After watching a deep dive on the Rushia incident here's my schizoid post as to what's happening with Gura. This is going to be a long one, so hear me out. To make this make more sense I’m going call the VA behind Gura, Gabby. As that is a name she has used a couple of times for the human version of that character.
The Gura we know and Gabby are very different people in terms of personality. I wouldn't be surprised if Gabby had a fairly normal life and could even be slightly outgoing. This is why she seems so secretive compared to other holomembers, because she’s trying to weave together a convincing ongoing story for Gura and she really has no real life experience for that type of role to base it on. That being said, not everything Gura says is a made-up story. Some of it is bits and pieces of her real life as Gabby. Those are the parts she really does not want to talk about in any detail, as if we knew all the information behind them it most certainly would break the character of Gura.
We know that the talents don’t have to be “themselves” and can play a role in hololive. Ame kind of let this out of the bag during one of her streams about her debut. In the story she told, she asked her manager about how she should approach the role of Ame and the manager said pretty much however you see fit. This led Ame to seriously consider trying to play the part of a British person, but she later decided against that as she knew she could not keep that role up for long.
When Gabby was coming up with the Gura character she chose a bratty, socially awkward ,shitposter, recluse, but also decided to go for the GFE kind of like what Rushia was doing at the time. There’s nothing wrong with providing the GFE or BFE, but when doing something like that while playing a role and trying to live a normal-ish life. You’re setting yourself up for trouble especially if you have a slight real life mental issue that could make decoupling from the role in your mind difficult. Eventually the story will fall apart when the fans learn the character they love has a real life with a real BF or GF, and everyone just ends up getting hurt badly in the end. This is what happened to both Rushia and Vox along with several other streamers that did that.
Gabby was probably fine playing the GFE and the role up until the “party incident”. At the party Gabby was probably fine being normal Gabby and having fun, but Mori kind of slipped up when she did that impromptu stream as it kind of put the first major crack into the character of “Gura” at least as far as fans knew her. As a party would be the last place a socially awkward recluse would be. That along with several other rumors running around and the “sunburn incident” could have made Gabby realize that the way she was playing the role of Gura was starting to get dangerous since her real life was starting to interfere with Gura’s life. Another likely scenario could be the mysterious senpai dinner in Japan was with either Coco or A-chan. As those are really the only 2 possible English speaking people that Gura would call senpai that would be in Japan. It’s possible they warned Gabby she was headed down a dangerous path. As she was pretty much in the same place Rushia was in just before the shit hit the fan and both of those people would know the Rushia story very well.
The issue is Gabby probably can’t just change the Gura’s personality as she is seeing it as part of herself or Gabby may not want to change it as she really does care for her fans and knows she’s going to emotionally destroy more than a few of them with something like that. The one true part of Gabby’s personality that bleeds through is she really doesn’t like conflict and does everything to avoid it. You don’t get a much bigger conflict than, do I destroy this role that I have been creating for 3 years or do I destroy my real life to make it match that of the role I created. I could absolutely see someone choosing option C when face with a decision like that which is to run away and disappear. Gabby is likely just as parasocial as Gura’s fans and truthfully she likes the attention that she gets from them. The problem is she also wants to live a normal-ish life, but can’t because of the role she is trying to play.
