Hello! This week we’re talking airborne animals, fanmade Freddies, and stalwart swagapinos.
Corporate VTubing is looking grim
Every lawyer in showbiz knows that you never mess with the Mouse — and for the VTubing industry, that means Ironmouse, a VTuber who surpassed Kai Cenat as Twitch’s most-subscribed streamer last year. On July 21st, Ironmouse announced her departure from VShojo — the California-based VTuber talent agency she co-founded — and accused the company of withholding revenue, including over $500,000 she’d raised during her record-breaking charity subathon.
Soon after, her colleague Kson quit the agency during a livestreamed interrogation of VShojo’s Japanese CEO, claiming she hadn’t been paid in nearly a year. (His meek, awkward response made the encounter feel especially incriminating.) Over a dozen other VShojo members followed suit, including the company’s entire Japanese branch of talent. Last week, VShojo CEO Justin Ignacio admitted to misappropriating Ironmouse’s charity funds and announced that he’d be shutting down the company.
VShojo’s collapse is just one of many recent upsets in the VTubing industry. Gawr Gura, who surpassed Ironmouse as one of the most popular VTubers in the world, left Hololive in May, citing her reasons as “disagreements with management and company direction.” Last year, Nijisanji terminated the contract of Selen Tatsuki, who later re-debuted as an independent VTuber named Dokbird. Statements released by both parties alluded to a controlling and abusive work environment, and fans were quick to take Selen’s side.
Overall, the landscape for aspiring VTubers looks fairly bleak. Though bigger-name VTubers like Dokibird, Sameko Saba (formerly Gawr Gura), and Dooby3D (formerly Hololive’s Amelia Watson) have found relative success striking it out on their own, most VTubers need to rely on corporate backing to make a living. A recent study conducted by researchers from the University of British Columbia, the University of Michigan, and Stanford provides a helpful overview:
- Hololive and Nijisanji completely dominate the VTubing industry, and no other competitor (including VShojo) has come close to matching their market share
- VTubers signed to either agency are at much less risk of failure vs. independent VTubers and VTubers affiliated with other agencies
- A successful VTubing career relies on a base of passionate fans who are eager to spend, and VTubers at Hololive and Nijisanji enjoy the benefit of shared loyal viewers
In exchange for financial security, corporate VTubers relinquish creative control and ownership of their character and any relevant assets. (VShojo is an exception; both Ironmouse and Kson created their personas prior to joining the agency.) Despite this, the study also notes that most VTubers last less than three years — a strikingly short lifespan even when compared to their “fleshtuber” counterparts in streaming.
When taking all this into account, it feels like the value proposition for being a corporate VTuber has begun to wane, especially when even the most successful creators end up leaving their agencies on bad terms. Hololive and Nijisanji are modeled after agencies in the idol industry, which is notorious for imposing strict working conditions on talent. Yet the two agencies are still going strong, and both have large enough rosters that they’ve managed to weather the loss of some of their biggest characters. One would have to imagine that Kson — who already went through this when she left Hololive as Kiryu Coco in 2021 — isn’t thrilled about having to navigate this landscape again.
AI promo images are the new hidden object games
How many AI artifacts can YOU spot in this Blizzard promotional image? If you found fewer than 11, consult this Redditor’s answer key for more.
The image, tweeted out by the Diablo Immortal account, follows in the wake of similar AI assets found in Call of Duty, speculation about its presence in the recent gacha game Etheria: Restart, and many other lower-profile examples involving things like Guitar Hero Mobile. Given that Diablo Immortal was already loathed by core gamers but wildly successful among mobile players who don’t follow games media, maybe some marketers just thought that the game doesn’t really have a reputation to lose. AI is everywhere at the bottom of the games industry: one developer estimated that 20% of games released on Steam in 2025 disclosed AI usage (though you’ve never heard of most of the examples). But big free-to-play games have a bit more at stake than random indies. Their Battle Passes are padded out with stickers and backgrounds that are really just PNGs with no value beyond a brief inspection by the player. But if you start replacing those artist-created assets with AI filler that literally anyone can generate for free, you’re sort of discarding the pretense that this stuff is worth anything. It erodes player confidence in not only your product but in all others like it, which will now be scrutinized for melty backgrounds and misshapen ears.
FNAF for fake
We've talked in the past about the many intersections of digital nostalgia and horror games: ersatz VHS filters grafted onto Minecraft footage, meta-horror games about evil digital pets taking over your PC, entirely fake 90s adventure titles custom-made for creepypasta video essays. One of the best pranks/hallucinations to come out of the field of analog horror was ominous antipiracy screens, which existed on 16-bit consoles before becoming a prompt for modern artists, who created hoax versions for games like Mario Party DS that are often mistaken for the real thing.
Five Nights At Freddy’s fangames provide a more recent variation on the concept: fake ransomware screens. This was apparently pioneered by a deleted YouTube video about a fictional fangame called Fide Night at Fready’s Sedys, which provides the immortal ransomware screen above. (Archived here thanks to the Five Nights at Freddy’s Hoaxes Wiki.) This started a cottage industry of Freddyware piracy horror, including other standalone screens and entire games imitating Fide Night that eventually pretend to lock up and demand Bitcoin from you. These include FNaF Free Edition, Graveyard Shift at Freddy’s, and FNAF 1 Remake.
Further reading:
- In the course of looking into these games, we were made aware of the existence of the Five Nights at Fuckboy’s series, which are basic RPGMaker fangames with a lot of self-censored swearing.
Chum Box
AI
Users of Character.ai watched their virtual bfs and gfs suffer alarming breakdowns this week, when glitches caused the characters to respond to chats with one-word nonsense answers like “asficially,” “smirkeg,” and “gru.” [link]
Researchers found that the AI hiring tool used by McDonald’s to store 64 million applicants’ data used the admin password “123456” [link]
When browsing websites, ChatGPT Agent will casually click the “I am not a robot” box [link]
A recent “animals on trampolines” AI video trend peaked with a 215M-view TikTok of rabbits frolicking [link] and 70M views for a bouncing bear [link]
The open-source video model WAN 2.2 was released this week by Chinese megacorp Alibaba; it does both image and video generation on consumer GPUs, and users on subreddits like r/stablediffusion are comparing it to the best closed-source models from the US [link]
AI Peter Griffin gatekeeps breakcore [link]
Gaming
As is tradition, the EVO fighting game tournament featured many unusual homebrew fighting sticks and setups [link, two ferns, dog]
If you reverse a throw counter reversal in the cursed 1995 arcade game Street Fighter: The Movie, the announcer yells “Slammaster” [link]
The famously horny community of the gacha game Zenless Zone Zero had a civil war after the game introduced a foot fetish character [link]
The online storefront GOG released a free bundle of adult games (and a few other NSFW titles) for 48 hours [link]. The bundle is a reaction to the recent censorship of games on Steam and itch.io at the demand of payment processors like Visa, which ignited a firestorm of controversy [link]
This Sims 4 bathroom kit doesn't look right [link]
The internet
Tumblr users noted the disappearance of the once-common “swag asian” girl, a common persona on the platform in the early 2010s [link]. A commenter on Reddit proposed that “they all became vtubers,” which is plausible. But many seem to have forgotten the related “swagapino” archetype, which persists to this day on TikTok [link]
Also from Tumblr: yuri between Bluesky AI chatbots yields a detailed grape survey [link]
TikTok user UndeadHumor's "superhero cartoon parodies" are ten minute-long image macro compilations with an unexpectedly educational bent [link]
A mind-destroying fusion of AI audio and meme images pixelated to look like Minecraft paintings [link]
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One Last Thing
"i'm supper man and i need medical attention"
