>>36107804Sonny is generally very chill but people shat on him early on for being too shy and now he tries to force himself to be more "cool" in collabs which leads to awkward moments like Pomu My Woman where he's forced out of his comfort zone to adapt to other members. He rarely gets to talk about things hes actually passionate about, people just shoehorned him as that quirky weird dude.
Fulgur originally went from being somewhat introverted because he was afraid of annoying people by joining too many streams to now joining almost every single totsu. He's basically a permanent presence as a generic +1 in collabs and it really diminishes his identity within the branch. Seems like he totally forgot about all the kayfabe stuff he wanted to do since he's too busy joining random totsus instead. I get that he just likes hanging with his friends but he's not an NPC like Shu that is made to be a +1, he's genuinely wasting his potential as a vtuber by not focusing on developing his identity more, at least as someone that thinks a heel could've been interesting in NijiEN even if it was only using that persona once in a while.
Ike's problem has little to do with collabs, he's just poorly influenced by Luxiem's fanbase as a group. His attempts at talking about anything remotely weeb within his own streams just falls totally flat because his community are underage girls. He's a generally big Vocaloid and VN fan but all anyone associates with him is "lmao miku waifufag" because he can't talk in detail unless he's collabing with someone else who enjoys vocaloid...which is like 4 people in the entire branch. If you put Ike in any of the earlier waves he would've fit in just fine and even the "brotuber" beggars would like him.
For the record I'm not complaining about what they want to do with their channels currently, because that's already influenced by what their peers are doing and what they see other livers having success with. It is what it is and we can't really turn back time to fix things. I just believe if the EN branch took a totally different direction these livers would've been just fine and people wouldn't act like LazuSydia was the last good wave. It's not entirely about the individuals, sometimes otherwise good vtubers just get put in a bad wave that gives them the wrong idea of what they should do with their content. Hope this clears things up.
