This is Ina. She's a priestess of the Ancient Ones, as you can probably tell from the eldritch tome and the tentacles. She's also an incredibly chill and sweet-tempered homebody who is just about the last person who would ever drown the world in madness and blood, so if that was the Ancient Ones' plan when they chose her, uh, they fucked up.

OK, that second sentence isn't really part of her character description, but it's a good summary of the way she actually comes across in practice. She's a virtual YouTuber, and like a lot of VTubers, she has a persona that's sort of one part scifi character, one part professional wrestler, and which plays relatively little actual part in her day-to-day performances. Most of the time she functions like a more-or-less normal YT streamer, except the visual aspect is a Live2D-animated avatar.

I didn't know any of that when I first ran across that picture of her on DB. As you'll see if you click through to the full-size version, they use the name of the agency she works for as the copyright tag on pictures of her, and at first I thought it was a weirdly-title mobile game or something. I mean, there's one called Blue Archive, why not? But no! No, as it turns out, it's something simultaneously more and less straightforward than that.

The English-language branch of Hololive is kind of a surreal corner of the universe, even by the relatively liberal standards of the Japanese entertainment industry. They're sort of idols--the lineage is plain to see; their agency structures their interactions with the public along the same lines, for instance. Every now and then they even do straight-up idol things, albeit with a CG twist, since they can't perform "live" in the traditional sense.

The rest of the time, though, they're basically regular YouTube streamers, like I said. They spend most of their online time streaming video games, chatting with subscribers, and generally cocking about. A few have other sidelines based on particular skills they have. Ina, for instance, is a high-grade artist, so much so that she drew the introductory splash banner for the first-generation HoloEN unit, codenamed "Myth". As such, she has frequent drawing streams, which are chill even by her standards, since they mainly consist of her mumbling self-deprecating remarks ("uh... how do draw again? oh no") while making magical things happen with a drawing tablet.

I stumbled across all of this a couple weeks ago, and have been backfilling my understanding of what's going on mostly from clips and best-of compilations, since watching three years' worth of actual streams would take... well, three years. By an interesting coincidence, the first HoloEN generation, Myth, debuted only a few weeks after I wrote the original Trouble With Randos post--their third anniversary is next week--so while the first five were just finding their feet and getting established, I was buried in a different avalanche, the one that led to Gallian Gothic.

I'm kind of sorry I missed it, because I get the impression that Myth's first year was a real lightning-in-a-bottle phenomenon--that they were something of an experiment on the company's part, one that no one on the outside really expected to succeed, but they came along at just the right time. They debuted at the end of the first pandemic summer, when the western world was starting to realize that this thing was going to go on for way longer than they promised us, and the numbers suggest they helped get a lot of people through that winter.

And I can see why, because behind the culturejammed high concept and the slightly unsettling parasocial dynamics of following a real person presented as a fictional character, they're all so goddamn charming. I mean, I spend at least a quarter of my watch time thinking about how the tech works (and I know at least one of them does too, which is kind of fun), and I enjoy them the most when they're paying the least attention to the kayfabe, which is probably not what the company behind them intended? But yeah. I'm on board. Like the man said, the street finds its own uses for things. :)

At present, there are three EN generations, the most recent of which, codenamed "Advent", just debuted a few weeks ago. At the moment, the standout of the batch to me is Koseki Bijou, who looks like a magical princess, has the voice of a little girl, and chooses violence at every opportunity in the games she plays. She established her bona fides during her first time streaming Armored Core 6, when the game started to load out to a cutscene when she met the mission objectives but there were still enemy units on the map, prompting her to squeak in dismay,

"Wait! I wanna kill more people! I wanna kill more people! I wanna kill more people, I'm not done!!"

Yeah. The Force is strong in Biboo. :)

I know much, much less about the other branches than I do about the English one, except that there are way too many in the Japanese one for me to keep track of (because there are, like, six or seven generations of them going back at least six years), and that the Indonesian ones seem to have a reputation for being completely bonkers even within the organization as a whole. I mean, one of them is a zombie idol who is literally named Kureiji Ollie and speaks at about 10,000 words per minute in three languages at once, which, you know, it's hard to beat that for bonkersitude.

At this moment, I have only the vaguest idea whether or how most members of Hololive would ever turn up in UF, but I figured I'd put this post here instead of in General anyway, because what the hell, I ought to know how these things work around here by now. :)

--G.
"Gryph, did you unseal another ancient tomb of evil?" "Well, I mean, it worked out fine when I opened yours."
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.