VShojo is bleeding talents

Welcome to this second edition of AWiVT! Let's quickly go over what I saw this week.

Geega left VShojo, Zentreya to follow

Well, things don't look good for VShojo, from the surface.

In case you missed it, we saw a talent and three staff members leave the company just in May:

• May 5th: Matara Kan, VTuber, after 1.5 years. (Tweets: VShojo's / Matara's)
• May 14th: MowtenDoo, CMO and co-founder, after 5 years. (Tweet)
• May 19th: TURBODAWG, design and art lead. (I assume it was 2 years? Skeet)
• May 21st: Poshie, merch manager, after 3.5 years. (Tweet)

And after a whole month, we learned this Wednesday, June 25th, that Geega was leaving VShojo in the next 2 days. (VShojo's tweet here.)

And as Geega is leaving, Zentreya announces this Friday, June 27th, that she will do the same on July 11th. (VShojo's tweet here.)

While we could (jokingly?) wonder if VShojo truly did bring anything for Geega, as people complain that she's just doing GTA RP and doesn't need a lot of managing and admin, the announcement of Zen's departure hits different. She was one of the founding members and grew considerably within the Big Pink V, audience-wise and tech-wise, while still being a mute/TTS VTuber.
We did notice during the last few months that she got frustrated a few times with things not going through and alluding that she could leave the company, and I guess that this is now a reality.

Like Matara Kan and all previous talents who left, both will keep their intellectual property (name, models, assets) and go independent, again.

When Silvervale, Veibae, and Nyanners left, almost all together in April 2023, we expected that changes were coming, but things kind of just continued… with Henya debuting the next month and Geega joining in September.
(Oh, and Nazuna left in December that year, but that's kind of a weird thing.)

And again, with three talents, we can wonder if something is going on at VShojo. With all the departures and VShojo Japan debuting a full generation, more "corpo-like"… Or maybe people are just naturally moving on and genuinely want to grow beyond what the company can offer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Meanwhile, we're still waiting to hear anything from the latest auditions since the applications closed in August 2024. Will it take more than a year for the results to be revealed, like it did with Haruka? (September 2021 → December 2022)

But yeah… We're clearly going through a peculiar shift within the VTubing sphere with their corpos. Along the birth and death of many small(-ish) groups last year, we've seen numerous talents leaving their agencies and going indie.

(Froot, please come back.)

Sameko Saba debuts

This totally legit and certified Fish debuted, and don't ask about the ears.

This was quite a large debut, with the peak concurrent viewership crossing the 200K mark, but we've been averaging the 140K near the end.
As I'm writing this, right before publishing, the VOD already reached 2.15M views.

In partnership with OMOCAT, she also released some merch. A bundle was up for $200, including a limited-edition signed card, and sold-out in under 2 minutes. The rest of the individual items were all gone in 5 minutes.

And she already teased an upcoming plushie.

We can see from her credits slide that she'll have a bunch of sisters:

• Her character designer, Shouu, also worked on Poko Rakun, Ferumi Kaipa, Niku Nanako, Miniko Mew, and a few more.
• The L2D Rigger, Cillia, worked on the latest version of Dokibird, Mint Fantôme, Vienna, Snuffy, Giwi, Laimu, Lucy Pyre, and more.
• For the L2D Prep, Cwunchy also did the same work for Snuffy, Giwi and Laimu.

This might be Shiina's first Live2D Art work, if we look at their "works history" post (which might be outdated), and I'm unable to find more than fan art.

There wasn't much happening during the stream, as she didn't prepare an extensive slideshow or anything. All the screenshots posted above are just about all that she shared. What you'd be missing are her various range of expressions, and that she still needs to find a name for her community.

You can follow Saba on Twitter at @SamekoSaba and watch her live on YouTube at @SamekoSaba.

Featured chuuba of the week

This week I'm suggesting you Saiiren!

She's a variety streamer, meaning that she can play many genres of games, but also do various type of content. Like, why not a handcam stream where she's cosplayed as Miyabi while she makes some pancakes?

She's currently doing a reverse subathon while playing Hollow Knight for the first time. It means that there's a timer for how long she's streaming, and you can shorten it by donating, subscribing, or sending bits. That's… interesting.

You can follow her on Twitter at @xsaiiren or watch her live on Twitch at /Saiiren.

Closing words

And... that's it!
I said in the first post that I would only pick a couple of news. So you should expect some of those posts to be short like this one. (And what do you mean the first post was a 20-minute read?)

Oh, and as an update to last week when I covered about Sinder, she gave some signs on the 25th! Pretty nice of her to at least think about her community.