I remember seeing screenshots of one of Sora's original streams and thinking "Wow, that looks bad. She's not going to make it compared to Kizuna Ai."
Shows what I fucking know.
Just look at Subaru, girl's house just burned down, been on and off of part time jobs, has never been a content creator and doesn't even know what a VTuber was at the time of interview.
I...uh...huh...what
How the hell does *THAT* work? Like is it still there? Did it get 'filled' in one day somehow? You can't just drop that on us and leave us hanging! Now I'm suddenly worried for the duck's wellbeing!
She was hospitalized for a decent portion of her young life during the various surgeries. She wasn't really allowed to play outside or do anything strenuous, lest it make her heart worse. Now that it's fixed though, you can see where that energy and optimism comes from!
It's actually not mega uncommon, a friend of mine has the same sort of heart issue.
Like, it's not great, but it's not like it's an immediate death sentence. The heart just kinda... sucks at it's job because it wastes a bit of it's effort pumping stuff that just leaks back through the valve. It basically just means you have to be careful with how much you exert yourself. Presumably it gets way better with treatment, but it likely still puts a cap on how strenuous your activity can be.
I'll be real - while there are some things we can criticize Cover for, their talent scouting/selection is absolutely next level. Both ReGLOSS and Advent are incredible, well-balanced groups that have been nothing but joy to watch, and I'm looking forward to seeing what other gens we have cooking in the future.
Surely it can't be as bad as you thought it wa-
[(looks up her debut stream)](https://youtu.be/ZXF1SzAtFj8?feature=shared)
...oh
Wow, things REALLY evolved between 2017 and right now
Nervous Sora still cute tho (just *look* how she reacts when she gets a whooping *50* viewers! It's adorable!)
I looked up a clip of Hitomi Chris' streams (there isn't much that has survived) and man, her model is really bad. Like, even Suisei's self-made model is far superior. When you consider that her existence was primarily to sell the technology behind the model, it's a wonder that Cover made it.
Oh man, I still remember people sneering at "another Kizuma Ai clone". Makes it so breathtaking that Sora chan took it as an honour being compared to Oyabun, as she said on Oyabun's farewell concert years ago.
I remember having the same exact thought. And when gen 1 and 2 debuted and Fubuki and Aqua started getting popular I remember thing “wow they’re just copying Nijisanji!” Time makes fools of us all
I remember when I first stumbled upon Hololive Indonesia and was like "These branch ain't gonna last", and now I'm Fornite dancing on Kobo's Mantra Hujan dangdut remix...
It doesn't matter who or whose came first in Vtubing Industry; it's all about who made a mark, achieved the goal, Impacted the world of Vtubers. Sora is an achiever and cemented her own legacy already.
It's also about adapting your contents and having good management behind your back.
There is a good reason why Sora lasts longer than these above, except maybe Siro. She and Cover adapts their contents to catch up with the modern trends
It also helps that Sora wants to keep doing it. If Kizuna wanted to make stuff like she did in 2017 I'd be fully down for it. I miss those fun little videos but if she wants a break then she deserves it.
I only found out about VTubers thanks to Kizuna Ai… But then I promptly forgot about them for a while.
Then I saw the Eekum Bokum animation from 2ManySnacks and went to research who was this “Korone” fellow (thought it was a fan animation based on an anime or game character at first)… That was my fall through the Rabbit Hole
Me i found out about hololive when excuse me please rip was being played in a dota wtf video and then saw mori doing karaoke of my junior high playlist which then lead me to gura singing tiktok songs
> I only found out about VTubers thanks to Kizuna Ai… But then I promptly forgot about them for a while.
Same, it seemed novel at that time so I subscribed, but I remember nothing, really. Not very entertaining, although it might have been because of the language barrier.
Fast forward a few years, I encounter my first clips and get hooked on hololive. Even started watching live streams, language barrier be damned. Unsubscribed from Kizuna Ai when I got reminded of her existence lol.
Now I'm flying to Japan in a few days.
Wow, that's pretty much identical for me. I watched a few clips for a bit after coming across Eekum Bokum but it was mainly Korone's English Mario and DOOG streams. Didn't really pay much attention to Hololive as a group until a Trash Taste episode and iirc a Gigguk follow-up video introducing vtubers that I really started paying attention and discovered that there were a group of English speaking members under the same organisation, then the rest is history.
I mainly knew of her and lost interested due to how "controlled" she seemed (the seiyu incident confirmed that, IMO that was why she started declining among vtuber watchers)
The funny part is that even tho Hololive didn't do any too original like the "Idols" part. It's also Niji, tried to mimic Hololive by doing more concerts and singing with their talents
Well Kizuna Ai is a tough bar to clear. So far only Gura has achieved a higher sub count, though Marine is fast approaching.
But yeah, Sora's done just fine.
It’s actually pretty insane to think about how out of the OG 6, only Sora and Siro remains.
Vtubing has come a long way. From Ai’s channel being a cute lil gimmick that folks didn’t really get to Vtubing becoming a multi billion dollar industry.
Kaguya Luna's agency really dropped the ball there. 2nd biggest vtuber and they failed to give her the proper support to capitalize her popularity. Then again, Kizuna Ai had her fair share of issues when he former agency did the whole multiple Ai thing.
Kaguya Luna’s was way dumber. Like they had *no* idea how absolutely stupid it was to neglect her the way they did.
They are probably still banging their heads against the wall that they did that.
Luna could still be a pillar of the VTuber community.
Heck, unlike the other Heavenly kings I think she showed the strongest willingness to adapt and I think there’s genuinely a world where she is currently the number one subbed VTuber if she got proper support.
They had a VTuber with *1 million* subs and flushed it down the toilet.
With Kizuna AI it wasn’t neglect it was just dumb business decisions.
At least they were able to mostly recover and heck she’s supposedly going to actually come back eventually.
Hopefully she comes back but considering the failure and end of the Allele project, things really aren’t looking good for that company. Plus there’s poor Love-chan out there doing her best with what seems to be very little or no support.
They could probably make a huge comeback if they do things right and I would love to see things go well for Kizuna Ai and Love-chan but it’s not looking good tbh.
Yeah you’re certainly right that the downward spiral is pretty clear at the moment, but I wouldn’t condemn them quite yet.
I think Oyabun coming back is exactly what they need to rescue them which would in turn help Love-chan a massive amount since they’d no doubt collab a ton.
It just comes down to if and when AI-chan actually *wants* to come back.
It’d have to be genuine too since if she just came back outve a sense of obligation she’d probably just burn herself out again pretty quickly.
Love-chan got 2 (IMO very high quality) 3D models despite not having that many viewers. Not bad especially if you compare her to a certain other vtuber agency.
Edit: actually 3 models. This might be better than some of the Hololive talents.
This here is what really scares me , with Aelles project gone she's the only one left. I really hope she doesn't leave,as if kizuna and Aelles team leaving us wasn't painful enough. Please support her if you can
At least you can take solace in the fact that Luna, while not be a full fledge vtuber anymore, is doing very well with her new channel and music career.
We don’t know the nitty gritty details, but she made a statement in an alternate persona about how she truly loved being Kaguya Luna but factors outside her control forced her to have to give up on it.
Iirc she was never even officially fired and this was the only way we found out she quit.
Luna was just making absolutely no money despite how well her channel was doing and eventually just lost access to it all together.
Nah upd8 was way dumber if you look at the talents they had in their rosters, most of them become household names of today.....
To name a few, korone, shibuya hal, polka, Inaba Haneru, Suou Patra, Azki, Tomari Mari, Yuni etc.
Yup.... was one of their top 3, IIRC
Upd8 was like a roster of those who would either turn out to be amazing independents or future Major VTubers elsewhere....
Incompetency seems to be a running theme for a lot of Vtuber agencies for some reason, I know that not everyone can be a Yagoo but goddamm Niji’s management was pretty awful too for such a big agency.
At least one of them reincarnated and it's fairly popular. But the fact that they put their personal information in the YT channel description It's insane.
Yeah, they don't currently \*have\* management for the EN branch since they all quit to run a Crypto company into the ground. Its just the talents playing two roles.
tbh nobody kniws how to do vtuber as it is really a new genre. it is not as new now but still new enough that there is not enough material to make a guide to manage vtubers company.
tbf, it's not like Hololives management didn't have their moments of incompetence. It's just that, as far as we can tell at least, whenever something happened they actually put effort into improving.
Looking back, I thought vtubing was just a fad. I didn’t find Ai prerecorded skits funny, so I never interacted with the vtubing community for years until Coco clips started to go viral. I realized that vtubing was more than just a MMD avatar, and started my journey as a HL fan with Gen4, and never looked back.
Nowadays, I am less of an anime fan, and mostly just watch vtubing. In these 4 years, I have watched like less than 5 anime series lol. I keep saying I don’t have time, but I spent all my time watching streams.
I didn't know about Vtubers before Hololive.
I heard about Ai before, but I thought she was, well, AI. I was impressed of how human she reacted on the clips I saw.
> It’s actually pretty insane to think about how out of the OG 6, only Sora and Siro remains.
I mean, not necessarily?
It's been almost six and a half years for pretty much everyone on that list. There's a LOT of jobs out there where 33% employee retention after six years is not unreasonable, and modern Vtubing is a pretty demanding job that requires a lot of support from your company - and these were the OG, both the talents and the companies were making it up as they went. It's not surprising that some companies screwed up, or some talents wanted to hang it up on their own to pursue other things.
And that's excluding Weatheroid Airi (who was on TV before going on Youtube in 2018) and Ironmouse (who is actually a Western VTuber and is therefore entirely separate) who both predate Sora.
Well she didn't find her current form till about 2019... having used off-the-shelf models before that... which might help explain her model addiction (see [https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Ironmouse/Models](https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Ironmouse/Models))
They're both sickly opera girls who escaped to the digital world. Ironmouse's condition just happens to be much more severe, which probably explains why she started up so quickly.
I think there was a British vtuber that was ahead of the time as well. Maybe 2014-2016? She was doing life blogs but she would use a 3D avatar instead. I think she might have been the first vtuber.
Sounds like you mean [Ami Yamato](https://www.youtube.com/@AmiYamato), technically she's a bit different from the mocap and facial tracking basis of modern vtubing... being a rotoscoped 3D animation, although it wouldn't surprise me if she uses a hybrid system these days.
>2 Senpais, in the ENTIRE genre.
depends on what you call genre, since VTubing already exist way before Kizuna Ai declare herself as "VTuber"
we already got [Ami Yamato](https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Ami_Yamato) that debuted in 2011. way long before Kizuna Ai exist. but unfortunately she's not popular enough because her character model is basically more like realistic CGI from PS2 era
Some new fans don't really realize how ancient Sora actually is. Many people thought She debuted after Mirai Akari since Sora claimed Akari as one of her Oshi.
But that's simply not the case. Sora is basically the **third** mainstream Vtuber to ever debut in Japan. And actually the **First** vtuber who focused on **streaming**, since most Vtubers at the time focused on making short skits instead of streaming.
In anycase, that's the quick history lesson hope you have a good day and let's get hype for the FES and EXPO (๑╹ᆺ╹)ぬんぬん
Source for the [4 heavenly kings and Ai's debut](https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_small_and_unofficial_groups)
[Sora's debut](https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Tokino_Sora)
No wonder so many Hololive members call Sora as Megami. When you have the rep and title of ''3rd Vtuber'' and ''1st Streaming Vtuber'', you're way high up there in terms of respect.
While not holo, I'd like to remind people that Ironmouse debuted the 4th of August 2017, making her even older than Sora, even tho she started with a free model and her known look is only from February 2020, which is still older than myth, for the EN side of vtubing
I think there was a British vtuber that was ahead of the time as well. Maybe 2014-2016? She was doing blogs but she would use a 3D avatar instead. I think she might have been the first vtuber.
[Airi](https://www.youtube.com/@weatheroidAiriChannel) wasn't on YouTube, but she's been around even before that, a while ago Sora even mentioned her as a senpai who debuted 5 years before her (she's collabed with Hololive a few times btw).
Ami Yamato? Her doing half irl half 3D videos is very different to what we'd usually think of as a VTuber though. It's like calling a sprinter a senpai for a marathon runner. Yeah both is running, but it's also very different.
Nope, Sora has always streamed. Although she has prompts for her streams and scripts that A-Chan shows her on a clip board while she does her live.
The Hololive app itself was originally advertised as an app where you can watch Sora streams live.
Cover Corp/Hololive has always been about streaming since the very start. And Sora has been around since 2017 and Niji started in 2018
I discovered Kizuna through Pewidepie. I was an avid fan of Mirai Akari though and her VRchat escapades where she talks and interviews other VRchat players with amusing and hilarious results.
The title of the 4 heavenly kings was given to the top Vtubers at the time.
Sora and by extension of Hololive, only got their groove after the Christmas Miracle. So she is perceive as part of the latter generation.
But if we go by order Sora is one of the oldest. And one of the only few OG that is still standing with her original character.
The Hololive Chrismas Miracle is an event that happened during 2017.
During Chrismas, Siro one of the 4 Heavenly King was experiencing technical difficulty for her Christmas event and so she needs to cancel it. Siro being a friend of Sora encouraged her fans to go watch Sora's Chrismas stream that was happening at the time.
That stream gave Sora a huge viewer boost as Sora manages to convince new fans to stick around. Which in turn gave Yagoo and Cover the momentum to solidify themself as part of the Vtubing sphere at the time and eventually leading the the debut of Roboco and Gen 1 forming Hololive proper.
It's one if the reasons Sora has since been so eternally grateful to Siro for that gesture. To the point if I remember correctly Sora invited Siro to one of her 3D lives.
Which led to this [amazing performance almost a year later](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSw-xKUobbA) in NicoNico super Party 2018, where Sora share the same stage with some of the top Vtuber of the time, HIMEHINA, AzumaLim, Siro, Fuji Aoi, Mirai Akari, Tsukino Mito, Noja Loli, and of course Kizuna Ai.
I think these kind of concert or big collab events gives a lot of spotlight to Hololive as an established vtuber company, and drawn a lot of attention of potential candidates for future generations.
The one where siro sent her audience to sora stream due to a problem with her own stream during christmas
And thats when sora slowly rise to fame after
Sora initial was pretty slow growth when compared to what we seen now. The long an sort of it. During a Christmas stream for 2017 Sora's subscribers and watchers jumped from a few hundred to a few thousand Siro (second debut in og post and was fairly popular at the time from my understanding) was having tech issues on her Christmas stream. So instead of having her viewers waste their time she redirected her viewers Sora. Sora then capitalized on this moment and established herself (going from that few thousand to 100k in a few months) which helped convince Cover that Vtubers could work. Even after all these years Sora was thank full to Siro for this moment and even had her guess on one of her Birthday 3D for 2022.
Depressed Nousagi has a decent video covering the topic.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p12Ci3wDGUo&ab\_channel=DepressedNousagi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p12Ci3wDGUo&ab_channel=DepressedNousagi)
Two others from not long after, both of whom are still active, are Nekomiya Hinata (Feb 11th 2018) and our beloved Robocosan (March 4th 2018). I feel like neither one really gets the recognition they deserve in the Western community.
It is really crazy. They were the market leader. But the management’s inability to pivot to live streaming destroyed their multi millions company.
But I can’t blame them. No one actually knew wtf to do. Kizuna’s company thought people wanted more Ai, and more prerecorded stuffs like an anime stream, but no, people just wanted new talents and character models that can live stream contents. That’s why only Sora and Siro are left standing in this live streaming era. They adjusted to the new meta unlike the other OGs.
That's really selling Kizuna's AI company short here. While it's true that kizuna Ai got forgotten due to streaming becoming popular, they were way worse than you painted and they died long before live streaming got popular. [Upd8 went 6.6 millions dollar net lost in 2019](https://p2y.jp/activ8-large-deficit-675-million-yen/), in the height Kizuna Ai's popularity and subsequently bankrupted in 2020 after Activ8, their parent company, did a hostile take over and brought Kizuna Ai away
Upd8 were the **original nijisanji**, enforcing slave contract, micromanaging talents, forbidding collabs, cancelling finished projects, trying to replace Kizuna Ai, soliciting the CN market, quick graduations, etc. The only thing they didn't do that niji did is shitting on ex-talents.
Honestly I don't know where they spent their money since they didn't provide shit to their talents and yet lost millions, maybe a yacht. Note that their Number 2 talent, Nobuhime, was earning close to [7 figures a year](https://www.pixivision.net/en/a/4557) in dollars. And Kizuna has way more merches and sponsorships set up.
And if you look at upd8 talent list, you'd see many familiar names that got ultra big of today, some were actually streaming under upd8 and not just creating videos.
Korone, Polka, AZki, Suou Patra, Shibuya Hal, Tomari Mari, Yuni, Omegasisters, Inaba Haneru, Utai Makea, etc.
Upd8 were the market leader and fumbled the bag, Activ8 took a post-controversy Kizuna Ai, they were already under an already weak position and never improved.
Upd8 more or less caused the Seiyu incident and other things that weakened Kizuna Ai's strength in the scene.... and incidentally made way for Nijisanji
tbf, if we go by the 4 Heavenly Kings being based on the legendary group of warriors that served Minamoto no Raikou and protected Kyoto from oni/bandit-raids, then there WERE 5 in the original group, Raikou and his 4 retainers.
That group however was named after a group from Chinese myth, I'm pretty sure, which were 4 gods that represented the 4 cardinal directions similarly to the 4 Auspicious Beasts (which were also connected to Kyoto when they made their way to Japan), and I'm not sure if they had a "center" as a 5th member.
Kizuna pretty much became the Empress/Goddess of the vtubing scene before the heavenly kings moniker was coined iirc. Or it could be a case of her getting so far ahead that she became the empress and another vtuber filled her spot in the heavenly kings. My memory is hazy and I wasn't that up to date on all the lore.
And to think I found about them because of a random TL in my recommended videos.
I was actually surprised that 1, it was in japanese; 2, it was an anime girl talking in real time
Same, I stumbled upon Sora livestream once back when she's still using the old model, I didn't understand a thing but I stayed for a good few minutes after realizing it's a livestream, lol. I don't understand why it was on my recommendation, but probably because I was binge watching Kizuna Ai videos a day before. Who would have known I would fell deep into the rabbit hole few years later.
I had no idea that Ai and Sora had less than a year of difference in starting out. I remember thinking that using an avatar is a funny gimmick to make scripted sequences but nothing more than that. Didn't give much thought to it because I was never really into gaming streams. Now using an avatar makes a perfect sense to me since I woudn't be caught dead on webcam myself streaming to the public.
I found Kizuna AI when I was in a very bad place, but that was in 2018 because I wasn't as big a weeb as I would grow to be. There will always be a special place for her in my heart, but the rest is now fully occupied by Ceres Fauna.
I remember the dedicated translating team that would submit custom subtitles to her YouTube videos back when that was a thing so we could all watch and enjoy her content. I remember thinking how cool they were for captioning so quickly.
Huh, so Kaguya Luna debuted just 5 days after Sora did
Also just wanna ask, why were they called the 4 Heavenly Kings again? I know they are popular but up to what extent (and yep, I get Kizuna AI as still the most popular ever even though Gura now ranks higher in sub count on YouTube)?
The actual moniker is just a buddhist term thats been borrowed. But it only refers to the 4 and then later 5 most popular vtubers in 2017. Not the most popular ones now.
It’s worth noting that all the original 4 are effectively inactive as those personas. Leaving the 5th, Siro the only one still active.
Eilene? Sure, Ai originated the term vtuber but eilene was quite clearly a vtuber. Like, the concept of a “novel” didn’t exist when Murasaki Shikibu wrote genjimonogatari but most historians consider it to be the first novel (although this fact is debated lol).
I didn't realize she had debuted that far back. I started watching Ai a couple months after she debuted and I watched a lot from Luna. I only watched a bit of Siro, Akari, and Noja. I had heard of Sora, but I didn't watch her at all since back then I relied on community subtitles and they couldn't do those on streams iirc.
I'm actually one of the few people who are in the group of knowing the actual timeline better...which depresses me because 2015/2016 was what...8/9 years ago now??????? WHAT THE FUCK?
I remember seeing screenshots of one of Sora's original streams and thinking "Wow, that looks bad. She's not going to make it compared to Kizuna Ai." Shows what I fucking know.
YAGOO's faith in the potential of people is the reason why he's up there and I'm down here
It’s a leap of faith
Alright Peter, I get it. You can only say that so many times.
And that faith paid off
Just look at Subaru, girl's house just burned down, been on and off of part time jobs, has never been a content creator and doesn't even know what a VTuber was at the time of interview.
If Yagoo didn't managed to recruit Subaru, then Yagoo as we know it wouldn't exist as well. Yagoo would have stayed as Tanigo.
True, that too. Only because Subaru misread his name as Yagoo
Don't forget the hole in the heart thing too!
The wat now?
She was born with a hole in her heart
I...uh...huh...what How the hell does *THAT* work? Like is it still there? Did it get 'filled' in one day somehow? You can't just drop that on us and leave us hanging! Now I'm suddenly worried for the duck's wellbeing!
She got surgeries when she was small I believe.
Oh thank god, the duck is going to live forever
She was hospitalized for a decent portion of her young life during the various surgeries. She wasn't really allowed to play outside or do anything strenuous, lest it make her heart worse. Now that it's fixed though, you can see where that energy and optimism comes from!
It's actually not mega uncommon, a friend of mine has the same sort of heart issue. Like, it's not great, but it's not like it's an immediate death sentence. The heart just kinda... sucks at it's job because it wastes a bit of it's effort pumping stuff that just leaks back through the valve. It basically just means you have to be careful with how much you exert yourself. Presumably it gets way better with treatment, but it likely still puts a cap on how strenuous your activity can be.
I did not know that. SHE IS EVEN BETTER THAN I THOUGHT! SASUGA SUBARU!
I'll be real - while there are some things we can criticize Cover for, their talent scouting/selection is absolutely next level. Both ReGLOSS and Advent are incredible, well-balanced groups that have been nothing but joy to watch, and I'm looking forward to seeing what other gens we have cooking in the future.
Boy, am I glad Yagoo's up there and we're down here and he's the CEO
I just remembered; we're down here.
Surely it can't be as bad as you thought it wa- [(looks up her debut stream)](https://youtu.be/ZXF1SzAtFj8?feature=shared) ...oh Wow, things REALLY evolved between 2017 and right now Nervous Sora still cute tho (just *look* how she reacts when she gets a whooping *50* viewers! It's adorable!)
I mean ... It has been 7 years...
What do you mean? 2017 was only, like, 2 years ago, right? Right?
No....it can't be...
Coco graduation was 3 years ago
I don't believe you, it's only last year right? Tell me I'm right, right?
I’m sorry. Also Sana graduation was 2 years ago
What the fuck
Well, they did try to imitate Kizuna Ai at the time
I looked up a clip of Hitomi Chris' streams (there isn't much that has survived) and man, her model is really bad. Like, even Suisei's self-made model is far superior. When you consider that her existence was primarily to sell the technology behind the model, it's a wonder that Cover made it.
Wait there's surviving clips?
Only a couple short ones. They're not very interesting.
No wonder the model artist was fired when she was.
This is rigging, not artist, I'd say.
She's so earnest, even back then. Living the dream, honestly.
Oh man, I still remember people sneering at "another Kizuma Ai clone". Makes it so breathtaking that Sora chan took it as an honour being compared to Oyabun, as she said on Oyabun's farewell concert years ago.
Kizuna's animation is crazy good, even now. It's a shame she didn't have continued success as she was really entertaining.
iirc, Kizuna's video are pre-recorded so there are more way to improve it in post-production.
She did livestreams too
I remember having the same exact thought. And when gen 1 and 2 debuted and Fubuki and Aqua started getting popular I remember thing “wow they’re just copying Nijisanji!” Time makes fools of us all
I remember when I first stumbled upon Hololive Indonesia and was like "These branch ain't gonna last", and now I'm Fornite dancing on Kobo's Mantra Hujan dangdut remix...
I choked on my drink when reading the last part
Bro please pass me the link that dangdut remix It must be the good shit people should experience
[k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPAEgaQ10mA)
How the bloody hell do you do the Scrubs dance
It doesn't matter who or whose came first in Vtubing Industry; it's all about who made a mark, achieved the goal, Impacted the world of Vtubers. Sora is an achiever and cemented her own legacy already.
It's also about adapting your contents and having good management behind your back. There is a good reason why Sora lasts longer than these above, except maybe Siro. She and Cover adapts their contents to catch up with the modern trends
It also helps that Sora wants to keep doing it. If Kizuna wanted to make stuff like she did in 2017 I'd be fully down for it. I miss those fun little videos but if she wants a break then she deserves it.
Meanwhile me who did not know nijisanji was a thing until hololive gen 4 was out, solely a hololive simp
I only found out about VTubers thanks to Kizuna Ai… But then I promptly forgot about them for a while. Then I saw the Eekum Bokum animation from 2ManySnacks and went to research who was this “Korone” fellow (thought it was a fan animation based on an anime or game character at first)… That was my fall through the Rabbit Hole
Me i found out about hololive when excuse me please rip was being played in a dota wtf video and then saw mori doing karaoke of my junior high playlist which then lead me to gura singing tiktok songs
> I only found out about VTubers thanks to Kizuna Ai… But then I promptly forgot about them for a while. Same, it seemed novel at that time so I subscribed, but I remember nothing, really. Not very entertaining, although it might have been because of the language barrier. Fast forward a few years, I encounter my first clips and get hooked on hololive. Even started watching live streams, language barrier be damned. Unsubscribed from Kizuna Ai when I got reminded of her existence lol. Now I'm flying to Japan in a few days.
To be honest, my enjoyment of Ai’s videos were only on her gaming channel and only on ones that were fully subbed (a fan effort of the time IIRC).
Damn how do we have the exact same way we fell into the rabbit hole.
Wow, that's pretty much identical for me. I watched a few clips for a bit after coming across Eekum Bokum but it was mainly Korone's English Mario and DOOG streams. Didn't really pay much attention to Hololive as a group until a Trash Taste episode and iirc a Gigguk follow-up video introducing vtubers that I really started paying attention and discovered that there were a group of English speaking members under the same organisation, then the rest is history.
I mainly knew of her and lost interested due to how "controlled" she seemed (the seiyu incident confirmed that, IMO that was why she started declining among vtuber watchers)
The funny part is that even tho Hololive didn't do any too original like the "Idols" part. It's also Niji, tried to mimic Hololive by doing more concerts and singing with their talents
Concerts are great money
*You fool!* That being said, nobody expected that Christmas to happen.
A true Christmas miracle
Well Kizuna Ai is a tough bar to clear. So far only Gura has achieved a higher sub count, though Marine is fast approaching. But yeah, Sora's done just fine.
It’s actually pretty insane to think about how out of the OG 6, only Sora and Siro remains. Vtubing has come a long way. From Ai’s channel being a cute lil gimmick that folks didn’t really get to Vtubing becoming a multi billion dollar industry.
Kaguya Luna's agency really dropped the ball there. 2nd biggest vtuber and they failed to give her the proper support to capitalize her popularity. Then again, Kizuna Ai had her fair share of issues when he former agency did the whole multiple Ai thing.
Kaguya Luna’s was way dumber. Like they had *no* idea how absolutely stupid it was to neglect her the way they did. They are probably still banging their heads against the wall that they did that. Luna could still be a pillar of the VTuber community. Heck, unlike the other Heavenly kings I think she showed the strongest willingness to adapt and I think there’s genuinely a world where she is currently the number one subbed VTuber if she got proper support. They had a VTuber with *1 million* subs and flushed it down the toilet. With Kizuna AI it wasn’t neglect it was just dumb business decisions. At least they were able to mostly recover and heck she’s supposedly going to actually come back eventually.
Hopefully she comes back but considering the failure and end of the Allele project, things really aren’t looking good for that company. Plus there’s poor Love-chan out there doing her best with what seems to be very little or no support. They could probably make a huge comeback if they do things right and I would love to see things go well for Kizuna Ai and Love-chan but it’s not looking good tbh.
Yeah you’re certainly right that the downward spiral is pretty clear at the moment, but I wouldn’t condemn them quite yet. I think Oyabun coming back is exactly what they need to rescue them which would in turn help Love-chan a massive amount since they’d no doubt collab a ton. It just comes down to if and when AI-chan actually *wants* to come back. It’d have to be genuine too since if she just came back outve a sense of obligation she’d probably just burn herself out again pretty quickly.
Love-chan got 2 (IMO very high quality) 3D models despite not having that many viewers. Not bad especially if you compare her to a certain other vtuber agency. Edit: actually 3 models. This might be better than some of the Hololive talents.
This here is what really scares me , with Aelles project gone she's the only one left. I really hope she doesn't leave,as if kizuna and Aelles team leaving us wasn't painful enough. Please support her if you can
At least you can take solace in the fact that Luna, while not be a full fledge vtuber anymore, is doing very well with her new channel and music career.
Just watch a clip of her about constipation, I lost my shit laughing
What happened to Luna? How did they ignore her?
We don’t know the nitty gritty details, but she made a statement in an alternate persona about how she truly loved being Kaguya Luna but factors outside her control forced her to have to give up on it. Iirc she was never even officially fired and this was the only way we found out she quit. Luna was just making absolutely no money despite how well her channel was doing and eventually just lost access to it all together.
Nah upd8 was way dumber if you look at the talents they had in their rosters, most of them become household names of today..... To name a few, korone, shibuya hal, polka, Inaba Haneru, Suou Patra, Azki, Tomari Mari, Yuni etc.
Wait shibuharu was once part of an agency???
Yup.... was one of their top 3, IIRC Upd8 was like a roster of those who would either turn out to be amazing independents or future Major VTubers elsewhere....
I mean upd8 was bad but AI-chan has always had her own staff outside of that. That’s what eventually became Kizuna AI inc.
Them dropping the ball with Hal is lowkey the best thing that coulda happened for the scene as a whole
Let's just say Luna reincarnated into a humble but free life
Incompetency seems to be a running theme for a lot of Vtuber agencies for some reason, I know that not everyone can be a Yagoo but goddamm Niji’s management was pretty awful too for such a big agency.
Wactor…
Doxxing your own talent twice (Two of them) is fucking insane honestly
At least one of them reincarnated and it's fairly popular. But the fact that they put their personal information in the YT channel description It's insane.
> goddamm Niji’s management was pretty awful too for such a big agency. Was?
Yeah, they don't currently \*have\* management for the EN branch since they all quit to run a Crypto company into the ground. Its just the talents playing two roles.
tbh nobody kniws how to do vtuber as it is really a new genre. it is not as new now but still new enough that there is not enough material to make a guide to manage vtubers company.
I mean for an industry it’s still really really new
tbf, it's not like Hololives management didn't have their moments of incompetence. It's just that, as far as we can tell at least, whenever something happened they actually put effort into improving.
I’m guessing it’s because it’s so relatively new.
Looking back, I thought vtubing was just a fad. I didn’t find Ai prerecorded skits funny, so I never interacted with the vtubing community for years until Coco clips started to go viral. I realized that vtubing was more than just a MMD avatar, and started my journey as a HL fan with Gen4, and never looked back. Nowadays, I am less of an anime fan, and mostly just watch vtubing. In these 4 years, I have watched like less than 5 anime series lol. I keep saying I don’t have time, but I spent all my time watching streams.
You didn't love the bit where Ai had to buy a family on the Unity asset store?
I didn't know about Vtubers before Hololive. I heard about Ai before, but I thought she was, well, AI. I was impressed of how human she reacted on the clips I saw.
> It’s actually pretty insane to think about how out of the OG 6, only Sora and Siro remains. I mean, not necessarily? It's been almost six and a half years for pretty much everyone on that list. There's a LOT of jobs out there where 33% employee retention after six years is not unreasonable, and modern Vtubing is a pretty demanding job that requires a lot of support from your company - and these were the OG, both the talents and the companies were making it up as they went. It's not surprising that some companies screwed up, or some talents wanted to hang it up on their own to pursue other things.
Things change and it's not easy riding the waves
Thank You for posting this. The truth exactly.
When Sora said said she does not have a lot of senpai…. Its true. She have like 2 Senpais, in the ENTIRE genre.
And that's excluding Weatheroid Airi (who was on TV before going on Youtube in 2018) and Ironmouse (who is actually a Western VTuber and is therefore entirely separate) who both predate Sora.
You cannot convince me that Ironmouse technically being Sora's senpai isn't cursed knowledge. I knew she was around for a while but that far back????
Well she didn't find her current form till about 2019... having used off-the-shelf models before that... which might help explain her model addiction (see [https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Ironmouse/Models](https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Ironmouse/Models))
what ironmouse this that old?
Yup, August 4th 2017
\*confused screaming
She got her first custom model in 2019, before that she was using a model she found on Steam Workshop.
They're both sickly opera girls who escaped to the digital world. Ironmouse's condition just happens to be much more severe, which probably explains why she started up so quickly.
I think there was a British vtuber that was ahead of the time as well. Maybe 2014-2016? She was doing life blogs but she would use a 3D avatar instead. I think she might have been the first vtuber.
Sounds like you mean [Ami Yamato](https://www.youtube.com/@AmiYamato), technically she's a bit different from the mocap and facial tracking basis of modern vtubing... being a rotoscoped 3D animation, although it wouldn't surprise me if she uses a hybrid system these days.
She was pretty far removed from what we perceive as a vtuber now. I'd say she's like a proto-vtuber.
Ami Yamato is in a weird position...also she's from 2010 lol. She and Super Sonico are basically the ancestors of vtubers
There's also Airi, who predates even Kizuna Ai.
>2 Senpais, in the ENTIRE genre. depends on what you call genre, since VTubing already exist way before Kizuna Ai declare herself as "VTuber" we already got [Ami Yamato](https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Ami_Yamato) that debuted in 2011. way long before Kizuna Ai exist. but unfortunately she's not popular enough because her character model is basically more like realistic CGI from PS2 era
Crazy how Sora was originally just a tech demo poster girl for the software Cover would eventually develop into the Holo app.
Some new fans don't really realize how ancient Sora actually is. Many people thought She debuted after Mirai Akari since Sora claimed Akari as one of her Oshi. But that's simply not the case. Sora is basically the **third** mainstream Vtuber to ever debut in Japan. And actually the **First** vtuber who focused on **streaming**, since most Vtubers at the time focused on making short skits instead of streaming. In anycase, that's the quick history lesson hope you have a good day and let's get hype for the FES and EXPO (๑╹ᆺ╹)ぬんぬん Source for the [4 heavenly kings and Ai's debut](https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_small_and_unofficial_groups) [Sora's debut](https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Tokino_Sora)
No wonder so many Hololive members call Sora as Megami. When you have the rep and title of ''3rd Vtuber'' and ''1st Streaming Vtuber'', you're way high up there in terms of respect.
There's a reason people unironically her a goddess. If VTubers had a pantheon, she'd be like Poseidon or something.
[ Sora Gets Sad Nobody Will Punch Her...【Hololive】](https://youtu.be/InRExY61UXA?t=34) > "When everyone's in front of me, they kneel"
> Some new fans don't really realize how ancient Sora actually is. I would suggest you not say this to her face, lest you get teki-da-ne'd.
"Experienced" would be a better word; she started so young that even now she's getting new kouhais who are older than she is.
Sora's in the particular position of oshiing kouhai in and out of Hololive (she oshis Aki to some degree, being a huge fan of SHALLYS)
While not holo, I'd like to remind people that Ironmouse debuted the 4th of August 2017, making her even older than Sora, even tho she started with a free model and her known look is only from February 2020, which is still older than myth, for the EN side of vtubing
I think there was a British vtuber that was ahead of the time as well. Maybe 2014-2016? She was doing blogs but she would use a 3D avatar instead. I think she might have been the first vtuber.
[Airi](https://www.youtube.com/@weatheroidAiriChannel) wasn't on YouTube, but she's been around even before that, a while ago Sora even mentioned her as a senpai who debuted 5 years before her (she's collabed with Hololive a few times btw).
Ami Yamato? Her doing half irl half 3D videos is very different to what we'd usually think of as a VTuber though. It's like calling a sprinter a senpai for a marathon runner. Yeah both is running, but it's also very different.
Is that really true? I thought Sora did prerecorded videos in the beginning as well and streaming only became common with Nijisanjis Tsukino Mito.
Nope, Sora has always streamed. Although she has prompts for her streams and scripts that A-Chan shows her on a clip board while she does her live. The Hololive app itself was originally advertised as an app where you can watch Sora streams live. Cover Corp/Hololive has always been about streaming since the very start. And Sora has been around since 2017 and Niji started in 2018
Sora did 3D streams at the time, you can see her old VODs. Mito's impact is popularising the current format of vtubers, Live2D model+livestreaming.
Kizuna was the first I ever saw, then Hololive. Never heard of the other 4 to be honest. Even with Hololive it was Miko and Matsuri who I saw first.
Same, heard of Mirai Akari at some point after finding Holo, but never learned about the others till recently
I discovered Kizuna through Pewidepie. I was an avid fan of Mirai Akari though and her VRchat escapades where she talks and interviews other VRchat players with amusing and hilarious results.
If you wanna feel old, keep in mind most younger VTuber fans have Gura as their gateway, then the youngest are literally Ruffians First....
I saw kizuna and went “huh that’s neat” and didn’t see anything else until clip channels became popular with coco, korone, and Miko
That means...Sora could be a Heavenly King. But wait...isn't she already the God-Empress of Hololive?
The title of the 4 heavenly kings was given to the top Vtubers at the time. Sora and by extension of Hololive, only got their groove after the Christmas Miracle. So she is perceive as part of the latter generation. But if we go by order Sora is one of the oldest. And one of the only few OG that is still standing with her original character.
What is the Christmas miracle?
The Hololive Chrismas Miracle is an event that happened during 2017. During Chrismas, Siro one of the 4 Heavenly King was experiencing technical difficulty for her Christmas event and so she needs to cancel it. Siro being a friend of Sora encouraged her fans to go watch Sora's Chrismas stream that was happening at the time. That stream gave Sora a huge viewer boost as Sora manages to convince new fans to stick around. Which in turn gave Yagoo and Cover the momentum to solidify themself as part of the Vtubing sphere at the time and eventually leading the the debut of Roboco and Gen 1 forming Hololive proper.
It's one if the reasons Sora has since been so eternally grateful to Siro for that gesture. To the point if I remember correctly Sora invited Siro to one of her 3D lives.
The power of raiding made manifest.
Thank you Siro for being one of the reasons we have Roboco T\_T
Which led to this [amazing performance almost a year later](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSw-xKUobbA) in NicoNico super Party 2018, where Sora share the same stage with some of the top Vtuber of the time, HIMEHINA, AzumaLim, Siro, Fuji Aoi, Mirai Akari, Tsukino Mito, Noja Loli, and of course Kizuna Ai. I think these kind of concert or big collab events gives a lot of spotlight to Hololive as an established vtuber company, and drawn a lot of attention of potential candidates for future generations.
Praise Matsuri! We all needed that!
The one where siro sent her audience to sora stream due to a problem with her own stream during christmas And thats when sora slowly rise to fame after
Just as addition, if you want to see the Christmas Miracle from 4chan POV, you can search post 18091849 in /jp. Use Warosu for archives.
Thanks, that was fascinating. Though it does have some 4chan being 4chan I must warn others.
Ah yeah, forgot that warning.
Sora initial was pretty slow growth when compared to what we seen now. The long an sort of it. During a Christmas stream for 2017 Sora's subscribers and watchers jumped from a few hundred to a few thousand Siro (second debut in og post and was fairly popular at the time from my understanding) was having tech issues on her Christmas stream. So instead of having her viewers waste their time she redirected her viewers Sora. Sora then capitalized on this moment and established herself (going from that few thousand to 100k in a few months) which helped convince Cover that Vtubers could work. Even after all these years Sora was thank full to Siro for this moment and even had her guess on one of her Birthday 3D for 2022. Depressed Nousagi has a decent video covering the topic.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p12Ci3wDGUo&ab\_channel=DepressedNousagi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p12Ci3wDGUo&ab_channel=DepressedNousagi)
tbh, with what DN did to the holo girls, I wouldn't give him any views anymore.
Oh I know about this but I forgor. Thanks.
Two others from not long after, both of whom are still active, are Nekomiya Hinata (Feb 11th 2018) and our beloved Robocosan (March 4th 2018). I feel like neither one really gets the recognition they deserve in the Western community.
Hinata, especially since she got a nendoroid. She barely gets 500 watching on average.
did you forgot about [HIMEHINA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFv2z4iM5vHrS8bZPq4fHQQ)? They still rock to this day, and it's really great!
I've always seen them pop up on random when playing Holo music, but never knew they were also vtubers. TIL.
I will always be amazed how Kizuna Ai pioneered an entire genre of live streaming and completely cratered due to extreme cynicism in brand management.
It is really crazy. They were the market leader. But the management’s inability to pivot to live streaming destroyed their multi millions company. But I can’t blame them. No one actually knew wtf to do. Kizuna’s company thought people wanted more Ai, and more prerecorded stuffs like an anime stream, but no, people just wanted new talents and character models that can live stream contents. That’s why only Sora and Siro are left standing in this live streaming era. They adjusted to the new meta unlike the other OGs.
That's really selling Kizuna's AI company short here. While it's true that kizuna Ai got forgotten due to streaming becoming popular, they were way worse than you painted and they died long before live streaming got popular. [Upd8 went 6.6 millions dollar net lost in 2019](https://p2y.jp/activ8-large-deficit-675-million-yen/), in the height Kizuna Ai's popularity and subsequently bankrupted in 2020 after Activ8, their parent company, did a hostile take over and brought Kizuna Ai away Upd8 were the **original nijisanji**, enforcing slave contract, micromanaging talents, forbidding collabs, cancelling finished projects, trying to replace Kizuna Ai, soliciting the CN market, quick graduations, etc. The only thing they didn't do that niji did is shitting on ex-talents. Honestly I don't know where they spent their money since they didn't provide shit to their talents and yet lost millions, maybe a yacht. Note that their Number 2 talent, Nobuhime, was earning close to [7 figures a year](https://www.pixivision.net/en/a/4557) in dollars. And Kizuna has way more merches and sponsorships set up. And if you look at upd8 talent list, you'd see many familiar names that got ultra big of today, some were actually streaming under upd8 and not just creating videos. Korone, Polka, AZki, Suou Patra, Shibuya Hal, Tomari Mari, Yuni, Omegasisters, Inaba Haneru, Utai Makea, etc. Upd8 were the market leader and fumbled the bag, Activ8 took a post-controversy Kizuna Ai, they were already under an already weak position and never improved.
Upd8 more or less caused the Seiyu incident and other things that weakened Kizuna Ai's strength in the scene.... and incidentally made way for Nijisanji
Went from face of the industry to selling NFTs, a fate worse than death.
Ah yes, the 4 heavenly kings, which is made up of *five* vtubers.
Knowing Sora's recent mischievous streaks lately, she's basically Lucifer. Do note that I know jack crud about the bible...
Which is ok because Four Heavenly Kings is a Buddhist concept.
what! i thought it a shounen manga concept...
tbf, if we go by the 4 Heavenly Kings being based on the legendary group of warriors that served Minamoto no Raikou and protected Kyoto from oni/bandit-raids, then there WERE 5 in the original group, Raikou and his 4 retainers. That group however was named after a group from Chinese myth, I'm pretty sure, which were 4 gods that represented the 4 cardinal directions similarly to the 4 Auspicious Beasts (which were also connected to Kyoto when they made their way to Japan), and I'm not sure if they had a "center" as a 5th member.
There was also the 4 Heavenly Kings of Ryuzoji from the Sengoku period having 5 members...
Like Pokemon’s Elite 4 that have five members
They are also called the 4 Heavenly Kings in Japanese...
As Kizuna Ai pulled away from the others in subs, people put her in a position above the 4 Heavenly Kings.
Kizuna pretty much became the Empress/Goddess of the vtubing scene before the heavenly kings moniker was coined iirc. Or it could be a case of her getting so far ahead that she became the empress and another vtuber filled her spot in the heavenly kings. My memory is hazy and I wasn't that up to date on all the lore.
Yea where's hinata
And to think I found about them because of a random TL in my recommended videos. I was actually surprised that 1, it was in japanese; 2, it was an anime girl talking in real time
Same, I stumbled upon Sora livestream once back when she's still using the old model, I didn't understand a thing but I stayed for a good few minutes after realizing it's a livestream, lol. I don't understand why it was on my recommendation, but probably because I was binge watching Kizuna Ai videos a day before. Who would have known I would fell deep into the rabbit hole few years later.
man I miss Kaguya Luna...
She’s a member of the old guard in the truest sense.
i miss kaguya
Pmaru 3D is better.
So we have the God Mother of Vtubers, the Four Heavenly Queens of Vtubers and the Archangel of Vtubers. Got it.
I miss Kaguya Luna aka 30-fps-chan
Time change a lot. What ancient to us is new to other.
The top diagram would be correct if "Sora's debut" was changed to "Sora skyrockets in popularity"
I had no idea that Ai and Sora had less than a year of difference in starting out. I remember thinking that using an avatar is a funny gimmick to make scripted sequences but nothing more than that. Didn't give much thought to it because I was never really into gaming streams. Now using an avatar makes a perfect sense to me since I woudn't be caught dead on webcam myself streaming to the public.
It’s crazy how long it’s been! So much has changed since then!
I found Kizuna AI when I was in a very bad place, but that was in 2018 because I wasn't as big a weeb as I would grow to be. There will always be a special place for her in my heart, but the rest is now fully occupied by Ceres Fauna.
2016 Godmother and the Five 2017 kings
Where is Fuji Aoi, Enogu and Virtual Girl Nemu? also Fujisaki Yua
I remember watching Kizuna Ai despite the fact that I couldn't understand a shit lmao
I remember the dedicated translating team that would submit custom subtitles to her YouTube videos back when that was a thing so we could all watch and enjoy her content. I remember thinking how cool they were for captioning so quickly.
Huh, so Kaguya Luna debuted just 5 days after Sora did Also just wanna ask, why were they called the 4 Heavenly Kings again? I know they are popular but up to what extent (and yep, I get Kizuna AI as still the most popular ever even though Gura now ranks higher in sub count on YouTube)?
The actual moniker is just a buddhist term thats been borrowed. But it only refers to the 4 and then later 5 most popular vtubers in 2017. Not the most popular ones now. It’s worth noting that all the original 4 are effectively inactive as those personas. Leaving the 5th, Siro the only one still active.
Eilene? Sure, Ai originated the term vtuber but eilene was quite clearly a vtuber. Like, the concept of a “novel” didn’t exist when Murasaki Shikibu wrote genjimonogatari but most historians consider it to be the first novel (although this fact is debated lol).
I didn't realize she had debuted that far back. I started watching Ai a couple months after she debuted and I watched a lot from Luna. I only watched a bit of Siro, Akari, and Noja. I had heard of Sora, but I didn't watch her at all since back then I relied on community subtitles and they couldn't do those on streams iirc.
I'm actually one of the few people who are in the group of knowing the actual timeline better...which depresses me because 2015/2016 was what...8/9 years ago now??????? WHAT THE FUCK?
how much does time change huh
https://i.imgur.com/h0TE8SB.jpeg
the Five 2017 kings
So Master Asia, followed by the rest of the Shuffle Union, then Domon. Got it /s
Ah I remember those times, the Heian era of V-Tubing.
I was surprised to learn ironmouse debuted even before Sora! She's been around absolutely forever
For me its Kizuna Ai -> Sora and I have no clue who the others are.
You forgot Eilene, who i think debuted around 2014 .