Nijisanji EN’s OBSYDIA celebrates the 6 month milestone

While never quite attaining the dizzy heights of Hololive English in terms of raw subscriber and viewer counts, Nijisanji’s English branch has been doing extraordinarily well in terms of developing a strong, loyal and thoroughly engaged community. And a big part of that is the wide range of talent on display through its various groups LazuLight, Ethyria, Luxiem — and, of course, OBSYDIA.

OBSYDIA was the second group of English-speaking VTubers to debut from Nijisanji’s English branch, and intended to act as something of a “mirror image” to initial wave LazuLight. Solar sky dragon Elira Pendora met her match in her lunar counterpart Selen Tatsuki; forest fairy Pomu Rainpuff was complemented by rose maiden Rosemi Lovelock; and everyone’s favourite horny feesh Finana Ryugu is a delightful contrast with the thoroughly wholesome frost penguin Petra Gurin.

Over time, each of the girls have established their own audience, style and distinctive way of doing things — and aside from their contrasting character designs and concepts, have naturally fallen into complementary roles to their senpai, too. Selen is an incredibly skilled gamer in contrast to Elira’s endearing muddling along in whatever she feels like playing that day; Rosemi is blissfully innocent (and endearingly dim at times) compared to Pomu’s world-weariness; and Petra contrasts with Finana to such a degree that she’s one of the few Nijisanji talents who has specifically requested not to have NSFW fanart drawn of her — as is her perfectly understandable right, I should probably say.

It’s a dynamic that works extremely well, allowing each member to stand on their own and develop their own specific dedicated audience, while at the same time allowing those who have a more general interest in VTubers or Nijisanji to always feel welcome, regardless of which streams or VODs they might decide to drop in on.

Let’s have a closer look at what each of the OBSYDIA members have been up to since their debut, then!

Petra Gurin

Petra has really come into her own since her debut. While initially appearing to be a calm, quiet sort of girl, certain collaborators tend to bring out a rather more sassy and blunt side of her. In recent weeks, her work alongside the chaotic Mysta Rias of Luxiem has been especially entertaining — particularly when during one collaboration Mysta was attempting to name all the members of OBSYDIA and seemingly forgot that Petra was one of them!

Petra comes across as someone who it’s easy to bully, to such a degree that she has reassured her audience on numerous occasions that she’s perfectly used to playing the underdog role in friendship groups. She makes it abundantly clear that she’s more than capable of giving as good as she gets, though, particularly when with someone like Mysta who can push her buttons in just the right way.

Petra is a talented artist, and is responsible for all of OBSYDIA’s stream overlays, as well as the one that Mysta Rias uses; despite everything, the two appear to be good friends, with Mysta often joking about his awkward first messages to Petra on the Nijisanji chat servers.

Petra’s most popular video to date is her cover of phony by Tsumiki (seen above). Other popular videos include her debut stream — her “visual novel”-style introduction remains a big hit with fans — and her 9-hour birthday party from December of 2021. Regardless of when you check in on her, you can rely on having a fun and comfy time with Petra — and plenty of laughs.

Selen Tatsuki

Selen Tatsuki was the most obviously at ease with an audience when she first debuted for OBSYDIA — and her enormously infectious laugh has become the stuff of legends.

Her confidence is actually kind of interesting when you bear in mind some of the things she admitted about her pre-Nijisanji life: she was concerned that her lack of skills in things like video editing would preclude her from ever being able to be part of the group, and indeed her application to Nijisanji was little more than a short Windows Movie Maker project and a brief written statement. “Even if you have no confidence,” she says, “look at me, I’m a dumbass and I’m here.”

One thing you can’t doubt Selen on is her gaming skill. Prior to joining Nijisanji, she was a Top 500 Predator in Apex Legends, which explains why that game forms such a major part of her overall streaming schedule.

It’s not just about showing off, though; she uses Apex as a means of collaborating with others both within and without Nijisanji; her guests are typically either well-known Apex players in their own right, or VTubers who are known to enjoy the game. To that end, she’s collaborated with people like Zentreya and Froot from VShojo as well as Apex pros such as RPR.

Selen is a VTuber who has great respect for gaming in general; she told her audience about how she used to watch her father play games when she was younger, and indeed one of her earliest streams was Onimusha in homage to this well-spent youth. Over the course of the last six months, she’s incorporated a variety of older games into her streaming programme as well as more recent trending titles — she’s played things like F.E.A.R, Dead Space, Alice: Madness Returns as well as some highly entertaining attempts to educate her less well-“read” colleagues on classics like Metal Slug.

Selen’s most popular video by far is her 10-hour Phasmophobia marathon (above), during which she played 20 games with a variety of her Nijisanji colleagues, and declared it the first and last time she would ever play Phasmophobia. Her birthday stream from the end of November was also immensely popular, featuring a lot of messages from all over the world, showing quite how much this toxic gamer dragon is loved by everyone whose path she crosses.

Rosemi Lovelock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kxxUWQeOjY

Rosemi — or Rosemi-sama as she prefers to be addressed — is a delightful study in contrasts. While attempting to play the role of ohohohoing ojou-sama to the best of her ability — and often succeeding quite convincingly — she frequently demonstrates herself to be endearingly innocent and naive. This latter aspect has become so pronounced over the last six months that both her audience and her fellow Nijisanji members do their best to try and protect her from anything inappropriate — particularly when Finana is around.

One of Rosemi’s most endearing traits is her willingness to laugh at herself. She’ll often tell stories about going out in the real world and making an idiot of herself in some way; one suspects that while in some cases these situations would have been mortifying to experience first-hand, being able to chuckle about them with a supportive audience after the fact helps reinforce how ridiculous and silly they were.

Rosemi’s also done a great job at developing her ASMR skills over the course of the last six months, too; her ASMR streams are enormously relaxing, highly varied and often quite amusing, too — particularly when she slips into “spoiled princess” mode before remembering what she’s actually supposed to be doing.

One thing Rosemi is absolutely completely and utterly open about is her fetish for tights. She explained to her audience that she often makes a point of wearing tights “even when it’s a billion degrees outside”, and this has caused her to strike up a friendship and collaboration with prolific tights-centric artist Pupi, who has contributed numerous pieces of thumbnail and stream schedule art to his beloved Rosemi-sama.

Rosemi’s most popular video to date is her saying “ZA WARUDO”. Her most popular full-length video is one of her ASMR streams, which is entirely understandable — give it a try if you’ve been having trouble sleeping, or just want to hear Rosemi-sama whispering things right in your lugholes.

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It’s clear OBSYDIA is here to stay, then; all three of its members are clearly having a great time doing what they do — and their audience are in this for the long haul then. We’ll be celebrating their one-year anniversary on YouTube before we know it — and who knows where we’ll go from there!

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