the first half of this post was written on august 18, 2023, and posted on cohost. the second half was written when the next holocure update landed on november 15, 2024.
holocure - save the fans got put on steam with its latest update and like. yep that game still goes hard.
it's kind of a bizarre object, a free (because... the lead dev refuses to take any money for it lest it become a work project rather than a hobby project?) survivors-like game based entirely on the both corporate-backed mythos and ever-developing parasocial rapport/in-jokes of a vtuber company that, this year, spent about 2.7 billion yen (roughly $20mil USD) to build a facility to facilitate/support their talents' work in japan
a, yes, free, and yes, excellent, but still odd byproduct of an industry that still 100% subsists on random shmucks on the internet going "yeah I want to support this anime girl" and hopefully not bankrupting themselves, and hopefully not going "I want to support the person behind this anime girl because I've given her so much, she owes me" because god knows this sort of shit still happens from time to time when you put an attractive facade in front of a lot of lonely people
and yeah it's a good game and it's about a company that was responsible for me realizing vtubing was an option and it was a way to bond with my best friend eat once I got her hooked on some dumb clips, and it's surreal to go back and look at me explaining to her who hoshimachi suisei was after all this time
but sometimes you take a step back and go "how the fuck am I going to explain why this wolf girl has a fucking pigeon-minotaur stand that appeared officially in their azur lane crossover and that's why her special is Like That1" or "how do I explain why one of the weapons that the game has unlocked by default is a buttplug2"
and you realize you've been in this hole for just about the entirety of the pandemic and it's felt like an eternity but a horrifyingly short one and you just feel the slow drip of sweat down your back as you realize where and when you are and that things are getting worse but people still prioritize keeping corporate anime girls afloat over helping out smaller people who could use the help more and --
..........holocure - save the fans is free on steam if you want a decent survivors-like/twin-stick shooter (remember when those were cool?). I can have a doom spiral all I want but sometimes you want to watch an Aussie zoomer rat throw dice at enemies and then particle effects happen and by god it's a good one of those particle effects games.
on that note, who the fuck put four-player local co-op in vampire survivors. did your computer fuck your wife or something? why would you do that
1. ookami mio's stand, hatotaurus, was born during a collab in february 2019, where she, shigure ui (a vtuber & illustrator for other vtubers), and sister claire (a talent from nijisanji, another vtuber corporation) took care of six hololive members who were pretending to be kindergarteners. one of the Bits was the "kids" drawing art for the caretakers to judge, and shirakami fubuki drew a creature with wolf legs, a minotaur's torso, and goat horns on a pigeon head. everyone promptly lost their shit, and then when fanart rolled in, one piece was so high-quality (from mio's artist, no less) that mio showed it off on stream, and it was placed in a position that made it look like her stand (a la jojo's bizarre adventure). then azur lane had a crossover with hololive and it was part of her art so it's essentially been canonized that this soft wolf girl (often referred to as mio-mama) also has this weird chimeric entity under her control. ↩
2. kiryuu coco (a former talent who helped pave the way for english talents by being bilingual and making some efforts to cater to english-speaking viewers) had a morning skit show called asacoco; she, at one point, did skits about selling asacoco in drug form for those who missed their morning dose of her show, and then a skit where she introduced a tail plug form of asacoco. yep. that's. that's a thing ↩
a year and a quarter later...
not much has changed except my point of view, really. I've had time and inciting incidents to focus on the reality beyond the facade.
having been forced to process what it means for a corporation to own the brand of your favorite internet personality, with my own favorite vtuber having been forcefully terminated out of nijisanji, I look at this work with an even more conflicted heart than I did last year.
I hope every one of the talents working at hololive is doing alright and has mutually respectful relationships with their coworkers.
I hope they're being paid fairly and treated well by the corporate structure that is built on their backs, and that they build on the backs of.
I hope they're taking advantage of every opportunity to make their dreams come true that cover corp can offer them.
the fact that these things are not guaranteed inherently and a non-zero number of their fans are not thinking about this reality propping up the live2d models they devote both fiscal and emotional resources on.... distresses me. I think that's probably the only reasonable response. despite that, this free game is a labor of love, and there is both labor and love to be found here in spades. it's a blast to play, the aesthetic is charming, and I do adore it as a whole. most easily recommended with ignorance of the industry or a strong ability to compartmentalize, but it really is a solid piece of work, dedicated to and played by vtuber fans of all sorts.
...when a corporate vtuber sheds their identity, we are made to witness it all, detached, parasocial, viewing the goings-on through the clear side of a one-way mirror splitting their image to hundreds, thousands, millions at a time. their gaze flickers over us in fractions of thoughts. we are the pedestal on which they stand. are they so great to be worth standing on our backs, too? they, too, are just people, and though they applied to be entertainers and entertainment, they were made to be more than that, becoming, by way of immense capital, idols of a different sort.
it's odd, seeing a professional animator dump a load of unpaid programming work into a game that will remain completely free, made of the IPs of a talent company of theseus, one where, by the time this game came out on steam, it had already adopted items and the need for an entire character statistic to honor a joke made about a talent who had long been terminated for leaking a lot of behind-the-scenes details. she's not in the game, herself, with the generation that would have brought her, unlike the other girl fired for seemingly the same contractual breach earlier this year; she's been deleted from the canon before she had a chance to be remembered by it in earnest.
the reverence paid to cover corp's intellectual property as the people doing the labor of wearing the masks take them off and continue to flourish elsewhere will always break my heart a bit, I think. the inherited celebrity status of people who move on from a company is, on some level, nice, but it pales in comparison to the ability to turn money into fans into money from fans. no how much love, labor, or holocure there is, you can't really save the talents from capitalism, nor save the fans from themselves.
