Hololive

About

Hololive is a group of virtual YouTubers created by Cover Corp. The group features dozens of Virtual Reality girls who livestream individually on their own channels, as well as a YouTube series where characters get into bizarre and vaguely sexual situations. While the overall goal is to promote Hololive as an Idol agency, including holding concerts and performances, each member works in various mediums such as music, art, and gaming. Most members stream using an animated 2D avatar using software such as Live2D, but occasionally they use full-body motion capture with a 3D avatar for certain events.

History

Hololive was created by Cover Corp CEO Motoaki Tanigo (known as "YAGOO" by both talents and fans). Hololive began airing with its founding member, Tokino Sora, on September 7, 2017 (shown below). Over time more talents were added to the company; some of them were pre-existing Virtual Youtubers who were looking to expand their audience (such as Sakura Miko or Hoshimachi Suisei).

On April 29th, 2019, the Hololive YouTube channel, hololive ホロライブ – VTuber Group, posted a teaser for the upcoming "Hololive" series (shown below, left). On May 9th, 2019, the channel uploaded its first episode, gaining over 380,000 views (currently privated; see below).

Over the following year, the talent roster expanded several new divisions and international branches, including the Hololive Gamers,^[1] Holostars (a male-specific group), Inonaka Music, Hololive China, Hololive Indonesia, and Hololive English. Popular members include Shirakami Fubuki, Minato Aqua, Natsuiro Matsuri, and Akai Haato (roster shown below). The main Hololive channel mainly features comedic skits, collaborations, and special event announcements such as live concerts.

The channel began growing in popularity with following a collaboration with the mobile game Azur Lane in November of 2019 (shown below, left). Around the same time, an English Twitter account for the group launched.^[2] As of August 2020, the most popular video on the channel, titled "[Ochame Kinou] hololive Fukkireta Chorus," has over 12,000,000 views (shown below, right).

Online Presence

As of February 2020, the Hololive channel has 195,000 subscribers.^[3] In total, members of the group have over 1.5 million subscribers.^[4] The English Twitter account for the group has over 9,000 subscribers.^[2] Besides Youtube, the group also has a presence on Bilibili (especially for the members of Hololive China), as well as at least one member streaming on Twitch.

In the summer of 2020, Hololive's international popularity grew exponentially; By August 2020, four of the top five earners of Superchat donations were Hololive members, with Kiryu Coco reported to have earned over $800,000 since the beginning of the year.^[6]

Hololive's online presence also lead to the creation of a dedicated fanbase, especially on r/Hololive after it became the official subreddit for the group. Besides being a place to share memes about the community, posts made by Hololive members would frequently reach r/All.^[7] The subreddit helped to bridge the gap between the Japanese and English-speaking portions of the fandom. r/Hololive's popularity received a boost when Kiryu Coco began her Meme Review series, where she'd review the subreddit's top posts, sometimes with a fellow member as a guest host (shown below).

Hololive's explosion in popularity, especially with the debut of Hololive English, resulted in more mainstream recognition; Gawr Gura became the first member of Hololive to reach 1 million subscribers on October 22 2020, despite her channel being over a month old.^[12] The day before, Mori Calliope's recently released album DEAD BEATS – EP charted #1 in several countries including Japan, and #3 in the US,^[13] then charting #1 globally the following day.^[15] And in the recently released DOOM Eternal DLC The Ancient Gods, players discovered an easter egg referencing Inugami Korone's DOOG let's play series.^[14] This easter egg was later removed in a subsequent patch.

Controversies

Copyright Strikes

In August of 2020, many older videos from both the Hololive main channel and individual member channels were set to private due to copyright claims from videogame publishers such as CAPCOM. Member Ookami Mio took a month-long break due to the copyright strike affecting her channel.^[5]

Mano Aloe's Retirement

On August 17 2020, Mano Aloe, shortly following her debut as part of Hololive Generation 5, announced that she would be on a two week suspension from livestreaming due to the fact that a private video made prior to her debut with her model had been leaked, which was a violation of her contract with Cover Corp. However, Cover Corp later announced on August 31 that Mano Aloe had chosen to retire, due to threats to her safety including harassment, doxxing, and reportedly real-life stalking.^[9] Cover Corp later announced that they would be implementing a program to protect their talents from such threats to the fullest extent of the law.^[10]

Suspensions over Taiwan

On September 27, Cover Corp announced that members Akai Haato and Kiryu Coco would be put on a three week suspension, as both had each read out their viewer analytics on their livestreams, both of which had included Taiwan on their analytics. The simple mention of Taiwan as a seperate statistic from China caused significant backlash due to Hololive's relationship with Bilibili, a Chinese livestreaming platform, and due to the Chinese government's "One China Policy," in which Taiwan is not considered by the People's Republic of China to be an independent country. Angry fans who were hardline Chinese nationalists had harassed Hololive's talents and demanded that Coco and Haato be removed from the company entirely. In Cover Corp's apology message on Bilibili, they affirmed the One China Policy, and on the English announcement on r/Hololive, Cover Corp claimed that Coco and Haato sharing their viewer statistics was "confidential" and that their statements had been "insensitive" and "inappropriate," despite acknowledging that the incident was an accident.^[11] This caused significant backlash from the English speaking fandom, who found Cover Corp's response to be unfair and unacceptable, and that Cover Corp was failing to protect their talents yet again.

As part of the aftermath of this incident, many who were still angry with the two streamers and Hololive as a whole would use chatbots to spam the various streamers for the following weeks; meanwhile, subscriptions on Bilibili for all members decreased dramatically, and the members of Hololive China reached an agreement with Cover Corp to become independent, due to the backlash affecting their channels the most due to their association with Hololive.

Related Memes

Many individual members garner memes of their own that emphasize their personality quirks or specific funny circumstances, while some memes relate to Hololive as a whole.

"Idol Group like AKB48" / YAGOO's Dream

In an interview (shown below, left) given by Motoaki "YAGOO" Tanigo on September 15 2019, he stated that the goal of Hololive was to create an idol group similar to that of AKB48, a well-established J-Pop band. Many fans have since joked that YAGOO's "dream" of having his own Idol group was effectively destroyed by hiring a group of at best eccentric, and at worst extremely off-color girls. Natsuiro Matsuri, Houshou Marine, Kiryu Coco and Akai Haato are among those cited as being the most responsible for derailing the group's wholesome image (shown below, right). Others joked that founding member Tokino Sora was solely responsible for keeping his dream alive, as she is the most "normal" and proper Idol in the company. YAGOO is often the butt of many jokes, made by both fans and even other Hololive members.

The Vtuber Rabbit Hole

Many fans reported that as soon as they became interested in any individual member of Hololive, they quickly found themselves discovering and obsessively watching many of the other members. Fans characterize this as entering an endless pit from which there's no escape, oftentimes trying to lure their friends into the same hole.

Japanglish / Big Kusa

After the growth of Hololive's international audience, attempts at cross-cultural communication have become a meme in itself. The most common one is the Japanese word 草 or Kusa (lit. "Grass"), a common slang term for laughing on Japanese social media.^[8] Common uses by international viewers include "Big Kusa" in place of LMAO. Other Japanglish phrases may be used for shitposting in chat, such as "Yamete Kudastop" and "Sorrymasen." Alternatively, fans frequently use Hiragana to spell out English phrases such as "スーパーチャットターイム" (Supa Chatto Taimu – Super Chat Time) or "量子チキンスープグラ ス ビッグチュングス" (Quantum Chicken Soup Grass Big Chungus – This phrase is used to confuse or annoy), or else use Kanji that resemble Latin script to write English. Likewise, two Hololive members known for their mangled English, Sakura Miko and Houshou Marine, are said to speak "ELITE English" and "Maringlish," respectively.

Search Interest

External References