Nijisanji is proving the power of male VTubers

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Conor Evans
March 23, 2022
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Male VTubers. They’re something I definitely wasn’t too familiar with when I was getting into this wonderful world. Don’t get me wrong, I obviously knew that male VTubers existed, but I almost never watched them, and if I’m completely honest I probably couldn’t have named any of them before I started to get into Nijisanji.

This brings me to the main topic that I want to talk about today: the way that Nijisanji is bringing out the best of male VTubers.

Nijisanji EN

Nijisanji was a little bit slower than its main rival Hololive when it came to first launching their branch of English-speaking VTubers, but my God, they were worth the wait. The first generation that came out of Nijisanji was LazuLight, a group I have spoken about numerous times here on Rice Digital, and they are three of my absolute favourite VTubers, full stop. They brought with them this feeling of freedom within the agency that I hadn’t really felt with some of the Hololive girls — it really felt like they were just allowed to do whatever they wanted, and that was fine.

Soon after came the following waves of Nijisanji EN, and before we knew it we were awaiting the debut of the first wave of male VTubers under the Nijisanji EN banner. This wasn’t really a huge surprise because we know just how big some of the boys are in the wider scope of Nijisanji — however, it still carried a little bit of uncertainty with it.

With female VTubers, there is almost a guarantee of at least some success, since both guys and girls love cute girls. When it comes to the guys though, you just need to look at initiatives like Cover’s Holostars, and you can see that although they are starting to see some of the fruits of their labour, their growth has been much slower than their female counterparts.

I remember my thoughts at the time of Nijisanji EN’s first male VTubers’ debut was something along the lines of “oh that’s interesting, but I probably won’t watch them a lot” — and now here I am watching Shu Yamino just after listening to Vox Akuma do some ASMR.

Njisanji’s first wave of male VTubers was a group called Luxiem and they consist of five members — Mysta Rias, Vox Akuma, Ike Eveland, Shu Yamino, and Luca Kaneshiro. All of them have really distinct looks and honestly, all of them bring a lot to the table, each of them offering different specialities as well. Vox is your typical ikemen-type with a nice voice, Mysta is the inevitable bullying victim (all in good fun, of course), Luca is a complete memer, Shu is smart and funny, and Ike is really sweet but also quite the funny guy.

Each of them had something genuinely interesting about them, and while I didn’t really stick around for each member’s individual debut streams, I almost always have a Nijisanji EN member’s stream open during my day, and these days the boys are just as likely as the girls to be one of the ones I have open. They have really made their mark on not only Nijisanji, but the whole male VTuber landscape — they are proving to others that it can be done successfully.

The secret to their success

I’ve spoken about the overwhelming love that some of the Nijisanji JP boys are already receiving and of course, it goes without saying that the boys themselves are all incredibly talented and hardworking individuals who totally belong in Nijisanji. Each of them has something that they’re good at, and they bounce off one another really well. This is something that has been extremely consistent among all of the waves of Nijisanji EN — the members of each wave have excellent chemistry with one another.

Another thing that I think massively contributes to the success of the Nijisanji boys is that they have total freedom with regard to collaborating with the female members. In Hololive, for example, it’s very rare to see any of the female members of JP, EN, or ID collaborating with any members of the opposite sex. I feel as though this hinders their growth sometimes and gives this weird feeling that even though they are a part of the same agency, they have to operate completely separately.

Nijisanji, meanwhile, sees its male members collaborating with people like the girls from LazuLight or Nina from Ethyria, who are both experienced VTubers at this point and generally very extroverted, open, and easy to talk to people. I imagine all of the Nijisanji boys really appreciate and massively value the opportunities to collaborate with their seniors. And we’ve even seen them collaborating with people from outside Nijisanji, too, such as the VShojo girls.

With the recently debuted second wave of Nijisanji boys all doing well and being equally as interesting and talented as the first generation, I am really looking forward to the future that Nijisanji EN has in store for us. Who are your favourite Nijisanji EN VTubers so far?

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