ON THE GRADUATION OF HOLOLIVE 4TH GENERATION’S KIRYU COCO
Some context is going to be required here.
Hololive is a group of virtual youtubers, or vtubers. This group is run by Cover Corporation, a talent management agency, and is organized along the lines of a Japanese idol group, meaning that new members are added in batches (referred to as “generations“ here but generally called “classes.”) There are between five and seven generations in Hololive’s Japanese branch, depending on how you count, two in their Indonesian branch, and one in their English branch. There was also a Chinese branch, at one point, but they all graduated.
Graduation: when a real life idol reaches a certain age (23 or so, usually) and is deemed too old for the business, she “graduates” from her group, with great ceremony, and has to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. But virtual idols don’t age. They could go on forever, or at least as long as the person playing them can do the voice. Nonetheless, graduations do happen - one member of the fifth generation resigned shortly after her introduction following a doxxing and harassment campaign, and the Chinese branch quit en masse after one of the Japanese Hololive members referred to Taiwan as a country. That member was Kiryu Coco: Yakuza, drug dealer, guerilla filmmaker, edgelord, bilingual comedian, host of the weekly Reddit Shitpost Review, and, fundamentally, an anime dragon woman with enormous tits. (Her horns are real, but her tail, she lets us know, is a plug-in.)
Coco announced her graduation yesterday. She will be the first established member to leave the group. It came as a shock; sure, there had been a difficult period following the Taiwan incident when mainland Chinese trolls were invading her streams and spamming her chat (the community referred to these people as “antis”, hilariously,) but that had blown over, for the most part. We knew there had been conflicts between her and Cover management over some of her more risque material - she was constantly pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable for an “idol”, or, frankly, for a female public figure of any kind in Japan - but she was so integral to the community, building bridges between the generations and the different language groups, refining and amplifying and in some cases inventing the running gags that were integral to the identities of so many of her colleagues, and, in general, working more hours than a human being should to make Hololive a success. Burnout is of course a big deal with streamers but Coco so rarely let her fatigue come across, and it’s not even clear that that’s what happened here. Coco is, most likely, going on to bigger and better things.
A Hololive vtuber is a weird gestalt entity, composed in part of the affectations and backstory and design created for the character and in part of the personality, real life and real history of the performer. We know that Coco’s real mother is sick and had to go back to America for treatment, because Coco tells us what’s going in her life, except she says that Mama Dragon has to go far across the sea and Papa Dragon is staying home; this blending of reality and kayfabe (a term in general use among english-speaking Hololive fans, tellingly) reminds me of pro wrestling, where the best characters and storylines make use of real personalities and events and rivalries to give them their charge. In Hololive as in WWE the company owns the character, but if a performer leaves WWE we know we will probably see them again soon enough. They’ll be under a new name, but it’ll be the same person with the same face and the same moves and the same personality - maybe tweaked a little to avoid a lawsuit, but close. With vtubers, though, it’s a different story. There is a person called Kiryu Coco with a voice and a face and friends and a history and on July 1st there will be a big farewell concert streamed live over the internet and then that person will cease to exist.
And that’s weird, right? I had enough of a parasocial relationship with this fake person that when I went to my discord to be sad about her imminent departure I had legitimately forgotten that she was a big titty anime dragon lady and that I was going to get roasted the second someone googled her. She’s just Coco in my brain, and I know that the woman who performs that role isn’t actually about to be erased but part of me insists that I’m awaiting an execution. That part of me - the part that had me writing “but what if cartoons were real and had feelings though” stories when I was in high school - is doing backflips about it. I can’t figure out the meta here. Does this entity have a soul? Does it live in a certain streamer who also goes by KSON, or somewhere else? Will it haunt the giant statue of Cover CEO Motoaki “Yagoo” Tanigo looking sad that Coco built in Minecraft as her last great contribution before her departure?
Whatever she is and wherever she’s off to, she will be missed, and I will hear her cheerful “good morning, motherfuckers!” on the wind.
