>>79751540Shondo recently talked how she knew people of incredible talent and of highest quality, and yet were still unable to succeed alone.
Until a corpo(most certainly Holo) 'saves' them and then they become big and successful.
When she said that I definitely thought of Nina and how hard she's tried over the years to grow, but to little avail despite the sheer talent she already has.
Shondo concluded that making it as an indie is mostly luck, which might be true, but I think there is more to this picture.
She merely restated the common narrative of how so many indies mostly of the seiso type just stagnate as 2views or 3views no matter how skilled they are, to the point they conclude that joining something like Hololive is their only viable path to success.
This idea is actually made stronger from the recent success of many indie 4views, because those 4views are what many consider "whores who embrace Twitch culture".
It roughly sums up to "People nice like Nina need Hololive in order to prosper", which is reflected well enough on Cover's indie picks for Advent and Justice, something Shondo has also pointed out.
But what if Hololive was the very reason Nina had been unable to find success to begin with?
It should be clear enough to anyone familiar with indies that Cover doesn't and likely couldn't dominate the entire EN market even if they are the biggest singular faction, due to enough people preferring different content like those from said "Twitch whores".
But they do have a near complete lock on the seiso-loving audience, "OG vtuber fans" many liken themselves as, the people who would have been most appreciative of Nina's content.
I initially naively thought that Hololive English succeeding would help bolster and embolden those who wanted to do content in a similar vein as theirs.
And while it did inspire a generation of new chuubas many of whom were eager to embrace "idol culture", it's pretty obvious from the get-go Cover doesn't intend to share that goodwill or prosperity to outsiders (and why would they? What kind of self-respecting company would let others leech off of them so freely?)
We end up in a situation where the most Holo-like indies(and small corpo talents) are the ones most deprived of their essential potential viewers, that is until they actually join the blue company itself.
Then the floodgates open, letting the lucky few to finally embrace the kind of audience most aligned to what they had wanted to do all along.
Far from the image of being the magical platform that brings salvation to hopeful starving 2views, they are the clout gatekeepers who have starved everyone with similar dreams from the beginning.
Then selecting 4 or 5 survivors to let in, to further reinforce their dominance of this audience.
I can think of a friend who did just that, and frankly..
I don't blame her at all, not one bit, considering the suffering in stagnancy she's endured for so long, worse than Nina herself had.
The biggest take is that the further success of HoloEN ends up hurting seiso indies like Nina the most.
All the while the whorish ones (which some holofans imagine being on a crusade against) are not only unharmed but even helped by Cover's own actions, as it allows them to better contrast with the dominant corpo, more easily winning over different audiences.
It all seems fairly obvious in hindsight; them being direct competitors of a sort. It feels dumb not realizing it sooner.
But it all still is so depressing.
Seiso-style independent creators are the people I love the most, which makes it painful how so many of them genuinely love Hololive and what they represent in spite of how they should be rationally treated, as competition to be swiped aside.
It does make me feel incredibly grateful however for the Barbie Girls being able to strive as they are, like a bubble of hope in the midst of a Holo-induced viewer drought.
So how could Nina escape the 3view ceiling of no fault of her own? I can think of two things.
She either changes her branding enough to be able to attract different viewers, as she already loses the most having her content being a near 1:1 match to Hololive's tone aside from more retro games.
Or she accomplishes something so truly exceptional it's able at least temporarily break Cover's stranglehold over her target audience.
As nice it is for Nina to personally know someone who's received the golden ticket into the company she's partly idolized for so long, knowing that this course ultimately exacerbates her struggles further is why I ended up feeling so mixed about it.
Maybe deep down Shondo also felt something similar but that's just my schizo-ing.
Being a hard competitor to Hololive's content is a harrowing endeavor; that Nina's been able to hold on for this long is somewhat reassuring.
I just wanna do what I can to keep the Indie Seiso dream alive.
It's an ideal too precious to be subsumed by any company however benevolent they are.
