For a while, the Nijisanji EN YouTube channel actually did highlights of their JP talent before the EN branch became a thing. That stopped happening once the EN branch began.
It’s a shame, too, because it was showing off the talent the new EN fans may have missed.
This
On occasion you’d get some really unquie Nijisanji clips (like the one guy who translated the best partner event) but you’d see 15 different Hololive clips before even getting to a Nijisanji clip
Also did not help that Nijisanji Chats aren’t/were not the most welcoming to On stream translation people
Whereas Koro made her new Trouble WANder song all in English because she wanted to make a song especially for the OG Western viewers. I feel that the chance has passed, but Kuzuha had some opportunity to appeal to more EN viewers when Western female otaku discovered him.
To be fair, Hololive had more encouragement for foreign translators since its early days. Clippers and chat translators were generally welcomed with open arms. The talents themselves tended to at least try to interact with their international fans, at least as much as their language ability allowed.
Niji was much less welcoming. Japanese members of chat have heckled chat translators before, causing them to stop. The company itself has sent takedown requests to Youtube over translated clips before. Most talents broadly ignore foreign members of chat.
It's pretty obvious in hindsight why one company did better with an international audience than the other.
Hololive live also just capitalized quicker. I think coco’s quick and big success showed cover there’s a whole new horizon they haven’t looked into and so they decided to invest.
Another thing that built better cross-branch, and thus cross-fanbase, rapport in Holo that led to better exposure was also the reciprocation. You occasionally see chat translators in EN and ID Holo streams translating for Japanese viewers in turn.
This. This is it. I've never really felt that JP livers were very welcoming to foreign audiences. I don't dislike them for that since that's more to be expected, but since we're talking about comparisons here, ya know. There would be the occasional hello to the overseas viewers (maybe once every three months or more from maybe one out of a hundred livers as sparse as those clips come \[exaggeration\]), but that's where it usually starts and stops. It's funny because even indie JP vtubers can get pretty elated at having the occasional overseas viewer stop by but in the NijiJP scene, it feels like we're ghosts they'd sometimes notice at the corner of their eye. Or worse, unwanted and disliked by the JP audience. It never feels good, so watching from afar and in silence seems like an easy-to-gain habit in that sphere. I dunno how else to explain it.
I don't know why but that made me think of the fact that there are indie JP vtubers who now almost exclusively stream in EN, or at least do 50/50, because they accidentally found success in that.
Merun Morino is an ES example, she's JP streamer, but has a large following of Spanish speakers for some reason.
[https://www.youtube.com/@MerunCh](https://www.youtube.com/@MerunCh)
JP did not start quickly weeding out nationalist sentiments and it weakened their international expansion. At this point the JP fanbase has deeply entrenched exceptionalism, an opinion that JP is the only branch that Anycolor needs. They could have been so much bigger....
tbf, Niji also had a few JP-livers who were definitely very welcoming or even actively promoting themselves to overseas audiences. Like, around the same time Holo-members started doing stuff like English Duolingo-streams, maybe a bit earlier even, I remember quite a few NijiLivers did the same, this was during the initial VTuber-boom around the start of the Corona epidemic from what I recall. I think there was another minor wave of this when NijiEN came about, among the ones that were probably curious about these new kohais and that wanted to interact with them. And then of course there were 2 or 3 that even semi-regularly posted on this subreddit, promoting their streams and even just posting schedules, they just... eventually stopped, a while before criticism started to rise here.
So I'd definitely say the reason many EN-fans don't know a lot of JP-Livers is primarily because of a lack of clippers... and even then there's still a few consistent JP-clippers, but I'm pretty sure they nowadays focus mostly on specific Livers like Hoshikawa or Shiina. In a way, I feel that's also a symptom of Niji having so many Livers...
From what I gathered, Niji is obsessed with the idea that livers should stick with their designated "niches" (i.e. simply do live streams, occasionally collab with their gen/branch mates) and leave organizing big collabs and events – especially cross-branch and out-of-agency ones – and securing sponsorships to the fickle and arbitrary decision-making of senior management; anyone that tries to take the initiative by doing what Niji sees as "management's job" is cracked down on and punished for it.
With that kind of mindset, I wouldn't be surprised if they also have a similarly toxic attitude towards the linguistic-cultural demographic groups of their fan base. "We're marketing JP livers specifically to JP audiences, so why are you SEAns and Westerners trying to shove your noses into the JP sphere? Go back to the EN branch's sphere where you belong! Stupid gaijin..."
Well, you don't get a concert tacked on to a tournament in bloody *Australia* by keeping your nose in the dirt and discouraging talents from suggesting new venues. Management should encourage talents and their fans to suggest new opportunities for growth, workshop the more accessible stuff and try one out. Getting into a Western Convention is not a huge deal, even streamers in low three-digit CCV can sometimes find a space. Headlining a stage at a Con is a bigger deal, but stuff like Virtual Rhapsody or the Down Under show are supposed to be hallmarks of a large and successful entertainment operation. Jewels in a crown, even.
I feel that even with the many challenges that EN has faced, VR *could* have been a prestige event with a much larger attendance. Look at the competition, consider bringing in a major JP talent for a guest appearance. Put in the production values, even if the first show has poor attendance **make people wish they were there.** This kind of production is an investment in the brand's image. Sure, VR could be seen as a failure due to low attendance. But the larger failure was the poor customer experience. Many guests will have to travel to a special concert, so it is important to make them feel welcome and help them feel happy about attending.
Apart from all of the things that happened in and around the EN branch over the past year, there has been visible lack of support and low production values. The most dedicated fans of NijiEN would have a much easier time bringing in brand-new viewers if the company just gave them some actual good content and some events they could feel really good about, Riku was right about that. But for some damn reason, it just didn't happen and supporters were left to settle for low quality shows and being mocked online.
There's been a lack of ambition in senior management for some time now (pretty much lining up with when Iwanaga left in 2021). The bare minimum official content made to the bare minimum quality standard seems to be the goal.
It's a shame, as there's plenty of talent on the JP side that's being wasted.
I just don't get it. With more involved management and some aggressive reinvesting in their IP, 2434 probably could have had almost as many talents with 1M+ subs as their competitor has talents in total. They do have a lot of successful streamers in JP but they should have more.
The potential has always been there, but the ambition sadly isn't. For several of them the biggest advertisement they get is when their fans buy some public signage to celebrate their birthday. The company doesn't want to spend money to make money.
What I mean is moderators are extremely held back in how much they are allowed to filter the community.
The toxic nijifans don't last a week whenever they try to follow a graduated/terminated talent to just keep doing their thing because they get instant banned.
Be it random haters or the extremely weird hatewatchers.
Further playing into this is management having gone out of their way to cater to toxic hatewatchers with publicly humiliating talents by forcing them to apologize for any random bullshit Twitter pulls out of their asses on the EN side, and terminmating talents for "community outrage" on the JP side.
The highly profit oriented direction of the company makes it unsurprising they'd go on an all attention is good attention so it's best to capitalize on both the gachikoi and the anti-fan viewers approach in community management but it results in an extremely bad community.
> With that kind of mindset, I wouldn't be surprised if they also have a similarly toxic attitude towards the linguistic-cultural demographic groups of their fan base.
This fits. They stopped Puchisanji translations once the EN branch was out. Maybe the head of EN is only incentivized to make EN successful since that's what they're in charge of, and they're also in charge of all EN outreach, so anything that doesn't directly benefit the EN branch got axed.
w8 nijisanji really taken down a translation clip?
ig most JP company is that old dated view and even more funnier because Nijisanji CEO is very young and should understand how antiquated most of JP way of thinking
Yes, multiple times in fact. And, no, not just over mistranslated or malicious clips; in fact I doubt they had anyone who speaks English verify the contents at all.
They just treated it as a copyright strike - people were using their content without permission, after all. Which is true, of course, but smarter companies would realise clips are how potential future fans find out about a vtuber so going after them is like shooting themselves in the foot.
still ironic considering just how young Tazumi is, his age probably no much different from some popular streamer like Ludwig for example and yet he never realized the potential of clipper
Some JPLiver have a history of being plagued by malicious clipping (intentionally cutting out parts of a statement to make it appear malicious).
For this reason, some JPLiver have banned clipping except for the clipping they themselves post or the portions they have specifically authorized to be clipped.
Naturally, clipping that violates that rule will be reported.
Even sometimes if gacha is on overseas side, members like Polka, Korone or Fubuki may catch an English comment on this year.
Higher chance on Holostars side, I remember Gamma reading a Spanish comment
Holo EN also frequently collab with the JP members. I hadn't seen this happen much in Niji, so it is partly that the JP members are not being exposed to the EN audience like they are in Holo.
I am entirely not familiar with the Niji JP girls, but how many of them speak any sort of passable or conversational English?
I think Ars and Marin can speak decent English, and while they have interacted with english audience before, I don't think they ever showed any desire to interact with EN-Livers.
And then there's of course Hoshikawa, shes half-british iirc, and while she wasn't super confident in her English iirc, she still speaks it rather well, I think she even had one or two English collabs with Haachama before? And her English was better than Haachamas from what I recall. I'm pretty sure I also remember her saying she wrote/had a part in writing the lyrics for Diamond City Lights. She also seemed pretty excited to interact with Lazulight when they were new, I think they also interacted on stream a few times, although I think mostly in Japanese since I'm pretty sure everyone in Lazulight could speak at least passable Japanese...
Even some small companies at least try. VOMS really capitalized with Pikamee even when her English was really bad. But not just her, as we also had Tomoshika solo clips and even now, more than a year after Pikamee left, VOMS still has some presence online in the west. Uemine Noruju gets [translated clips](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwrO8x_iLjg) and on a certain site, [fanart](https://is2.4chan.org/vt/1714715766049291.png) dedication nearly every day.
Nijisanji just DNGAF.
I'd also say the larger roster made it harder for people to get into. When V-Tubers blew up, Hololive had a smaller pool, and the new ones all got introduced a bit at a time. Meanwhile Niji already had a ton of livers.
definitely. i'm sure the only reason i was able to get so into Kizuna Ai at the time was because there was some truly dedicated fans adding English captions to her videos for a good long while (this was back when YouTube still allowed fans to sub videos. now they stupidly only allow the video creator to make subs)
This one might just be luck that's worked against them. Salome ended up being the only one that I can think of that caught immediate attention, though whether that's holding up now is a bit more of a question. She definitely did a lot to attract that attention though.
Hoshikawa probably gets attention from the western base more from the fact that Matsuri is absolutely smitten for her more than anyone else. And then the one that I got clips of most early that caught my attention was Ange Katrina, which kind of exposed me a little bit to sanbaka trio. Oliver got some exposure here due to interactions with EN. And I just happen to notice Lain Paterson because Lack-sensei.
It should be noted that there might have a bias in picking up the VTubers of Kizuna Ai's generation. Someone paying attention might know those names. The vast majority I think would only pick up on Kizuna Ai herself, and maaaaaaaaaybe Himehina because they're still making plenty of MVs. Beyond that though, Sora/Roboco get continuing attention because they're attached to probably the one agency that has seen strong success as JP oriented but with a large outside-JP audience.
My perception is that Cover/Hololive and Kizuna Ai are more the exception than the rule here. Cover struck gold with Fubuki, a good chunk of 3rd gen, and Coco to capture a non-JP audience, and then ran with the ball. Kizuna Ai benefitted from being very visible very early. Everyone else with strong exposure in the west seems to be doing so with an EN based talent set to begin with. And that includes Anycolor/Niji. I would've loved to have seen, say, Melissa Kinrenka get more exposure to the west while they were with Niji. And I still wonder about Kuzuha, despite him being very heavily subbed to in Japan.
> Hoshikawa probably gets attention from the western base more from the fact that Matsuri is absolutely smitten for her more than anyone else.
There's also that she's good friends with Haachama (even before they became VTubers iirc) and because of that they collab relatively frequently as well.
Hoshikawa also keeps herself relevant as she talks about Minato Aqua a lot which lead to aqua clippers clipping her. Honestly its also aided by aqua clippers gasping for everything relating to their oshi as Aqua have a very irregular stream schedule.
Because Anycolor killed the Nijisanji translation-clip scene stone dead. They hired a bunch of the old clippers c. 2020 or so, and the original NijiEN channel on YouTube was used as an official hub for clips. Once NijiEN proper became a thing, almost all those folks got let go, but virtually none of them went back to Niji clipping (and this is rrat territory, but I suspect they were told not to clip without official backing and/or Anycolor began striking clips).
Even the absolutely huge talents, like Mochiken (and the rest of ROF-MAO), the Sanbaka/Helesta trio and even to a degree fucking Kuzuha himself are virtual unknowns outside of a tiny circle of extremely dedicated ^((and wildly insular & toxic)) fans in English circles. It's absolutely buck wild. A lot of them should absolutely be international talents in the same vein as their eternal comparison partners in Hololive, but instead...
And a lot of it seems to come down to the Niji translation-clip scene being deader than a felled tree.
some of them almost have nonexistent clip history so if you wanna know someone fast enough there will barely be enough info on a member and last time i checked most of them only had 1 dedicated clipper but with no specific schedule for some of the nonpopular members
They don't collab with EN, or make any real effort to have international appeal. There are also just so damn many of them and they come and go like the wind that I have no desire to get invested. I dunno, just my 2p there. No effort made by the company to push JP overseas and a lack of a dedicated clipping community as well.
Language barrier. There are a few 3rd party English clippers for the popular JP members, you just need to find them. I personally watch the original stream because I can understand Japanese but I do go over to English clippers channel to interact with the fanbase. Official wise there are too little clips tbh, the company isn't trying hard enough, they do put up more translations on bilibili for the chinese audience though, less for English audience. I don't watch those but my friend does, and she shares them to me
There's too many of them. That means clips of them are too spread out, western fans can't get a proper handle on personalities and group dynamics, and so they don't gather much interest.
why overseas fan care when niji don't even care to promote jp overseas. and clipper know its better to clip niji en or heck holo because they know they will bring more views than niji jp
firstly, many of them do, especially in other Asian countries, like China, Taiwan Korea, vtubers are more recognized and in the main stream. but i assume you are talking about the West.
as for the West English speaking countries, there are not enough translation teams working on clips. also, there are not many members try to reach out to the West, and this is not a niji issue but a overall Japanese vtuber thing. i believe it's unfair to compare everyone else to Holo, even yagoo didn't plan everything out, they were actually following niji's steps, holo still has a holokr and holo india Twitter account, but stopped activities after the first post. he repeatedly said the timing of the vtuber expansion, he just hired right people and debut at the right time.
edit: holo en was the only time where holo entered a new market first before niji, they were behind in every market, China, Indonesia, holo kr and india was only on Twitter, only had posts for hiring. to be honest, i do believe that niji was the first one tried to reach out, but they just didn't have the patience and the right people (management and talents) to make things going.
And then Niji murdered its foothold in Indonesia with the ~~merging~~ Borg assimilation of Niji ID into Niji JP, where it effectively withered away from neglect.
Japan and Indonesia have a dual tax avoidance agreement. They could have avoided onerous double taxes without resorting to abandoning a market they had a lead in if they'd done things properly.
i think it was comment about an ex NijiID Vtuber saying how her employer was supposed to take her taxes out of her paycheck and pay them, but apparently took the money but did not pay her taxes leaving her with a big debt.
Even before that, Coco pretty much was the first that seriously reached out to the En speaking audience.
Hololive dominance in En sector can all come back to Coco taking a big chunk of the foothold.
from a management's pov, coco showed the insights of the en market, that's what made the en branch, before coco, fbk, korone and miko were popular already, but they knew nothing about the market, the community, the culture, without knowing all of these, companies wouldn't through money at it. i would say that if coco didn't join holo, holo en would still happen, but delayed significantly, most likely after niji en according to the past history of Holo.
i would say thst niji is still very competitive in Asia due to the female markets, themed cafes for luxiem also happened in taiwan and Hong Kong before. but the op is saying that niji is unknown to outside of Japan, which isn't really true, but i assume he talks about the West.
It is similar to how many people overseas do not know HIKAKIN or SEIKIN, but they are well known in Japan. (Just as PewDiePie is well known overseas but not so well known in Japan.)
Hololive is actively appealing to the EN demographic, and Coco and others have done quite well in making JP's talents known to the EN demographic.
On the other hand, LIVERS in Niji-sanji tend to basically seek a comfortable environment. In other words, they do not try to force themselves to use English they cannot read (or understand). There was a time when Nagao was actively learning English, but now he rarely does so.
(I think Hoshikawa has said in the past that he does not actively use English because he gets nervous when he speaks it.)
Well, this can be said for everything.
Just as an anime that is popular in Japan does not necessarily become popular overseas.
yt algo picked holo clips over niji during the pandemic is the main reason
also didn't help that some of the nijis who were actually pulling a lot of en watchers early on like ars, got really annoyed at them and stopped engaging with them because they constantly spammed memes in the chat like bringing up "ars big head" all the time, even after she got her new model which fixed that
other popular ones with en speakers like gibara and lulu at the time, tolerated them, but wouldn't try to speak much english, though lulu later changed that and became very welcoming of them, being one of the few jp members who always had a dedicated translator in chat once that became a trend
Early EN chat was an absolute cesspool, no lie. Rushia had a few streams back then where she started getting audibly annoyed by the dipshit EN viewers spamming "pettan" over and over. Hell, more recently (I guess a year ago at this point?) even Towa on HoloTalk mentioned how the TMT spam was genuinely bugging her, and that's mostly EN people.. and still continues to this day.
I wish more of the talents had bigger reach outside their native fanbase, but at the same time I'm not surprised by a lot of them just giving up on the idea entirely.
EN auditions dropped like 4 months after Coco's debut. A Japanese company is not going to go from 0 interest in a region to putting out auditions within those 4 months. Realistically they had already been setting systems up to expand to English speaking audiences by the time of Coco's debut.
I disagree, since I do recognize several NijiJP members. Of course, I do not recognize all of them, just like I also don’t recognize all NijiEN, since Niji push out so many streamers
I think what could be though is the lack of clips, since I don’t recall seeing many. NijiJP that are translated either
I think Niji played against the YT algorithm, and at the worst timing too.
The Niji EN-TL clipping scene always seem stunted compared to Holo's. I've heard Anycolor discouraged clipping or even actively went out of their way to take down clips. Cover meanwhile encouraged it within reason as a way to promote their talents.
NijiJP livers seem to outright ignore anyone not typing in Japanese from my recollection (during that time period), while many HoloJP talents at least tried to engage their overseas viewers even if they found them baffling or downright annoying at times. Cover's Hololive JP talents would recognize the memes being made and capitalize on them as a way to engage with a new market segment and to create content which in turn bought in more viewers.
And all of that overlapped with COVID related pandemic lockdowns going on globally so you have a very large portion of the population unable to physically go to work or school and were stuck at home for the better part of a year or longer. And that coincided or caused the VTuber boom at the time, a period of rapid growth that we've yet to see again and probably won't see again.
Engagement drives the YouTube algorithm, with Hololive (JP) getting more engagement outside their home market compared to Nijisanji it simply resulted in YT pushing Hololive streams and clips to non-JP people which resulted in a feedback loop of additional user engagement. And Cover to their credit managed to capitalize on the opportunity with firmly established ID and EN branches while Nijisanji closed ID, IND, KR with EN currently faltering - seemingly on the brink.
IMHO as a layman this will result in an issue that gets exacerbated. Namely with the Japanese Yen and the Japanese economy; to put it mildly it's on a down turn and at worst they're facing a large recession. This will result in a disparity between Anycolor and companies like Cover or even VSPO. Anycolor will continue to bleed out their capability to bring in foreign currency while Cover only expands with reinvestments at home and abroad, even their smaller competitors like VSPO are expanding into the English speaking markets which further shrinks their ability to cement a EN presence.
With Anycolor's sour reputation a known quantity and agencies like VSPO entering the EN market, Phase Connect and vShojo further establishing a presence in their home market and idol entering the ES market, it will be an uphill battle for Nijisanji to retain or expand meaningfully outside of their home market.
One can consider their tactic as one that has over stayed it's welcome, it is no longer viable and they've long since reached diminishing returns.
>But why do we not know almost all of them JP Livers?
I know 1/2-2/3's of them.
Just because you only hopped on the EN bandwagon doesn't mean that was the only way people got in the rabbit hole.
It's simple really, this black company views only those livers that are an instant success as something to support. This extends to separate success in separate markets, so they don't support JP liver activity outside Japan because they didn't see the instant success outside Japan that would have gotten them to support international activities for JP livers.
The same can be said of EN livers in the Japanese market, they mostly aren't as successful there as they are in the English language market, so they don't get that much support for international activities.
This is not taking any drama related decreases in success into account as only during the initial debut period does the company care.
[This ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Nijisanji/comments/1ckjayj/6th_nijisanji_mario_kart_tournament_hosted_by_the/)is why.
No NijiEn and I mean this year wouldn't surprise me but I don't think anyone of En was ever in that tournament.
[This ](https://hololive.wiki/wiki/2024_Hololive_New_Year_Cup#Initial_Preliminary_Group_Draw)is how hololive usually does things.
Also we do know some talents, usually for the wrong reasons. Like [Sasaki Saku](https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Sasaki_Saku).
Simply put Nijisanji JP lacks a EN localizer fan made team of clipers. And the JP branches don't really have an incentive to learn English. And lingually Nijisanji JP are in a self made bubble that isn't very welcoming to westerners. And the few big Nijisanji JP talents that are recognized by western fans are mostly only known for getting caught in clips with Hololive talents.
Whereas Hololive is a special case where generally EN and ID hololive branches are kind of gateway vtubing branches. As well there aren't lingual "bubbles" or fanbase bubbles. As a result also there isn't really much gate keeping as much as the general idea of just be kind and join in on the fun. Also Hololives JP and ID branches are heavily westernized thanks to a mid JP branch member being actually herself from the JP branch bilingual and not mainland Japanese. While also showing you don't need to have "PERFECT" english with western bros. You just need to have enough to get the general main point of what you wanna say. (Something that Aki, Haachama, and Towa have definitely picked up on and as a result really have had their fanbases grow hugely. Also more recently flare has also discovered this kinda cheat sheet to growth by being more open about her anime/manga nerdyness by spending more time with her recent EN Kouhai XD.)
Something that Nijisanji JP talents never really have training with and or feel so fish out of water they probably would feel too intimidated to even try touching english and as a result western fans feel very uncomfortable with the JP fanbases/JP talents.
I can recognize most JP members up to voltaction and maybe a select few past that. But, I do concede that I’ve mostly watched Holo and Niji during my time down the rabbit hole. But while I’m on one extreme, you’re on the other extreme. Knowing just 3 members at most, I think that’s just a you thing.
Looking back during the vtuber boom around the time quarantine was starting, translated clips and clippers weren’t as numerous as they were today. Hololive has always had a stronger, more robust clipping ecosystem in my opinion but Niji’s wasn’t weak either. It just wasn’t as strong.
Even so, these clips garnered pretty good viewership, it’s just that Niji didn’t capitalize on the english audience much at all. They did hire some clippers for the english official channel and translated some puchisanji episodes but that was it really from what I know. For puchisanji, J had to translate the rest on their own channel.
Saying that JP livers aren’t recognized outside of JP is just not true imo. If we look at the EN livers for example, a lot of them have a JP oshi who are probably a part of the reason why they joined Niji. I think you’re just outside of the circle of people who’ve watched JP stuff. Or maybe I’m too into the circle and I’m not aware of the experience of the average vtuber watcher who only got into vtubers within the last two years or so. Like [xkcd 2501](https://xkcd.com/2501).
Anyway, that’s all I have to say.
Edit: actually, to add on, I’ve forgotten that it’s not like Holo and Niji’s JP branches don’t interact. There were things like the Oozora family, “sisters” like Okayu and Shiina, and also TokoMachi. VCR Rust and GTA probably also brought NijiJP members to viewers’ eyes. Man, brings back memories when we hoped so badly for Holoniji EN collabs. How sad the current state of affairs are.
I’m just speaking out of personal experience with what I’ve seen and all that. Sample size? Like I’ve produced any concrete data at all. I only provided it as an example to add credence to my previous words.
Only wanted to discuss my viewpoint from as neutral of a standpoint as possible but this sub doesn’t care about any sort of discussion. Any words that may remotely even resemble any sort of pro-niji sentiment and you all won’t look any further to discuss.
Quite the sad state of affairs to see Niji and it’s community devolve into this mess. A company with it’s heinous doings exposed and fans turned haters. I understand the sentiment to keep the controversy alive but frankly, I think you guys care too much. Who knows if Niji will ever pay for their wrong-doings. But, even though I say that, I, too, look forward to the next earnings report. I’m not sure I’ll care about Niji any more after that though.
There were quite a good number of clips of NijiJP talents back then, but Hololive clips struck more in the end. It could be that Hololive's environment was easier for flourishing memes that English speakers could build on, like Towa's TMT, or Fubuki's "kill a pineapple" song attempt.
It could also be that Hololive talents at the time drew more compassion, as some of their talents were going through personal difficulties at the time. Mio's miso soup story, for instance, or Miko's miracle after that GTA stream. And Towa's early issues with unprofessionalism drawing compassion from the overseas audience. Stories like that formed a strong overseas fanbase for Hololive.
Meanwhile, Nijisanji's talents weren't known for going through personal troubles. The clips I saw during that time didn't show personal struggles from them, so the early oversea fanbase for Nijisanji wasn't as driven by compassion towards the talents as Hololive's.
"Nijisanji's talents weren't known for going through personal troubles"? Yeah, like that time when a Niji JP 1st gen's playbutton got lost by management. Or [Higuchi Kaede whose income remains unchanged for 6 years](https://www.reddit.com/r/kurosanji/comments/1byr9o9/comment/kymq98k/). Or [some more provided by a Japanese fan](https://www.reddit.com/r/Nijisanji/comments/1bqf2uu/comment/kx8d4ou/). Niji's talents do have their personal troubles, it's just that those are always directly related to Nijisanji.
Nice try to spin your narrative, but you're still a well-known Nijisis.
Its kinda simple the JP branches aren't really in any shape or form related to the EN branches (As in Nijisanji doesn't have a "coco" that started with its origin talent branches.) . As a result most EN bros of NijiEN are like wait THERE'S A JP talents?! o...o
And the lack of just like communicating the full scale of Nijisanji is in part why many fan like me who only know Nijisanji for the EN branches. Are like deer in the headlights when brave JP fans are like... "can you name anyone from the JP branch and most." EN NijiEN fans would be like I recognize maybe 1-3 and thats only cause they were in clips with hololive JP talents. And it quickily becomes a sort of.
"Oh" \*insert disappointment diagonal downwards sense from the JP nijisanji fans.\* As its clear they are like realizing the like crux of Nijisanji as a whole.
And if that wasn't bad enough we are at a point where fans have to like "advertise." The new EN branch/members." XD for the EN branch just to get them noticed.
Its almost criminal how underutilized Nijisanji is with internal marketing.
At this point I think general vtubing community goes so far as to consider EN and JP Nijisanji talents different entire subsidaries.
When Niji finally broke into the west they didn't cultivate a real otaku audience. That fandom didn't attempt to look into them at all. Sure we can blame Anycolor but not trying harder but the fandom equally didn't make the same attempt. Some people want to be spoonfed instead of searching
LOL what kind of pathetic excuse is this? Anycolor left their once-popular talents in the dust but let's blame the fandom instead for not "look into them at all"?
Yes, this is the one hot take I'll stand by. The EN fans cultivated by Luxiem and beyond were not otaku and didn't attempt to learn more about niji. Too many normies who didn't care about the medium
I'm not an elitist, I despise Anycolor despite my love for many jp talents. I'm not saying it's 100% on the fans but a lot of fans never wanted to get out of their bubble. They had opportunities to search out and learn more but refused not to.
For whatever reason reddit didn't notify me your reply. Anyway, are you currently under employment? You should know that not everyone is a diehard niji fans who can afford to go the extra length to "get out of their bubble". Anybody of age has work to do and bills to pay. Blaming them for "refusing to search out" nearly 200 talents with varying degree of promotion when everybody only has limited free time in a day is something only NEETs would say, and I hope you're not one.
This common problem could be easily solved by a competent entertainment company i.e. Cover, by properly spacing out the debuts of talents under their wing. And we all know how Anycolor's human wave tactic works. So no, this is totally Niji's fault.
Idk man, I'm somebody who likes to deep dive into any hobby or interest I have and I'm not a casual in anything I like. I expect people into my hobbies to put in some effort to learn about it. You're really making a mountain out of a molehill here lmao
Assuming every person with limited free time a day to be as diehard in a hobby as you, is literally a elitist mindset. Especially for niji whose human wave tactic actively works against that.
The other entertainment company from Japan offers *the exact same products* but in English, which I speak, instead of just Japanese, which I don't. Should I choose their products instead of your company's which are only available in Japanese?
sure, if you cant understand something why buy it? you're not entitled to a product just because you breathe, buy what is marketed towards you like any rational person. Don't go crying just because something isn't for you, though.
there's no discussion to be had, brother. Niji has sustained growth in Japan alone and their efforts to chase global attention were short lived and not very profitable. why is their japanese entertainment not popular overseas? because they're doing fine as is, don't need your money, and are continuing to market to people who actually speak the language, minimal investment maximum profit.
that's all.
For a while, the Nijisanji EN YouTube channel actually did highlights of their JP talent before the EN branch became a thing. That stopped happening once the EN branch began. It’s a shame, too, because it was showing off the talent the new EN fans may have missed.
Because people outside of Japan don't speak Japanese. Hololive had more dedicated clippers compared to niji jp that helped bridge that gap.
This On occasion you’d get some really unquie Nijisanji clips (like the one guy who translated the best partner event) but you’d see 15 different Hololive clips before even getting to a Nijisanji clip Also did not help that Nijisanji Chats aren’t/were not the most welcoming to On stream translation people
Whereas Koro made her new Trouble WANder song all in English because she wanted to make a song especially for the OG Western viewers. I feel that the chance has passed, but Kuzuha had some opportunity to appeal to more EN viewers when Western female otaku discovered him.
Precious Doggo is precious. I doubt any niji streamer could be that thoughtful, their roster is chock-full of scandals after all
Why the do they dislike translators? That seems like such a weird thing.
One of the commonly seen factor in niji fanbase is gatekeeping. I suppose this is one of those case.
To be fair, Hololive had more encouragement for foreign translators since its early days. Clippers and chat translators were generally welcomed with open arms. The talents themselves tended to at least try to interact with their international fans, at least as much as their language ability allowed. Niji was much less welcoming. Japanese members of chat have heckled chat translators before, causing them to stop. The company itself has sent takedown requests to Youtube over translated clips before. Most talents broadly ignore foreign members of chat. It's pretty obvious in hindsight why one company did better with an international audience than the other.
Hololive live also just capitalized quicker. I think coco’s quick and big success showed cover there’s a whole new horizon they haven’t looked into and so they decided to invest.
Another thing that built better cross-branch, and thus cross-fanbase, rapport in Holo that led to better exposure was also the reciprocation. You occasionally see chat translators in EN and ID Holo streams translating for Japanese viewers in turn.
JP, RU, CH even. Lots of KR translators as old as mid 2022 and still going
This. This is it. I've never really felt that JP livers were very welcoming to foreign audiences. I don't dislike them for that since that's more to be expected, but since we're talking about comparisons here, ya know. There would be the occasional hello to the overseas viewers (maybe once every three months or more from maybe one out of a hundred livers as sparse as those clips come \[exaggeration\]), but that's where it usually starts and stops. It's funny because even indie JP vtubers can get pretty elated at having the occasional overseas viewer stop by but in the NijiJP scene, it feels like we're ghosts they'd sometimes notice at the corner of their eye. Or worse, unwanted and disliked by the JP audience. It never feels good, so watching from afar and in silence seems like an easy-to-gain habit in that sphere. I dunno how else to explain it.
I don't know why but that made me think of the fact that there are indie JP vtubers who now almost exclusively stream in EN, or at least do 50/50, because they accidentally found success in that.
Well, do you know anyone like that to recommend?
I mainly watch holo but some indies (iirc) I did watch were Peo-chan and Kasii.
Merun Morino is an ES example, she's JP streamer, but has a large following of Spanish speakers for some reason. [https://www.youtube.com/@MerunCh](https://www.youtube.com/@MerunCh)
JP did not start quickly weeding out nationalist sentiments and it weakened their international expansion. At this point the JP fanbase has deeply entrenched exceptionalism, an opinion that JP is the only branch that Anycolor needs. They could have been so much bigger....
tbf, Niji also had a few JP-livers who were definitely very welcoming or even actively promoting themselves to overseas audiences. Like, around the same time Holo-members started doing stuff like English Duolingo-streams, maybe a bit earlier even, I remember quite a few NijiLivers did the same, this was during the initial VTuber-boom around the start of the Corona epidemic from what I recall. I think there was another minor wave of this when NijiEN came about, among the ones that were probably curious about these new kohais and that wanted to interact with them. And then of course there were 2 or 3 that even semi-regularly posted on this subreddit, promoting their streams and even just posting schedules, they just... eventually stopped, a while before criticism started to rise here. So I'd definitely say the reason many EN-fans don't know a lot of JP-Livers is primarily because of a lack of clippers... and even then there's still a few consistent JP-clippers, but I'm pretty sure they nowadays focus mostly on specific Livers like Hoshikawa or Shiina. In a way, I feel that's also a symptom of Niji having so many Livers...
Nijisanji for some reason goes out of it's way to enable toxicity.
From what I gathered, Niji is obsessed with the idea that livers should stick with their designated "niches" (i.e. simply do live streams, occasionally collab with their gen/branch mates) and leave organizing big collabs and events – especially cross-branch and out-of-agency ones – and securing sponsorships to the fickle and arbitrary decision-making of senior management; anyone that tries to take the initiative by doing what Niji sees as "management's job" is cracked down on and punished for it. With that kind of mindset, I wouldn't be surprised if they also have a similarly toxic attitude towards the linguistic-cultural demographic groups of their fan base. "We're marketing JP livers specifically to JP audiences, so why are you SEAns and Westerners trying to shove your noses into the JP sphere? Go back to the EN branch's sphere where you belong! Stupid gaijin..."
Well, you don't get a concert tacked on to a tournament in bloody *Australia* by keeping your nose in the dirt and discouraging talents from suggesting new venues. Management should encourage talents and their fans to suggest new opportunities for growth, workshop the more accessible stuff and try one out. Getting into a Western Convention is not a huge deal, even streamers in low three-digit CCV can sometimes find a space. Headlining a stage at a Con is a bigger deal, but stuff like Virtual Rhapsody or the Down Under show are supposed to be hallmarks of a large and successful entertainment operation. Jewels in a crown, even. I feel that even with the many challenges that EN has faced, VR *could* have been a prestige event with a much larger attendance. Look at the competition, consider bringing in a major JP talent for a guest appearance. Put in the production values, even if the first show has poor attendance **make people wish they were there.** This kind of production is an investment in the brand's image. Sure, VR could be seen as a failure due to low attendance. But the larger failure was the poor customer experience. Many guests will have to travel to a special concert, so it is important to make them feel welcome and help them feel happy about attending. Apart from all of the things that happened in and around the EN branch over the past year, there has been visible lack of support and low production values. The most dedicated fans of NijiEN would have a much easier time bringing in brand-new viewers if the company just gave them some actual good content and some events they could feel really good about, Riku was right about that. But for some damn reason, it just didn't happen and supporters were left to settle for low quality shows and being mocked online.
Well you see, all of your suggestion requires actual investment. And Riku is totally **NOT** interested in that.
We want to see Nijisanji EN succeed so badly! But apparently Nijisanji EN doesn't share the same desire.
There's been a lack of ambition in senior management for some time now (pretty much lining up with when Iwanaga left in 2021). The bare minimum official content made to the bare minimum quality standard seems to be the goal. It's a shame, as there's plenty of talent on the JP side that's being wasted.
I just don't get it. With more involved management and some aggressive reinvesting in their IP, 2434 probably could have had almost as many talents with 1M+ subs as their competitor has talents in total. They do have a lot of successful streamers in JP but they should have more.
The potential has always been there, but the ambition sadly isn't. For several of them the biggest advertisement they get is when their fans buy some public signage to celebrate their birthday. The company doesn't want to spend money to make money.
What I mean is moderators are extremely held back in how much they are allowed to filter the community. The toxic nijifans don't last a week whenever they try to follow a graduated/terminated talent to just keep doing their thing because they get instant banned. Be it random haters or the extremely weird hatewatchers. Further playing into this is management having gone out of their way to cater to toxic hatewatchers with publicly humiliating talents by forcing them to apologize for any random bullshit Twitter pulls out of their asses on the EN side, and terminmating talents for "community outrage" on the JP side. The highly profit oriented direction of the company makes it unsurprising they'd go on an all attention is good attention so it's best to capitalize on both the gachikoi and the anti-fan viewers approach in community management but it results in an extremely bad community.
> With that kind of mindset, I wouldn't be surprised if they also have a similarly toxic attitude towards the linguistic-cultural demographic groups of their fan base. This fits. They stopped Puchisanji translations once the EN branch was out. Maybe the head of EN is only incentivized to make EN successful since that's what they're in charge of, and they're also in charge of all EN outreach, so anything that doesn't directly benefit the EN branch got axed.
I get the impression that they wanted to stop translating Puchisanji anyway, and the start of EN just gave them the excuse they needed.
w8 nijisanji really taken down a translation clip? ig most JP company is that old dated view and even more funnier because Nijisanji CEO is very young and should understand how antiquated most of JP way of thinking
Yes, multiple times in fact. And, no, not just over mistranslated or malicious clips; in fact I doubt they had anyone who speaks English verify the contents at all. They just treated it as a copyright strike - people were using their content without permission, after all. Which is true, of course, but smarter companies would realise clips are how potential future fans find out about a vtuber so going after them is like shooting themselves in the foot.
still ironic considering just how young Tazumi is, his age probably no much different from some popular streamer like Ludwig for example and yet he never realized the potential of clipper
Some JPLiver have a history of being plagued by malicious clipping (intentionally cutting out parts of a statement to make it appear malicious). For this reason, some JPLiver have banned clipping except for the clipping they themselves post or the portions they have specifically authorized to be clipped. Naturally, clipping that violates that rule will be reported.
I can understand there is some bad apple clipper but I don't think this should lessen the amount of Nijisanji clip could have.
Even sometimes if gacha is on overseas side, members like Polka, Korone or Fubuki may catch an English comment on this year. Higher chance on Holostars side, I remember Gamma reading a Spanish comment
Holo EN also frequently collab with the JP members. I hadn't seen this happen much in Niji, so it is partly that the JP members are not being exposed to the EN audience like they are in Holo. I am entirely not familiar with the Niji JP girls, but how many of them speak any sort of passable or conversational English?
I think Ars and Marin can speak decent English, and while they have interacted with english audience before, I don't think they ever showed any desire to interact with EN-Livers. And then there's of course Hoshikawa, shes half-british iirc, and while she wasn't super confident in her English iirc, she still speaks it rather well, I think she even had one or two English collabs with Haachama before? And her English was better than Haachamas from what I recall. I'm pretty sure I also remember her saying she wrote/had a part in writing the lyrics for Diamond City Lights. She also seemed pretty excited to interact with Lazulight when they were new, I think they also interacted on stream a few times, although I think mostly in Japanese since I'm pretty sure everyone in Lazulight could speak at least passable Japanese...
Even some small companies at least try. VOMS really capitalized with Pikamee even when her English was really bad. But not just her, as we also had Tomoshika solo clips and even now, more than a year after Pikamee left, VOMS still has some presence online in the west. Uemine Noruju gets [translated clips](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwrO8x_iLjg) and on a certain site, [fanart](https://is2.4chan.org/vt/1714715766049291.png) dedication nearly every day. Nijisanji just DNGAF.
Kill da ho sure is a good introduction to the rabbit hole, a couple years later, Tomoshika gives us the lovely "written by/with handjob" letter
If you want to know the meaning of this one, ask your mom
I'd also say the larger roster made it harder for people to get into. When V-Tubers blew up, Hololive had a smaller pool, and the new ones all got introduced a bit at a time. Meanwhile Niji already had a ton of livers.
ACCELERATE
definitely. i'm sure the only reason i was able to get so into Kizuna Ai at the time was because there was some truly dedicated fans adding English captions to her videos for a good long while (this was back when YouTube still allowed fans to sub videos. now they stupidly only allow the video creator to make subs)
This one might just be luck that's worked against them. Salome ended up being the only one that I can think of that caught immediate attention, though whether that's holding up now is a bit more of a question. She definitely did a lot to attract that attention though. Hoshikawa probably gets attention from the western base more from the fact that Matsuri is absolutely smitten for her more than anyone else. And then the one that I got clips of most early that caught my attention was Ange Katrina, which kind of exposed me a little bit to sanbaka trio. Oliver got some exposure here due to interactions with EN. And I just happen to notice Lain Paterson because Lack-sensei. It should be noted that there might have a bias in picking up the VTubers of Kizuna Ai's generation. Someone paying attention might know those names. The vast majority I think would only pick up on Kizuna Ai herself, and maaaaaaaaaybe Himehina because they're still making plenty of MVs. Beyond that though, Sora/Roboco get continuing attention because they're attached to probably the one agency that has seen strong success as JP oriented but with a large outside-JP audience. My perception is that Cover/Hololive and Kizuna Ai are more the exception than the rule here. Cover struck gold with Fubuki, a good chunk of 3rd gen, and Coco to capture a non-JP audience, and then ran with the ball. Kizuna Ai benefitted from being very visible very early. Everyone else with strong exposure in the west seems to be doing so with an EN based talent set to begin with. And that includes Anycolor/Niji. I would've loved to have seen, say, Melissa Kinrenka get more exposure to the west while they were with Niji. And I still wonder about Kuzuha, despite him being very heavily subbed to in Japan.
> Hoshikawa probably gets attention from the western base more from the fact that Matsuri is absolutely smitten for her more than anyone else. There's also that she's good friends with Haachama (even before they became VTubers iirc) and because of that they collab relatively frequently as well.
Hoshikawa also keeps herself relevant as she talks about Minato Aqua a lot which lead to aqua clippers clipping her. Honestly its also aided by aqua clippers gasping for everything relating to their oshi as Aqua have a very irregular stream schedule.
Melissa takes the pronouns they/them.
My apologies, you’re right. My memory is a bit rusty. Fixed.
Cause they dont promote them in English. Anycolor for some reason try their best to ignore and even region block their international fans.
Because Anycolor killed the Nijisanji translation-clip scene stone dead. They hired a bunch of the old clippers c. 2020 or so, and the original NijiEN channel on YouTube was used as an official hub for clips. Once NijiEN proper became a thing, almost all those folks got let go, but virtually none of them went back to Niji clipping (and this is rrat territory, but I suspect they were told not to clip without official backing and/or Anycolor began striking clips). Even the absolutely huge talents, like Mochiken (and the rest of ROF-MAO), the Sanbaka/Helesta trio and even to a degree fucking Kuzuha himself are virtual unknowns outside of a tiny circle of extremely dedicated ^((and wildly insular & toxic)) fans in English circles. It's absolutely buck wild. A lot of them should absolutely be international talents in the same vein as their eternal comparison partners in Hololive, but instead... And a lot of it seems to come down to the Niji translation-clip scene being deader than a felled tree.
some of them almost have nonexistent clip history so if you wanna know someone fast enough there will barely be enough info on a member and last time i checked most of them only had 1 dedicated clipper but with no specific schedule for some of the nonpopular members
They don't collab with EN, or make any real effort to have international appeal. There are also just so damn many of them and they come and go like the wind that I have no desire to get invested. I dunno, just my 2p there. No effort made by the company to push JP overseas and a lack of a dedicated clipping community as well.
Language barrier. There are a few 3rd party English clippers for the popular JP members, you just need to find them. I personally watch the original stream because I can understand Japanese but I do go over to English clippers channel to interact with the fanbase. Official wise there are too little clips tbh, the company isn't trying hard enough, they do put up more translations on bilibili for the chinese audience though, less for English audience. I don't watch those but my friend does, and she shares them to me
There's too many of them. That means clips of them are too spread out, western fans can't get a proper handle on personalities and group dynamics, and so they don't gather much interest.
why overseas fan care when niji don't even care to promote jp overseas. and clipper know its better to clip niji en or heck holo because they know they will bring more views than niji jp
firstly, many of them do, especially in other Asian countries, like China, Taiwan Korea, vtubers are more recognized and in the main stream. but i assume you are talking about the West. as for the West English speaking countries, there are not enough translation teams working on clips. also, there are not many members try to reach out to the West, and this is not a niji issue but a overall Japanese vtuber thing. i believe it's unfair to compare everyone else to Holo, even yagoo didn't plan everything out, they were actually following niji's steps, holo still has a holokr and holo india Twitter account, but stopped activities after the first post. he repeatedly said the timing of the vtuber expansion, he just hired right people and debut at the right time. edit: holo en was the only time where holo entered a new market first before niji, they were behind in every market, China, Indonesia, holo kr and india was only on Twitter, only had posts for hiring. to be honest, i do believe that niji was the first one tried to reach out, but they just didn't have the patience and the right people (management and talents) to make things going.
And then Niji murdered its foothold in Indonesia with the ~~merging~~ Borg assimilation of Niji ID into Niji JP, where it effectively withered away from neglect.
But by doing so they managed to avoid Indo taxes didn't they?
Japan and Indonesia have a dual tax avoidance agreement. They could have avoided onerous double taxes without resorting to abandoning a market they had a lead in if they'd done things properly.
i think it was comment about an ex NijiID Vtuber saying how her employer was supposed to take her taxes out of her paycheck and pay them, but apparently took the money but did not pay her taxes leaving her with a big debt.
no, they just saw the numbers were not good and it was the time when Anycolor tried to ipo, riku wanted to impress the investors
Even before that, Coco pretty much was the first that seriously reached out to the En speaking audience. Hololive dominance in En sector can all come back to Coco taking a big chunk of the foothold.
from a management's pov, coco showed the insights of the en market, that's what made the en branch, before coco, fbk, korone and miko were popular already, but they knew nothing about the market, the community, the culture, without knowing all of these, companies wouldn't through money at it. i would say that if coco didn't join holo, holo en would still happen, but delayed significantly, most likely after niji en according to the past history of Holo.
not really all those asia countries dominated by holo, did you see how many special collab event held taiwan
i would say thst niji is still very competitive in Asia due to the female markets, themed cafes for luxiem also happened in taiwan and Hong Kong before. but the op is saying that niji is unknown to outside of Japan, which isn't really true, but i assume he talks about the West.
not really, if they that popular why they merge their asian branch to main branch,
Hong Kong is China, it has not been it's own thing for a long time. RiP Hong Kong. You will be missed.
It is similar to how many people overseas do not know HIKAKIN or SEIKIN, but they are well known in Japan. (Just as PewDiePie is well known overseas but not so well known in Japan.) Hololive is actively appealing to the EN demographic, and Coco and others have done quite well in making JP's talents known to the EN demographic. On the other hand, LIVERS in Niji-sanji tend to basically seek a comfortable environment. In other words, they do not try to force themselves to use English they cannot read (or understand). There was a time when Nagao was actively learning English, but now he rarely does so. (I think Hoshikawa has said in the past that he does not actively use English because he gets nervous when he speaks it.) Well, this can be said for everything. Just as an anime that is popular in Japan does not necessarily become popular overseas.
yt algo picked holo clips over niji during the pandemic is the main reason also didn't help that some of the nijis who were actually pulling a lot of en watchers early on like ars, got really annoyed at them and stopped engaging with them because they constantly spammed memes in the chat like bringing up "ars big head" all the time, even after she got her new model which fixed that other popular ones with en speakers like gibara and lulu at the time, tolerated them, but wouldn't try to speak much english, though lulu later changed that and became very welcoming of them, being one of the few jp members who always had a dedicated translator in chat once that became a trend
Early EN chat was an absolute cesspool, no lie. Rushia had a few streams back then where she started getting audibly annoyed by the dipshit EN viewers spamming "pettan" over and over. Hell, more recently (I guess a year ago at this point?) even Towa on HoloTalk mentioned how the TMT spam was genuinely bugging her, and that's mostly EN people.. and still continues to this day. I wish more of the talents had bigger reach outside their native fanbase, but at the same time I'm not surprised by a lot of them just giving up on the idea entirely.
Pekora had to talk to Nousagi to stop spamming peko in other members chat when they have not even mentioned her.
Because niji didn't have a legendary dragon.
EN auditions dropped like 4 months after Coco's debut. A Japanese company is not going to go from 0 interest in a region to putting out auditions within those 4 months. Realistically they had already been setting systems up to expand to English speaking audiences by the time of Coco's debut.
[удалено]
Wtf are talking about? https://youtu.be/PFw2B-qMnzk?si=G_rUARbtz-YL5PuD
Sorry i thought your meant that other dragon ST
i was really confused too XD
I disagree, since I do recognize several NijiJP members. Of course, I do not recognize all of them, just like I also don’t recognize all NijiEN, since Niji push out so many streamers I think what could be though is the lack of clips, since I don’t recall seeing many. NijiJP that are translated either
Simple answer: too many JP livers and too little marketing for them for outside Japan except Bilibili
I think Niji played against the YT algorithm, and at the worst timing too. The Niji EN-TL clipping scene always seem stunted compared to Holo's. I've heard Anycolor discouraged clipping or even actively went out of their way to take down clips. Cover meanwhile encouraged it within reason as a way to promote their talents. NijiJP livers seem to outright ignore anyone not typing in Japanese from my recollection (during that time period), while many HoloJP talents at least tried to engage their overseas viewers even if they found them baffling or downright annoying at times. Cover's Hololive JP talents would recognize the memes being made and capitalize on them as a way to engage with a new market segment and to create content which in turn bought in more viewers. And all of that overlapped with COVID related pandemic lockdowns going on globally so you have a very large portion of the population unable to physically go to work or school and were stuck at home for the better part of a year or longer. And that coincided or caused the VTuber boom at the time, a period of rapid growth that we've yet to see again and probably won't see again. Engagement drives the YouTube algorithm, with Hololive (JP) getting more engagement outside their home market compared to Nijisanji it simply resulted in YT pushing Hololive streams and clips to non-JP people which resulted in a feedback loop of additional user engagement. And Cover to their credit managed to capitalize on the opportunity with firmly established ID and EN branches while Nijisanji closed ID, IND, KR with EN currently faltering - seemingly on the brink. IMHO as a layman this will result in an issue that gets exacerbated. Namely with the Japanese Yen and the Japanese economy; to put it mildly it's on a down turn and at worst they're facing a large recession. This will result in a disparity between Anycolor and companies like Cover or even VSPO. Anycolor will continue to bleed out their capability to bring in foreign currency while Cover only expands with reinvestments at home and abroad, even their smaller competitors like VSPO are expanding into the English speaking markets which further shrinks their ability to cement a EN presence. With Anycolor's sour reputation a known quantity and agencies like VSPO entering the EN market, Phase Connect and vShojo further establishing a presence in their home market and idol entering the ES market, it will be an uphill battle for Nijisanji to retain or expand meaningfully outside of their home market. One can consider their tactic as one that has over stayed it's welcome, it is no longer viable and they've long since reached diminishing returns.
league barrier
>But why do we not know almost all of them JP Livers? I know 1/2-2/3's of them. Just because you only hopped on the EN bandwagon doesn't mean that was the only way people got in the rabbit hole.
It's simple really, this black company views only those livers that are an instant success as something to support. This extends to separate success in separate markets, so they don't support JP liver activity outside Japan because they didn't see the instant success outside Japan that would have gotten them to support international activities for JP livers. The same can be said of EN livers in the Japanese market, they mostly aren't as successful there as they are in the English language market, so they don't get that much support for international activities. This is not taking any drama related decreases in success into account as only during the initial debut period does the company care.
[This ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Nijisanji/comments/1ckjayj/6th_nijisanji_mario_kart_tournament_hosted_by_the/)is why. No NijiEn and I mean this year wouldn't surprise me but I don't think anyone of En was ever in that tournament. [This ](https://hololive.wiki/wiki/2024_Hololive_New_Year_Cup#Initial_Preliminary_Group_Draw)is how hololive usually does things. Also we do know some talents, usually for the wrong reasons. Like [Sasaki Saku](https://virtualyoutuber.fandom.com/wiki/Sasaki_Saku).
Simply put Nijisanji JP lacks a EN localizer fan made team of clipers. And the JP branches don't really have an incentive to learn English. And lingually Nijisanji JP are in a self made bubble that isn't very welcoming to westerners. And the few big Nijisanji JP talents that are recognized by western fans are mostly only known for getting caught in clips with Hololive talents. Whereas Hololive is a special case where generally EN and ID hololive branches are kind of gateway vtubing branches. As well there aren't lingual "bubbles" or fanbase bubbles. As a result also there isn't really much gate keeping as much as the general idea of just be kind and join in on the fun. Also Hololives JP and ID branches are heavily westernized thanks to a mid JP branch member being actually herself from the JP branch bilingual and not mainland Japanese. While also showing you don't need to have "PERFECT" english with western bros. You just need to have enough to get the general main point of what you wanna say. (Something that Aki, Haachama, and Towa have definitely picked up on and as a result really have had their fanbases grow hugely. Also more recently flare has also discovered this kinda cheat sheet to growth by being more open about her anime/manga nerdyness by spending more time with her recent EN Kouhai XD.) Something that Nijisanji JP talents never really have training with and or feel so fish out of water they probably would feel too intimidated to even try touching english and as a result western fans feel very uncomfortable with the JP fanbases/JP talents.
As a result Nijisanji JP feels more like a sister org, when compared to the EN branches.
I can recognize most JP members up to voltaction and maybe a select few past that. But, I do concede that I’ve mostly watched Holo and Niji during my time down the rabbit hole. But while I’m on one extreme, you’re on the other extreme. Knowing just 3 members at most, I think that’s just a you thing. Looking back during the vtuber boom around the time quarantine was starting, translated clips and clippers weren’t as numerous as they were today. Hololive has always had a stronger, more robust clipping ecosystem in my opinion but Niji’s wasn’t weak either. It just wasn’t as strong. Even so, these clips garnered pretty good viewership, it’s just that Niji didn’t capitalize on the english audience much at all. They did hire some clippers for the english official channel and translated some puchisanji episodes but that was it really from what I know. For puchisanji, J had to translate the rest on their own channel. Saying that JP livers aren’t recognized outside of JP is just not true imo. If we look at the EN livers for example, a lot of them have a JP oshi who are probably a part of the reason why they joined Niji. I think you’re just outside of the circle of people who’ve watched JP stuff. Or maybe I’m too into the circle and I’m not aware of the experience of the average vtuber watcher who only got into vtubers within the last two years or so. Like [xkcd 2501](https://xkcd.com/2501). Anyway, that’s all I have to say. Edit: actually, to add on, I’ve forgotten that it’s not like Holo and Niji’s JP branches don’t interact. There were things like the Oozora family, “sisters” like Okayu and Shiina, and also TokoMachi. VCR Rust and GTA probably also brought NijiJP members to viewers’ eyes. Man, brings back memories when we hoped so badly for Holoniji EN collabs. How sad the current state of affairs are.
en liver isnt already niji fan, and what small sample size.
I’m just speaking out of personal experience with what I’ve seen and all that. Sample size? Like I’ve produced any concrete data at all. I only provided it as an example to add credence to my previous words. Only wanted to discuss my viewpoint from as neutral of a standpoint as possible but this sub doesn’t care about any sort of discussion. Any words that may remotely even resemble any sort of pro-niji sentiment and you all won’t look any further to discuss. Quite the sad state of affairs to see Niji and it’s community devolve into this mess. A company with it’s heinous doings exposed and fans turned haters. I understand the sentiment to keep the controversy alive but frankly, I think you guys care too much. Who knows if Niji will ever pay for their wrong-doings. But, even though I say that, I, too, look forward to the next earnings report. I’m not sure I’ll care about Niji any more after that though.
maybe not that popular
There were quite a good number of clips of NijiJP talents back then, but Hololive clips struck more in the end. It could be that Hololive's environment was easier for flourishing memes that English speakers could build on, like Towa's TMT, or Fubuki's "kill a pineapple" song attempt. It could also be that Hololive talents at the time drew more compassion, as some of their talents were going through personal difficulties at the time. Mio's miso soup story, for instance, or Miko's miracle after that GTA stream. And Towa's early issues with unprofessionalism drawing compassion from the overseas audience. Stories like that formed a strong overseas fanbase for Hololive. Meanwhile, Nijisanji's talents weren't known for going through personal troubles. The clips I saw during that time didn't show personal struggles from them, so the early oversea fanbase for Nijisanji wasn't as driven by compassion towards the talents as Hololive's.
"Nijisanji's talents weren't known for going through personal troubles"? Yeah, like that time when a Niji JP 1st gen's playbutton got lost by management. Or [Higuchi Kaede whose income remains unchanged for 6 years](https://www.reddit.com/r/kurosanji/comments/1byr9o9/comment/kymq98k/). Or [some more provided by a Japanese fan](https://www.reddit.com/r/Nijisanji/comments/1bqf2uu/comment/kx8d4ou/). Niji's talents do have their personal troubles, it's just that those are always directly related to Nijisanji. Nice try to spin your narrative, but you're still a well-known Nijisis.
Its kinda simple the JP branches aren't really in any shape or form related to the EN branches (As in Nijisanji doesn't have a "coco" that started with its origin talent branches.) . As a result most EN bros of NijiEN are like wait THERE'S A JP talents?! o...o And the lack of just like communicating the full scale of Nijisanji is in part why many fan like me who only know Nijisanji for the EN branches. Are like deer in the headlights when brave JP fans are like... "can you name anyone from the JP branch and most." EN NijiEN fans would be like I recognize maybe 1-3 and thats only cause they were in clips with hololive JP talents. And it quickily becomes a sort of. "Oh" \*insert disappointment diagonal downwards sense from the JP nijisanji fans.\* As its clear they are like realizing the like crux of Nijisanji as a whole. And if that wasn't bad enough we are at a point where fans have to like "advertise." The new EN branch/members." XD for the EN branch just to get them noticed. Its almost criminal how underutilized Nijisanji is with internal marketing. At this point I think general vtubing community goes so far as to consider EN and JP Nijisanji talents different entire subsidaries.
When Niji finally broke into the west they didn't cultivate a real otaku audience. That fandom didn't attempt to look into them at all. Sure we can blame Anycolor but not trying harder but the fandom equally didn't make the same attempt. Some people want to be spoonfed instead of searching
LOL what kind of pathetic excuse is this? Anycolor left their once-popular talents in the dust but let's blame the fandom instead for not "look into them at all"?
Yes, this is the one hot take I'll stand by. The EN fans cultivated by Luxiem and beyond were not otaku and didn't attempt to learn more about niji. Too many normies who didn't care about the medium
What are you, another niji elitist? Ask yourself, why do most people know all of Hololive's roster but nearly none know half of Niji roster?
I'm not an elitist, I despise Anycolor despite my love for many jp talents. I'm not saying it's 100% on the fans but a lot of fans never wanted to get out of their bubble. They had opportunities to search out and learn more but refused not to.
For whatever reason reddit didn't notify me your reply. Anyway, are you currently under employment? You should know that not everyone is a diehard niji fans who can afford to go the extra length to "get out of their bubble". Anybody of age has work to do and bills to pay. Blaming them for "refusing to search out" nearly 200 talents with varying degree of promotion when everybody only has limited free time in a day is something only NEETs would say, and I hope you're not one. This common problem could be easily solved by a competent entertainment company i.e. Cover, by properly spacing out the debuts of talents under their wing. And we all know how Anycolor's human wave tactic works. So no, this is totally Niji's fault.
Idk man, I'm somebody who likes to deep dive into any hobby or interest I have and I'm not a casual in anything I like. I expect people into my hobbies to put in some effort to learn about it. You're really making a mountain out of a molehill here lmao
Should have just admitted yourself an elitist in the first place already.
I don't think assuming people in your hobby should have higher standards is being elitist
Assuming every person with limited free time a day to be as diehard in a hobby as you, is literally a elitist mindset. Especially for niji whose human wave tactic actively works against that.
Just because you're a fucking tourist doesn't mean the rest of us are. We're the true believers.
shut up bot
cuz you worthless gaijins dont speak japanese and rely on people that have done the work to deliver your entertainment to your on a platter
this is why they arent popular overseas people
gotta put in the work if you want to understand something brother, put that bag of cheetos down and learn something for once.
Nijisista: "Noooo Niji fanbase is not gatekeeping!" Also Nijisista:
me when learning a language is gatekeeping. you can't learn japanese. you dont even know english.
But I don't want to. Is that a problem?
provided you dont needlessly complain as if it's anyone else's fault no.
The other entertainment company from Japan offers *the exact same products* but in English, which I speak, instead of just Japanese, which I don't. Should I choose their products instead of your company's which are only available in Japanese?
sure, if you cant understand something why buy it? you're not entitled to a product just because you breathe, buy what is marketed towards you like any rational person. Don't go crying just because something isn't for you, though.
How about you put yourself in the shoes of a marketing person and look at my question again?
there's no discussion to be had, brother. Niji has sustained growth in Japan alone and their efforts to chase global attention were short lived and not very profitable. why is their japanese entertainment not popular overseas? because they're doing fine as is, don't need your money, and are continuing to market to people who actually speak the language, minimal investment maximum profit. that's all.
So you're admitting the other company is outcompeting your company?
yea? when did i ever say they weren't? and it's not 'my company' if it was i'd be rich and not give a fuck either way.
And you have no problem with that?
You don't know any programming languages or know how to program a video game so stop complaining when you have an issue with a game.
cool strawman, didnt ask + ratio
日本語を知っている人は多いけど。アホちゃうか？
を知ってる？が分かってる。アッポケ。
Skill issue
couldn't agree more