EnclavedMicrostate在2022-03-07~2022-03-13的言论

2022-03-13 作者: EnclavedMicrostate 原文 #Reddit 的其它文章

207: the ol us vs uk, submitted on 2022-03-07 07:45:59+08:00.

—– 207.1 —–2022-03-07 13:22:04+08:00:

The Oxford/Cambridge college system is, however, unique within the UK; no other universities maintain anything similar. There are technically separate colleges of the University of London, but each ‘college’ is functionally a self-contained university for all intents and purposes, with the ‘University’ designation being an extremely loose one.

—– 207.2 —–2022-03-07 18:06:03+08:00:

Indeed; my phrasing is potentially a little awkward, but the two sentences are not meant to be linked. i.e. ‘Oxford and Cambridge have a unique college-university arrangement, whereas the University of London is a loose association of entities that are named ‘colleges’ but are otherwise self-contained universities’.

208: Marin Kitagawa as Calli, Calli shocked., submitted on 2022-03-07 09:10:44+08:00.

—– 208.1 —–2022-03-07 11:15:10+08:00:

I can just hear Calli’s scream here.

—– 208.2 —–2022-03-07 13:49:50+08:00:

Oh I was thinking more her classic incoherent screeches such as here

209: Wikipedia claims that the Mughal ruler Akbar assembled some 400,000 troops for the Battle of Tukaroi. What were the logistics like for the Mughals at this time, that this army – or one large enough to be exaggerated to 400,000 – could be maintained in the field?, submitted on 2022-03-07 11:05:45+08:00.

—– 209.1 —–2022-03-07 18:35:55+08:00:

Thank you!

210: Disastrously Distraught Doomsayers - Weekly Discussion Thread, March 7th, 2022, submitted on 2022-03-07 13:40:35+08:00.

—– 210.1 —–2022-03-14 01:44:06+08:00:

Calli has been known to wear a ski mask when doing camera streams.

211: What was the population of the Kingdom of David?, submitted on 2022-03-08 22:45:31+08:00.

—– 211.1 —–2022-03-08 23:40:39+08:00:

Please repost this question to the weekly “Short Answers” thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

Alternatively, if you didn’t mean to ask a question seeking a short answer or a list of examples, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. Examples of questions appropriate for the ‘Short Answers’ thread would be “Who won the 1932 election?” or “What are some famous natural disasters from the past?”. Versions more appropriate as standalone questions would be “How did FDR win the 1932 election?”, or “In your area of expertise, how did people deal with natural disasters?” If you need some pointers, be sure to check out this Rules Roundtable on asking better questions.

Finally, don’t forget that there are many subreddits on Reddit aimed at answering your questions. Consider /r/AskHistory (which has lighter moderation but similar topic matter to /r/AskHistorians), /r/explainlikeimfive (which is specifically aimed at simple and easily digested answers), or /r/etymology (which focuses on the origins of words and phrases).

212: What is the weirdest story you know from the 1500’s?, submitted on 2022-03-08 23:23:45+08:00.

—– 212.1 —–2022-03-08 23:40:50+08:00:

This submission has been removed because it violates the rule on poll-type questions. These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focused discussion. Questions about the “most”, the “worst”, “unknown”, or other value judgments usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers. For further information, please consult this Roundtable discussion.

For questions of this type, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.

213: How did Japanese culture become so deeply entrenched in Western consciousness compared to Chinese and Korean culture?, submitted on 2022-03-09 20:10:26+08:00.

—– 213.1 —–2022-03-11 00:44:48+08:00:

Answers in the subreddit are expected to be in-depth and comprehensive, as laid out in the subreddit rules. There is no hard and fast definition of that, but in evaluating what you know on the topic, and what you are planning to post, consider whether your answer will demonstrate these four qualities to a reader:

In this particular case, there’s a lot of interesting information here about nineteenth-century East Asia and about Euro-Asian perceptions in that period, but not a lot on the core question regarding how Japanese, Chinese, and Korean cultural influence have been sustained in the West, especially in the twentieth century to the (rough) present. Where connections are made between political history and cultural contacts, they aren’t elaborated enough and tend to verge on being outright speculative, rather than drawing on scholarship specifically analysing such linkages. While the sources you’ve included are reasonable for a discussion of East Asian political history, they’re either unrelated or at most tangentially related to the history of cultural reception.

If you have further questions, please reach out to us via modmail. Thank you!

214: Why the inclusion of the baltic states in NATO didn’t led to a crisis with Moscow?, submitted on 2022-03-09 20:57:31+08:00.

—– 214.1 —–2022-03-09 22:25:50+08:00:

This submission has been removed because it violates our ‘20-Year Rule’. To discourage off-topic discussions of current events, questions, answers, and all other comments must be confined to events that happened 20 years ago or more. For further explanation of this rule, feel free to consult this Rules Roundtable.

215: Whose “mythos” has changed the most since their debut?, submitted on 2022-03-10 00:17:34+08:00.

—– 215.1 —–2022-03-11 02:37:02+08:00:

To be fair ‘de gozaru’ is an archaic form of ‘desu’, so it’s not a tic so much as a general idiosyncracy along the lines of someone using ‘thou’ and its derivatives for second-person singular.

216: When the Soviet Union fell at the end of 1991, its last member was the Kazakhstan Soviet. The UN Charter in 1945 made the Soviet Union one of the the Permanent 5 (P5) members of the UN’s security council. Why is Russia today one of the P5 when Kazakhstan is clearly the successor of the USSR?, submitted on 2022-03-10 23:19:31+08:00.

—– 216.1 —–2022-03-11 00:25:06+08:00:

This submission has been removed because it is soapboxing or moralizing: it has the effect of promoting an opinion on contemporary politics or social issues at the expense of historical integrity. There are certainly historical topics that relate to contemporary issues and it is possible for legitimate interpretations that differ from each other to come out of looking at the past through different political lenses. However, we will remove questions that put a deliberate slant on their subject or solicit answers that align with a specific pre-existing view.

217: A wealthy and/or noble family in medieval Europe had a better or worse quality of life than a modern-day south-American rural family?, submitted on 2022-03-10 23:23:28+08:00.

—– 217.1 —–2022-03-11 01:00:26+08:00:

This submission has been removed because it violates the rule on poll-type questions. These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focused discussion. Questions about the “most”, the “worst”, “unknown”, or other value judgments usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers. For further information, please consult this Roundtable discussion.

For questions of this type, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.

218: Are there any information about the 12 gates of Tashkent?, submitted on 2022-03-11 11:15:27+08:00.

—– 218.1 —–2022-03-11 12:01:58+08:00:

Hi there - unfortunately we have had to remove your question, because /r/AskHistorians isn’t here to do your homework for you. However, our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself.

If you have indeed asked a homework question, you should consider resubmitting a question more focused on finding resources and seeking clarification on confusing issues: tell us what you’ve researched so far, what resources you’ve consulted, and what you’ve learned, and we are more likely to approve your question. Please see this Rules Roundtable thread for more information on what makes for the kind of homework question we’d approve. Additionally, if you’re not sure where to start in terms of finding and understanding sources in general, we have a six-part series, “Finding and Understanding Sources”, which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay. Finally, other subreddits are likely to be more suitable for help with homework - try looking for help at /r/HomeworkHelp.

Alternatively, if you are not a student and are not doing homework, we have removed your question because it resembled a homework question. It may resemble a common essay question from a prominent history syllabus or may be worded in a broad, open-ended way that feels like the kind of essay question that a professor would set. Professors often word essay questions in order to provide the student with a platform to show how much they understand a topic, and these questions are typically broader and more interested in interpretations and delineating between historical theories than the average /r/AskHistorians question. If your non-homework question was incorrectly removed for this reason, we will be happy to approve your question if you wait for 7 days and then ask a less open-ended question on the same topic.

219: Why didn’t the British take the Dutch east indies for themselves at the end of the Napoleonic Wars?, submitted on 2022-03-11 11:31:05+08:00.

—– 219.1 —–2022-03-11 12:02:15+08:00:

Hey there,

Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we’re letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as ‘Why didn’t X do Y’ relatively often don’t get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, ‘why didn’t X do Y’ questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It’s worth remembering that people in the past couldn’t see into the future, and they generally didn’t have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn’t necessarily look that way at the time.

If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn’t happen didn’t happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!

220: Has there ever been a three-sided battle in history?, submitted on 2022-03-11 11:35:45+08:00.

—– 220.1 —–2022-03-11 12:01:35+08:00:

Please repost this question to the weekly “Short Answers” thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

Alternatively, if you didn’t mean to ask a question seeking a short answer or a list of examples, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. Examples of questions appropriate for the ‘Short Answers’ thread would be “Who won the 1932 election?” or “What are some famous natural disasters from the past?”. Versions more appropriate as standalone questions would be “How did FDR win the 1932 election?”, or “In your area of expertise, how did people deal with natural disasters?” If you need some pointers, be sure to check out this Rules Roundtable on asking better questions.

Finally, don’t forget that there are many subreddits on Reddit aimed at answering your questions. Consider /r/AskHistory (which has lighter moderation but similar topic matter to /r/AskHistorians), /r/explainlikeimfive (which is specifically aimed at simple and easily digested answers), or /r/etymology (which focuses on the origins of words and phrases).

221: Can anyone tell me more about these photographs with Adolf Hitler?, submitted on 2022-03-11 16:10:40+08:00.

—– 221.1 —–2022-03-11 16:56:30+08:00:

Please repost this question to the weekly “Short Answers” thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

Alternatively, if you didn’t mean to ask a question seeking a short answer or a list of examples, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. Examples of questions appropriate for the ‘Short Answers’ thread would be “Who won the 1932 election?” or “What are some famous natural disasters from the past?”. Versions more appropriate as standalone questions would be “How did FDR win the 1932 election?”, or “In your area of expertise, how did people deal with natural disasters?” If you need some pointers, be sure to check out this Rules Roundtable on asking better questions.

Finally, don’t forget that there are many subreddits on Reddit aimed at answering your questions. Consider /r/AskHistory (which has lighter moderation but similar topic matter to /r/AskHistorians), /r/explainlikeimfive (which is specifically aimed at simple and easily digested answers), or /r/etymology (which focuses on the origins of words and phrases).

222: Was there ever a hui or tibetan dynasty?, submitted on 2022-03-13 04:09:21+08:00.

—– 222.1 —–2022-03-15 19:54:25+08:00:

This question is one that was perhaps more complicated than you may have imagined while writing it, because it gets into two main areas: matters of ethnic reification and classification, and the ‘dynastic cycle’. Because the terms ‘Hui’, ‘Tibetan’, and ‘dynasty’ are less concrete, in a grand historical context, than you might imagine.

Problems of Ethnicity in Pre-Modern China and Inner Asia

You allude to the idea of there being ‘five main races’ in China, but this is something with a particular historical context. The idea of ‘Five Races Under One Union’, encompassing the Han, Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, and Muslims, was first promulgated around the time of the 1911 Revolution as a means of reconciling nationalist demands for Han majority rule with imperial ambitions of holding on to the Inner Asian regions of the Qing empire. In practical terms, it was short-lived as a political doctrine, as Mongolia and Tibet declared and achieved independence that year and would not be absorbed into the Republic of China (although it did exercise claims to these regions and technically still does). The People’s Republic of China, established by the Communists in 1949, defines 56 ethnicities: the Han, and 55 state-designated ‘minority ethnicities’. Neither of these classifications has any objective correctness, and both are ultimately Procrustean to some extent or another. The Republican ‘Five Races’ notably exclude any of the indigenous peoples of southern China, while the Communist method of ethnic classification arbitrarily combines several groups that self-identify in distinct ways, in some cases purely on the basis of a shared character in their Chinese transcriptions rather than any real consideration for indigenous genealogies.

But in turn, these classifications also reflect the scope of a larger ‘China’ as created by the Qing, whose conquests beyond China Proper established a (mostly) lasting political settlement over large portions of Inner Asia that had not previously been unified under a single state formation. I use ‘China’ in scare quotes because there was not, and arguably still is not, a single term in the Chinese languages that corresponds to the relatively vague English use of the term. ‘China’ can be defined as a geographical space, a cultural space, or as a political entity. The Republic of China and People’s Republic of China have long had a certain interest in enabling that vagary in order to justify their existence as being nation-states, rather than as empires, claiming large parts of Inner Asia that had been outside the scope of historic Chinese empires into the geographic and cultural space of ‘China’, on the retroactive basis of their current political scope. Take for example Tibet. Historically, Tibet was never geographically or administratively part of ‘China’ as such before the Communist conquest and annexation in 1951 – while it had been part of the Mongol Yuan and Manchu Qing empires, in neither case was its administrative structure subordinated to or brought in line with the Chinese provinces.

That is not to say that Tibetans or Muslims did not have a significant place in the Qing Empire. Whether the Republicans realised it or not, they were in essence attempting to codify an informal understanding that had developed in the Qing imperial court in the late 18th century, that being what Pamela Crossley terms ‘constituencies’ and what James Millward calls ‘blocs’ – Manchu, Han, Mongol, Tibetan, and Muslim. The issue is actually quite complex and theory-heavy – Crossley’s ‘constituencies’ are ideological concepts and not actual people, whereas Millward’s ‘ethnic or linguistic blocs’ (reframed by Emma Teng as ‘culture blocs’) are actual groups of people, at least as construed by the court – but we need not dig too deep into the weeds here. The main thing is that the idea of Tibetans and Muslims being core ethnic groups in China is and was a product of the eighteenth-century Qing conquests, rather than being rooted in any prior imperial Chinese rhetoric. Indeed, we can extend that to the Manchus and Mongols, whose homelands lay outside the scope of any Han Chinese empires. The Qing conquests enabled the prospect of conceptualising – or at least rhetorically claiming – ‘China’ as a multiethnic union.

Before moving on it is also important to raise the matter of Muslim identity as classified by imperial and republican Chinese states, because ‘Muslim’ in the case of the ‘Five Races’ does not map neatly onto the Hui, a category which itself has a complicated history. Under the Ming, all Muslims were referred to as ‘Huihui’, a corruption of the earlier ‘Huihe’, a transcription of ‘Uighur’. Under the Qing, there was some effort to distinguish between subgroups – the main groups being the Sala Hui in the Kokonor region, Chantou (Turbaned) Hui in Qing Turkestan (now Xinjiang), and Han Hui for Chinese-speaking Muslims, located primarily in Gansu, Shaanxi, and Yunnan. The broad-brush use of ‘Hui’ to designate all Muslims in the empire was retained in 1911, but fell out of use during the Republican period as Muslim identities in Inner Asia, especially that of the Uighurs, solidified, leading to ‘Hui’ becoming a term specifically for Sinophone Muslims in China Proper by the time of the PRC’s founding, and becoming reified as such by its minority policy. In effect, then, ‘the Hui’ as an ethnic group, as understood today (that is, Sinophone Muslims), did not exist during the imperial period.

Problems of the ‘Dynastic Cycle’

The periodisation of Chinese history as a series of ‘dynasties’ is, for many reasons, problematic, as I discuss here. One of the major problems with a dynastic-centric periodisation is a paradoxical effect on how change and continuity are perceived: there is often a presumption that a ‘dynastic transition’ implies substantial political changes, but that in the broad sweep there is little effect on the underlying state structures of ‘China’. But another issue, one much more relevant to your query, is that there is a sort of ‘there can be only one’ problem when it comes to the imperial claim: the history of imperial China gets presented as a bit of a relay race where the torch is passed from one singular ‘dynasty’ to the next at discrete points in time, with the occasional mess of squabbling states such as the Northern and Southern and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms periods. The problem is that these states did not conceive of themselves as simply inheriting each other’s mantles; nor did they see themselves as coming into existence at the moment that their ‘predecessor’s’ existence ceased. To cite just one case, the Qing were founded in 1636, nearly a decade before the fall of the Ming proper in 1644, and even then remnants of the Ming court and its loyalists continued to operate as the ‘Southern Ming’ until (nominally) 1683, while several rebel states, most prominently the Great Shun, also made claims on the imperial title. Starting the Qing in 1644 is an arbitrary, Sinocentric approach to the issue.

The most substantial elision resulting from this ‘relay race’ model is that the period between the end of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms in 960 and the establishment of the Yuan in 1271 often gets referred to as ‘the Song’, despite the fact that the Song themselves never actually controlled all of China proper: to the northeast, the Khitan-established Great Liao held several areas of historically Han settlement, including the Liaodong region and what is now northern Hebei (the region around Beijing); they would be usurped by the Jurchen-established Jin, which went further by conquering all of China north of the Huai river and driving the Song to the south; to the northwest, after a brief period of Song dominion the Tanguts revolted in 984 and eventually established the state of Western Xia in Gansu in 1038. Western Xia was, for all intents and purposes, the weakest of the three states, and would be the first to fall to the Mongols, but it nevertheless exercised a claim to imperial status. In the traditional chronology, and even in the modern trend for referring to 960-1271 as the ‘Song-Liao-Jin’ period, Western Xia is rather unceremoniously cast aside.

Summaries and Conclusions

I bring up Western Xia because in a sense, it is a decent candidate for being a ‘Tibetan dynasty’ as phrased in the question, but there is a reason I say a decent candidate and not a definite contender. The Tanguts had a relatively long history of entanglement with Tibet, but from a linguistic standpoint they were relatively distant, with Tangut being part of the Eastern rather than the Western Tibeto-Burman family and thus arguably closer to modern Burmese than modern standard Tibetan. More importantly, ‘Tibetan’ as an identity was not universally accepted by those living in what we would now call Tibet, as the territorial extent of Tibet waxed and waned considerably over the course of its history, with perhaps the most substantial waxing taking place during Qing rule/patronage/whatever you want to call it. In effect, we run into the problem from the first section again: ethnic identities cannot simply be retrojected back through time as though they have existed forever, let alone been unchanged forever.

So, have there ever been Hui or Tibetan dynasties of China? No, firstly because ‘Hui’ and ‘Tibetan’ as identities are more recent than they may first appear, and secondly because Tibetans in particular were not a substantial part of ‘China’ in any meaningful sense until arguably the Yuan and more concretely the Qing (and even if you count the Yuan they were not part of the Ming). Moreover, the ‘dynastic’ classification breaks down once you get in the weeds a bit, and is just an unhelpful method of categorisation except in the broadest strokes.

223: [Hobby Scuffles] Week of March 14, 2022, submitted on 2022-03-13 23:00:12+08:00.

—– 223.1 —–2022-03-16 23:15:46+08:00:

How do you know what country the HoloEn people are in/from?

To add to /u/LordMonday, both Calli[ope] and IRyS have mentioned being in Japan, and even if they hadn’t the fact that they meet up offline with each other and other Japanese members is a bit of a giveaway. Kiara has been very overtly not concealing her general location; she used to claim she was from ‘Australia’ (with intentional irony) but officially just admitted to being in Austria after overhearing someone IRL taking it completely seriously.

—– 223.2 —–2022-03-16 23:19:49+08:00:

They are different from Hololive and Nijisanji since they grabbed streamers that were experienced, popular and had their own brands already

That’s not entirely true as phrased though I believe I agree with what you’re trying to get at – I don’t know about Nijisanji but Hololive, at least looking at EN, has generally hired people with some degree of experience with some form of content creation already and a decently established audience – no names named just to preserve the ‘forbidden knowledge’. The difference vs VShojo is that with one notable exception (Suisei) Hololive talents get totally new VTuber personas whereas VShojo simply pulled together several existing talent-persona pairs (and added a couple new ones).

—– 223.3 —–2022-03-16 23:25:52+08:00:

Yeah, I’m sort of surprised she only got a slap on the wrist for it. I don’t know the full details of the situation so maybe it’s not that close, but, I don’t know.

It seems to be a combination of it having happened quite a while ago, Nene knowing the artist personally, and there already having been some kind of internal resolution before the situation was publicly made known.

—– 223.4 —–2022-03-16 23:36:15+08:00:

There was a podcast recently where the host, while interviewing Ironmouse, likewise sort of shittalked Hololive and implied that any streamer regardless of talent would be successful on Hololive due to the brand name

To be fair, Connor (CDawgVA) himself admits it was a poorly thought out statement delivered even less articulately and that he doesn’t even know what he was trying to say anymore; besides that he’s friends with HoloEN’s Mori Calliope anyway so it’s not like he has genuine beef with it.

—– 223.5 —–2022-03-17 01:40:46+08:00:

Not to make this an r/AskHistorians essay but I feel like one thing that’s worth bringing up is some of the early history of VTubing up until around the end of 2019, because the landscape changed a lot in that time. VTubing as it exists today is in some ways quite different from how it was originally conceived.

First off, there’s no firm definition of what a VTuber is as such, and by extension who you would count as the ‘first’ VTuber. For instance, do you count Ami Yamato, who vlogged using a 3D virtual avatar starting in June 2011? Or does the fact that it was (at least to begin with) done entirely with post-processing and overlaid on the real world discount her? Kizuna AI, who coined the term ‘VTuber’ and whose first video was released on 29 November 2016, is often considered the first ‘true’ VTuber in that on the technical side, the character was done using studio motion-capture to produce a fully virtual character in a fully virtual environment, while on the content side, her main format was Let’s Plays, which would definitely constitute a particularly ‘conventional, high-interest genre to be involved in. Yet most VTubers today are streamers rather than releasing recorded content, meaning that the first ‘modern’ VTuber, i.e. primarily a streamer rather than doing recorded videos, might actually be Hololive’s Tokino Sora, who debuted with a livestream rather than a recorded video on 7 September 2017 and whose content since has been predominantly streamed.

As originally conceived, Kizuna AI, as the model of what VTubers would be, was essentially a pretty conventional Youtuber, producing mostly short Let’s Plays interspersed with skits and vlogs, but with a key twist: Kizuna AI was not a person but a corporate product. The character was the IP of the company Activ8, and the identity of her voice actor was concealed from the general public. This was, overtly, a profit-driven thing: Activ8’s investor pitch argued that the key advantage of VTubing is that because VTubers are characters being played by people, the companies owning VTuber IPs have a substantially greater amount of leverage when it comes to apportioning revenue. In their own words, whereas an agency managing ‘conventional’ Youtubers might at most get a 30% revenue cut, a VTuber-owning agency could expect to get 80%. (This is much more extreme than most modern agencies, but even so it is worth noting that at Hololive for instance, talents generally only get a 50% cut of channel revenues, albeit a very high proportion of merch profits.) The other effect of Activ8’s approach was that they could, in theory, supplement or even replace a VTuber’s voice actor. Put a pin in that one, it becomes important later.

Thing is, 2017-18 saw a few changes, primarily technical, that increasingly rendered Activ8’s model a bit obsolete.

  • The first I have alluded to, that being livestreaming: this was always a feature on Youtube, but was made much more accessible in late 2016, and led to the emergence of specifically streaming-focussed VTubers in the latter part of 2017 like Hololive’s Tokino Sora, alongside experiments in streaming by existing VTubers. A growing acceptance of livestreaming meant that VTubing content as a whole would become considerably less ‘curated’ so to speak, with much more emphasis being placed on the talent’s own personality thanks to the nature of livestreaming as a format.

  • The second was the iPhone X, whose facial recognition functionality, introduced as a security feature, could be used for motion capture for more limited shoulders-up movement, which is realistically all that you need for streaming video games with an avatar in the corner, so VTubing now simply required a high-end smartphone rather than a full-blown studio setup.

  • The third was Live2D, a technology that had existed well before Kizuna Ai but which gained especial prominence in conjunction with the arrival of smartphone facial recognition. Live2D is, in short, a catch-all term for a number of software programs for animating 2D assets through various morphs and contortions rather than direct hand-drawing, and this can be combined with motion capture inputs to allow for 2D avatars to be animated live based on a person’s performance. The primary advantage of this is that the amount of work that needs to go into creating and rigging the avatar is substantially reduced compared to a full 3D model, which further lowered the barrier for entry. A handful of new VTubers in late 2017 used Live2D, but Live2D would take over almost entirely in 2018, with the more prominent debuts including Nijisanji’s first member, Tsukino Mito, on 7 February. Hololive debuted a second 3D member, Roboco-san, on 4 March, but switched over almost entirely to new Live2D members afterwards, beginning with Yozora Mel on 13 May.

But among these debuts by what are now major agencies, there were a lot of independent content creators as well thanks to the continually lowering barrier to entry. In essence, the ‘corporate product’ model developed by Activ8 was simply not sustainable, as it relied on a) VTubers having relatively curated, short-form video content rather than more intimate long-form livestreams, and b) VTubing being a high barrier-to-entry medium that meant aspiring VTubers were reliant on companies with developed 3d modelling and mocap studio setups, rather than just being able to buy a high-end phone and commission an artist and a rigger, or join an agency with the resources to do it for them.

So then we get to 2019, when two agencies that haven’t really absorbed the nature of this change screw things up royally. Activ8 has perhaps been the most enduringly controversial, as it unveiled the ‘Multiple AI Project’ which at first added two Japanese and one Chinese voice actor to Kizuna AI, and then at some stage – early July at the latest – the original Kizuna AI voice actor simply stopped lending her voice to the character. If Activ8 had done this as late as maybe early 2018, when the number of active VTubers was still in the double-digit range, they might still have gotten away with it and the VTubing landscape today might have turned out very different. But by early 2019 the idea of VTubers as simply characters with interchangeable voice actors was simply no longer true to how audiences perceived it, and the damage to Kizuna AI’s brand was pretty severe: the main Kizuna AI channel was arguably on track to hit 3m subs by the end of 2019, but growth tanked amid the controversy and never fully recovered. Activ8 would report over USD$6m in debt during the third quarter of 2019, and seems to have initiated some kind of restructuring. The Multiple AI Project ended with the formation of a separate subsidiary under Activ8, Kizuna AI Corporation, in May 2020, with the original VA in an advisory position and being reinstated as the character’s sole voice actor, and the other two Japanese VAs being spun off into their own characters. Kizuna AI has trundled on at a reduced but not inconsiderable level of popularity, and did eventually hit the 3m mark in late 2021 (having been beaten to it by Hololive’s Gawr Gura in July), but has since gone on an indefinite hiatus after a live concert last month, with no clear statement on what may happen next.

Amazingly, this was not Activ8’s only screwup. It had, for a time, maintained an agency called upd8, representing a mix of in-house and independent talent as well as some affiliates from other smaller agencies like 774 and Hololive, but Kizuna AI, despite being under Activ8, was withdrawn from the agency on 30 April 2020 in conjunction with the formation of Kizuna AI Corporation. This coincided with the not-entirely-voluntary withdrawal of the agency’s next most popular in-house VTuber, Oda Nobuhime, whose talent had revealed on stream that her social media accounts were being operated by the agency and not by herself; several affiliates withdrew from upd8 the same day, principally those from 774. By all accounts, upd8 was terrible to be part of, especially if you were in-house with Activ8, and it was dissolved at the end of the year albeit with the remaining members being given control of their characters’ IP.

The other big controversy of summer 2019 was the ‘C-Tuber’ fiasco with Unlimited, whose main group, Game-Bu (Game Club Project) was a channel featuring four members that was, for a time, a decently large channel with nearly 500k subs. The Game-Bu controversy revolved around the recasting of two of these members with, initially, no public announcement or acknowledgement, followed by the company declaring that it was going to recast the other two as well, and that it was not actually a VTuber agency but a ‘C-Tuber’ (Character Tuber) agency where recasting was Normal, Actually. This did not sit well with anyone, and it tanked even harder than Kizuna AI did. Game-Bu effectively ceased activity in May 2020 and formally dissolved in February 2021, with one (recast) member continuing as an independent.

Basically, all this to say that VTubing today is dominated by agencies that either never subscribed to the ‘corporate product’ model, or quickly abandoned it in favour of what the current understanding of VTubers is – that is to say fictional personas adopted by real people who may put a lot of their real selves into that persona. I’d say it’s telling that despite both agencies having fired at least one of their talents shortly after debut for internal issues (Hitomi Chris at Hololive and Shindo Raito at Nijisanji), the characters were never recast despite the time and money that had been spent on producing the necessary assets – especially notable in Hololive’s case, where Chris was, at the time, the eighth ever member of the agency. And so the events of 2019 and early 2020 were, I would argue, the most impactful pieces of drama in VTubing history, because they so potently illustrated how the ethos behind the concept had shifted since Kizuna AI’s debut.

—– 223.6 —–2022-03-17 09:48:24+08:00:

Right, and to restress from my earlier post, the ‘eternal idol’ concept is one that made a lot more sense at a time when the barrier to entry was substantially more prohibitive – thus placing much more leverage on the part of companies able to create and maintain characters rather than the people playing them – and when the content style was predominantly recorded videos rather than livestreams, meaning there was much less emphasis on what defines VTubing a lot now, which is a sort of genuine authenticity despite a superficially fictive persona.

What’s interesting is that a lot of decisions that Activ8 made regarding Kizuna AI ended up setting a number of ground rules for how VTubing as a whole should work, despite the shift in ethos I’ve described. The big one is the whole idea of the VTuber persona being entirely distinct from any other personas or RL identities, and not having them be brought up in the same context. So for instance it’d be pretty taboo in some spaces for me to openly declare that Mori Calliope is actually played by ABC, who is also XYZ; but more than that, Mori Calliope and ABC are contractually required not to intentionally declare this either. Now, these days this is often rationalised as being a way for certain artists to keep different areas of their work separate and/or to protect their identities, and to be fair, this can be entirely true for many if not most VTubers. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that this approach originated with two aspects of Kizuna AI’s pitch – the more ‘optimistic’ idea of the ‘eternal idol’ with no fixed voice, and the more cynical point that if nobody knows who is voicing Kizuna AI, then that VA has incredibly little negotiating power vis-a-vis the company. And (as I’ll note in more detail later) there are a few agencies that contractually restrict non-VTubing activities by their members because, should a link between the personas be made, the talent might end up drawing attention to their non-agency accounts and away from their agency one.

This does become a hard circle to square, because to be fair the whole aspect of not splitting the audience to the company’s detriment is a valid reason for it to be a contractual condition on the company side, but the lack of negotiating power can become very problematic if there is a severe breakdown in relations between company and talent. Hololive I think has made a decent stab at it by not really suppressing ‘forbidden knowledge’ outside platforms it has some degree of moderation control in (such as the Hololive subreddit) and also relying on the whole fan taboo, which means that if any members have substantial non-Hololive activities it does end up as an open secret. For a time, Hololive’s ‘worst kept secret’ was that Kiryu Coco was also another VTuber going by Kson Onair, and after she retired (amicably) from the company in 2021 citing creative constraints, a lot of Coco’s old audience migrated to Kson. Similarly, Mori Calliope’s alt account has been more active again lately and there’s a tacit acknowledgement that a lot of the recent attention has come from people who found out about said alt via ‘forbidden knowledge’ leaks about Mori Calliope. So there’s certainly a degree of a ‘safety net’ in that it’s reached a point where enough people know about any active alts that should a member quit or be fired, they would bring a decent chunk of audience with them to wherever they go next; that said this only applies to people with notable activities outside the agency, which isn’t everyone.

I’ve kind of ended up alluding to two major pieces of recent drama: the termination of Hololive’s Uruha Rushia, and the doxxing of Wactor’s Shino Laila. The Rushia termination I think has already been discussed in the comments here, but this analysis of the situation by u/sulendil – one apparently drawn from stuff I’ve written on Qing history on r/AskHistorians! – I think is relevant to what I’ve said above, in that it argues Mikeneko, the (pseudonymous) talent behind Rushia, screwed up in failing to properly acknowledge the divide between the two personas and trying to fix a potential scandal with one through activities on the other. The WACTOR doxxing is its own kettle of worms/can of fish which u/LordMonday brought up on a scuffles thread here. What’s interesting with the WACTOR incident is that you can see how there was a certain sort of financial rationale explaining why they had this kind of non-compete clause: if you are doing monetised streams as a VTuber at the agency, and as a different VTuber outside the agency, anyone wanting to financially support the talent would naturally send any donations the way of the non-agency account which deprives the company of its cut. I can think of at least one Hololive member who does actual face streams occasionally on her alt channel, but these are unmonetised perhaps for that very reason – quite plausibly not contractually but still out of a sort of ethical concern. Also, whether intentionally or otherwise, this dox has essentially allowed Laila to port much of her audience over. It’s still an incredibly shitty thing to do, though, even if it has raised interesting questions of how to work out the underlying problem.

—– 223.7 —–2022-03-17 14:21:15+08:00:

Funnily enough you’re not the only person to suggest I write a full top-level, so I’m now working on that based on an old draft of something I wrote but never got round to completing. I don’t know how much more I can insert in terms of shenanigans although I can always frame it as Hobby History instead…

—– 223.8 —–2022-03-17 16:45:05+08:00:

There’s just a lot of VTuber watchers on Reddit and especially on HobbyDrama I suppose.

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