On March 31, 1986, two members of the Japanese girl group Onyanko Club, Nakajima Miharu and Kawai Sonoko, announced that they would be leaving the group to pursue different careers. Since Onyanko Club was primarily made up of high schoolers, they made the decision to brand their departure as “graduations” from being an idol.
This announcement would mark the first ever use of the term “graduation” to signify an idol’s departure from the entertainment industry – a term that would not only go on to be applied to almost all Japanese idols going forward, but to the world of VTubers as well, as many were initially branded as “virtual” idols.
To say it’s been a rough couple of weeks for VTuber fans would be an understatement, especially for those in the English-speaking sphere. Hololive EN’s Nanashi Mumei and Gawr Gura will be graduating on April 28 and May 1 respectively, while Nijisanji EN’s Fulgur Ovid recently announced his graduation for May 5.
As the three were some of their respective agencies’ most popular talents – with Gura in particular standing at 4.5 million subscribers and being widely considered as the face of English-speaking VTubing – the announcements sent shockwaves through not only the VTubing community, but the wider streaming and anime communities as a whole, with fans delivering outpourings of grief across all corners of social media.
With that, though, has come some confusion (and maybe even a little derision) from people outside the community, with many being perplexed seeing fans being so devastated over what’s essentially a simple career change. While I do see where they’re coming from, as someone who’s been through a fair share of VTuber graduations, I’d like to hopefully give some perspective on why they matter so much to fans.
If you’re kind of around my age, you might remember the day when Steve from Blue’s Clues left to go to college. It’s a pretty surreal video to look back on: the music suddenly stops, Steve looks at you directly, and thanks you for helping him all this time. Then, with a chorus of goodbyes, he leaves the show forever.
It’s an episode that’s stuck with a lot of people, probably because for many of the children who watched it, it was their first time having to process a form of loss. A character they had come to know and love, from a show that was part of their weekly routine, was now suddenly gone. A new host was brought in, and the other characters remained, but things were never quite the same.
I feel like even as adults, we don’t lose the ability to feel that kind of loss. If you made watching a streamer or VTuber part of your everyday routine, having that suddenly come to an end would feel pretty jarring – and if you watched someone stream almost every day for months, or even years, and became invested in their goals, dreams, and journey as a streamer, you will, to some degree, start developing an attachment towards them, which makes processing that loss even harder.
While the VTuber is free to continue streaming on a different channel or as a new VTuber entirely, there’s no guarantee if or when they will make their return – and even if they do, their fans will still have to get used to a completely different look, and sometimes even completely different styles of content. It’s a small loss in the grand scheme of things, but it can be one that’s still deeply felt, especially if you were a fan who viewed their old content as a source of comfort during hard times.
There’s also a few things that are more specific to the Japanese corporate VTubing space that companies like Hololive and Nijisanji play in. In these spaces, it’s generally considered somewhat taboo for a graduated VTuber to publicly make the connection between themselves and their former identity, which means many will no longer be able to speak about the former projects and achievements many of their fans loved without at least shrouding it in layers of “if you know, you know“.
This even extends to interactions with their former agency coworkers, many of whom would have been their close friends and on-stream companions. It’s not uncommon for fans to become as invested in their favourite VTubers’ friendships as they are in the VTuber themselves, and seeing those relationships come to an end (or just move out of the public eye) can be just as devastating as losing the relationship between themselves and their fave.
There’s also the lesser-discussed, but no less impactful, loss of the fan community that would have surrounded the VTuber while they were still active. While some might stay and wait to see if their favourite VTuber reappears, others might drift towards different VTubers and streamers, or pursue completely different interests entirely.
Without the shared love of the same VTuber to hold them together, many fan communities – and the friendships people shared within them – often gradually disintegrate over time.
If you read through all that, and still think it’s a little silly for people to be grieving over someone leaving their anime girl or boy avatar behind – well, I’d honestly say “yeah, fair enough”. But, I’d also like to leave you with two things to think about.
The first is that I think many of these fans’ reactions are rooted in the very human fear of change. Even small changes like these, which don’t affect them directly, can still remind them of the fact that one day, their own circumstances and even relationships might be changed forever.
The other is that I think it can be pretty heartwarming, and even hopeful, to see people empathise and feel so deeply for a person they’ve never met, and whose face they’ve never even seen. As the world around us becomes colder and more divided, isn’t that something we could all use more of?
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