Namely, Brave Group, back when it was still Unlimited, was clearly angling at something conceptually similar. It had all of these little projects with notionally heavy lore, and which lasted only a certain amount of time, generally speaking. Aogiri High School proved to be the one long-term survivor, and that of course was sold off a few years ago. But a consideration both of Unlimited's situation and the wider situation for lore- and story-heavy VTubers in this era seems to cast new light on Unlimited's infamous claim that it was managing 'C-Tubers' whom it could recast. The recasting part I think will always be controversial, but the deeper conceptual idea that Unlimited was selling storylines played out by actors, rather than 'authentic' personalities filtered through the lens of a character shaped by a talent, seems to have been lost in the sauce of the (understandable) outrage over the Game-bu controversy. We can see now that this approach has too many flaws to be practicable, but at the time it was clearly a niche being explored beyond just Unlimited, and I think that gives some useful context to what it was trying to achieve.
Wow, that chart is really impressive. Good job! I might reference it in future articles if you don't mind :) I have been wanting to write about .live because I feel like they used to be compared to Niji and Holo but for some reason failed to garner anywhere near the same attention.
Tangents aside, I do agree with you on the Gamebu situation. I actually thought of them while writing this, but ended up not mentioning them since their videos were more Hologra style skits than a coherent story. But yea they were definitely trying to focus more on characters rather than the personalities themselves, which is fine (in fact their vids were super popular). But recasting was a bit too far- even in anime recasting a voice actor is not a popular thing to do.
Absolutely fine for you to use it! It's definitely incomplete and missing a lot of very early VTuber history, so if you have suggestions for inclusion I'd be more than happy to update it too.
As ever, I am impressed by your ability to unearth old Japanese VTuber history. This piece reminded me of something that struck me late last year when I was putting together this timeline: https://www.reddit.com/r/VirtualYoutubers/comments/1hqcjmb/to_round_out_2024_lets_see_where_the_vtuber/
Namely, Brave Group, back when it was still Unlimited, was clearly angling at something conceptually similar. It had all of these little projects with notionally heavy lore, and which lasted only a certain amount of time, generally speaking. Aogiri High School proved to be the one long-term survivor, and that of course was sold off a few years ago. But a consideration both of Unlimited's situation and the wider situation for lore- and story-heavy VTubers in this era seems to cast new light on Unlimited's infamous claim that it was managing 'C-Tubers' whom it could recast. The recasting part I think will always be controversial, but the deeper conceptual idea that Unlimited was selling storylines played out by actors, rather than 'authentic' personalities filtered through the lens of a character shaped by a talent, seems to have been lost in the sauce of the (understandable) outrage over the Game-bu controversy. We can see now that this approach has too many flaws to be practicable, but at the time it was clearly a niche being explored beyond just Unlimited, and I think that gives some useful context to what it was trying to achieve.
Wow, that chart is really impressive. Good job! I might reference it in future articles if you don't mind :) I have been wanting to write about .live because I feel like they used to be compared to Niji and Holo but for some reason failed to garner anywhere near the same attention.
Tangents aside, I do agree with you on the Gamebu situation. I actually thought of them while writing this, but ended up not mentioning them since their videos were more Hologra style skits than a coherent story. But yea they were definitely trying to focus more on characters rather than the personalities themselves, which is fine (in fact their vids were super popular). But recasting was a bit too far- even in anime recasting a voice actor is not a popular thing to do.
Absolutely fine for you to use it! It's definitely incomplete and missing a lot of very early VTuber history, so if you have suggestions for inclusion I'd be more than happy to update it too.