>>11774521I was talking about the whole english/western vtuber scene in general. If you specifically only mean HoloEN itself, sure, there are individual issues.
The initial post wanted Holo (and Niji) to "work on building up the connected feeling that the JP scene has".
(well, Niji seems to be doing okay in that regard, as they're doing something similar like the JP scene that all knew each other from NND back in the day, and most NijiEN hires are also indies who already knew each other, so they'll get that memed "chemistry" buff that the autistic strangers of HoloEN who take months to warm up to each other lack).
I was responding as to why mainly HoloEN seems to be oddly averse to small company / indie collabs (as that would "build the connectedness of the scene"), and it's probably for management/business reasons. There's little reward in it for them (everyone already knows Hololive already, so you don't gain much by collabing with smaller chubas, instead you only send your people to boost your "competitors"), I know it's cynical and "bad" if you think this "hurts the scene as a whole", but in the end Cover is a business, not a charity.
>3 out of 11 that isn't from North America isn't exactly "spread out".North America is still beeg, you will never get the same ease and spontaneity of off-collabs like you have in Japan where everyone is basically at most just a one-hour trainride away from each other, and people go in and out of the "office" to meet each other naturally.
An NA off collab would still have to be scheduled way in advance for everyone to make the necessary arrangements, and the fact that the three NA myth girls haven't done so in over a year shows that it's not so easy (that is, if the explanation for that isn't just "they actually didn't really want to" and just "they want to, but found it too difficult to pull off for now").
As for more pure zatsu streams, I wholeheartedly agree, I've been banging that drum forever. Maybe it's a personality thing, but the EN girls seem strangely averse to doing just pure casual talking streams - the few they have were actually mostly really good, but they were just so few and far between - as if they still aren't really confident enough in their talking skills and think they need the "crutch" of a game to keep peoples attention or direct their conversations.
I think most of them probably have some hang-ups like "oh, no one would want to hear me ~just talk~, I need to entertain them with a game" or "I wouldn't want to impose on the other talent by asking them ~just to talk~ with me, I need a ~reason~ to collab so I'll propose doing something multiplayer game". Which ends up all too often resulting in stilted collabs where all they talk is focused on gameplay related tasks and little to no natural casual banter can develop between them.
Which is a shame, because we've seen them have great casual conversations and it's always a treat. The recent Minecraft invigoration arc that Council brought, by simply having more people on the server so it's not just a barren wasteland where you never meet anybody, and them having less autism to spontaneously hop on each other's voice chat has been great and I hope it serves as an icebreaker to have more zatsu interactions in the future.
