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Hello Ruffians, in the effort to make good posts and ontopic discussion, I'd like to share my thoughts on the Holo Nexus pop up shop.
First the bad news. The event itself sucked. They had no FUWAMOCO acrylics, no Advent acrylics at all except Shiori. People who were there on the first day confirmed that was the case then too. The merch was very limited, it really felt like the "Prime Day" of Hololive, where it was just shit they had leftover from other events like acrysta, stickers, and some generic T shirts, umbrellas and camp chairs stamped with the Nexus Gate logo and no sign of the girls anywhere. Everything was insanely overpriced, it was 8 dollars for a pin and the pins are gacha. They were selling those short little pencils that they use in libraries stamped with the Holo Nexus logo for 10 dollars each. Compare that to the Gundam popup shop that was also going on at the same time in the same mall where they give you a free little Gunpla kit to make as well as a free V fin headband and an inflatable sword and shield. If you buy anything you also get a free Gundam bag. Now this kit is the cheapest of cheap shit ever, it’s like 5-10 dollars worth of plastic and probably cost Bandai a fraction of that to make but it’s still nice compared to Holo Nexus which doesn’t give you anything and chargers 25+ for acrylic stands with even less articulation. I realize that Bandai and Gundam are vastly bigger than Hololive and they can probably afford to do this but the overall lack of effort in the Holoshop was pretty apparent.
The good news is, the community is still great. Talking to people about Hololive is fun, and there’s none of the toxic positivity that you’d get in a hugbox nor any of the toxic trolling you’d have to put up with here. It’s just a lot of fun to shoot the shit with other Holofans, and most of them are cool guys. The cosplayers here were taking pictures with people and they didn’t ask for money for pictures so that’s a good sign. People gave me free stickers, the gacha pins were all swapped between people so everyone got their oshi in the end, and the staff were very chill and even moved the cardboard standees around for me so I could get a good picture. (You’re not allowed to touch the standees yourself). Staff were mostly NA, but there were 2 or 3 Japanese guys who were clearly higher ups from the main office. Hololive has a long way to go but I do appreciate that they are at least attempting to have stuffs outside of Japan so I’ll always try and go to show them there is an audience for this kind of thing. People BAU BAU’d, and we got a big BAU BAU at the end for the video that the staff took, I wonder if it will appear on the main channel. In the end, I’m glad I went, I had a great time. The Gundam pop up helped save it a lot, but even if it hadn’t been there, I enjoyed talking to other fans enough that it was worth it for me.
