>>57119681Hololive’s model is the holobox. You watch your oshi because you like her, but you pick a Hololive member as your oshi because you like all the kino interactions and collabs. When she graduates, all that surrounding chemistry is gone. It is a clear downgrade, and the entire oshi ethos (wanting to support someone as they go on their journey to become an idol) gets shot too.
Hololive members are the big corporate idols of vtubing. Their stuff is sleek and flashy and well-marketed. The rm’s feel like underground idols in comparison. Some people are into that, but it’s not for everybody—that’s why the underground idol scene is so small.
Meanwhile, Vesper’s appeal was fully on himself. His personal bullshit aside, the dude was entertaining. My rrat is that he chose to sabotage the potential Tempus box so that his viewers wouldn’t give a shit about the others and he could successfully poach his viewers where others have failed.
That’s the thing about the holobox. It discourages grifters. Male collabs from people like Towa are tolerated as long as you return to the holobox. But that only works if you genuinely care about Hololive. Grifters who phone it in do well, but less well than the ones who truly care (most of the time…). Overall, I think this is why Hololive is able to stand out, since they’ve made it so that members are encouraged to do things to help the corpo rather than interact with grifters and shit up the brand.
It’s absolutely diabolical, if you ask me. It’s genius. And if Tempus fails, it all but guarantees the destruction of any viable “you don’t have to be an attention whore on twitch” meta to male vtubing.
