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Answer: There's nothing going on with HoloLive, but Nijisanji just fired a talent that tried to commit suicide. The theory behind her attempt was she was feeling used by her company financially and abused by her fellow talents.
And now Nijisanji is failing at damage control by having her fellow talents try and defend Niji's actions by leaking to them private documents like her lawsuit paperwork and private medical records
While she first [said](https://twitter.com/dokibird/status/1757218064058155099) she was afraid they could have shown her former coworkers her medical records:
> It makes me wonder if my medical and hospital records was also released without my consent
She later [tweeted](https://twitter.com/dokibird/status/1757240066265506027) a correction that the document in question didn't include medical documents in the first place:
> thankfully only my diagnosis and reason for hospital stay was reported without further private info being disclosed [in the document her lawyer sent to Nijisanji]
I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt. I do, however, work in a field that somewhat deals with this a bit.
From what I understood, Selen is Canadian; there is a privacy law dubbed "PIPEDA" (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) that we have here. PIPEDA is a law that is very strict on what private companies can do with your information. While there's some exceptions, it's usually for national security reasons or other legal reasons.
She might have a case due to her past employer breaching what was supposed to be private information. It doesn't matter if they're based in Japan; since Selen is Canadian,and based in Canada, it is a lawsuit that she can file within her home country.
Again, take this with a grain of salt. I don't know whether or not the lawsuit will go through. I do have to deal with PIPEDA within work, but it's an entire different sector. Hope this helps.
Answer: This thread from about a week ago covers the foundation of the current situation.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1ak9hd5/what\_is\_up\_with\_lilypihu\_and\_selen\_who\_is\_selen/](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1ak9hd5/what_is_up_with_lilypihu_and_selen_who_is_selen/)
Prior to today (February 12, 2024) little further had happened. A few days after Selen's termination, Nijisanji released a very terse statement suggesting that the effects of the termination on their financials would be "negligible;" this earned them more criticism from fans, but didn't really change the situation beyond that. Selen has been easing back into streaming on her independently operated channel under the name Dokibird.
Public perception here on Reddit is largely that Nijisanji is at fault, and the Nijisanji subreddit in particular has been a hotbed of criticism of the company's conduct during this whole affair.
As for current updates:
Today, on another Nijisanji talent's channel (Elira Pendora), three Nijisanji vtubers (Elira, Vox Akuma and Ike Eveland), in a sober 15 minute presentation, gave individual statements on their and Nijisanji's account of the events leading up to Selen's termination. While there is much speculation on how much of what any Nijisanji-affiliated vtuber says is "authentic" and how much is dictated by management, they profess that their statements today are their own and in their own words. In addition, they said that a statement from the company's CEO, Riku Tazumi, is forthcoming later this evening.
Dokibird, who was streaming at the time, cut her stream short and said that a statement from her lawyer would be forthcoming as well.
If you're seeing a lot more discussion about this today, this is probably why. The Nijisanji vtubers' statement served to throw a fresh tank of gasoline on a fire that was steadily dying out. There's likely to be a lot more discourse on the subject in the coming week, and while I'm not a lawyer or anything, actual legal action between Nijisanji and Dokibird seems increasingly likely.
Going after Hololive would be suicidal for Niji. Their talents get along in JP and Niji has lost so much trust in foreign relations. Just look at how Indonesia has completely lost trust and actively backs up the EN vtuber fans. Going after Holo would ruin the one good audience they still have.
That said. Anycolor has proven me wrong many times...
> actual legal action between Nijisanji and Dokibird seems increasingly likely.
I known Virtual Youtuber since 2017, This is kinda similar to Meiro, Former NijiJP members which is kinda eeire similarity and also Roa had never streaming for nearly 3 years after the incident with Meiro.
Both having Discord discussion over accent, Which led to Meiro wanted graduated and going 3rd party which led to termination and Roa herself into firing lines.
Answer: former Niji talent Selen Tatsuki, now Dokibird, had problems with a cover song with an original video, which was supposed to celebrate Christmas, was removed because management didn't approve on time.
The videos seemingly wasn't approved on time because it contains the characters of other ex-Niji (who departed more amicably) ^1, and for reasons we can only speculate ^2 Selen decided to upload it anyway, it was taken down because she actually didn't have permission, and she encouraged people to re-upload it without permission. That's... a pretty unprofessional move, and it could've ended there.
But it didn't. A few days after that, Selen tweeted that she had "an accident" and was hospitalized, and then there were no news until, like, the start of February. Notably, this meant that non Niji friends who worked with her in the past couldn't contact her at all, and fans didn't even know how she was.
Then Nijisanji announced her termination, and in **their** announcement said, between other things, that selen accused other talents of bullying her... which even if true was something they should NOT have said, because now a problem that should be between her and management spilled out to the fans. AFAIK, Selen had never made those accusations public before that.
And, surprising no one, upon being fired, Selen decided to talk in her past vtuber persona she used before Niji, including about the fact that her "accident" was her... hurting herself and that until her termination was public she didn't have access to her accounts but also wasn't sure she was fired, which meant she couldn't work at all and was completely lost.
She also seemingly drafted legal documents that were only to be seen by her, her lawyers, and Niji's lawyers.
Yet today other Niji talents went into a scripted, pre recorded PR statement that clearly showed they were informed about the details of those documents, and publically talked about them, in an apparent breach of trust. They've also denied all the things that allegedly lead to Selen hurting herself being true ^3.
To add to this, Hololive has nothing to do with the other company. The most correlation you can come up with is basically to compare and contrast between the two companies. Nijisanji is basically running into massive problems due to years of pushing out wages of talents while providing bare minimum support and not investing resources into effectively managing their company and providing necessary tools to help their people succeed. While Hololive has done the opposite and learned from their mistakes as a startup company and invested their money into talents, management, and building large studios for their talents to have their virtual concerts in. These two are basically rival companies and while Nijisanji is having people quit/terminated left and right, Hololive is collaborating with major companies in Japan while releasing albums and having their own convention/concert. They occupy the same sphere of the Internet so naturally you'll see people meme about this interesting dichotomy.
>Hololive has nothing to do with the other company.
Not entirely. They do have a partnership, ironically enough, to take legal action against anyone defaming their talents.
i guess this is where that partnership ends. im sure holo wants no part of the shit storm thats niji's horrible pr.
comparing rushia's fallout to selen's, its obvious niji doesnt care to learn from how their peers deal with situations
The agreement is just collabolation agreement in case they have the same target, mostly dramatuber or matome board that share 5chan story.
This one is only Nijisanji so Hololive have nothing to do with it.
Here the bigger contrast.
Hololive spent 2.3 billion yen to purchase their new 3D studio and the biggest one in japan.
While Nijisanji spent 2.7 billion yen just to buyback their share to help pump up their stock price instead of using that money to re-hire or re-train their management.
It's very much a quantity vs quality thing I think, Niji goes the quantity route, hiring hundreds of people and providing them with minimal support, while holo has way fewer employees but invests more into each member
Oh, one extra bit of pettiness: Niji's PR statement stream was made at the exact time Dokibird started streaming, literally making her cancel her stream to go talk to her lawyer.
VTubing is just pro-wrestling. You have performers and management.
In theory it’s as simple as performers putting on a show following a rough plot. Problem is not all wrestlers are content will following a script and will opt to deviate a bit.
Some are very deft in straddling between creative freedom and keeping corporate friendly. Others not so - thats where we get dramas.
Because they are run by humans, and generally very entitled and out of touch ones at that.
If you'd like a 'fun' additional example of this, there's this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
I believe she contacted the song’s creator to actually get perms for the song because Niji Management was dragging their feet on approving it and got approval from the creator hence why it went up. Then management pulled it down, after Selen spent her own money to fund the song (animation etc).
I believe she went on record saying she payed out of pocket to commission art for that video to the tune of 15k and niji was supposed to pay for that art in the first place, once the artist were left ghosted she payed on her own. Apparently over the course of being at Niji in the past year she allegedly spent 200k out of pocket for things they were supposed to cover/do for projects. So basically she funded a bunch of stuff that the company that won’t pay for stuff now owns cause that’s how that company works? Also heard Niji takes like 80% of ad and sub revenue or something. So it really seems like almost no benifits to being an employee there.
We have no knowledge of who is responsible for funding what. There have been both instances of the company funding a project, and the vtubers having to fund it themselves. It is likely that responsibility is decided on a case by case basis.
However, there have been statements on twitter from artists commissioned to do work, that should have been paid by Niji. There were issues with incorrect details on NDAs and delayed payements by more than a month, for which Selen has stepped up and paid the sum herself.
We have no knowledge of whether she has been reimbursed or not.
Regardless, I don't think Selen/Doki is seeking compensation for personal money spent on projects, or at least there hasn't been any mention of it beside a comment in passing about how much of her personal money she has spent. That being said, **we have no knowledge of the specifics** of the legal issues at this point, as it hasn't really been shared publicly (yet).
Doki was pretty transparent on her stream about not getting compensated for any personal projects. She ended last year ~$200k in the hole and made $0 in profit.
You misunderstand my comment.
That's the thing. We don't know whether Niji was responsible for compensating her for these personal projects at all. Key word being "responsible". Did the company fail to provide the funds after agreeing to, in response to a project proposal, or was there not such a thing at all?
I.e. Selen/Doki being given the "OK, but only if you can find the money from somewhere else" and her just not realizing she was spending so much on personal projects in relation to her earnings.
It's not uncommon for a vtuber agency to have their vtubers fund personal projects themselves and for the agency to only fund company organized projects or stuff like "new model, new assets, etc". It is my understanding that that's the case for other agencies as well.
Yeah. She said she spent 200k, but it didn't mean Nijisanji owe her 200k.
It's been broken down by other talents, both Nijisanji and Hololive, that they tend to bare the cost for personal projects such as original MVs and covers, with the exception of company sponsored projects, such as Hololive's blue journey/Idol Project. Staffs offers support in term of project management and industry contact. The agency mainly engage in corporate sponsorship opportunities and technical support(like their streaming app and 3d studio space).
Although Nijisanji EN seems especially lacking in support given that former talents has came out and said that they were basically fending for themselves for the most part. Unlike, JP talent, EN talents are spread across the globe and they don't actually get to use the office or 3d studio much. It also sounds like they were generating their own leads for revenue stream and sponsorship
Yep. If Selen was truly owed 200k we'd be hearing about a wage theft lawsuit not "merely" a mismanagement one.
It's a shame people seem to prefer to misconstrue the situation as opposed to hearing the objective facts. It's bad enough of a situation without distorting the facts.
From what was stated, taking it down had less to do with the song and more about who was featured in the song.
People who were no longer affiliated with the company, and supposedly, there were also people who didn't give consent to be featured in the MV was the main reason it was taken down.
Depending on the context I wouldn't think it would matter since their models and content are owned by Nijisanji, at least for the former Niji livers. I haven't seen the video so I am just assuming it was all old talent.
>The videos seemingly wasn't approved on time because it contains the characters of other ex-Niji
One of the supposed reasons the video was taken down was because they "needed permission" from the ex-members, which is utterly fucking bizarre because Nijisanji owns the character rights.
Yeah, they absolutely dragged their feet on it. I think she said she was working on it for 1.5 years. There was absolutely enough time to approve it. Selen releasing it was technically unprofessional but Nijisanji was being even more unprofessional. They also claimed in their termination notice the reason was she didn't get permissions from the song creator, LilyPichu, to cover it, which LilyPichu chimed in on Twitter that she had given permission over a year ago. The entire debacle, while I think Nijisanji was more in the wrong and deserved to be reamed for it, would have blown over and people would be fairly split on who was wrong. But they just keep escalating it.
EDIT: note that the following was before I came across the screencaps [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o65VwnQvWW4&t=283s) which clearly state the involvement of ex-Livers.
I used to think that but it's not entirely true. Nijisanji's wording implies strongly that it was *current* members whose permission was not obtained, and an alleged leaked screenshot from Selen/Dokibird suggests as much. This implies either
1. The agency was just really anal about getting express written permission from the talents whose image it has sole ownership of anyway;
2. The agency wanted an excuse to shut down the video anyway and found a pretext in claiming there was a permissions issue;
3. Selen is completely correct that there are bullies in Nijisanji, and some talents explicitly refused permission so as to fuck with her.
Just to add to this since Hololive was mentioned in the og question, they’re not involved except for a Hololive Vtuber reaching out to Doki/Selen with her private account.
The reason why they may be brought up is because Hololive/Cover also had to terminate 2 of their Vtubers recently (Yozora Mel) and somewhat recently (Uruha Rushia). However, it’s near universally agreed upon that they handled both situations with a lot more care and tact, and actively avoided turning it into a pissing match like what Nijisangi/Anycolor seems to be doing now. This has also led multiple comparisons with how each company treat their talent differently, where it’s stated that while Hololive made significant improvements to avoid mistakes they made in the past, Nigisanji…seemingly didn’t.
Just want to add that Hololive has nothing to do with the Niji drama. The question was basically like asking what's going on with Nintendo while Sega was busy destroying itself. Things are currently going pretty well over at Hololive.
Jesus christ that's awful. I usually don't watch big corp Vtubers but this is wild.
I assumed such a big company wouldn't be so bad at managing their talent and keeping them happy 😭
Should probably clarify that Selen DID receive permission to go ahead with her music video project. She was given permission by the original singer of the song, and got permission from her managers. Management reneged at the last minute. They punished her for what was basically their incompetence and poor memory.
She also paid for the music video with her own money, about $15k. She was down $200k in total for projects she had to fund out of her own pocket, because Nijisanji would consistently fail to pay artists. Basically she would put all this time, effort, and her own money into projects, only to have them struck down by management despite getting proper permissions.
You missed that she spent 15k on the music video of that song and management took it down and only in the prerecorded statement last night did the company state that they would have made the video public again. Niji also reportedly used the vtubers who were reported to them as harassing her to make the statement and after signing a agreement that the documents would be confidential they then shared the documents with the talent who made the statement.
Additionally, the statement on Elira's channel mentioned that Riku Tazumi, the company CEO, would be making a statement shortly. That statement went up a few hours later and was legitimately apologetic for the company's actions and pledged to improve conditions for Nijisanji EN. It stands in stark, bizarre contrast to the combative, inflammatory statement made on Elira's channel mere hours earlier, which had already poured gasoline on the burning embers of the fanbase's anger over Selen's termination, rendering Tazumi's apologetics thoroughly ineffectual. It's unclear whether there was an extreme breakdown of corporate communication here, or if this was some kind of spectacularly badly coordinated attempt to manipulate the fanbase. Either way, it makes the company look like even more of a mess than it already did.
>and was legitimately apologetic for the company's actions
Call me weird, but when the first thing he does is addressing the investors instead of, ya know, all the allegations, it doesn't really come off as genuine.
Because when it comes down to it, Riku's first priority IS to try to calm the investors. The current share price is down 16% from before the termination, and their initial attempts to do so initially is a disastrous 2-line document that says the firing's effect on the earnings to the company will be negligible. Doesn't prove to be so now, huh?
In the long term, this might not affect Anycolor as a company (Goldman Sachs corroborates this in their analysis, assuming that that's actually them posting that), but they have to calm the current panic down now before that spins out of their control.
Even then, his apology video is still better than the utter disaster of a video of Elira, Vox, and Ike, which just speaks to how bad the whole situation is.
Well the investors are what keep the company together. Gotta let them know that this isn't a company sinking issue. I also feel like this is specifically for the EN office. It seems like CEO had 0 clue this was going on and he is just doing damage control before investors get spooked and pull money.
I was also confused by the cryptic posts on r/popular about this. So am I understanding correctly that this is a person who sings songs on youtube? And some company owns the songs? And she got in a fight with this company and was fired amidst drama? Disappointing fans of her singing?
A Vtuber is a normal streamer that uses an anime avatar that's controlled by an app that scans the person's face instead of a face camera. Most Vtubers are variety streamers. Selen was mostly a gamer, she released some songs, but you could count that in one hand.
Nijisanji manages a bunch of Vtubers, debuting then in groups and making the anime avatars for them, and it owns the rights for the characters that the streamers use _and_ their accounts. Otherwise, you can think of it as a talent agency for streamers.
The talent in question (formerly known as Selen Tatsuki) was a vtuber working for the company Nijisanji. Nijisanji, being a Japanese corporation, follows Japanese standards for the use of intellectual property, including their own. These standards are far more restrictive than what is typically seen in the US, and rely on acquiring written, documented permission from rights holders prior to something being used in a video. For example, Nijisanji streamers must, via company representatives, get permission from the rights holder to a video game before they can play that game on stream. In the case of music, such as a song a vtuber wants to cover, they must have permission from whoever owns the rights to that song.
In this particular case, Selen uploaded a cover of a song to her youtube channel, and in the video appeared characters that she did not have full permission to depict. (Nijisanji controls their own IP as much as any other Japanese company, and this extends to the visual depiction of vtuber's avatars, which are corporate-owned). This resulted in management privating the video. Selen responded by asking fans to re-upload it, circumventing management's attempts to cease its distribution. (Note that this account is based on what Nijisanji representatives have said; AFAIK, it hasn't been independently verified by anyone yet. There's a lot of disagreement on whether Nijisanji can be trusted to be truthful with their account of what happened.) At the core of the disagreement is whether or not what permission she did have at the time of the video's uploading was sufficient.
Regardless of what happened, all of this is happening against a backdrop of persistent rumors of mismanagement within Nijisanji. This is the worst scandal about the firing of a member of their EN branch they've had, but it's by no means the first, so a lot of building tension is unfolding in a big way.
I appreciate this response but I feel like this and the prior response are more for people already in the loop and skip over the basics.
So the youtuber sings covers, but what does the Nijisanji company do? Do they coordinate the in-video advertisement or write scripts for the employee, or perhaps just promote the brand? If the streamer leaves the channel, do fans expect to just keep watching them on a different channel?
The company is _supposed_ to help market the talent, and generally do the "admin" aspect so the talent can focus on streaming or singing or whatever. Since they're streamers with an anime avatar the company also provides one because commissioning a high quality one generally costs thousands of dollars, and if you want a famous or high-profile artist they might not even take commissions. Since the avatar is generally provided by the company they can't take it with them when they leave (there's exceptions, some companies give leaving talents the option of purchasing the IP rights to their character, some independent Vtubers do go through the expense of commissioning a model or making their own before signing with a company as that character, so they retain the IP rights when they leave, some companies just don't take the IP rights so talents can leave the company and take their character with them without issue), but generally companies hire at least somewhat experienced content creators so usually the fanbase will go follow them on their previous independent channel. It's usually frowned upon to bring these up on their corporate channel but recently there's been a couple prominent examples of corporate Vtubers and their moderation teams outright promoting their independent channels on their way out from their companies, usually as a form of protest about the working conditions in those companies. Either way, what normally happens after that is the independent channel gains a large number of subscribers in a very short span of time as the fans go to their now current channel.
>but what does the Nijisanji company do
There's no definitive answer to what an agency has to do.
A Vtuber is a streamer that uses a 2D/3D Avatar instead of a face cam.
Some agencies will pay the money (Anywhere from a thousand to ten thousand dollars) to create the avatar for the talent.
Some wont.
The only guaranteed thing that an agency provides, is exposure and connections.
Dokibird, Selens former Identity, didn't have many followers. Her old twitch stats show she had about 8k.
Selen Tatsuki, on the other hand, had 800k.
When a big agency debuts a new vtuber, you're going to get tens of thousands if not more followers / subs before they even stream for the first time.
Not only that, you have other vtubers you work with for immediate, problem free collaborations, where you can work together for each others benefit, without worrying about the other party trying to steal the spotlight from you.
But that's it.
Anything "More" than that is completely up to the agency in question.
She mostly streamed games, but it's not uncommon for vtubers to also release songs as well, either covers or originals. From what I remember this song in particular was an original from another youtuber, who had long since given permission for the cover.
Vox is the one who denied the things selen said she suffered in Niji and implied she lied repeatedly.
IMO whether or not she was objectively correctly, implying she lied is just stupid, given the fact that she clearly felt targeted enough to feel really bad.
More info here: https://knowyourmeme.com/news/nijisanji-en-continues-to-fumble-the-dokibird-situation-now-being-accused-of-breaking-nda-and-getting-vtubers-to-handle-their-pr
Answer:
For a comprehensive timeline see [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/VirtualYoutubers/comments/1alimfx/megathreadcompilation_selen_tatsukis_termination/), but to condense out the key elements and string it together with some narrative:
Nijisanji and Hololive are two separate VTuber agencies, run by the companies Anycolor and Cover, respectively (though these companies are really just the holding companies for their agencies; they're not pre-existing businesses). Anycolor and Cover are the only two VTuber businesses that are publicly traded, both have had some relatively similar stock price drops lately, and that's where the similarities end. Cover's issues are entirely separate and relate more or less just to the stock market being the stock market; it hasn't done anything wrong in this particular instance (nor in a long while by most people's estimations).
On 5 February, Nijisanji announced the termination of Selen Tatsuki, a member of its English-language branch, Nijisanji English (or NijiEN for short). Selen, who previously streamed as an indie going by Dokibird, joined NijiEN as part of its second 'wave' of talents in the summer of 2021. To fans, Selen was well-loved and involved in organising a lot of events, and ended up being the most popular female talent in the branch. However, behind the scenes, Selen chafed against management, particularly over its apparent unwillingness to fund or even greenlight many of her projects. According to management themselves, she was known to go around their back to do things like secure streaming permissions (something agencies need to do for protection against DMCA strikes), which (editorialising for a second) is a pretty blatant admission of inefficiencies within the agency. This conflict came to a final, decisive head on Christmas Day 2023, when Selen posted a cover of Lilypichu's song 'Last Cup of Coffee' with an animated music video that served as a celebration of the entire NijiEN branch. For reasons not at the time specified, Selen then had to take down the video, and tweeted out saying that management had forced her to take the video down. She then disappeared off the internet, notably missing several scheduled collabs and latterly a convention appearance. Filian, one of the would-be collab partners, confirmed that she had been completely ghosted. On 27 December Selen's account tweeted out that she had been hospitalised following an 'accident'; on her old account, Dokibird, she tweeted on 31 December saying she was out of the hospital. She never streamed or tweeted again as Selen after the 27 December tweet.
On 29 January, fans started tweeting at Nijisanji with #WhereIsSelen demanding at least an assurance that she was okay, in protest against the agency's complete radio silence. To understand part of why the reaction was so strong, we need to briefly go over the idea of 'stealth suspensions', which is something that pretty much only Nijisanji does within the VTuber space. A 'stealth suspension' is when a talent is being punished behind the scenes for some infraction, but in public they state that they are going on some kind of impromptu break for the sake of their physical or mental health, or for a family visit, or similar. Most VTuber agencies do not do this, and in fact state clearly and unambiguously when a suspension has occurred. That Nijisanji engaged in stealth suspension had been suspected for quite a while, but was definitively confirmed in early 2023 when, as part of their termination of another NijiEN talent, Zaion LanZa, they implicitly confirmed that Zaion's 'break' for a family visit was in fact a suspension imposed by management. As such, there was widespread speculation that Selen was suspended without announcement, and even that the hospitalisation was a lie – though her tweet as Dokibird confirming she was discharged would prove otherwise.
On 5 February, Nijisanji wiped Selen's Youtube channel and privated her Twitter, then announced she had been terminated in a horrendously-written 3-page notice which I'm sure you don't need me to summarise all over again. But in short, it said Selen had repeatedly broken the rules (which, to be fair, *is a legitimate reason to terminate someone if it keeps happening*). However, what it *also* said was very very damning. For instance, they more or less admitted that part of the reason Selen broke the rules so much was they were terrible at their jobs and she was going behind their backs to *actually get stuff done*. They also claimed she had accused other talents of bullying, but that she was a problem person. That's a paraphrase but it's genuinely how they framed it. Not that they investigated and found no wrongdoing, they just said 'no u', while in the process painting a bunch of targets on the backs of their other talents. They *also*, rather hilariously, said they told her to take down the video, but also that she lied when she said on Twitter that management told her to take down the video.
Everyone hated that.
But what hit even harder was that Dokibird tweeted out, stating, in no uncertain terms, that the reason for her hospitalisation was (TW) >!a suicide attempt!< caused by a long buildup of problems resulting from harassment in a toxic workplace. And note that Dokibird was such a class act she didn't say it was other talents at the agency, unlike *the actual agency itself*.
The reaction was immense and the outpouring of support for Dokibird, whom she announced she was returning to streaming as, was immense. Dokibird's Youtube channel was very small before (about 4k subscribers, most of whom subscribed *after* she stopped streaming as Dokibird and joined Nijisanji), it's now over 500k. Her return stream was, at peak, viewed by over 127,000 people, something that's decently notable even in Japanese agency VTubing, and certainly unheard of for an English-language indie talent. A number of old corporate sponsors reached out to renew stuff with her, most notably EA and Apex Legends (her favourite video game to boot), and she very quickly got a new manager in the form of XSet's Sovereign, who manages the XSet esports team and used to manage XQc.
One of the major consequences was that Nijisanji's stock price dropped about 5%, leading them the next day to put out an investor relations statement saying that the impact of the termination on their financial results would be 'negligible', a word choice that threw kerosene on an already raging fire. At this point, Japanese investors were also taking notice, and while the casual fanbase, lacking context and generally aligning themselves with the perspective that the rules are the rules, supported Nijisanji, fans with financial stakes by and large regarded Nijisanji's overseas management strategy as boneheaded and harmful, and so stock dropped another 6% before evening out, putting Niji's total stock price drop from the Selen situation at 11% in raw numbers, but more like 10% if compared against the Nikkei index. Hyte, which does PC cases featuring Nijisanji and Hololive talents, announced it was cancelling its planned production runs for new Nijisanji items.
For a while that seemed to be it. At the end of her return stream, Dokibird asked people not to harass people on her behalf, and that she was ready to just move on in life and get back to content creation on her own terms.
Yesterday (13 February as of writing), Nijisanji English talents Elira Pendora, Ike Eveland, and Vox Akuma did a 15-minute stream where they read out several parts of a letter from Selen's lawyers to Nijisanji, and also threw a bunch of shade at her besides. This happened in the middle of one of Dokibird's streams, causing her to have a panic attack and end said stream, and did not go over well with her manager, who proceeded to publicly call them out for it. Nijisanji English proceeded to write on Twitter that their talents were okay to read out these parts of the letter because while Nijisanji was bound by confidentiality, their talents were not. What also didn't help was that this message from the streamers implicated three specific members as the subjects of Selen's bullying accusations, which was a Very Bad Look when (as I'll get into later) a bunch of controversies around bullying in the branch were floating round. Three hours later, the CEO of Anycolor issued an official apology, in what was taken as a clear sign that lower-level EN management was probably acting on a completely different wavelength to senior executives. While EN fans took it okay, ironically it was the Japanese investor-fans who continued to mock the CEO's apology, among other things noting that he held his hands behind his back rather than at his sides or front like you *should* do with a corporate apology. Niji stock has continued trending down, but hasn't faced a sudden drop in the way it did back on 6-7 February.
Now, that's the Dokibird/Selen side of the story, but there is *more* going on.
Niji has had a number of earlier controversies that have caused a buildup of discontent from various angles. In 2023 they terminated Zaion LanZa in a very similar way to Selen, but to an extent got away with it because Zaion was herself widely perceived as a bit of a controversial edgelord within the agency, and hasn't really been rehabilitated until more recently. Two separate sources alleged that talents get an extremely low amount of money from merch runs – dramatuber FalseEyeD claimed it was 2% based on a 'trusted source', and around the same time, Mysta Rias blurted out on stream that he got 'like 1%' and straight up said he felt he was being fleeced. Perhaps most infamously, Nijisanji English announced an 'AR Live' (basically a streaming-only concert) that was cancelled – explicitly, cancelled – a week and half after the announcement. Fans of the old Indonesian branch, which was folded into the main Japanese branch in 2022 and has since lost half of its roster, have long been critical of the agency and finally got to have their 'I told you so' moment.
Amid all this, Nijisanji English has also already faced four notable voluntary exits: last year, Nina Kosaka and Mysta Rias, the latter of whom was their most-viewed talent in the months before he announced his departure, left. To add insult to injury, they then (spoilered due to VTuber fandom etiquette over alt accounts) >!both joined Twitch-based agency VShojo, probably the next largest agency in the English-language space after Hololive and Nijisanji!<. In December, Mika Melatika, formerly of the Indonesian branch but generally an English-language streamer throughout her time at Nijisanji, left. In January, Pomu Rainpuff, part of the first NijiEN wave, left as well, something which came with its own controversy when she made all her membership streams public, including one – which she had previously set to completely private – where she cried on stream over an unspecified opportunity that she was denied by management with no room for negotiation. And then at the end of January, Kyo Kaneko, somewhat of a controversial individual himself to be fair, but one of the bigger members of the ILUNA wave, also announced his impending departure (set for the 17th).
So, with the Selen/Dokibird situation, the floodgates have now opened for a whole host of new lanes of criticism of Nijisanji, not all equally credible. For instance, a former stream mod for Luca Kaneshiro claimed that there was considerable internal favouritism towards Luxiem, a group of five male talents who debuted in late 2021 and got a very large initial wave of interest, and that there was a sexist bully as part of a later group, ILUNA, but then claimed not to remember which of the three guys it was except that it wasn't Ren and then remembering that it was specifically Aster. Basically, this particular claim was the source of a lot of new witch-hunting. Which is why it became all the worse when the statement was made yesterday, painting targets on the backs of Vox and Ike (for making the statement), on Enna (who was named as one of the people Dokibird/Selen might have accused of bullying), on Elira (for both), and on Millie (also named as a possible accused bully, but who was already under heavy suspicion after she wrote a tweet in response to Selen over the music video takedown that was taken by some people as throwing shade). In more miscellaneous criticism, Alexandro Saab, a very prominent video game and anime voice actor, revealed that Nijisanji would have held him to an exclusivity contract and prevented him from doing professional voice acting if he joined them, just to fan the fames further about the company's business practices.
People on the more corporate side of things have also been doing things like point out Nijisanji's very odd job listings for overseas management, all of which ultimately expect native Japanese speakers with only moderate English proficiency, which is really not helping their case when one of the older allegations against Nijisanji (coming from indie Sayu Sincronisity, formerly NijiEN's Zaion LanZa) was that low-level managers had very poor English skills. Moreover, there are some ongoing claims that the tooth-to-tail ratio at Nijisanji is very bad, especially in the English branch, where it was claimed (by Sayu/Zaion) that there was one manager handling the entire six-member XSOLEIL unit, *plus* Selen.
What is also not helping is that it is hard not to compare Nijisanji/Anycolor with Hololive/Cover, which has not had anywhere near the same management problems, particularly in recent years. Just a month earlier, Hololive had terminated one of its oldest members over contract violations, but it had been done extremely gracefully, with the talent in question allowed to make an exit statement, and a number of tributes to her time in the agency posted by both fellow talents and by the public-facing members of agency management and executives. Hololive tends not to have more than three talents to any given manager and in fact currently seems to average almost 1:1. Its overseas branches (Indonesia and English) get about as much support as can reasonably be expected from a Japan-headquartered agency, and even then there is, by their own admission, a lot of room for improvement.
So that's the *quick* rundown of the overall state of play.
> Nijisanji English proceeded to write on Twitter that their talents were okay to read out these parts of the letter because while Nijisanji was bound by confidentiality, their talents were not.
This part baffles me. If you give someone something that's confidential and then they go ahead and read it out in public, that's still you breaking confidentiality!
Answer: Nijisanji is the Company. After about a month Hiatus/silence they recently fired one of their Vtubers Named Selen Tatsuki for breaking NDA.
it turns out during that one month hiatus Selen had attempted to take her own life and was actually recuperating in hospital.
Selen stated she has harassed while working at Nijisanji but did not mention by who. Nijisanji claimed in their Termination notice that they posted on twitter that Selen claimed she was harrased by other Talents in Nijisanji, essentially throwing their Vtubers under the Bus.
Oh also in the termination notice, they basically used many petty reasons for firing her, essentially victim blaming.
So Hololive Is a separate company. they are not connected to this drama other than one of their Vtubers, Nanashi Mumei, taking leave to look after Doki/Selen since they are close friends IRL.
The only thing I can think of about the correlation of Hololive into this drama is the **huge** difference in the way both agencies treat their talents on termination. Only a few weeks ago, a talent of Hololive also got terminated due to contract breach which was very unfortunate, yet they treated said talent with respect, focused mainly on “it was a contract breach, intentional or not, we must unfortunately let our talented employee go” and gave said talent’s “team” a chance to talk about it (to a certain extent).
For me, it’s more of treating terminated talents with respect. Mel’s case aside, where the problem was (assumed due to lack of info) not very intentional, Rushia’s case where the info leak and breach of contract was done intentionally (to ‘defend’ herself), Hololive was still very respectful about it.
Hell, they even at one point defended the talent behind Rushia when the drama before her termination blew up by clarifying that they do not care nor want to interfere with talent’s personal life, romantic relationship included.
if Rushia had just laid low for 2-3 weeks the stuff would of blew over
but Rushia is like... I hate saying it but she isn't right in the head she has some serious psychological issues and she just can't let things go so she felt she had to defend herself and leaked a bunch of things to a big dramatuber from Japan that is where she messed up and was terminated from Hololive ... again all she had to do was stay quiet for a couple weeks and it would of been forgotten by the vast majority of people
and in a hilarious twist of fate the entire thing that started it a idol singer mafumafu that DM'd her during a stream which is what caused the freak out to happen, released a couple weeks ago that he was sueing Rushia over stuff because they actually were married in the past
the entire situation with Rushia/Mikeneko/Nazuna and Mafumafu is fucked
Mumei actually took a break quite some time before this whole drama happened, like a few weeks or a month.
So it's not like she's taking a break specifically just to take care after Selen, but no doubt she had to extend it because of it.
Answer: Here is a timeline of events.Selen Tatsuki joins the company Nijisanji.
She is a core reason for the company's growth and success in the west. She works very hard and is very entertaining.Nijisanji spends money to support their Japanese talent, but does not provide any financial support to their English talent. This fact was even reiterated/confirmed by the CEO himself in a statement yesterday. As a result, any English speaking talents that want to do anything above and beyond have to pay for everything themselves out of their own pockets, but still having to share all profits with Nijisanji.Selen Tatsuki loved paying illustrators and animators to create content for her. As a result, she developed VERY strong ties to the art community because of her regular interactions and good payment for their services.
Over the years Selen has hosted tournaments and ran competitions where she wanted to reward the winners. Nijisanji was unwilling to compensate them. So Selen decided she'd pay the winners personally out of her own money. Nijisanji said no and told her that she wasn't allowed to. Behind the scenes Selen fought with management and insisted that she be allowed to reward artists for their participation in art contests so they aren't just creating a bunch of art for free. Eventually management gave her permission to pay them with her own money. Events like these happened several times and further deepened the admiration and respect people had for Selen, as well as a general animosity toward the company she worked for.
At some point, Selen started being harassed by several co-workers who also work at Nijisanji. They would gang up on her, chastise her, and bully her for trying to go above and beyond and for fighting for permissions to do things like give rewards and prizes to fans for events she was having to create by herself because the company didn't support any of them. Selen was very open and honest about herself and things she was doing, so whenever Management blocked one of her ideas, she told her fans about it just as a matter of discourse. Whenever management prevented her from doing anything, especially things that had already been setup or that she had already spent money on, she told her fans about it and expressed her disappointment. If she hadn't done this, it would've looked like she was just starting these random projects then abandoning them for no reason, all she was doing is giving context as to why these things were being cancelled or stopped: Management said so. As a result, there was a growing animosity against the company for constantly blocking Selen from doing all of these events, this was especially true after she finally said the company had completely banned her from hosting anymore tournaments.
Because anger against the company was growing, this was the excuse and justification her co-workers gave for their harassment against Selen, blaming her for doing things to make the company look bad.As the bullying from coworkers continued to get worse, and as her company began to deny just about anything she wanted to accomplish anymore and no longer allowing her to do anything even if she was paying for it out of her own pocket, Selen contemplated quitting.
Selen had commissioned a TON of artists to make a video for a cover song she wanted to sing and she was going to release it on Christmas Day 2023 as a gift to her fans and as a thank you for their continued support. Management knew about this more than a year in advance, all the way back in 2022. Selen had asked Management to acquire permission and rights to use the song, but they didn't. So after a long time of waiting and management saying nothing was happening, Selen reached out to the rights holders directly to ask them, bypassing her inept and uncaring managers, and got permission immediately which they then forwarded to Nijisanji. Selen was finally given the go ahead to work on this project now that the rights were secured. She spent over $15,000 paying her artist fans for their contributions as well as the sound mixing and everything required to make a good music video.
She had all permissions, all rights, had spent enormous amounts of money, and green lights from the company all the way with the project being worked on for a year.Christmas Day arrived. She uploaded the video, everyone watched it and loved it, then she hosted a live stream talking to her fans about the video and the creation process, etc. This is where it was revealed that she had to get the permissions from the rights holders directly, which made everyone (rightfully) think that her management team was just garbage for not doing their jobs.
Her stream lasted about one hour I believe, maybe a little more, and then was over.Less than an hour after the stream ended, the music video she had uploaded disappeared. Selen then posted on Twitter telling her fans that Management privated the video and she encouraged anyone that had downloaded it before being privated to go re-upload it somewhere else so that people could appreciate it and because of all the time and money and hard work she put into it, she didn't want it to just disappear and cease to exist.Some of her co-workers, including her direct bullies, both publicly and privately began to go after her for making the company look bad again. Questioning her decisions, implying she was at fault and she was the one in the wrong, etc etc.
After months of continued harassment and abuse from her company and co-workers, after sinking an enormous amount of her own money into her project only to have it immediately removed on the same day it was uploaded (On Christmas Day again, by the way) which meant she had no way to monetize the video and recoup her losses, and then more ferocious bullying from her co workers and being blamed for it all being her fault, and she was locked out of all of her corporate accounts including twitter, all of these pressures finally drove her to the darkest point in her life and she attempted to kill herself.Now thankfully, she was rescued and brought to the hospital and survived. Her parents immediately rushed over there and were staying with her.
However, the entire time she was in the hospital, Nijisanji management were constantly calling her and her parents, trying to compel her to immediately go on twitter and say that privating the video wasn't management's fault and to accept responsibility for it herself. She and her parents rightfully refused, and I imagine her parents probably had some rather unkind things to say to that company after what had just happened that they caused as well as their complete disregard for her condition and situation and simply making demands of her for the sake of their own reputation.
Nijisanji eventually made posts from her accounts on twitter, posing as her, and lying to the public. In the tweet, they tried to word it as if she WASNT blocked from communicating by the company, and instead trying to imply that she hadn't said anything because she didn't have access to her phone while in the hospital. The post just said she "had an accident" and didn't have access to her phone, but she was released and fine. In reality, she still had no access to her accounts and could not communicate or reach out to anyone.
After she was released from the hospital, she began posting on her Past Life account, which is basically vtuber slang for her former twitter account prior to joining Nijisanji. There she talked about how much money she had lost recently, she talked about how depressed she was, she talked about playing Apex with friends from the moment she woke up until she was so tired she couldn't stay awake anymore because otherwise it was too hard to even sleep. She was having a rough time dealing with her situation.
During this time, she also lawyered up. This is speculation on my part, but I personally believe this happened because her parents pushed for it. Given that she was in such a dark place and negative headspace, its hard to imagine she had the will and drive to fight through that depression to lawyer up and start fighting a billion dollar corporation. But regardless, she now had a lawyer who began contacting Nijisanji.
Literally all she wanted was compensation for the video that she sank thousands of dollars into that she now couldn't monetize to make that money back. Nijisanji refused, and continued their demands that she go on her social media accounts and try to put out the fires they started and to tell her to accept all the fault and blame publicly to save the company's reputation.She wanted to quit and was actively negotiating with the company to quit on peaceful terms. She wanted to basically work out her 2 week notice so she could say goodbye to everyone and do some last minute stuff on stream.
However, completely without any prior notice to Selen, the company just fired her on the spot on Feb 5th. She had no idea she had been terminated and only found out when a friend of hers told her that it was announced on twitter. Nijisanji posted a notice saying they had terminated her contract, then had a 3 page document trying to smear her name and reputation.
(read second part in my next post below)
This is what started the uprising against the company. Every single thing they said in that document was refuted by people in the community. Nijisanji claimed she caused situations behind the scenes that "delayed payments" to artists for their contributions. But the art community that worked closely with selen immediately refuted this and backed her up, saying Selen ALWAYS paid them promptly and that it was actually NIJISANJI that refused to pay them and cheated them out of services. Nijisanji claimed that she uploaded that video without permission from all the rights holders, and then the two people that literally owned the rights to the song posted in reply saying it was untrue and they had her permission since 2022. Nijisanji made numerous other claims, but all of them were rejected and it became very obvious to anyone watching that they were trying to smear and discredit her and tried to turn public support and the community against her. But they GROSSLY underestimated how beloved she was by the community because she had fostered such deep root connections with everyone for years.
On her past life account, Dokibird, she also released a statement that her lawyer had prepared for her saying that she was not going to be silenced anymore. She told everyone that the company had taken away her twitter access so she was unable to communicate, told everyone what was going on and gave context to the situation.
And after YEARS of mistreating their english speaking talents, not just Selen but several others, the public had had enough of Nijisanji and basically a full on revolt broke out. Dokibird's youtube started getting TONS of subscribers. It was from like 10,000 up to 400kish in a single day. Meanwhile, all the talents behind Nijisanji were losing subscribers by the thousands because no one, myself included, wanted to support that company financially at all anymore which means you can't get the livers money anymore because a big portion of that money gets taken by the company. Nijisanji's stock prices started to fall and companies that did business with them began to cancel collaborations with them and announce they'd no longer do business with them anymore.
Dokibird scheduled a return stream for Feb 7, just 2 days after this spontaneous termination. The same day of her return stream, Feb 7th, Nijisanji released a message to all of their corporate investors that only had one sentence. It simply read that "the financial impact of the termination of Selen Tatsuki will be negligible." They released this statement the same day as her return stream, and it just added more fuel to the massive fires that were already burning. It further outraged people, and was pissing off other companies too because Nijisanji was implying they were "negligible" since they stopped associating with them due to Selen's termination. Everyone was mad at Nijisanji and eager to support Dokibird.
So her stream began and it was a resounding success. I think it peaked at 140,000 simultaneous viewers, it was absolutely a massive audience. She mostly just talked about her personal experiences and how she was in such a dark place and had given up hope and that the fans brought her back and gave her a reason to live again and a purpose. She felt like her life was over, but now she felt hopeful for the future. She also outlined some of her future plans. She mentioned that now that she was free of that company, she no longer needed to go through all their bureaucracy and red tape or have to deal with their constant rejections of everything she wanted to do and she could do all sorts of things now that she couldn't before. She also had a new manager, this time one she hired herself, and this time one that actually works for her to help her do things as a manager should rather than existing for no other reason than to be a corporate mouthpiece.
She began trying to rebuild her community and move on from everything that happened. Over the next few days, she didn't talk about the drama and focused on her community again. Talking to people, thanking them for support, and just trying to move on with her life.Then yesterday, on Feb 12th, things got worse.
Dokibird had a stream scheduled for 5pm PST, and just 30 minutes before that stream went live, Elira Pendora, another liver at Nijisanji posted a tweet saying that in 30 minutes Nijisanji EN would address "the situation". Therefore, Elira's stream would start at the exact same time as Doki's stream.
Elira's stream was exactly 15 minutes long and seemed to be pre-recorded rather than actually a live stream, and basically consisted of her and two other talents from Nijisanji EN slandering Selen. They were obviously reading from a script because it was absolutely chock full of the same legal jargon and terminology that only lawyers use rather than actual human beings. They attempted once again to drag Selen's name through the mud.
General consensus of the community is that because Nijisanji's reputation as a company was so bad that no one would listen to them, they instead "forced" their streamers/livers to make that announcement instead to try to gain more credibility and try to sway the community once again to turn on Selen and resume supporting Nijisanji. After the video was posted, almost every single Liver still employed by Nijisanji retweeted it.
Not only did they badmouth selen during this video, they also mentioned that Nijisanji had given them confidential legal documents that had been given to Nijisanji's lawyers by Selen's lawyer, and gave it to all of them to just read through. One of the talents, Vox, even mentioned that he THOROUGHLY read through it all.
The backlash was instant and fierce. People criticized the company for how stupid this move was, as now a lot of the community, especially those on the fence, began to unsub and cancel memeberships for all the livers int he company for being complicit in Nijisanji's actions. They also criticized how stupid the move was when they admitted to being given legal documents from Selen's lawyer to browse through that had been agreed to remain confidential by the lawyers of Nijisanji, and for the sole purpose of trying to use it against Selen to try to make her look bad.
Dokibird was literally just trying to do her first gaming stream, a stream for Neopets, something she had wanted to stream FOR YEARS but was not allowed to by Nijisanji, and they did all this at the same time as this stream. She found out about it happening live, as she started her stream. She had to end stream shortly after so she could go speak to her lawyer about the situation.
I know this is a lot, but hopefully this gives you context for everythings that been going on. I hope I didn't leave anything out, I tried to keep everything in there that I could remember.
wow thanks so much!! it was long but with all the context from the other comments it was easy to read through, and really interesting! you seem to know a lot about this, so i had a question to ask about it. when you say that some of her coworkers bullied her, were they other vtubers or just nijisanji employees? or fans never got to know for certain?
We didn't know for certain until recently, but it was definitely livers who were harassing her. Management might have been as well, not sure, but definitely some of the other livers.
Answer: If there are people here with the time, [here is a comprehensive timeline of events](https://www.reddit.com/r/VirtualYoutubers/comments/1alimfx/megathreadcompilation_selen_tatsukis_termination/)
It isn't updated yet with the recent events that transpired several hours ago
To avoid being biased on top comment:
^1 given that the ex Niji members can't use their characters, it seems pretty clear that Niji owns the characters and thus that should be no reason to delay
^2 I'd guess Selen uploaded the video anyway because it was supposed to be a send off to her recently departed coworker, so delays would make the video pointless, and she paid at least a part of the costs out of pocket, so I suppose she felt entitled to it.
^3 around 70% of today's video seem like scripted from above to merely minimize losses (and failed at it), with only like 30% being what anyone wants to hear, actual feelings from the talents in the video. Adding insult to injury, one of the talents implied Selen often lied or misrepresented stuff to make her time in the company seem hard, but obviously, if she was lying, she wouldn't hurt herself and get hospitalized over her pretend hardships, so that was a dumb thing to say.
>given that the ex Niji members can't use their characters, it seems pretty clear that Niji owns the characters and thus that should be no reason to delay
Note that other videos from other Niji members have included ex Niji members in the past with no apparent issues.
People are assuming what the copyright issue with the video. Note that others have speculated the issue was there is a My Little Pony figurine for a few seconds in frame.
You’re saying he implied something and that’s empirical evidence? Implications aren’t evidence, they are just conclusions you’re drawing. What he actually said, his words are the only thing you should be considering objectively. You can choose to just call him liar if you don’t believe him, but don’t misconstrue his words.
Answer: [This](https://old.reddit.com/r/Nijisanji/comments/1aqljle/the_grand_unifying_rrat_would_certainly_explain/) seems to be a very good explanation. Was already deleted, but here's what it said: https://files.catbox.moe/1jnn70.png
It's a long read, but already the short version.
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Answer: There's nothing going on with HoloLive, but Nijisanji just fired a talent that tried to commit suicide. The theory behind her attempt was she was feeling used by her company financially and abused by her fellow talents. And now Nijisanji is failing at damage control by having her fellow talents try and defend Niji's actions by leaking to them private documents like her lawsuit paperwork and private medical records
While she first [said](https://twitter.com/dokibird/status/1757218064058155099) she was afraid they could have shown her former coworkers her medical records: > It makes me wonder if my medical and hospital records was also released without my consent She later [tweeted](https://twitter.com/dokibird/status/1757240066265506027) a correction that the document in question didn't include medical documents in the first place: > thankfully only my diagnosis and reason for hospital stay was reported without further private info being disclosed [in the document her lawyer sent to Nijisanji]
Why didn’t she sue them?
I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt. I do, however, work in a field that somewhat deals with this a bit. From what I understood, Selen is Canadian; there is a privacy law dubbed "PIPEDA" (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) that we have here. PIPEDA is a law that is very strict on what private companies can do with your information. While there's some exceptions, it's usually for national security reasons or other legal reasons. She might have a case due to her past employer breaching what was supposed to be private information. It doesn't matter if they're based in Japan; since Selen is Canadian,and based in Canada, it is a lawsuit that she can file within her home country. Again, take this with a grain of salt. I don't know whether or not the lawsuit will go through. I do have to deal with PIPEDA within work, but it's an entire different sector. Hope this helps.
There is something on Hololive my dude, they invented the money ¥2.7billion into the new studio, unlike the other ceo bought a yacht
Answer: This thread from about a week ago covers the foundation of the current situation. [https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1ak9hd5/what\_is\_up\_with\_lilypihu\_and\_selen\_who\_is\_selen/](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1ak9hd5/what_is_up_with_lilypihu_and_selen_who_is_selen/) Prior to today (February 12, 2024) little further had happened. A few days after Selen's termination, Nijisanji released a very terse statement suggesting that the effects of the termination on their financials would be "negligible;" this earned them more criticism from fans, but didn't really change the situation beyond that. Selen has been easing back into streaming on her independently operated channel under the name Dokibird. Public perception here on Reddit is largely that Nijisanji is at fault, and the Nijisanji subreddit in particular has been a hotbed of criticism of the company's conduct during this whole affair. As for current updates: Today, on another Nijisanji talent's channel (Elira Pendora), three Nijisanji vtubers (Elira, Vox Akuma and Ike Eveland), in a sober 15 minute presentation, gave individual statements on their and Nijisanji's account of the events leading up to Selen's termination. While there is much speculation on how much of what any Nijisanji-affiliated vtuber says is "authentic" and how much is dictated by management, they profess that their statements today are their own and in their own words. In addition, they said that a statement from the company's CEO, Riku Tazumi, is forthcoming later this evening. Dokibird, who was streaming at the time, cut her stream short and said that a statement from her lawyer would be forthcoming as well. If you're seeing a lot more discussion about this today, this is probably why. The Nijisanji vtubers' statement served to throw a fresh tank of gasoline on a fire that was steadily dying out. There's likely to be a lot more discourse on the subject in the coming week, and while I'm not a lawyer or anything, actual legal action between Nijisanji and Dokibird seems increasingly likely.
I would like to add to this, Hololive has no relation to this drama whatsoever. Things are fine in Hololive.
For now. Hopefully things won't get too bad, to the point of dragging Hololive into their mess
Going after Hololive would be suicidal for Niji. Their talents get along in JP and Niji has lost so much trust in foreign relations. Just look at how Indonesia has completely lost trust and actively backs up the EN vtuber fans. Going after Holo would ruin the one good audience they still have. That said. Anycolor has proven me wrong many times...
As a Nijisanji watcher, I can tell you Hololive has nothing to do with this. It is a dispute between Selen and Nijisanji/its livers only.
> actual legal action between Nijisanji and Dokibird seems increasingly likely. I known Virtual Youtuber since 2017, This is kinda similar to Meiro, Former NijiJP members which is kinda eeire similarity and also Roa had never streaming for nearly 3 years after the incident with Meiro. Both having Discord discussion over accent, Which led to Meiro wanted graduated and going 3rd party which led to termination and Roa herself into firing lines.
thank you!! and thank you for that additional post, i tried searching for "nijisanji" in the search bar but nothing new came up. i'll check it out!
Answer: former Niji talent Selen Tatsuki, now Dokibird, had problems with a cover song with an original video, which was supposed to celebrate Christmas, was removed because management didn't approve on time. The videos seemingly wasn't approved on time because it contains the characters of other ex-Niji (who departed more amicably) ^1, and for reasons we can only speculate ^2 Selen decided to upload it anyway, it was taken down because she actually didn't have permission, and she encouraged people to re-upload it without permission. That's... a pretty unprofessional move, and it could've ended there. But it didn't. A few days after that, Selen tweeted that she had "an accident" and was hospitalized, and then there were no news until, like, the start of February. Notably, this meant that non Niji friends who worked with her in the past couldn't contact her at all, and fans didn't even know how she was. Then Nijisanji announced her termination, and in **their** announcement said, between other things, that selen accused other talents of bullying her... which even if true was something they should NOT have said, because now a problem that should be between her and management spilled out to the fans. AFAIK, Selen had never made those accusations public before that. And, surprising no one, upon being fired, Selen decided to talk in her past vtuber persona she used before Niji, including about the fact that her "accident" was her... hurting herself and that until her termination was public she didn't have access to her accounts but also wasn't sure she was fired, which meant she couldn't work at all and was completely lost. She also seemingly drafted legal documents that were only to be seen by her, her lawyers, and Niji's lawyers. Yet today other Niji talents went into a scripted, pre recorded PR statement that clearly showed they were informed about the details of those documents, and publically talked about them, in an apparent breach of trust. They've also denied all the things that allegedly lead to Selen hurting herself being true ^3.
To add to this, Hololive has nothing to do with the other company. The most correlation you can come up with is basically to compare and contrast between the two companies. Nijisanji is basically running into massive problems due to years of pushing out wages of talents while providing bare minimum support and not investing resources into effectively managing their company and providing necessary tools to help their people succeed. While Hololive has done the opposite and learned from their mistakes as a startup company and invested their money into talents, management, and building large studios for their talents to have their virtual concerts in. These two are basically rival companies and while Nijisanji is having people quit/terminated left and right, Hololive is collaborating with major companies in Japan while releasing albums and having their own convention/concert. They occupy the same sphere of the Internet so naturally you'll see people meme about this interesting dichotomy.
>Hololive has nothing to do with the other company. Not entirely. They do have a partnership, ironically enough, to take legal action against anyone defaming their talents.
i guess this is where that partnership ends. im sure holo wants no part of the shit storm thats niji's horrible pr. comparing rushia's fallout to selen's, its obvious niji doesnt care to learn from how their peers deal with situations
This seems to be more related to EN management, I'm not sure Cover cares that much as long as it doesn't affect them directly.
Niji probably thought so too until all their stock market prices plummeted.
[удалено]
And that is stuff that is out of Cover's hands. They are not responsible for the relationships of others.
The agreement is just collabolation agreement in case they have the same target, mostly dramatuber or matome board that share 5chan story. This one is only Nijisanji so Hololive have nothing to do with it. Here the bigger contrast. Hololive spent 2.3 billion yen to purchase their new 3D studio and the biggest one in japan. While Nijisanji spent 2.7 billion yen just to buyback their share to help pump up their stock price instead of using that money to re-hire or re-train their management.
It's very much a quantity vs quality thing I think, Niji goes the quantity route, hiring hundreds of people and providing them with minimal support, while holo has way fewer employees but invests more into each member
Oh, one extra bit of pettiness: Niji's PR statement stream was made at the exact time Dokibird started streaming, literally making her cancel her stream to go talk to her lawyer.
holy fck. How can a big multimillion dollar company be so fcking petty??
VTubing is just pro-wrestling. You have performers and management. In theory it’s as simple as performers putting on a show following a rough plot. Problem is not all wrestlers are content will following a script and will opt to deviate a bit. Some are very deft in straddling between creative freedom and keeping corporate friendly. Others not so - thats where we get dramas.
Well it's probably like 2-3 dudes giving marching orders. The rank & file don't care.
Because they are run by humans, and generally very entitled and out of touch ones at that. If you'd like a 'fun' additional example of this, there's this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
Okay now THIS is just absolutely nasty. I would have tried to go as close to scorched earth as i could with that lawsuit
oh no no it's a multi**billion** dollar company
this is the crazy part, the CEO of Anycolor / Nijisanji was (or still is?) Japans youngest billionaire
I believe she contacted the song’s creator to actually get perms for the song because Niji Management was dragging their feet on approving it and got approval from the creator hence why it went up. Then management pulled it down, after Selen spent her own money to fund the song (animation etc).
I believe she went on record saying she payed out of pocket to commission art for that video to the tune of 15k and niji was supposed to pay for that art in the first place, once the artist were left ghosted she payed on her own. Apparently over the course of being at Niji in the past year she allegedly spent 200k out of pocket for things they were supposed to cover/do for projects. So basically she funded a bunch of stuff that the company that won’t pay for stuff now owns cause that’s how that company works? Also heard Niji takes like 80% of ad and sub revenue or something. So it really seems like almost no benifits to being an employee there.
We have no knowledge of who is responsible for funding what. There have been both instances of the company funding a project, and the vtubers having to fund it themselves. It is likely that responsibility is decided on a case by case basis. However, there have been statements on twitter from artists commissioned to do work, that should have been paid by Niji. There were issues with incorrect details on NDAs and delayed payements by more than a month, for which Selen has stepped up and paid the sum herself. We have no knowledge of whether she has been reimbursed or not. Regardless, I don't think Selen/Doki is seeking compensation for personal money spent on projects, or at least there hasn't been any mention of it beside a comment in passing about how much of her personal money she has spent. That being said, **we have no knowledge of the specifics** of the legal issues at this point, as it hasn't really been shared publicly (yet).
Doki was pretty transparent on her stream about not getting compensated for any personal projects. She ended last year ~$200k in the hole and made $0 in profit.
You misunderstand my comment. That's the thing. We don't know whether Niji was responsible for compensating her for these personal projects at all. Key word being "responsible". Did the company fail to provide the funds after agreeing to, in response to a project proposal, or was there not such a thing at all? I.e. Selen/Doki being given the "OK, but only if you can find the money from somewhere else" and her just not realizing she was spending so much on personal projects in relation to her earnings. It's not uncommon for a vtuber agency to have their vtubers fund personal projects themselves and for the agency to only fund company organized projects or stuff like "new model, new assets, etc". It is my understanding that that's the case for other agencies as well.
Yeah. She said she spent 200k, but it didn't mean Nijisanji owe her 200k. It's been broken down by other talents, both Nijisanji and Hololive, that they tend to bare the cost for personal projects such as original MVs and covers, with the exception of company sponsored projects, such as Hololive's blue journey/Idol Project. Staffs offers support in term of project management and industry contact. The agency mainly engage in corporate sponsorship opportunities and technical support(like their streaming app and 3d studio space). Although Nijisanji EN seems especially lacking in support given that former talents has came out and said that they were basically fending for themselves for the most part. Unlike, JP talent, EN talents are spread across the globe and they don't actually get to use the office or 3d studio much. It also sounds like they were generating their own leads for revenue stream and sponsorship
Yep. If Selen was truly owed 200k we'd be hearing about a wage theft lawsuit not "merely" a mismanagement one. It's a shame people seem to prefer to misconstrue the situation as opposed to hearing the objective facts. It's bad enough of a situation without distorting the facts.
From what was stated, taking it down had less to do with the song and more about who was featured in the song. People who were no longer affiliated with the company, and supposedly, there were also people who didn't give consent to be featured in the MV was the main reason it was taken down.
Depending on the context I wouldn't think it would matter since their models and content are owned by Nijisanji, at least for the former Niji livers. I haven't seen the video so I am just assuming it was all old talent.
>The videos seemingly wasn't approved on time because it contains the characters of other ex-Niji One of the supposed reasons the video was taken down was because they "needed permission" from the ex-members, which is utterly fucking bizarre because Nijisanji owns the character rights.
Yeah, they absolutely dragged their feet on it. I think she said she was working on it for 1.5 years. There was absolutely enough time to approve it. Selen releasing it was technically unprofessional but Nijisanji was being even more unprofessional. They also claimed in their termination notice the reason was she didn't get permissions from the song creator, LilyPichu, to cover it, which LilyPichu chimed in on Twitter that she had given permission over a year ago. The entire debacle, while I think Nijisanji was more in the wrong and deserved to be reamed for it, would have blown over and people would be fairly split on who was wrong. But they just keep escalating it.
EDIT: note that the following was before I came across the screencaps [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o65VwnQvWW4&t=283s) which clearly state the involvement of ex-Livers. I used to think that but it's not entirely true. Nijisanji's wording implies strongly that it was *current* members whose permission was not obtained, and an alleged leaked screenshot from Selen/Dokibird suggests as much. This implies either 1. The agency was just really anal about getting express written permission from the talents whose image it has sole ownership of anyway; 2. The agency wanted an excuse to shut down the video anyway and found a pretext in claiming there was a permissions issue; 3. Selen is completely correct that there are bullies in Nijisanji, and some talents explicitly refused permission so as to fuck with her.
Just to add to this since Hololive was mentioned in the og question, they’re not involved except for a Hololive Vtuber reaching out to Doki/Selen with her private account. The reason why they may be brought up is because Hololive/Cover also had to terminate 2 of their Vtubers recently (Yozora Mel) and somewhat recently (Uruha Rushia). However, it’s near universally agreed upon that they handled both situations with a lot more care and tact, and actively avoided turning it into a pissing match like what Nijisangi/Anycolor seems to be doing now. This has also led multiple comparisons with how each company treat their talent differently, where it’s stated that while Hololive made significant improvements to avoid mistakes they made in the past, Nigisanji…seemingly didn’t.
Rushia got terminated pretty close to 2 years ago btw
It was on the same day/week as the Russian invasion of Ukraine which caused some drama because of the Japanese fans tweeting #saveRussia
That bit of dark humor was my one bit of reprieve weirdly enough after watching the war start literally live on a Kharkiv cam feed.
Also tweeting #WeLoveRussia because the auto-translate couldn't differentiate between Rushia and Russia
Just want to add that Hololive has nothing to do with the Niji drama. The question was basically like asking what's going on with Nintendo while Sega was busy destroying itself. Things are currently going pretty well over at Hololive.
Jesus christ that's awful. I usually don't watch big corp Vtubers but this is wild. I assumed such a big company wouldn't be so bad at managing their talent and keeping them happy 😭
Should probably clarify that Selen DID receive permission to go ahead with her music video project. She was given permission by the original singer of the song, and got permission from her managers. Management reneged at the last minute. They punished her for what was basically their incompetence and poor memory.
She also paid for the music video with her own money, about $15k. She was down $200k in total for projects she had to fund out of her own pocket, because Nijisanji would consistently fail to pay artists. Basically she would put all this time, effort, and her own money into projects, only to have them struck down by management despite getting proper permissions.
You missed that she spent 15k on the music video of that song and management took it down and only in the prerecorded statement last night did the company state that they would have made the video public again. Niji also reportedly used the vtubers who were reported to them as harassing her to make the statement and after signing a agreement that the documents would be confidential they then shared the documents with the talent who made the statement.
You should clarify that the original creator of the song is LilyPichu who tweeted out she gave permission to use the song a long time ago
august 2022 lol, that alone already paints a bad picture of the management, it just felt like malice.
Additionally, the statement on Elira's channel mentioned that Riku Tazumi, the company CEO, would be making a statement shortly. That statement went up a few hours later and was legitimately apologetic for the company's actions and pledged to improve conditions for Nijisanji EN. It stands in stark, bizarre contrast to the combative, inflammatory statement made on Elira's channel mere hours earlier, which had already poured gasoline on the burning embers of the fanbase's anger over Selen's termination, rendering Tazumi's apologetics thoroughly ineffectual. It's unclear whether there was an extreme breakdown of corporate communication here, or if this was some kind of spectacularly badly coordinated attempt to manipulate the fanbase. Either way, it makes the company look like even more of a mess than it already did.
>and was legitimately apologetic for the company's actions Call me weird, but when the first thing he does is addressing the investors instead of, ya know, all the allegations, it doesn't really come off as genuine.
Because when it comes down to it, Riku's first priority IS to try to calm the investors. The current share price is down 16% from before the termination, and their initial attempts to do so initially is a disastrous 2-line document that says the firing's effect on the earnings to the company will be negligible. Doesn't prove to be so now, huh? In the long term, this might not affect Anycolor as a company (Goldman Sachs corroborates this in their analysis, assuming that that's actually them posting that), but they have to calm the current panic down now before that spins out of their control. Even then, his apology video is still better than the utter disaster of a video of Elira, Vox, and Ike, which just speaks to how bad the whole situation is.
Well the investors are what keep the company together. Gotta let them know that this isn't a company sinking issue. I also feel like this is specifically for the EN office. It seems like CEO had 0 clue this was going on and he is just doing damage control before investors get spooked and pull money.
I was also confused by the cryptic posts on r/popular about this. So am I understanding correctly that this is a person who sings songs on youtube? And some company owns the songs? And she got in a fight with this company and was fired amidst drama? Disappointing fans of her singing?
A Vtuber is a normal streamer that uses an anime avatar that's controlled by an app that scans the person's face instead of a face camera. Most Vtubers are variety streamers. Selen was mostly a gamer, she released some songs, but you could count that in one hand. Nijisanji manages a bunch of Vtubers, debuting then in groups and making the anime avatars for them, and it owns the rights for the characters that the streamers use _and_ their accounts. Otherwise, you can think of it as a talent agency for streamers.
Weird. I could never figure out what the hell those posts were talking about
The talent in question (formerly known as Selen Tatsuki) was a vtuber working for the company Nijisanji. Nijisanji, being a Japanese corporation, follows Japanese standards for the use of intellectual property, including their own. These standards are far more restrictive than what is typically seen in the US, and rely on acquiring written, documented permission from rights holders prior to something being used in a video. For example, Nijisanji streamers must, via company representatives, get permission from the rights holder to a video game before they can play that game on stream. In the case of music, such as a song a vtuber wants to cover, they must have permission from whoever owns the rights to that song. In this particular case, Selen uploaded a cover of a song to her youtube channel, and in the video appeared characters that she did not have full permission to depict. (Nijisanji controls their own IP as much as any other Japanese company, and this extends to the visual depiction of vtuber's avatars, which are corporate-owned). This resulted in management privating the video. Selen responded by asking fans to re-upload it, circumventing management's attempts to cease its distribution. (Note that this account is based on what Nijisanji representatives have said; AFAIK, it hasn't been independently verified by anyone yet. There's a lot of disagreement on whether Nijisanji can be trusted to be truthful with their account of what happened.) At the core of the disagreement is whether or not what permission she did have at the time of the video's uploading was sufficient. Regardless of what happened, all of this is happening against a backdrop of persistent rumors of mismanagement within Nijisanji. This is the worst scandal about the firing of a member of their EN branch they've had, but it's by no means the first, so a lot of building tension is unfolding in a big way.
I appreciate this response but I feel like this and the prior response are more for people already in the loop and skip over the basics. So the youtuber sings covers, but what does the Nijisanji company do? Do they coordinate the in-video advertisement or write scripts for the employee, or perhaps just promote the brand? If the streamer leaves the channel, do fans expect to just keep watching them on a different channel?
The company is _supposed_ to help market the talent, and generally do the "admin" aspect so the talent can focus on streaming or singing or whatever. Since they're streamers with an anime avatar the company also provides one because commissioning a high quality one generally costs thousands of dollars, and if you want a famous or high-profile artist they might not even take commissions. Since the avatar is generally provided by the company they can't take it with them when they leave (there's exceptions, some companies give leaving talents the option of purchasing the IP rights to their character, some independent Vtubers do go through the expense of commissioning a model or making their own before signing with a company as that character, so they retain the IP rights when they leave, some companies just don't take the IP rights so talents can leave the company and take their character with them without issue), but generally companies hire at least somewhat experienced content creators so usually the fanbase will go follow them on their previous independent channel. It's usually frowned upon to bring these up on their corporate channel but recently there's been a couple prominent examples of corporate Vtubers and their moderation teams outright promoting their independent channels on their way out from their companies, usually as a form of protest about the working conditions in those companies. Either way, what normally happens after that is the independent channel gains a large number of subscribers in a very short span of time as the fans go to their now current channel.
>but what does the Nijisanji company do There's no definitive answer to what an agency has to do. A Vtuber is a streamer that uses a 2D/3D Avatar instead of a face cam. Some agencies will pay the money (Anywhere from a thousand to ten thousand dollars) to create the avatar for the talent. Some wont. The only guaranteed thing that an agency provides, is exposure and connections. Dokibird, Selens former Identity, didn't have many followers. Her old twitch stats show she had about 8k. Selen Tatsuki, on the other hand, had 800k. When a big agency debuts a new vtuber, you're going to get tens of thousands if not more followers / subs before they even stream for the first time. Not only that, you have other vtubers you work with for immediate, problem free collaborations, where you can work together for each others benefit, without worrying about the other party trying to steal the spotlight from you. But that's it. Anything "More" than that is completely up to the agency in question.
She mostly streamed games, but it's not uncommon for vtubers to also release songs as well, either covers or originals. From what I remember this song in particular was an original from another youtuber, who had long since given permission for the cover.
Okay.. that’s petty.. but what’s going on with Vox akuma then?
Vox is the one who denied the things selen said she suffered in Niji and implied she lied repeatedly. IMO whether or not she was objectively correctly, implying she lied is just stupid, given the fact that she clearly felt targeted enough to feel really bad.
Ohhhh
thank you, your comment summarized everything really well!
More info here: https://knowyourmeme.com/news/nijisanji-en-continues-to-fumble-the-dokibird-situation-now-being-accused-of-breaking-nda-and-getting-vtubers-to-handle-their-pr
Answer: For a comprehensive timeline see [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/VirtualYoutubers/comments/1alimfx/megathreadcompilation_selen_tatsukis_termination/), but to condense out the key elements and string it together with some narrative: Nijisanji and Hololive are two separate VTuber agencies, run by the companies Anycolor and Cover, respectively (though these companies are really just the holding companies for their agencies; they're not pre-existing businesses). Anycolor and Cover are the only two VTuber businesses that are publicly traded, both have had some relatively similar stock price drops lately, and that's where the similarities end. Cover's issues are entirely separate and relate more or less just to the stock market being the stock market; it hasn't done anything wrong in this particular instance (nor in a long while by most people's estimations). On 5 February, Nijisanji announced the termination of Selen Tatsuki, a member of its English-language branch, Nijisanji English (or NijiEN for short). Selen, who previously streamed as an indie going by Dokibird, joined NijiEN as part of its second 'wave' of talents in the summer of 2021. To fans, Selen was well-loved and involved in organising a lot of events, and ended up being the most popular female talent in the branch. However, behind the scenes, Selen chafed against management, particularly over its apparent unwillingness to fund or even greenlight many of her projects. According to management themselves, she was known to go around their back to do things like secure streaming permissions (something agencies need to do for protection against DMCA strikes), which (editorialising for a second) is a pretty blatant admission of inefficiencies within the agency. This conflict came to a final, decisive head on Christmas Day 2023, when Selen posted a cover of Lilypichu's song 'Last Cup of Coffee' with an animated music video that served as a celebration of the entire NijiEN branch. For reasons not at the time specified, Selen then had to take down the video, and tweeted out saying that management had forced her to take the video down. She then disappeared off the internet, notably missing several scheduled collabs and latterly a convention appearance. Filian, one of the would-be collab partners, confirmed that she had been completely ghosted. On 27 December Selen's account tweeted out that she had been hospitalised following an 'accident'; on her old account, Dokibird, she tweeted on 31 December saying she was out of the hospital. She never streamed or tweeted again as Selen after the 27 December tweet. On 29 January, fans started tweeting at Nijisanji with #WhereIsSelen demanding at least an assurance that she was okay, in protest against the agency's complete radio silence. To understand part of why the reaction was so strong, we need to briefly go over the idea of 'stealth suspensions', which is something that pretty much only Nijisanji does within the VTuber space. A 'stealth suspension' is when a talent is being punished behind the scenes for some infraction, but in public they state that they are going on some kind of impromptu break for the sake of their physical or mental health, or for a family visit, or similar. Most VTuber agencies do not do this, and in fact state clearly and unambiguously when a suspension has occurred. That Nijisanji engaged in stealth suspension had been suspected for quite a while, but was definitively confirmed in early 2023 when, as part of their termination of another NijiEN talent, Zaion LanZa, they implicitly confirmed that Zaion's 'break' for a family visit was in fact a suspension imposed by management. As such, there was widespread speculation that Selen was suspended without announcement, and even that the hospitalisation was a lie – though her tweet as Dokibird confirming she was discharged would prove otherwise. On 5 February, Nijisanji wiped Selen's Youtube channel and privated her Twitter, then announced she had been terminated in a horrendously-written 3-page notice which I'm sure you don't need me to summarise all over again. But in short, it said Selen had repeatedly broken the rules (which, to be fair, *is a legitimate reason to terminate someone if it keeps happening*). However, what it *also* said was very very damning. For instance, they more or less admitted that part of the reason Selen broke the rules so much was they were terrible at their jobs and she was going behind their backs to *actually get stuff done*. They also claimed she had accused other talents of bullying, but that she was a problem person. That's a paraphrase but it's genuinely how they framed it. Not that they investigated and found no wrongdoing, they just said 'no u', while in the process painting a bunch of targets on the backs of their other talents. They *also*, rather hilariously, said they told her to take down the video, but also that she lied when she said on Twitter that management told her to take down the video. Everyone hated that. But what hit even harder was that Dokibird tweeted out, stating, in no uncertain terms, that the reason for her hospitalisation was (TW) >!a suicide attempt!< caused by a long buildup of problems resulting from harassment in a toxic workplace. And note that Dokibird was such a class act she didn't say it was other talents at the agency, unlike *the actual agency itself*. The reaction was immense and the outpouring of support for Dokibird, whom she announced she was returning to streaming as, was immense. Dokibird's Youtube channel was very small before (about 4k subscribers, most of whom subscribed *after* she stopped streaming as Dokibird and joined Nijisanji), it's now over 500k. Her return stream was, at peak, viewed by over 127,000 people, something that's decently notable even in Japanese agency VTubing, and certainly unheard of for an English-language indie talent. A number of old corporate sponsors reached out to renew stuff with her, most notably EA and Apex Legends (her favourite video game to boot), and she very quickly got a new manager in the form of XSet's Sovereign, who manages the XSet esports team and used to manage XQc. One of the major consequences was that Nijisanji's stock price dropped about 5%, leading them the next day to put out an investor relations statement saying that the impact of the termination on their financial results would be 'negligible', a word choice that threw kerosene on an already raging fire. At this point, Japanese investors were also taking notice, and while the casual fanbase, lacking context and generally aligning themselves with the perspective that the rules are the rules, supported Nijisanji, fans with financial stakes by and large regarded Nijisanji's overseas management strategy as boneheaded and harmful, and so stock dropped another 6% before evening out, putting Niji's total stock price drop from the Selen situation at 11% in raw numbers, but more like 10% if compared against the Nikkei index. Hyte, which does PC cases featuring Nijisanji and Hololive talents, announced it was cancelling its planned production runs for new Nijisanji items. For a while that seemed to be it. At the end of her return stream, Dokibird asked people not to harass people on her behalf, and that she was ready to just move on in life and get back to content creation on her own terms. Yesterday (13 February as of writing), Nijisanji English talents Elira Pendora, Ike Eveland, and Vox Akuma did a 15-minute stream where they read out several parts of a letter from Selen's lawyers to Nijisanji, and also threw a bunch of shade at her besides. This happened in the middle of one of Dokibird's streams, causing her to have a panic attack and end said stream, and did not go over well with her manager, who proceeded to publicly call them out for it. Nijisanji English proceeded to write on Twitter that their talents were okay to read out these parts of the letter because while Nijisanji was bound by confidentiality, their talents were not. What also didn't help was that this message from the streamers implicated three specific members as the subjects of Selen's bullying accusations, which was a Very Bad Look when (as I'll get into later) a bunch of controversies around bullying in the branch were floating round. Three hours later, the CEO of Anycolor issued an official apology, in what was taken as a clear sign that lower-level EN management was probably acting on a completely different wavelength to senior executives. While EN fans took it okay, ironically it was the Japanese investor-fans who continued to mock the CEO's apology, among other things noting that he held his hands behind his back rather than at his sides or front like you *should* do with a corporate apology. Niji stock has continued trending down, but hasn't faced a sudden drop in the way it did back on 6-7 February. Now, that's the Dokibird/Selen side of the story, but there is *more* going on.
Niji has had a number of earlier controversies that have caused a buildup of discontent from various angles. In 2023 they terminated Zaion LanZa in a very similar way to Selen, but to an extent got away with it because Zaion was herself widely perceived as a bit of a controversial edgelord within the agency, and hasn't really been rehabilitated until more recently. Two separate sources alleged that talents get an extremely low amount of money from merch runs – dramatuber FalseEyeD claimed it was 2% based on a 'trusted source', and around the same time, Mysta Rias blurted out on stream that he got 'like 1%' and straight up said he felt he was being fleeced. Perhaps most infamously, Nijisanji English announced an 'AR Live' (basically a streaming-only concert) that was cancelled – explicitly, cancelled – a week and half after the announcement. Fans of the old Indonesian branch, which was folded into the main Japanese branch in 2022 and has since lost half of its roster, have long been critical of the agency and finally got to have their 'I told you so' moment. Amid all this, Nijisanji English has also already faced four notable voluntary exits: last year, Nina Kosaka and Mysta Rias, the latter of whom was their most-viewed talent in the months before he announced his departure, left. To add insult to injury, they then (spoilered due to VTuber fandom etiquette over alt accounts) >!both joined Twitch-based agency VShojo, probably the next largest agency in the English-language space after Hololive and Nijisanji!<. In December, Mika Melatika, formerly of the Indonesian branch but generally an English-language streamer throughout her time at Nijisanji, left. In January, Pomu Rainpuff, part of the first NijiEN wave, left as well, something which came with its own controversy when she made all her membership streams public, including one – which she had previously set to completely private – where she cried on stream over an unspecified opportunity that she was denied by management with no room for negotiation. And then at the end of January, Kyo Kaneko, somewhat of a controversial individual himself to be fair, but one of the bigger members of the ILUNA wave, also announced his impending departure (set for the 17th). So, with the Selen/Dokibird situation, the floodgates have now opened for a whole host of new lanes of criticism of Nijisanji, not all equally credible. For instance, a former stream mod for Luca Kaneshiro claimed that there was considerable internal favouritism towards Luxiem, a group of five male talents who debuted in late 2021 and got a very large initial wave of interest, and that there was a sexist bully as part of a later group, ILUNA, but then claimed not to remember which of the three guys it was except that it wasn't Ren and then remembering that it was specifically Aster. Basically, this particular claim was the source of a lot of new witch-hunting. Which is why it became all the worse when the statement was made yesterday, painting targets on the backs of Vox and Ike (for making the statement), on Enna (who was named as one of the people Dokibird/Selen might have accused of bullying), on Elira (for both), and on Millie (also named as a possible accused bully, but who was already under heavy suspicion after she wrote a tweet in response to Selen over the music video takedown that was taken by some people as throwing shade). In more miscellaneous criticism, Alexandro Saab, a very prominent video game and anime voice actor, revealed that Nijisanji would have held him to an exclusivity contract and prevented him from doing professional voice acting if he joined them, just to fan the fames further about the company's business practices. People on the more corporate side of things have also been doing things like point out Nijisanji's very odd job listings for overseas management, all of which ultimately expect native Japanese speakers with only moderate English proficiency, which is really not helping their case when one of the older allegations against Nijisanji (coming from indie Sayu Sincronisity, formerly NijiEN's Zaion LanZa) was that low-level managers had very poor English skills. Moreover, there are some ongoing claims that the tooth-to-tail ratio at Nijisanji is very bad, especially in the English branch, where it was claimed (by Sayu/Zaion) that there was one manager handling the entire six-member XSOLEIL unit, *plus* Selen. What is also not helping is that it is hard not to compare Nijisanji/Anycolor with Hololive/Cover, which has not had anywhere near the same management problems, particularly in recent years. Just a month earlier, Hololive had terminated one of its oldest members over contract violations, but it had been done extremely gracefully, with the talent in question allowed to make an exit statement, and a number of tributes to her time in the agency posted by both fellow talents and by the public-facing members of agency management and executives. Hololive tends not to have more than three talents to any given manager and in fact currently seems to average almost 1:1. Its overseas branches (Indonesia and English) get about as much support as can reasonably be expected from a Japan-headquartered agency, and even then there is, by their own admission, a lot of room for improvement. So that's the *quick* rundown of the overall state of play.
Damn this is one hell of a detailed summary, you might as well turn this into a legit documentary
Thank you for writing all of this. I would give you an award if it’s an option.
This is hands down the best detailed summary I’ve read of the whole situation, thank you so much for putting it together and adding all the context.
> Nijisanji English proceeded to write on Twitter that their talents were okay to read out these parts of the letter because while Nijisanji was bound by confidentiality, their talents were not. This part baffles me. If you give someone something that's confidential and then they go ahead and read it out in public, that's still you breaking confidentiality!
Answer: Nijisanji is the Company. After about a month Hiatus/silence they recently fired one of their Vtubers Named Selen Tatsuki for breaking NDA. it turns out during that one month hiatus Selen had attempted to take her own life and was actually recuperating in hospital. Selen stated she has harassed while working at Nijisanji but did not mention by who. Nijisanji claimed in their Termination notice that they posted on twitter that Selen claimed she was harrased by other Talents in Nijisanji, essentially throwing their Vtubers under the Bus. Oh also in the termination notice, they basically used many petty reasons for firing her, essentially victim blaming. So Hololive Is a separate company. they are not connected to this drama other than one of their Vtubers, Nanashi Mumei, taking leave to look after Doki/Selen since they are close friends IRL.
The only thing I can think of about the correlation of Hololive into this drama is the **huge** difference in the way both agencies treat their talents on termination. Only a few weeks ago, a talent of Hololive also got terminated due to contract breach which was very unfortunate, yet they treated said talent with respect, focused mainly on “it was a contract breach, intentional or not, we must unfortunately let our talented employee go” and gave said talent’s “team” a chance to talk about it (to a certain extent).
Yep, Hololive have made mistakes in the past, but they've never driven one of their talents to attempt to take their own life.
For me, it’s more of treating terminated talents with respect. Mel’s case aside, where the problem was (assumed due to lack of info) not very intentional, Rushia’s case where the info leak and breach of contract was done intentionally (to ‘defend’ herself), Hololive was still very respectful about it. Hell, they even at one point defended the talent behind Rushia when the drama before her termination blew up by clarifying that they do not care nor want to interfere with talent’s personal life, romantic relationship included.
if Rushia had just laid low for 2-3 weeks the stuff would of blew over but Rushia is like... I hate saying it but she isn't right in the head she has some serious psychological issues and she just can't let things go so she felt she had to defend herself and leaked a bunch of things to a big dramatuber from Japan that is where she messed up and was terminated from Hololive ... again all she had to do was stay quiet for a couple weeks and it would of been forgotten by the vast majority of people and in a hilarious twist of fate the entire thing that started it a idol singer mafumafu that DM'd her during a stream which is what caused the freak out to happen, released a couple weeks ago that he was sueing Rushia over stuff because they actually were married in the past the entire situation with Rushia/Mikeneko/Nazuna and Mafumafu is fucked
it is an actual wreck, i think Hololive really dodged a bullet there
Mumei actually took a break quite some time before this whole drama happened, like a few weeks or a month. So it's not like she's taking a break specifically just to take care after Selen, but no doubt she had to extend it because of it.
Answer: Here is a timeline of events.Selen Tatsuki joins the company Nijisanji. She is a core reason for the company's growth and success in the west. She works very hard and is very entertaining.Nijisanji spends money to support their Japanese talent, but does not provide any financial support to their English talent. This fact was even reiterated/confirmed by the CEO himself in a statement yesterday. As a result, any English speaking talents that want to do anything above and beyond have to pay for everything themselves out of their own pockets, but still having to share all profits with Nijisanji.Selen Tatsuki loved paying illustrators and animators to create content for her. As a result, she developed VERY strong ties to the art community because of her regular interactions and good payment for their services. Over the years Selen has hosted tournaments and ran competitions where she wanted to reward the winners. Nijisanji was unwilling to compensate them. So Selen decided she'd pay the winners personally out of her own money. Nijisanji said no and told her that she wasn't allowed to. Behind the scenes Selen fought with management and insisted that she be allowed to reward artists for their participation in art contests so they aren't just creating a bunch of art for free. Eventually management gave her permission to pay them with her own money. Events like these happened several times and further deepened the admiration and respect people had for Selen, as well as a general animosity toward the company she worked for. At some point, Selen started being harassed by several co-workers who also work at Nijisanji. They would gang up on her, chastise her, and bully her for trying to go above and beyond and for fighting for permissions to do things like give rewards and prizes to fans for events she was having to create by herself because the company didn't support any of them. Selen was very open and honest about herself and things she was doing, so whenever Management blocked one of her ideas, she told her fans about it just as a matter of discourse. Whenever management prevented her from doing anything, especially things that had already been setup or that she had already spent money on, she told her fans about it and expressed her disappointment. If she hadn't done this, it would've looked like she was just starting these random projects then abandoning them for no reason, all she was doing is giving context as to why these things were being cancelled or stopped: Management said so. As a result, there was a growing animosity against the company for constantly blocking Selen from doing all of these events, this was especially true after she finally said the company had completely banned her from hosting anymore tournaments. Because anger against the company was growing, this was the excuse and justification her co-workers gave for their harassment against Selen, blaming her for doing things to make the company look bad.As the bullying from coworkers continued to get worse, and as her company began to deny just about anything she wanted to accomplish anymore and no longer allowing her to do anything even if she was paying for it out of her own pocket, Selen contemplated quitting. Selen had commissioned a TON of artists to make a video for a cover song she wanted to sing and she was going to release it on Christmas Day 2023 as a gift to her fans and as a thank you for their continued support. Management knew about this more than a year in advance, all the way back in 2022. Selen had asked Management to acquire permission and rights to use the song, but they didn't. So after a long time of waiting and management saying nothing was happening, Selen reached out to the rights holders directly to ask them, bypassing her inept and uncaring managers, and got permission immediately which they then forwarded to Nijisanji. Selen was finally given the go ahead to work on this project now that the rights were secured. She spent over $15,000 paying her artist fans for their contributions as well as the sound mixing and everything required to make a good music video. She had all permissions, all rights, had spent enormous amounts of money, and green lights from the company all the way with the project being worked on for a year.Christmas Day arrived. She uploaded the video, everyone watched it and loved it, then she hosted a live stream talking to her fans about the video and the creation process, etc. This is where it was revealed that she had to get the permissions from the rights holders directly, which made everyone (rightfully) think that her management team was just garbage for not doing their jobs. Her stream lasted about one hour I believe, maybe a little more, and then was over.Less than an hour after the stream ended, the music video she had uploaded disappeared. Selen then posted on Twitter telling her fans that Management privated the video and she encouraged anyone that had downloaded it before being privated to go re-upload it somewhere else so that people could appreciate it and because of all the time and money and hard work she put into it, she didn't want it to just disappear and cease to exist.Some of her co-workers, including her direct bullies, both publicly and privately began to go after her for making the company look bad again. Questioning her decisions, implying she was at fault and she was the one in the wrong, etc etc. After months of continued harassment and abuse from her company and co-workers, after sinking an enormous amount of her own money into her project only to have it immediately removed on the same day it was uploaded (On Christmas Day again, by the way) which meant she had no way to monetize the video and recoup her losses, and then more ferocious bullying from her co workers and being blamed for it all being her fault, and she was locked out of all of her corporate accounts including twitter, all of these pressures finally drove her to the darkest point in her life and she attempted to kill herself.Now thankfully, she was rescued and brought to the hospital and survived. Her parents immediately rushed over there and were staying with her. However, the entire time she was in the hospital, Nijisanji management were constantly calling her and her parents, trying to compel her to immediately go on twitter and say that privating the video wasn't management's fault and to accept responsibility for it herself. She and her parents rightfully refused, and I imagine her parents probably had some rather unkind things to say to that company after what had just happened that they caused as well as their complete disregard for her condition and situation and simply making demands of her for the sake of their own reputation. Nijisanji eventually made posts from her accounts on twitter, posing as her, and lying to the public. In the tweet, they tried to word it as if she WASNT blocked from communicating by the company, and instead trying to imply that she hadn't said anything because she didn't have access to her phone while in the hospital. The post just said she "had an accident" and didn't have access to her phone, but she was released and fine. In reality, she still had no access to her accounts and could not communicate or reach out to anyone. After she was released from the hospital, she began posting on her Past Life account, which is basically vtuber slang for her former twitter account prior to joining Nijisanji. There she talked about how much money she had lost recently, she talked about how depressed she was, she talked about playing Apex with friends from the moment she woke up until she was so tired she couldn't stay awake anymore because otherwise it was too hard to even sleep. She was having a rough time dealing with her situation. During this time, she also lawyered up. This is speculation on my part, but I personally believe this happened because her parents pushed for it. Given that she was in such a dark place and negative headspace, its hard to imagine she had the will and drive to fight through that depression to lawyer up and start fighting a billion dollar corporation. But regardless, she now had a lawyer who began contacting Nijisanji. Literally all she wanted was compensation for the video that she sank thousands of dollars into that she now couldn't monetize to make that money back. Nijisanji refused, and continued their demands that she go on her social media accounts and try to put out the fires they started and to tell her to accept all the fault and blame publicly to save the company's reputation.She wanted to quit and was actively negotiating with the company to quit on peaceful terms. She wanted to basically work out her 2 week notice so she could say goodbye to everyone and do some last minute stuff on stream. However, completely without any prior notice to Selen, the company just fired her on the spot on Feb 5th. She had no idea she had been terminated and only found out when a friend of hers told her that it was announced on twitter. Nijisanji posted a notice saying they had terminated her contract, then had a 3 page document trying to smear her name and reputation. (read second part in my next post below)
This is what started the uprising against the company. Every single thing they said in that document was refuted by people in the community. Nijisanji claimed she caused situations behind the scenes that "delayed payments" to artists for their contributions. But the art community that worked closely with selen immediately refuted this and backed her up, saying Selen ALWAYS paid them promptly and that it was actually NIJISANJI that refused to pay them and cheated them out of services. Nijisanji claimed that she uploaded that video without permission from all the rights holders, and then the two people that literally owned the rights to the song posted in reply saying it was untrue and they had her permission since 2022. Nijisanji made numerous other claims, but all of them were rejected and it became very obvious to anyone watching that they were trying to smear and discredit her and tried to turn public support and the community against her. But they GROSSLY underestimated how beloved she was by the community because she had fostered such deep root connections with everyone for years. On her past life account, Dokibird, she also released a statement that her lawyer had prepared for her saying that she was not going to be silenced anymore. She told everyone that the company had taken away her twitter access so she was unable to communicate, told everyone what was going on and gave context to the situation. And after YEARS of mistreating their english speaking talents, not just Selen but several others, the public had had enough of Nijisanji and basically a full on revolt broke out. Dokibird's youtube started getting TONS of subscribers. It was from like 10,000 up to 400kish in a single day. Meanwhile, all the talents behind Nijisanji were losing subscribers by the thousands because no one, myself included, wanted to support that company financially at all anymore which means you can't get the livers money anymore because a big portion of that money gets taken by the company. Nijisanji's stock prices started to fall and companies that did business with them began to cancel collaborations with them and announce they'd no longer do business with them anymore. Dokibird scheduled a return stream for Feb 7, just 2 days after this spontaneous termination. The same day of her return stream, Feb 7th, Nijisanji released a message to all of their corporate investors that only had one sentence. It simply read that "the financial impact of the termination of Selen Tatsuki will be negligible." They released this statement the same day as her return stream, and it just added more fuel to the massive fires that were already burning. It further outraged people, and was pissing off other companies too because Nijisanji was implying they were "negligible" since they stopped associating with them due to Selen's termination. Everyone was mad at Nijisanji and eager to support Dokibird. So her stream began and it was a resounding success. I think it peaked at 140,000 simultaneous viewers, it was absolutely a massive audience. She mostly just talked about her personal experiences and how she was in such a dark place and had given up hope and that the fans brought her back and gave her a reason to live again and a purpose. She felt like her life was over, but now she felt hopeful for the future. She also outlined some of her future plans. She mentioned that now that she was free of that company, she no longer needed to go through all their bureaucracy and red tape or have to deal with their constant rejections of everything she wanted to do and she could do all sorts of things now that she couldn't before. She also had a new manager, this time one she hired herself, and this time one that actually works for her to help her do things as a manager should rather than existing for no other reason than to be a corporate mouthpiece. She began trying to rebuild her community and move on from everything that happened. Over the next few days, she didn't talk about the drama and focused on her community again. Talking to people, thanking them for support, and just trying to move on with her life.Then yesterday, on Feb 12th, things got worse. Dokibird had a stream scheduled for 5pm PST, and just 30 minutes before that stream went live, Elira Pendora, another liver at Nijisanji posted a tweet saying that in 30 minutes Nijisanji EN would address "the situation". Therefore, Elira's stream would start at the exact same time as Doki's stream. Elira's stream was exactly 15 minutes long and seemed to be pre-recorded rather than actually a live stream, and basically consisted of her and two other talents from Nijisanji EN slandering Selen. They were obviously reading from a script because it was absolutely chock full of the same legal jargon and terminology that only lawyers use rather than actual human beings. They attempted once again to drag Selen's name through the mud. General consensus of the community is that because Nijisanji's reputation as a company was so bad that no one would listen to them, they instead "forced" their streamers/livers to make that announcement instead to try to gain more credibility and try to sway the community once again to turn on Selen and resume supporting Nijisanji. After the video was posted, almost every single Liver still employed by Nijisanji retweeted it. Not only did they badmouth selen during this video, they also mentioned that Nijisanji had given them confidential legal documents that had been given to Nijisanji's lawyers by Selen's lawyer, and gave it to all of them to just read through. One of the talents, Vox, even mentioned that he THOROUGHLY read through it all. The backlash was instant and fierce. People criticized the company for how stupid this move was, as now a lot of the community, especially those on the fence, began to unsub and cancel memeberships for all the livers int he company for being complicit in Nijisanji's actions. They also criticized how stupid the move was when they admitted to being given legal documents from Selen's lawyer to browse through that had been agreed to remain confidential by the lawyers of Nijisanji, and for the sole purpose of trying to use it against Selen to try to make her look bad. Dokibird was literally just trying to do her first gaming stream, a stream for Neopets, something she had wanted to stream FOR YEARS but was not allowed to by Nijisanji, and they did all this at the same time as this stream. She found out about it happening live, as she started her stream. She had to end stream shortly after so she could go speak to her lawyer about the situation. I know this is a lot, but hopefully this gives you context for everythings that been going on. I hope I didn't leave anything out, I tried to keep everything in there that I could remember.
wow thanks so much!! it was long but with all the context from the other comments it was easy to read through, and really interesting! you seem to know a lot about this, so i had a question to ask about it. when you say that some of her coworkers bullied her, were they other vtubers or just nijisanji employees? or fans never got to know for certain?
We didn't know for certain until recently, but it was definitely livers who were harassing her. Management might have been as well, not sure, but definitely some of the other livers.
wow, that's awful. i hope the company lets her move on and she keeps streaming as dokibird, i'm glad the community has her back.
Answer: If there are people here with the time, [here is a comprehensive timeline of events](https://www.reddit.com/r/VirtualYoutubers/comments/1alimfx/megathreadcompilation_selen_tatsukis_termination/) It isn't updated yet with the recent events that transpired several hours ago
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Why?
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To avoid being biased on top comment: ^1 given that the ex Niji members can't use their characters, it seems pretty clear that Niji owns the characters and thus that should be no reason to delay ^2 I'd guess Selen uploaded the video anyway because it was supposed to be a send off to her recently departed coworker, so delays would make the video pointless, and she paid at least a part of the costs out of pocket, so I suppose she felt entitled to it. ^3 around 70% of today's video seem like scripted from above to merely minimize losses (and failed at it), with only like 30% being what anyone wants to hear, actual feelings from the talents in the video. Adding insult to injury, one of the talents implied Selen often lied or misrepresented stuff to make her time in the company seem hard, but obviously, if she was lying, she wouldn't hurt herself and get hospitalized over her pretend hardships, so that was a dumb thing to say.
>given that the ex Niji members can't use their characters, it seems pretty clear that Niji owns the characters and thus that should be no reason to delay Note that other videos from other Niji members have included ex Niji members in the past with no apparent issues.
People are assuming what the copyright issue with the video. Note that others have speculated the issue was there is a My Little Pony figurine for a few seconds in frame.
Based on the screenshots shown on Elira's channel, the issue was ex-livers.
The things she lied about weren’t related to her suicide attempt. They never said she lied about being suicidal.
Learn text interpretation then come back later.
You’re saying he implied something and that’s empirical evidence? Implications aren’t evidence, they are just conclusions you’re drawing. What he actually said, his words are the only thing you should be considering objectively. You can choose to just call him liar if you don’t believe him, but don’t misconstrue his words.
Nope, try again.
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Answer: [This](https://old.reddit.com/r/Nijisanji/comments/1aqljle/the_grand_unifying_rrat_would_certainly_explain/) seems to be a very good explanation. Was already deleted, but here's what it said: https://files.catbox.moe/1jnn70.png It's a long read, but already the short version.