>>57662416There was a point back when they did them. Back then they brought in Vei but otherwise didn't know who else they could or wanted to join. The overwhelming horde of applications exceeded their expectations and that's also pretty much when things fell apart. They expected a few hundred, maybe a thousand, and instead got several thousand and were not equipped to handle it from a manpower standpoint. By all accounts, the decision was made in April 2022 (we know because at least two of the final contestants made Discord posts talking about being rejected, in Snuffy and Anny, and that hey were in the final round). However, the winner of the audition contest, Haruka Karibu, wouldn't debut in VShojo until December 2022, a full 8 months later, pushing the results of the contest from half a year to fourteen months. Nobody is quite sure why. Haruka did get a new model but it didn't take 8 months for that, and pretty much during that timeframe she was doing collabs with more and more VShojo girls to get familiar with them before the debut (to that point she was mostly known by Zen and Nyan, despite what people think about her being a nepo hire). The speculation is that VShojo had Kson and Nazuna fall into their laps around March of 2022 and that VShojo decided to launch VShojo Next at Anime Expo either "early" or with more effort and hype to get VShojoJP started with a bang, which put off Haruka until December. But nobody really knows except VShojo.
