Let’s meet Ethyria, Nijisanji’s new VTuber group

After officially launching in English-speaking territories less than half a year ago, Nijisanji’s English branch appears to be going from strength to strength. At the time of writing, they’ve just launched their third group of English VTubers, known collectively as Ethyria — and these four new girls seem to have gotten off to a solid start both on social media and YouTube.

Ethyria consists of four members, known as Reimu Endou, Nina Kosaka, Millie Parfait and Enna Alouette. They join Selen Tatsuki, Rosemi Lovelock and Petra Gurin from Obsydia, who debuted in July of 2021, and Pomu Rainpuff, Elira Pendora and Finana Ryugu from Lazulight, who launched Nijisanji EN back in May of 2021.

So, let’s see what these new additions to the crowded VTuber space have to offer us, the audience, then, shall we?

Enna Alouette

Enna Alouette describes herself as “Nijisanji EN’s bird of heaven”, and according to her intro video, is “obliged to mend the hearts of the many” in order to “find true tranquility within”. She’s actually from Hell, but is now cleansing her sins and impurities in Heaven. As you do.

It appears that she’s quite literally a songbird; her intro video during Ethyria’s debut weekend was followed by both a theme song performed by her (and the indication that it is “coming soon” — it seems this will be a full single at some point) and a live vocal performance. She’s got a hell of a set of pipes on her — and there’s a delightful contrast between her “cutesy” voice she uses to speak and her powerful singing voice, though she makes absolutely no secret of the fact she’s putting the former on.

She seemed immediately at ease with the audience, confidently explaining the basics of her lore and who she is before immediately crediting the people who had helped bring her lore project to life. It seems she played an active role in the development of the song alongside music producer Jairus Cambe, visual artist and character designer Xiao and animator Phin.

Her overall character design is the work of KT, also known as gahara411. KT’s work is vibrant and exuberant, with strong moe tendencies, bursts of colour and elaborate details; all of these elements can be clearly seen in Enna’s design.

Her birthday is February the 20th, which she casually mentioned “just happens to be National Handcuff Day”, and she speaks “English, Mandarin, Japanese and gibberish”. She’s a fan of Nijisanji (obviously), traditional tea, music, anime and manga, crime documentaries, space, psychology and pondering existence; meanwhile, her dislikes include heights, birds, thunder, swimming, transport, loud noises and germs. Being turned into a bird angel was supposed to be some sort of ironic divine punishment for her past misdeeds.

She admits that she’s not that much of a gamer, but is excited to play some things because that means “everything will always be super-new to me”. She’s invested over 800 hours in Animal Crossing and likes Tetris a lot; she’s also interested in playing the Chilla’s Art games, which means she’ll get along just fine with pretty much every other VTuber out there.

Her hobbies include singing, reading, cooking and eating, insulting, voice acting, teasing and pranking. Her personality really came across in her debut — her love of voice acting is clear from the versatility of her vocal delivery and how confident she seems, and I suspect poor old Chat is going to take a fair share of abuse from her as time goes on… and they’re going to love every second of it, the perverts.

Millie Parfait

Millie’s a witch! She describes her sole purpose as “consuming all the food on earth and living a comfortable life while having fun”. Much like Enna, her debut stream kicked off with an anime-style intro song and animation that gave us a bit of information about her lore; this time around it was a pretty spectacularly emotional affair that certainly added some drama to the occasion. It seems she was set to be burned as a witch, but managed to survive by making a pact with a black cat called Lucie who is definitely not a devil, obviously.

This dramatic opening was followed by a more light-hearted animation and musical number that introduced how she met Enna in the depths of Hell. Enna was eating something described only as “Pomu Leaf” — but she then introduced Millie to the magic of parfait. Millie, thoroughly enraptured by the sweet dessert, cast a spell to take herself to Earth, only to discover that her magic doesn’t work here and that she’s trapped, broke, homeless and dead inside. Hashtag relatable.

Millie’s design is the work of Tometa_QP, and her intro video was put together by Xiao, Riguruma and Furai_sen. She has an attack value of 99, a defence of 1, 50 dexterity and minus 3 intelligence. Her weaknesses are the water, light and aubergine elements.

Millie’s plans for the future include playing Dungeons and Dragons with everyone else in Nijisanji EN, along with collaborative musical projects with other people from Nijisanji. She’s also interested in cooking and mukbang streams, ASMR videos and a nonstop JoJo watchalong with viewers. Her long-term goals include having her own house (supposedly she lives in Elira’s basement right now), releasing her own album and managing to not get cancelled. I think we can all relate.

Games-wise, she’s into card games, tabletop games and Final Fantasy XIV, as well as gacha titles, RPGs and retro games — hopefully we’ll see some more Selen-style retro streams from Millie. She has pretty broad musical and anime tastes, too, so things certainly shouldn’t be boring when she’s around!

Like Enna, Millie comes across as a very confident, enthusiastic performer — and I suspect we’ll see some good chemistry between the pair of them as they get established and start hosting collaborations with one another and the other Nijisanji EN girls.

Nina Kosaka

Nina immediately endeared herself to everyone on social media well before her actual debut stream on YouTube by strongly playing up her “mommy” appeal, honey. And as such when her stream actually started with nothing more than her yawning and grunting a few times rather than a bombastic intro video, everyone lapped it right up, honey.

Yes, following hot on the trail of Ouro Kronii’s obvious appeal to a certain demographic, now Nijisanji also has their own deep-voiced mature lovely to call their own. She’s no Kronii clone, however; she’s somewhat less cynical and sarcastic than our favourite Warden of Time, though she did seem rather surprised at the prospect of actually having to work for a living.

Nina’s designer is So-Bin, an artist with a distinct and very appealing painterly style. Her design features strong influences from traditional Japanese imagery; she’s represented as a nine-tailed fox, and is wearing traditional Japanese garb.

Nina explains that her two weaknesses are ikemen and cute anime girls. She is concerned that working alongside such an army of cute girls in the rest of Nijisanji will allow them to have too much power over her — but one suspects that she doesn’t really have much of a problem with this. One also suspects that she’s capable of giving as good as she gets — in her words “this ol’ fox may not be able to learn new tricks, but my ol’ tricks, I got them good.”

Her particular dislikes include working hard, cold rain, being ignored and getting scared. She claims not to dislike many things because she “loves things”. Certainly a nice change from today’s default position of hating everything, for sure. She’s a particular fan of classic anime, including titles like Lucky Star, Gintama, Hellsing, Toradora, Mushi-shi and Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Nina’s definitely got a distinct appeal about her; her obviously more “mature” vibe has a pleasantly warm and comfy feeling, but it’s also clear that she absolutely knows how to have fun. She’s particularly looking forward to embarrassing her genmates in various ways, so it will be exciting to see what she gets up to come the inevitable collabs.

Reimu Endou

Finally, we have Reimu Endou, who is a ghost. She was another regular sight on social media prior to the actual debut streams — her distinctive hat found itself transplanted onto a variety of other VTubers around Twitter, and Pomu Rainpuff put out a series of absolutely horrifying artistic interpretations of what said hat did to people.

Reimu’s stream was another that opened with a song — it seems like Ethyria as a whole has a lot of musical talent going on between all of them, so it will be exciting to see how they both get on as individuals and as a group.

Interestingly, Reimu was the only member of the group to not credit her “mama” directly; this appears to have been a deliberate choice for one reason or another, since she did credit those who helped her with elements such as her stream overlay, graphics and animations, and also revealed her character reference sheet which shows all the details of her very elaborate costume.

As you might expect from a ghost, Reimu likes horror games, horror movies and horror in general. She also likes singing, learning new languages, cooking, cute fashion and plushies. She dislikes spicy things, sports (except swimming), kanji (though she does note that the kanji which make up her name have a special meaning) and tall cabinets.

We can doubtless expect some horror games on her streams, since she cites titles like Amnesia, Resident Evil and Silent Hill as some of her favourite games, but she’s also fond of strategy games such as Age of Empires, and indie games. She also has something of a weakness for The Sims 4 “when she’s too lazy to think”. She’s also keen to get better at shooters and become a “sweaty gamer” — I suspect Selen will be able to help with that side of things.

Once again, Reimu is a performer who seems very much at ease appearing on “camera” and she’s doubtless going to be a lot of fun to watch in the coming weeks and months.

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And that wraps things up for the new generation of Nijisanji. There’s a lot to love here — and collectively, the Nijisanji EN girls are some of the most entertaining VTubers on YouTube. One gets the distinct impression that they’re a little less “restricted” on what they’re allowed to do than some of Hololive’s members — though they’re still beholden to the whims of management and publishers on whether or not they’re allowed to stream certain games.

Doubtless we’re going to see great things from these new girls in the near future — so get in there now and you can say you were there at the very beginning!

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