This whole Gura thing is an interesting scenario.
On one hand, talents taking long-ass unannounced breaks isn't new. Laplus, Haachama, Shion, Ayame all have had long breaks.
I suppose the difference is that, eventually the reason for the breaks is announced after a while. e.g. Menhera for Laplus, Grandpa (or was it Grandma?) dead for Ayame, illness (actually college) for Haachama etc. And once these announcements are made, people stop fretting for the most part. But even without announcements, Ayame, Shion etc. are often streaming infrequently. Although nowadays they are more active on twitter, there were times where they wouldn't tweet for 2-3 weeks on end.
On the other hand, after Cover became a mid-sized company in 2019, there hasn't been any talents that have outright missed their own birthday celebrations afaik, and more importantly there hasn't been a single instance of a talent not even informing her fans about whether or not there will be ANY stream for her birthday - not just 3D.
The viability of Ayame-level streaming exists in EN - Ina being the best example. She announces all her long breaks, and often shitposts on twitter during her breaks, so her fans never feel that she's "not there". Even without streams, just reading her tweets they know that she's doing alright, and that's good enough for most fans.
BUT, Gura has made it perfectly clear that she despises using twitter because she's scared that anything she says will get used as ammo to shit on her. This has proven true on multiple occasions as her Garlic Bread tweet showed.
BUT, Gura has been quite good at just ignoring this stuff throughout her career. Her early days she was SWARMED by twitchfags and OTK-types trying to suck some clout off her small tits, both on twitter and on youtube. She's ignored almost ALL of it, and was able to stream just for her fans for the most part of a year and a half.
BUT, it's Gura's own fans that have recently started shitting on her for these prolonged absences. The phenomenon is similar since Ayame had the same antis back when her family was going through some shit and she was on an 80 day break or something - all of which disappeared once she returned. Unlike Ayame though, the people shitting on Gura are NOT just antis. As the comment vibes on that reddit thread proves, there's a large portion of EN Holofans that are just tired of Gura fucking off from her supposed "responsibilites" and attending to whatever she has going irl, who gives a shit if someone died or is sick, we want the fucking stream.
Gura has made it pretty clear during one of her recent streams that she's going to just try to stream when she is able to, so the statement is already made regarding her mindset to streaming which chumbuds should already be aware of.
BUT, I suppose as the second point says, it's VERY surprising that a Holo talent would miss a birthday stream, one of the most important days to farm some cash. The fact that Cover is ALSO seemingly fine with it means that her situation is quite serious.
Either way this situation is quite unprecedented when it comes to Cover and Hololive, so I can understand why fans are antsy just waiting for SOMETHING to be said by either party.
