>>72491841She was the first, doesn't mean she was the most talented.
Japanese women saying FAQ and the concept of VTuber in general was a novelty at the time and an initial hook to GET eyes on you. What KEEPS your audience hooked is consistent entertainment. Ai HAD this for a while, with community subtitles serving as a vehicle to bring her content worldwide - which was why she shined during that time period.
Once those died though, she stopped appearing in any foreign feeds, and became JP only. Her company only did English translations, and that too after a LONG gap without any community subs, which caused her to just drop off the face of the algorithm.
Her company actually identified the problem with expansion - that of one person not being enough of a brand (or being able to do enough stuff) to keep the brand of Ai afloat.
Hence the multiple Ais. Unfortunately for her, it PERFECTLY coincided with the Gamebu chuuba VA replacement drama. Two replacement attempts (one real, one perceived) from two different companies happening so close to each other just added fuel to the rumor mill.
This was one major instance where fucking rumors and rumor mongering caused actual reputational damage to a company because of their silence and lack of transparency.
Didn't help that somewhere in between, her VA also started vagueposting and deleting some tweets, fueling even more rumors.
Ai clarified that she was not being replaced, but it came like 2 years after the whole yab started (in 2021). By then the damage had already been done.
Once Mito, Nijisanji and later Hololive entered the fray, Ai was simply left behind.
Pekora was better at banter and gaming, Marine was better at zatsudan, Suisei was better at music, and Coco went far beyond what Ai could with her humor and memes in attracting a western audience. And of course, HoloEN debuted and took over western weeb internet for some time.
Unlike some of the other retards here said, Ai DID pivot into Livestreaming later on in her career. The fact that no one even knows about those streams should make it obvious enough that she just wasn't that good at it, at least compared to her competition.
Hololive and Nijisanji perfected the idea behind "multiple Ais". That is, multiple talents with their own personalities and charm, all interacting under a single unified umbrella.
The Kizuna Ai company made a mistake in branding everything under "Kizuna Ai" and being super lore-heavy on her pre-recorded streams (even to the point that some western audiences wondered if she was an ACTUAL AI at the time). It prevented them from adding more characters into the environment that weren't "Kizuna Ai related", and when they DID try, their timing was extremely terrible.
It was a mistake they didn't even know they made until it was too late, but then they were literally the pioneers of the industry. Mistakes were inevitable.
The NFT thing and the rest of her career have many "controversies" and all, but by that time almost all her foreign audience was dead in the water anyway, so I don't think it mattered.
At the end of the day it's hard to say whether anyone was to blame. Kizuna Ai's mistakes became a guideline for the corpos that came after her. Two of them (now increasingly more) simply perfected the "ensemble cast" formula with such a multitalented cast doing both regular 2D and 3D content, that Ai and her clones just couldn't keep up.
I respect the oyabun though.
She walked through a thorny path so my oshis and several others could run.
Hope she enjoys the retired life.
