VTubing (or content creation in general) is not an easy activity. You need time, you need patience and you need determination to even persevere let alone thrive doing it - even then, strong will and dedication might not be enough sometimes.
We all have our oshi or just creators whose content we enjoy but sometimes those people vanish. Maybe they got bored or tired and decided to quit. Maybe they disappeared suddenly without a trace. Either way, they’re no longer active and the only thing left are the archives.
I’ve been thinking about one of such VTubers recently and thought this could be an interesting topic to reminiscence and learn about people you’ve never heard about.
The one I’ve been thinking about is Vasuki, a French streamer who used to be active on Twitch. She streamed variety of games, with FFXIV as a regular “filler” between them. While she wasn’t huge, she seemed to be doing fine and nothing really indicated she’s planning to stop her activities. She was even working on an AI powered partner to use during streams. One day she simply vanished. No more streams, no more archives, no more tweets - she’s just gone.
I’m sure some of you have a similar story so I’d like to ask you to tell me about the VTubers of your past. Who were they? What did they do? What was your favorite thing about them?
Let’s go through a memory lane together.
I’m cheating a little bit because my memories of Vasuki don’t really come with any clip worthy moments or anything like that. She wasn’t a huge storyteller or a natural born comedians like some of the biggest names active today.
My favorite thing about her streams was just hanging out with a small number of other viewers and chatting about games and such. I’m not a huge fan of crowds, whether virtual or real ones, so I tend to just hang around in the background whenever big number of people show up in chat. This wasn’t a problem with Vasuki.
I know this might sound kind of shitty (“hell yeah, streamer I watch isn’t blowing up so I can keep chatting!”) but small channels are the only places I feel comfortable in - there’s enough people to actually interact with but not enough to change the whole thing into a bunch of monkeys looking for attention (yes this is an overreaction, not a serious feeling).
I kind of stopped looking for new small streamers after that. I have a hard time entering existing groups so joining the chat can be a challenge. There was one other streamer since then but YouTube decided to block my account until I gave them more data and since I’m not doing that I can no longer chat so once again I’m stuck watching from the shadows.
I hope some of you have more positive stories.
Miyune.
She just vanished one day. She had three different versions of her model and a growing friend network, but just went into indefinite hiatus one day after citing social burnout. Could be a personal/irl issue, could have went corpo(but don’t have a clue if she did). Hell, learning about Seth/MSM’s blacklist, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what she meant by “social burnout”.
That actually sounds familiar. I think I might’ve even caught it live for a bit back then - it was a fun one.
Not sure what the blacklist is about (I don’t really follow the stuff happening outside the streams) but I’m guessing it had something to do with cliques and similar drama? Is so, these are always a bummer.
The blacklist being the reason for Miyune’s hiatus is pure speculation on my part, but 10 days ago, FalseEyed ran a story about how talent agency MSM has failed to file their LLC paperwork, has been paying taxes and has been behind on paying many commissioned artists. Later that night, Krimbo ran a stream about he and the SouthSide group had been blacklisted by Seth(CEO) at MSM. Krimbo attributes Takahata101’s departure from regular vtubing from stress from also being on the blacklist, which according to Krimbo was because Taka “wouldn’t kiss Seth’s ring”.
Seth eventually released a statement saying that MSM does not have a blacklist, but does maintain a list of people who MSM advises their talents not to associate with. Which is the same thing as a blacklist. There’s some other accusations against Seth, but I just want to focus on these points.
Previous, I just though Taka experienced burnout and wanted to focus on something else for a while. His Weary101 and TV2 streams have always been a high light for me. Hearing that one person might be responsible for what for me was splitting up The Beatles… well, I’d really like to hear Taka make a statement on the matter. BTW, I was so happy to see him for Wrestletuber2024.
Again, Miyune being in the blacklist is pure speculation, but a lot of people took a step back from vtubing in 2023-24. People who had good ccv and seemed to be investing in their setups.
Welp, that turned out to be a bit deeper than anticipated. Thanks for a detailed explanation!
That is the summary. I left out a lot, but you can look up FalseEyed’s and Krinbo’s streams on the matter if you want.