(for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)
Good morning squares and factorials, welcome to Day 175 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
Tuesday is an important milestone day when it comes to writing these pieces, which makes it a shame that I have missed so many recently as part of my schedule slippage. We have the tradition of me making every Tuesday topic talking about something in the VTuber space, but the day also helps me keep track of how many weeks I have been doing the Redundancy Review, and by extension, making sure my day counter stays consistent.
When it comes to writing a Tuesday piece, I will take the day and divide it by seven. Getting a whole number back means I am still consistent in my day tracking, and lets me know what week I am on.
It is week twenty-five, if you are curious. Twenty-five weeks since I first got made redundant, with so much learnt about myself along the way, and yet… I still feel immature within the world as a whole.
My birthday is coming up next week, and I will be twenty-eight years old, which coincidentally is also a multiple of seven, and my birthday is on Tuesday, which means it will be on a multiple of seven day for the review… okay I am getting tangential here, need to get back on track.
Twenty-eight is a young age, all things considered, but I feel an immense amount of pressure from within my own mind to be beyond my own capabilities. For all intents and purposes, I have made an extraordinarily successful life for myself and my partner for people within our Gen Z age group, even through all the uncertainty and instability that my redundancy brought, we still had a very good lifestyle.
I anticipate needing to do some amount of lifestyle trimming depending on the outcome of this contract and how easily I can come into new work after the contract ends. It will take a while for me to reach a point where I feel “stable” in terms of work again, and there is a real possibility that I will be in what I consider to be “unstable” work for a while yet.
In the meantime though, I shall keep carrying on as I do, rambling about the nature of life as I see it and, when I actually make a post on a Tuesday, VTubers.
Given the news this morning though, I feel I have to try highlight the work and career of Amane Kanata, a talent from Hololive Japan Fourth Generation who today announced they would be graduating at the end of December.
This might be a little difficult, because I admittedly am not massively in tune to what work they have done outside of the few appearances I know off the top of my head, but I will sure try.
First off, six years. Six years spent as a Hololive idol, working on streaming, original albums, and solo concerts. That is an impressive amount of time to spend in any career, let alone one that puts so much pressure on the talent to perform on a regular basis, so that level of dedication has to be respected.
She listed her reasons for graduation in a document, the translated version of which I will link here (Twitter link) for full context, but it seems like she was taking on too many responsibilities above her position which led to her falling behind on her actual streamer activities, all of which took a toll on her health – all the more worrying considering she suffers from Meniere’s Disease, a very debilitating condition that causes vertigo, tinnitus, and fluctuating hearing loss.
From the small bits I have seen of Kanata, she is an incredibly talented singer, being able to hold notes for extreme amounts of time whilst having complete control over her voice. Additionally, there was an absolutely massive outpouring of love on Twitter from other Holomems, finding out about her decision to graduate at the same time as the greater fanbase.
People sharing good memories, saying how supportive she was of their activities, and saying that when things calm down, they should share good food together. It is the mark of a good colleague that everyone feels rough when you announce your departure.
Though, it definitely highlights the rough nature of corporate VTubing in a way. Kanata taking on way more responsibility than her position dictated should not have happened, and suggests a lot of potential management issues behind the scenes that we as fans do not know about – something that has been speculated for a long time considering how often “disagreements with management” were cited as reasons for graduation.
Any corporate entity is likely to have issues with management, but when the brand is built on the personas of these idols, taking time away from them which could be spent on brand building activities to instead fix problems above their station does not bode well, so hopefully after a rough year of multiple graduations for Hololive, the corporate structure going forward favours talents more and enables them to perform at their best without bureaucracy holding them back.
For now, I wish Amane Kanata the best in whatever she does next. She explicitly stated she does not intend to reincarnate or return as a VTuber, preferring instead to be a private individual once more – which I can relate to.
That covers everything for today, thank you for reading this edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope your week is going well, and that you have positive things on the horizon.
Rosalia Rambles 
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