this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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They went public. It's always the death knell of your favorite subculture when it goes mainstream. Happened to video games. Happened to anime.
Cover handled it better then Niji or maybe Niji was always going to have their exodus. Who knows?
Last night Pippa of Phase connect told her chat that she's explained to her boss that she's walking if Phase ever went public or got bought out.
It's never as simple as "They went public, everything is shit now". Kiara talked about that at length in todays stream. Those things don't just happen over night because a company goes public, it happens over years and affects each talent differently.
I know it feels like people are graduating left and right but the golden age of vtubing is simply coming to an end. People retire not because 'every is shit now', they retire simply because they have been doing this for years and wanna move on to different stuff.
And for corporate Vtubers, that often just means graduating
Every video game company and every anime company would disagree. Kiara is still in the company, so her opinion of the company is going to have a bias, even considering she's been the most outspoken member of Myth. Many of the members who have left have flat out said that they're leaving because of disagreements with management. Not because they don't like Idol stuff or streaming. Yuuki Sakana flat out released a cover song when everyone thought she was going to focus on gaming.
Afaik the large majority of anime companies aren’t publicly traded… the issue in that field is usually within production committees (which can, and often do, include public companies).
Apparently that applies to a lot of gaming companies I like too… but that made me realize pretty much all of the publicly traded companies I know are shit and now I’m more afraid than before.
I'm actually referring to the monstrosity that is Sony-Funimation-Crunchyroll-Rightstuf.
The actual production companies are hit or miss on toxic work culture. I'm limited in my exposure, but Kyoto Animation seems to be a good one and A-1 Pictures is shit(oh, it's a subsidiary of Sony). Generally, the smaller the better. Smaller gap between the executives and the animators and smaller teams means they have to keep the workers happy because if a few leave, the whole production grounds to a halt. I'm afraid I'm seeing the slow decline of Gainax all over again.
Ehh… nowadays most studios outsource a LOT, so losing talent isn’t really that threatening. Afaik KyoAni and Ghibli are the only studios who barely outsource anything, other ones may have some “regular” director or animator but most of them are just freelancers.
Their bank account is much more important than talent retention, sadly (and most studios do pretty badly under that aspect as well, as most of the money goes to committees).
Anime industry is just a mess in general, it’s a miracle they even manage to release great products from time to time.
I mean, it didn't. They went public 1,5 years ago didn't they? Not saying that's the cause, but disagreement with management seems to rhyme pretty well with that
Yeah, that’s definitely a thing to be considered. And apparently Hololive was started with venture capital so going public was bound to happen sooner or later.
I’m not knowledgeable enough about the stock market to say if this is feasible or not, but considering this fandom seems to have many people with A LOT of disposable income, is it not possible for them to pool up money and “make it go private again”?
That's a lot of organizing to try and make a company private again. And there's no guarantee that the fan run org that would buy Holo would even be able to effectively run it. Unless the fans were completely hands off and put the talents in charge of all decisions, it would likely go to shit in a different direction. One of the reasons people join agencies is because they don't know how to manage the business side of things. I'm gonna mention Pippa again, but she's grateful to Phase for managing that stuff. She wouldn't be able to coordinate her mech deals or organize 3D concerts. Nana Asteria has also said that she misses being part of a company for similar reasons.
Well, even now it’s not 100% public, afaik around 40/50% is still owned by Yagoo. Fans would “just” need to buy the rest and say “listen Yagoo, we don’t really care that much about profit, just run the company like you used to and we’re good”.
Though of course, that’s still a lot of organizing and having a bunch of people commit to handling things the same way is definitely not an easy task.
I'm adjacent to enough backroom con drama. Some "fan" will try to become the king of the hill. Honestly, if Hololive nose dives, the talents have plenty of examples to follow on restarting their careers as indies or corpos. I think that's going to be the real legacy of Coco. Before her, no one knew if the fans would follow.
Yeah, I can see that happening unfortunately. My cynical mind says they would probably do better than the average shareholder, but I wouldn’t put my money on it.
We had a small taste with Delutaya but yeah, Kson really paved the way with that. Looking at the bright side though, the fact that 3+ years later so many old talents still choose to stay in holo shows they can’t be doing that badly, at least on the JP side. We’ll see if Doki proving how well that can go on the EN side will cause an uptick in Holo graduations like it happened with Niji, hopefully not because that would be a very red flag about the EN management.
Holo and Niji are still very different beasts. Everyone leaving Holo are still doing it on professional terms. No one's reported abuse, favoritism, or pay being withheld. No one's ended up in a hospital. No talents have dogpiled on anyone leaving. We also had two graduation notices within two days, so there's no enforced queue, although I wouldn't be surprised if the talents are choosing to soften the blow by spacing things out voluntarily.
Well, iirc that was the situation for Niji as well up to Zaion’s termination… and then in less than a year everything came crumbling down, revealing things were going terribly even before then.
Now I wholeheartedly hope that’s not the case in Holo, but we can never know for sure. Though yeah, before any of that gets public it’s no use being paranoid. Let’s just see what the future brings.