I am but a humble Shrimp.

[Dragon Lord]

Yeah it sucked, but that's the nature of a Souls game. No pausing, so I had no one to blame but myself for not noticing my controller was almost dead.

To answer your question, I will have to go into a bit of detail:

So back in September, Hololive (a Vtuber group under a company in Japan called Cover Corp.) introduced an English branch. The first time that they've ever expanded to the Western audience. One of the five Vtubers who was in this new group is called Gawr Gura, and her character is a shark-girl (my avatar is a drawing of Gura or here is a full picture of her Vtuber model). During her first streams, it became a running joke that instead of having 'simps' (people who are blindly loyal to a female online and will blindly defend them to the death), it became a running joke that because she's a shark-girl, instead of having 'simps', she has 'shrimps'. So because I am a huge fan of Gura, I just jokingly changed the title to call myself a shrimp, even though I haven't thrown any money at her or any such thing. 

Interesting Gura fact: Despite only having made her debut on September 12th, 2020, Gura became the first Hololive member to reach 1,000,000 subscribers on YouTube back in October, reaching the milestone in less than two months from her debut. She has continued to grow at an astonishing rate as well, currently sitting at 1.31 million subscribers. 

To give a comparison to show how remarkable her growth was, Shirakami Fubuki, who is one of the OG Japanese Hololive girls (the first generation), made her debut on June 1st, 2018, and she hit 1 million subs about a week ago. Which isn't any kind of slam on Fubuki or other Japanese Hololive girls, Fubuki is amazing, but just shows how much of an untapped market there was for Hololive Vtubers in the west.

[Moonface]

I heard about Hololive recently because there's a subreddit for it that comes on the front page sometimes when I'm browsing it after Twitter has run dry for me, and it took me a while to learn what it was actually about. XD

Has anyone who does Hololive ever shown their real selves?

[Dragon Lord]

No, they haven't as far as I'm aware. As part of their contracts, I'm pretty sure they are unable to reveal their true selves. Although from what I've heard, you can find information about who they are due to leaks and such online. There's a group people refer to as "Antis" that pretty much make it their mission to try and expose and ruin the careers of Vtubers. Kind of pathetic on their part, really.

Also some people seem to know who Gura is due to her previous work. Hololive doesn't just hire random people to vTube, they actually hire talents. I didn't look into it because I really don't care about it, but some people I guess recognized Gura's voice from her previous YouTube channel before she got hired by Hololive as a vTuber.

The English girls have it a little easier than the Japanese girls do though, because they don't have to deal with how the Japanese fans are. You'd think there wouldn't be a similarity between them, but the Hololive JP girls are basically held to the same standards as Idols are in Japan, and if you know anything about the idol industry in Japan, you know that the fans are extremely toxic. Idols in Japan aren't allowed to have boyfriends, because they have to remain a shining image of absolute perfection for all the delusional fans who think the idols exist solely for them. For some reason the Hololive girls in Japan are also held to this standard, so revealing themselves would be a big no-no because it'd shatter the illusion of them actually being these cute anime girls in the eyes of these Japanese fans. Whereas over here, we see a vTuber like Gura and we're like, "Oh, that' really cute", but at the end of the day we're not sitting here thinking that this little anime sharkgirl is real and we know there's a human being behind it.

Also let me quickly be fair: I'm not saying all Japanese fans are like that, but the specific group of them that are, are so terrible that they will ruin the careers of idols if they find out she has a boyfriend, or has had a boyfriend, or has done anything that isn't "seiso" (Japanese word meaning like pure). Even something as simple as finding out that one of their precious idols has kissed a boy in the past would be enough to send them into an absolute frenzy and get her career ruined.

[Moonface]

Happy Birthday DL! I forgot you're a year older than me. XD

I'll respond to what you wrote later but I just wanted to make sure I wished you a birthday wish on your day. 

[Mr EliteL]

Oh dang it was yesterday, so many notable birthdays this time of year so Happy Belated and all that. May you never stop gaming away.

Also damn that side of the crazy idol fans, and by extension to whomever else they try to do it too, kinda knew about them but yeah I still needed to say it.

[ShiraNoMai]

Happy belated! I'm a twat and forgot to post here last night!

Still, hope you enjoyed your day just as you do your others, perhaps with 100% less work and 100% gameplay

[Dragon Lord]

Thank ya kindly everyone. I did have a pretty good day. Had the day off from work, went and spent time with my family, and then decided to finally pull the trigger and bought myself a Galaxy NoteS20 Ultra (512 GB model). I'm justifying the $1,000 price tag as my birthday and Christmas presents to myself for the next 5 years. 

At least with the Samsung financing, I'm only paying $28 a month for the phone for 40 months, all with absolutely no interest build up, so that makes it a lot easier to deal with.

[ShiraNoMai]

Oh did you buy it directly from Samsung? Thought you'd try to get it through a carrier, or if you weren't, from a retailer that'll sell it unlocked.

Glad to hear your day went well. Hope your family is safe/healthy as well

[Dragon Lord]

Yeah, I decided to go through Samsung themselves. For a few reasons.

First of all, they valued a trade-in of my S9+ more than anyone else. Verizon would credit me $124 for it. Samsung will credit me $275 for it. On top of a $200 discount they were running for Black Friday sales. So almost $500 off the phone immediately.

Secondly, the options for getting the 512 GB one were extremely limited. Verizon was completely out of it, so I had to buy an unlocked version of it, and the only place that still had it available was Samsung's website. I wanted to get an unlocked one so that I have more freedom to do what I want with it. I can go back through Verizon like I have been the last couple of years, or maybe go and try another one like Straight Talk or something. Haven't decided yet, but I like having that freedom to choose.

Lastly, Samsung had the best payment plan available. $28/month for... I think 40 months, with 0% APR. Any place else would have been at least $45-55 a month payments, I think. Some where around that range.

[Moonface]

No, they haven't as far as I'm aware. As part of their contracts, I'm pretty sure they are unable to reveal their true selves. Although from what I've heard, you can find information about who they are due to leaks and such online. There's a group people refer to as "Antis" that pretty much make it their mission to try and expose and ruin the careers of Vtubers. Kind of pathetic on their part, really.

Also some people seem to know who Gura is due to her previous work. Hololive doesn't just hire random people to vTube, they actually hire talents. I didn't look into it because I really don't care about it, but some people I guess recognized Gura's voice from her previous YouTube channel before she got hired by Hololive as a vTuber.

The English girls have it a little easier than the Japanese girls do though, because they don't have to deal with how the Japanese fans are. You'd think there wouldn't be a similarity between them, but the Hololive JP girls are basically held to the same standards as Idols are in Japan, and if you know anything about the idol industry in Japan, you know that the fans are extremely toxic. Idols in Japan aren't allowed to have boyfriends, because they have to remain a shining image of absolute perfection for all the delusional fans who think the idols exist solely for them. For some reason the Hololive girls in Japan are also held to this standard, so revealing themselves would be a big no-no because it'd shatter the illusion of them actually being these cute anime girls in the eyes of these Japanese fans. Whereas over here, we see a vTuber like Gura and we're like, "Oh, that' really cute", but at the end of the day we're not sitting here thinking that this little anime sharkgirl is real and we know there's a human being behind it.

Also let me quickly be fair: I'm not saying all Japanese fans are like that, but the specific group of them that are, are so terrible that they will ruin the careers of idols if they find out she has a boyfriend, or has had a boyfriend, or has done anything that isn't "seiso" (Japanese word meaning like pure). Even something as simple as finding out that one of their precious idols has kissed a boy in the past would be enough to send them into an absolute frenzy and get her career ruined.

Jeez, I didn't know that was how idol stuff works to that level of detail. I guess that helps in not having someone abuse their position, along with it not just being anyone who is on Hololive as a streamer. I don't get the impression from your post but I guess the Japanese fans who impose an idol culture on the Japanese HL girls don't also do the same to the western ones?

[Dragon Lord]

They probably do, honestly, but in the end it doesn't matter because the amount of Western viewers for the EN girls far outweighs the Japanese viewers who are able to watch, and so if there are any out there that expect the EN girls to submit to Japanese idol standards, it's not going to do anything.

Granted the EN girls do hold themselves back and keep their streams mostly family-friendly, likely a request by Cover Corp themselves. However, there are a few girls in the entirety of Hololive that just kind of throw that whole thing out the window and are lewd and crude, and they don't really give a shit about how it makes them look. Amelia, who is one of the EN girls, is one such girl. Gura is also slowly starting to let her true colors show, and she's being more and more of a gremlin every stream. Though it won't be as much of a deal for them as for the JP girls, because again, the western audience doesn't have that image of them being perfect little goddesses in their minds.

[Moonface]

Assuming it doesn't exist already on HL, do you think there would be a market for there to be virtual guys?

[Dragon Lord]

There are indeed some male vTubers out there. Both company-signed and indie. Hololive has a sub-branch called Holostars that includes some male vTubers, although they are not nearly as popular as the Hololive girls are. I think the other giant vTuber company in Japan, Nijisanji, also has male vTubers on their team as well, though I've never watched any of theirs or looked into them. They did just recently open up auditions for English vTubers though, hoping to piggyback off the immense success of Hololive's English team.

Other than that, you can find some male vTubers on Twitch. I've personally never watched any of them and probably wouldn't have any interest in doing so, but you can find them if you look around.

[Moonface]

So I see on Discord that you often show as playing something called Bluestacks, which Google indicates is some Android emulator program or something. So I'm curious, what are you emulating with that instead of using your phone? XD

[Dragon Lord]

Bluestacks is indeed an Android emulator, and I use it to play both Azur Lane and Arknights. Playing Arknights on it actually feels better than playing on my phone, because using a mouse to select/set/face my units feels like it leaves less room for error than my finger does.

It's also a lot easier to play Azur Lane on emulator when I intend to do heavy farming of an event.

Of course the main draw is being able to use the emulator and my phone to play both games at the same time. There are also several mobile games releasing this year in the West that I want to try, so Bluestacks will allow me to continue to play/farm AL and Arknights while also playing a new game on my phone.