. She apparently taught herself Japanese after playing a game from Sega's Yakuza series and has been living in Japan for some time after her family moved there for work.
Behind her raunchy, at times foul-mouthed on-screen persona, Coco is smart, forward-thinking, creative, sensitive, compassionate, and pretty selfless. She's helped several Hololivers through personal crises, provided tech support, and mulled the creation of a dorm-cum-office that's more conducive for Hololivers to stream and live in. All this, the lengths she goes to for each stream, and more contributed to her meteoric rise in popularity.
And it shows. Just check out these stats. This website, Playboard, only started tracking these figures early last year, but grossing nearly RM12.3 million in super chats from her debut up to her graduation is no mean feat. Coco's is currently listed as the most superchatted YouTube channel worldwide.
Even assuming that YouTube takes 30 per cent and Hololive, say, 40 per cent, her net earnings are still damn serious for someone who plays an exaggerated version of herself online. Small wonder millions are hopping onto this bandwagon. Well, I thought it was a big deal until I looked up some income tax rates.
Coco is also cited as the main reason Hololive English came about. Its members' popular YouTube channels reached the million-subscriber milestone less than a year after their debuts, and sitting at the top is shark girl Gawr Gura, with more than three million subscribers, beating that of the standard bearer of Japanese VTubing, Kizuna Ai.
She shows more of her caring, introspective side in her "Bar Coco" segments, where she plays the accomodating hostess of a virtual bar helping her guests (the audience) wind down after a long day, dispensing advice and telling jokes. She's done more, but repeating all that here is pointless.
Not for nothing Coco's epithet among fans and colleagues was kaichou or Chairman, a nod to her being a Yakuza fangirl and reflective of her growing influence within the global VTubing sphere.
But there were hard times. Because YouTube is Hololive's primary streaming platform, VTubers who cross the line become demonitised - no superchat or ad revenue - or even banned from streaming temporarily. Coco and several other Hololivers have been hit. And after she broadcasted YouTube stats that showed Taiwan as a country, Chinese nationalist fanatics coordinated a months-long harrassment campaign, spamming her chat window and those of other Hololivers in collaborative streams, to get the company to fire her.
Nevertheless, she persisted, so when she announced in June that she was graduating from Hololive, about one and a half years after her debut and at the peak of her career, everyone was shook. After all she had endured, after all the time and effort she invested, it had come to this?
...but went supernova
The harrassment was one factor, but as the date approached she revealed that she'd found herself descending an unhappy spiral over her streaming activities. Having some of her ideas for streaming and such shot down by management no doubt contributed to her slump. Her fans are understandably furious about the harrassment and the antis are a convenient sandbag. But Hololive appears to be an archetypal Japanese talent agency after all, and Coco's Western ways were never going to be welcome there. She's likely to have haters among Japanese viewers too, for not meeting expectations.
She has already influenced some Hololivers to swear in English and pick up the language to communicate with the wider Anglophone audience, affectionately referred to as "overseas bros". She played a role in getting Hololivers from various branches - Japan, Indonesia and the English-speaking group - to bond. Her presence was inducing changes to the company and probably the industry as a whole, which the conservative segment of Hololive's management probably could not adapt to, in less than two years!
But before management could decide, Coco apparently decided to graduate on her own, announcing the decision first to her colleagues, then to the world maybe several months later, after laying out a roadmap for her exit. Collabs, an original song, a group single with her fellow genmates, and a graduation stream were arranged. She even managed to interview Tanigo Motoaki, a.k.a. YAGOO, the CEO of Cover Corp, Hololive's parent company.
Towards the end, she gave it her all in her last livestreams, often exuding the strongest "whatcha gonna do, fire me?" vibes any outgoing employee has ever displayed.
A bunch of fans including music mixers and artists helped her put together a music video for her cover of "Fansa" ("Fanservice") in time for her graduation - and didn't bill her a yen. Elsewhere, fan tributes poured in: posts, tweets, videos, songs and art. Before and shortly after her exit, during collabs and streams, some Hololivers couldn't hold back tears at the thought of her departure.
Even after her graduation, unlike most idols, her name was not verboten. Coco is still referred to and brought up during livestream conversations by other Hololivers. Several of them even sang her apparently fan-made(!) original song online. Her Twitter account and YouTube channel remain, along with all the other clips of her made by clippers.
It's still cold comfort for fans, especially those who had just discovered her, only to learn that her time with us would be cut short. Many of us who needed an escape from the COVID-riddled reality tumbled into the VTuber rabbit hole, and Coco was among those who first pulled us in. And just when we needed her even more, she left us.
Towards a new sky
I broke down at one point after watching one too many tributes to her online. Tears shed not solely for a star that braved hardship and the ire of petty people only to be unjustly deprived of her chance to shine even brighter, but from everything else that led us to seek solace in her antics and those of other VTubers. The scene just isn't the same without Hololive's naga lucu.
Some have wondered if she would have been more at home with a Western Vtuber agency like, say, VShojo, whose talents tend to be as forward as she is. I don't think so. In VShojo, she would have been just "one of the girls". In Hololive? A more restrained, more wholesome and family-friendly arena? She glowed like a supernova, albeit too brightly and too hot in the end.
It's likely that despite her distinctive voice, as well as her identifying character and verbal tics (which have helped the curious discover her other online identity), Coco insisted on being herself in an alien sky because she knew how bright she'd shine there.
So we can perhaps be comforted by the fact that she'll find another sky to shine in, and that we haven't seen the last of her, assuming she managed to save whatever remained of her love of streaming and cheering up audiences.
Live strong, Chairman, wherever you may be.
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