>>103620397(1/2)
There's a lot more to the history. I will go through a brief summary.
Golden Age: Lazulight/Obsydia era
-- These talents were greater than the sum of their parts. Individually they were just average streamers, but their group-dynamic was something fresh, new, and fun. Holo had the best individual streamers, but Lazylight and Obsydia had the best "group".
-- Open VC culture was something new and fresh, and something really fun that created some of the most memorable moments.
-- One of the most anticipated collabs since the very beginning was Selen and Elira's collab. Which, strangely, never happened.
Ethyria:
-- A group of nepo-hires. They were very weak and nobody really liked them. Millie was by far the most anticipated one, but underperformed. They were frustrated, and complaining about being "forgotten". They felt they "deserved" more.
The Shattering: Luxiem era
-- Males debuted. Initially they were low viewed, but caught fire with Kpop viewers, especially in China. Within a few months they were mega-popular stars. Although their viewers were slightly lower than Holo, their income was way higher.
-- The male fans at this point started getting angry about the Luxiem guys joining every collab with their oshis, often with extremely sexual comments about their dicks. It's certain the girls lost a lot of male fans here. Management decided to completely end open-VC culture.
-- More guys debuted, less popular this time, but still doing alright. They were rushed out quickly to capitalize on the success. Even Hololive started preparing male talents of their own.
-- For the first few months, the girls kept their distance. But Ethyria was licking their chops, seeing viewers and money they desired. So all of them took a male ship, and started pushing collabs with the guys. They were doing so well, the Lazulight and Obsydia girls were heavily pressured to join them.
ILuna: The first disaster
-- The first mixed wave, to fully bring Nijisanji culture to the EN market.
-- Whoever designed this wave had a femdom fetish. They made the guys short and weak, and encouraged the girls to be aggressive and bully them. They even hired Aia, who has a shrill unlistenable voice, because she was willing to do femdom content.
-- This was a disastrous decision. The female fans were angry that the girls were being "mean", and didn't like the undersized male models. The female fans were largely coomers and desperate for more bishonen models they could fap to.
-- Within a month ILuna was shitting the bed with low 3-view streams, the first in the history of the branch. Despite having the biggest debut in Nijisanji history. In fact the entire branch started a downturn.
The collapse
-- The mixed gender content did not go over very well. Reimu was eager to ship herself with Vox, and invaded his BFE ASMR stream, which caused intense backlash from his fans. At this point, Vox started to decline, along with the males in general.
-- The fans who came in were largely chinese/asian, and didn't understand Western norms, and were easily offended. Many of them didn't even speak English and were just here for a fap. They started moving on.
-- At this point, Ethyria was bragging about the "progress" they made in changing Vtuber culture. Enna became obsessed with purging parasocial fans. She started doing blatant NTR streams, and invited Kyo into her bedroom, and streamed with him from her bedroom holding his hand. Unfortunately, this worked all too well in driving away fans.
-- In early 2023, NijiEN started completely collapsing. Views were imploding rapidly for all the boys, and the girls too.
-- The new XSoliel wave was another disappointment. Extremely poor hiring choices. Two girls were just JP members hired by nepotism, and the other was fired almost immediately.
-- AR Live was a massive show for Luxiem, for which the Luxiem boys recorded in Japan. But Elira insisted that all the waves preceding them be included too. This was obviously impossible, so the show was cancelled. In response the Luxiem guys had a total meltdown, protesting management openly on twitter. They largely gave up and stopped streaming in protest.
-- In response to the collapsing audience, Ethyria tried to generate "drama", believing this would draw interest. Shitting on coworkers during collabs, tierlist streams, insulting people.This came to a head during the Secret GC stream, where they openly shat on 4chan and mocked their coworkers in a petty nasty stream, mostly instigated by Enna. Both Enna and Millie were suspended.
-- By late 2023, the branch was a shell of itself. The boys were down 3/4 of their audience, and the girls were down 60%. Nina had left, Mysta had left, and it was rumored that even Pomu might leave soon (spoiler, she did)
