Also related, in the most recent of a series of hilariously poor decisions by Upd8, the original voice of Kizuna Ai is being replaced by 3 other women, one of which is supposedly a Chinese cosplayer who was couch cast by the CEO.
I should dig into this topic some more, because so far it's mostly people repeating anonymous 5chan posts.
Alright, it seems like this is going to be about as good as it gets.
A while back, Activ8 announced that they were going to do the birthday stream that would cost money to view in Japan, but free for China via Bilibili (Chinese Youtube).
Upd8 receives a $5M investment from a Chinese company.
Later, this tweet comes out, from the VA. The tweet has since been deleted, but said something like "some things will be changing but we'll still have fun, thanks everyone!"
Following this, there is a tweet from the Kizuna Ai character Twitter that mentions something about installing new personalities.
This plays out as 3 new people voicing visually identical Kizuna Ai characters, one of which is Chinese, presumably to capitalize on Bilibili.
The birthday stream releases. One of the new voices declares that she is Kizuna Ai. The first Kizuna Ai makes something that viewers interpret as a retirement speech. The event is promptly rated very poorly on Niconico (Japanese Youtube).
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Note.mu docs drop. The 3 new VAs are found, the Chinese one having a colorful history. (Text is all in JP, no good translation exists afaik)
https://note.mu/toton_kouzai/n/n9c9d02e45472
https://note.mu/toton_kouzai/n/nc039fdf8700d
アーカイブされた 2019年6月30日 08:58:48 UTC
archive.is
アーカイブされた 2019年6月29日 18:45:32 UTC
archive.is
>2018年5月に副島が入ってから、経営・プロデュース・企画等の要職を担当していたActiv8設立メンバーが何人も会社を去っている。
>Since Soejima joined in May 2018, a number of Activ8 founding members who have been in charge of key roles such as management, production and planning have left the company.
English viewers think something is off, but aren't sure what's going on.
First 'news' article on the topic:
https://www.sankakucomplex.com/2019/07/14/kizuna-ais-new-voice-upsets-fans/
It gets stranger because it seems like there are actual shills, pretending that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary is happening and that everything is fine and definitely not in any danger of changing.
https://desuarchive.org/wsg/thread/2911836 AI-chan (note exact capitalization)
I got curious, so I went to look up earlier times when that capitalization was used, bringing things back to January, although other posts with that all seem hostile and baiting:
Fuuka Imageboard Archiver at warosu.org
warosu.org
The rabbit hole goes deeper given the insane meltdowns from this guy, who has apparently been sperging out for half a year. Maybe more than a year, based on filenames of deleted posts. It might be a genuinely unhinged person.
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Fuuka Imageboard Archiver at warosu.org
warosu.org
Maybe he got fired and replaced with a more competent Chinese shill
www.youtube.com
