>>83899911>All this crying and wailing just for Aqua to hop over to another corpo.There's a tiny bit of "FPBP" reaction from me too, but the thing is, I think this reaction is only appropriate if Aqua was actually your oshi. Paradoxically, her graduation is way more painful if Aqua wasn't actually your oshi, and you only knew her in the periphery as a partner for other hololive members. Or, put another way:
AquShio is dead.
Negi*U is dead.
Umisea is dead.
StartEnd is dead.
I hate to admit it, but I'm not going to follow Not-Aqua in all likelihood because most 'hololive magic' moments (though not all) are the results of multiple people - StartEnd in its entirety being probably the best topical example, but even outside of collabs, the venue-based concerts are another; having all of the fans there in one place is a huge part of the experience, and just singing to a bunch of people online, while still cool, will never really capture that kind of hype. Hololive hires well in finding people that really bounce off each other, and THAT is why losing them is painful - I knew Coco was KSon even before she graduated, but I knew that without the other hololive members to bounce off of, I wasn't going to enjoy watching her - I only really liked her as a collab partner.
All of this is to say that Aqua cannot recreate the magic she found with hololive unless she can find another group of people who all replace the roles of the people she was already collaborating with. Who's going to be able to form StartEnd 2 with her? Who's going to be the back-and-forth partner that Not-Aqua claims loves her too much? Who will be the extroverts that torment Not-Aqua with their actual ability to socialize? Hell, even outside of collab partners, who's going to help her get that next SoloLive concert such that there's a proper fan gathering at an actual venue? It's not impossible, but the odds are slim.
And I think that's okay. I think Aqua, to a certain extent, just doesn't care about having the spotlight anymore. She was made into a superstar, but I don't think she really WANTED to be a superstar past the point where she had enough fans to have a career, and she's past that benchmark by multiple orders of magnitude. She will still absolutely have fans, because at base she was still a good enough streamer and idol to keep those fans. But unless she was your oshi... the magic is over, and now you have to decide if you actually really enjoyed watching Aqua simply as another streamer. And for most people... that's not going to be yes, because most livestreamers, when purely looked at as a streamer and not as anything else, aren't that popular.
So for anyone asking when do I consider hololive dead: once the number of graduations hits the point where the chemistry between talents is found more often in their reincarnations than still in hololive.
