[0:00]VTubing is not friendly for male content creators. For the longest time the exception is the East because VTubing there is a bit more mainstream in the greater Otaku culture. In the West, not so much. The industry here is overwhelmingly female dominated. Most of the relevant audiences are other men who just want to see cute girls doing cute things. Most men were relegated to peasant jobs like editors, clippers, reactionaries and even professional simps. But then came a lightning in a bottle for the most unexpected company. Nijisanji English's own Hololive Myth, Luxiem, their EN branches' first male group. Their debut song reached 1 million views unexpectedly. Their tweets started getting interactions. Even I made this video documenting their massive rise. It aged like an abused child celebrity but it was relevant for its time. Heck, I even made another dedicated video on Vox Akuma himself. In 2022, Luxiem was on top of the world. Actively competing against Hololive English's numbers, dominating the Southeast Asian Otaku culture, and it seemed like it was only going to get higher from here on out. Or at least, that's what we thought. That's what many of their fans thought, including myself. Because come literally the next year, we started to see the cracks. Of course, the tail of Nijisanji EN's downfall has been recorded many times, but in this video, I'd like to point the microscope on the face of the branch itself, Vox Akuma. Because he was the king of not just Nijisanji English, but the king of male VTubing as well. Those who followed on his stead became popular with him. His presence elevated the numbers and dynamics to those around him. No longer... Today, we look at the tragic downfall of English VTubing's King of Male VTubers, Vox Akuma. When Luxiem started rising, Mysta Rias was actually the one who led the charge at first. His infamous interaction with Mr. Rogers, as well as his general commedic bits, made him Luxiem's first favorite. But come the middle of the year, Vox Akuma easily took his spot's place, and this was for one major reason: pandering. It was clear to many people that the reason why Luxiem was so successful was because they tapped into a niche previously untouched in the English side of VTubing: the female demographic. VTubing's overwhelming number of audience always has been men, like I mentioned, and Luxiem with their handsome design and kiss your homies goodnight sort of banter, they managed to innovate. The reason why Vox Akuma started to get more popular than everyone in the group was because he was the one who went all in. Shamelessly indulging on his horny female fans' wildest imaginations and serving English VTubing's most potent boyfriend experience. Everyone in Luxiem didn't really do this, at most they would validate their audience, tell them they loved and appreciate them or something, but nobody was licking this audience's digital pussies or ravaging their digital throats quite like Vox was. People outside Vox Akuma's audience had a very strong impression on him and his audience, especially Hololive fans. Notice how I said strong, not good. Because the first drama he was involved in was in March 2022, roughly four months after they debuted. There was an accidental Discord server leak from a fellow Nijisanji member Petra. In this leak, we were able to see that a few Nijisanji members were shit talking Hololive and people didn't really like that. The biggest lightning rod of the outrage was Fulgur himself, who was being smug that Hololive Council didn't do as good and that a lot of Hololive fans were insecure and mad that Nijisanji was thriving. The second biggest lightning rod was Vox, who said Hololive Tech Issues in shambles Nijisanji thriving. The context that I personally believe in and had peddled in the past was that this was in response to Shu. Because Shu was their tech guy, this was supposed to be nothing more than a joke, so I didn't really take it seriously. I threw a lot more shade at Fulgur's out of pocket comment, but a lot of Hololive fans didn't really give out as much grace. Before this drama, there was a war brewing between Hololive EN and Nijisanji EN fans, you see. Tribalism was at an all time high. Hololive talents like Calliope Mori unfollowed a few of them. She did refollow them back, but it was clear that it pushed a sensitive spot for her. Though this fueled the tribalism, it didn't really do much against Vox, aside from like making him kind of weird out to outsiders. The real drama happened shortly after: May 2022. Fellow Nijisanji member Reimu and Vox were streaming at the same time. Reimu was playing FNAF while Vox, who had a role play date ASMR stream. All of a sudden, Reimu decided to message Vox to help her out for a game. Vox momentarily paused the date stream to help her out, but when Vox hit that end stream button, he awoke to see that his people were mad. Like mad mad, especially the Chinese. Not at him, but on Reimu, all because Reimu dared to disrupt their date together. Death threats were lobbed her way, a harassment campaign started, social media was filling up with all sorts of angry schizophrenic ramble about how Reimu was a whore. You would think that the appropriate response for this was push back from Vox Akuma himself. Tell these people to cool it, tell them to shut the f*ck up or try to deescalate matters, but nope. That's not what Vox did. What he did instead was to lightly touch upon the subject, only implying dissatisfaction but still defending his fans. People didn't like this. The greater Nijisanji EN community did not like this. The backlash was intense, but thankfully, he would later address this matter, firmly saying that none of the things he does is real and that this is all role play, f*cking obviously. And that he doesn't claim the people throwing off and randomly harassing other people. He would even say that he doesn't like them, a sterner, more absolute defense of his friends and his reputation. And while yes, did his recover his PR, it put a bad impression of his audience's character. Because in the background, everyone, everywhere, was starting to recognize that Vox's audience was pretty f*cking toxic. Not just within Nijisanji's own community, but even to people beyond it, even to his friends like Shoto. Which a lot of Nijisanji fans seem to think that he was part of Nijisanji for some reason. To a point that Mysta had to address and clarify something so obvious. And even still, these fans still kept harassing him to collab with them more, only to end up being angry that Shoto was being disrespectful in some kind of way somehow. This tiny chaos and dissatisfaction beyond Vox's audience is important to note. Because while yes, within your walls you are thriving and the economy of your kingdom is still flowing greatly, it becomes a lot harder to expand and trade beyond it. By the tail end of Vox's golden years, people even inside the Nijisanji community recognized the signs. Faced the insane reality of Vox's own toxic fanbase. Vox still got involved in minor drama, such as in August of 2022, when he was making fun of Sonny's mom. Fans from China, who had a culture against such behaviors, were super mad and demanded Vox apologize, but this was a nothing burger. Vox addressed it, we all chalk it up to culture clash and that was it. Yet at the same time, while these dramas were minor, they were signs of a greater issue. See, the problem with catering to parasocial f*cks, as hard as Vox did, isn't just you getting pigeonholed into your own content. It's also the fact that you have to cater to these insufferable f*cks. You are stuck in a horrible, unviable place where you can't go hard on your fans too much, or they'll rebel. But at the same time, people outside your walls are afraid of your fans just as much as you are, so it's hard to engage with you. With this fanbase, even if you find the courage to try and tard wrangle them, it's not going to work most of the time. You can't uns*xualize a s*xual. His chat was constantly spammed by emotes. He kept being infantilized. During this specific era of his popularity, his audience was more to blame than himself. Vox never intended to do BFE when he joined Nijisanji. He just felt obligated to do what the audience he captured wanted him to do, because they kept flinging him sh*t tons of money. One thing you got to know is that throughout a huge part of 2022, Vox received huge sums of money for months on end. A $100,000 almost every single month in donations from his gachis, every month, brother. And that's just donations, ads, membership money, merch money, and sponsorship money aren't even taken into account. So when you start from nothing into getting that kind of money on the regular, it can be hard to cope or even, for a lot of people, empathize with that kind of mental rewiring. To a certain extent, it's understandable why Vox felt like he had to cater to these people. These people, even if some were freaks, were the reason why he had so much money, why he had so much freedom, ironically. It's scary to distance yourself away from that big of a bag and that kind of external validation. Such is the core problem of the parasocial Andy streamer. Some people are built for this sort of content. A lot of VTubers sustain it healthily, even for years, without developing a problematic audience. Even if there are freaks in his chat or tweets causing a scene, telling them to get the f*ck out, is it necessarily going to work the way he wanted it to? It's a dangerous fanbase. We've seen such a case with the downfall of the GFE queen Uruha Rushia, who got canceled when it turns out that she and another famous Japanese content creator Mafumafu was in a relationship. But these sorts of fanbases don't just get dangerous when they start hating you. I would argue, they become even more dangerous when they love you too much. In February 2023, Vox announced that he was going on a hiatus to deal with emergency family matters. But False ID received reports and broadcasted the news that Vox's actual address got leaked. A stalker, it seems, was able to pinpoint accurate information and even determine his personal Instagram account by referencing photos that Vox himself posted on his corporate Twitter. Of course, we don't actually know if this doxxer and stalker was a fan of him or not, but such an egregious action is not beyond what a Vox fan could do and want to do. The reason I say that is because, in now on a deleted site called n*fco, aka the doxx site, these sorts of informations and discussions were freely thrown around. Yes, there is a Japanese website dedicated to finding and talking about private information of VTubers. Who are the majority of the users, you may ask? Nijisanji English fans, Vox fans. There is a saying that goes that chat reflects the streamer. This statement is generally true, I would like to think, but sometimes there can be exceptions. It's not an all-encompassing fact, I don't think any streamer or content creator should be held 100% responsible for what their audience is doing. You can't really tard wrangle all your fans, it's just impossible. Even if you're not putting a call to action, even if you tell your fans not to harass anyone and to play nice, some small fraction of idiots in any fanbase will always do so. And even if that fraction is a minority, their actions will still reflect badly on the streamer itself. Such is a problem with Vox Akuma's fanbase. No matter what he did, the goodwill he would generate, that small fraction of his audience will always haunt him, will always make him look bad. In 2023, we have seen an utter collapse of Nijisanji's reputation and Vox was one of the heavier targets for the mockery. The Zaion LanZa drama, the Gundo Mirei termination, the Nina Kosaka graduation, the Mysta Rias graduation. All of this happening, and the toxicity of his own fanbase has had profound effects on Vox's mental health. He was already diagnosed with ADHD before. In fact, this diagnosis was used as a sort of explanation for a lot of his actions. Fans were recognizing the fact that he was not in the best shape. In fact, fans recognized more than that as well. It would seem that collaborations with a lot of people have disappeared. Vox's banter with anyone was genuinely a fun time to watch, so it was sad to see that over time, his collaborations with the very few people his fans enjoyed him interacting with, has ceased. One on one collabs with Shoto, for example, has noticeably stopped, citing that shippers and toxic fan behaviors ruined it for them. He also stopped getting invited to many events or shows that would have multiple appearances from other guests. Because of Vox's fanbase, even in 2023, people outside Nijisanji were rather reluctant to collab with him. But as long as he can still make his content, as long as his fanbase's thirst can be quenched, he can make it, right? After all, I've been talking a lot about the negatives of having his own walls up, stuck within this sort of fanbase, but in reality, it's not all bad. Even if he didn't get as many donations as before these days, he was still bringing in mad money, still had a loyal viewer base, could still do his ASMRs and role plays and he even made a feature length lore video. There was a bit of a drama around this movie he made. Vox and Nijisanji accused a crypto company, basically, of violating copyright by using a piece of the music that he used for this movie, but then it turns out that said music didn't even belong to them. It was purchased from a third party, so technically, no copyright was being violated. But like that ADHD kind of made him jump the gun over here, huh? Being a Corpo VTuber is a job. It can't just be a hobby. And just like any other job, sometimes you just got to deal with it. As long as you stick to your own circle, do what you got to do, you'll be fine, to a certain extent. But like a real job, sometimes you can't do it as effectively because your stupid boss said so. All of a sudden, YouTube just declared that ASMRs are to not have any adult themes. Otherwise, say goodbye to your content. Many VTubers were hit hard by this change. Some channels even just straight up died. Vox was one of the few people that was affected. All those 18 plus ASMRs that he had lovingly created for his audience just gone. The reason this is a big deal is because ASMRs are perhaps one of the greenest evergreen content. A person can and will always have a reason to go back to a particular ASMR that they like. But beyond its financial and tangible usefulness, it also served as a historical and cultural marker for Vox Akuma's content and identity. He was the Nijisanji BFE, the John Boyfriend experience. A lot of that BFE content needing to get deleted, it's just a waste. But perhaps, this wasn't all that bad. I can gamble on the idea that perhaps after the initial distress, Vox was relieved by this in some sort of way. With all of that deleted, perhaps he would feel like doing his ASMR more poignantly, even toned down the intensity of his ASMR, a reason to refuse uncomfortable scenarios or requests. And besides, it's not all his ASMRs that were being deleted, just the more explicit ones. Perhaps that even despite Nijisanji's declining reputation, he can continue and maintain this audience that likes him and his content. An exclusive group of people that will not be affected by the happenings of the greater Nijisanji community. Those were what the walls were there for after all. Maybe in the coming year, he can stabilize his content, and while his best year was behind him, perhaps he can still carve out something special for himself. That is not what happened. In February 2024, Nijisanji EN terminated Selen Tatsuki, one of VTubing's most beloved creators. This followed months upon months of instances where Selen had her requests frequently rejected by Nijisanji or that she got screwed up in some sort of way. She responded to this termination, but the fierce backlash that came from her and the greater VTubing community had to prompt a response from Nijisanji EN itself. And shockingly, they did. It was perhaps the greatest, biggest sin ever recorded in English VTubing. One of the people responsible for this, actually, no, the central figure of this was none other than Vox Akuma. Vox was the biggest voice of the trio that presented this pushback. In this announcement, he said that before things went down, Selen sent Nijisanji a legal document airing out her frustrations and her intent to leave immediately. He claims that Selen peddled falsehoods in her legal document, said that he felt hurt because this document contained information from other talents and that she secretly recorded a call with him to use evidence against Nijisanji. He denies the fact that Nijisanji had favoritism, said he doesn't think the confrontation against her was harassment, and lastly, he says that he thoroughly reviewed this document, but this was a document that only legal entities aside from Selen herself was supposed to be able to view. I would attempt to debunk these claims in the video, but this isn't a Nijisanji video. This is a Vox video. I can only cover what happened to Vox himself specifically because what exactly happened was a sh*t show for him. The phrases he said during the black screen stream became a meme. There is no favoritism, and in my opinion, this is not a form of harassment. Because in Nijisanji, there was obvious bias towards Vox Akuma and Luxiem as a whole, owing to them being the biggest in the entire branch. Vox and Luxiem got invited to fancy dinners with the CEO while in Japan. Nobody got consistent merch releases like they did. They were getting milked the f*ck out. Of course, it's the nature of any business to have blatant favoritism or an extended leniency for your biggest and most influential assets. But to deny that none of it exists is wack, and to deny or outright dismiss the fact that your friend was in emotional distress and almost killed herself, to basically invalidate and that claim that what they did to her was not harassment. All without any emotion in your voice, it was weird. It was sociopathic to see from him even.
[18:36]He seemed blind to his privilege and position in Nijisanji and the bigger industry, seemed to lack empathy, seemed like he was just emotionally manipulative. He could have just said no, not include himself in this whole debacle, no, he wasn't forced into this. All implications point to the fact that to some degree, he wanted to participate. He lacked responsibility, digging his own grave only to bitch about it later, and that did not sit right with people beyond Nijisanji. After the black screen stream, Nijisanji EN as a whole were losing followers and viewers. Vox included for obvious reasons, and people started to bring up old allegations from Vox's past. Also, they could find a reason to hate him even more. For context, there was a previously dismissed accusation against Vox when he debuted, claiming that he did horrible things in his PR as a creator named Vade. Some of these accusations include flirting with a minor, when he was a minor, being emotionally manipulative, making out with a 19 year old woman when he was 17, and that he was mean because he told an autistic fan that he just needed to stop being a whiny b*tch. Another person would even create an entire Google Doc-y recapping this whole situation, but again, these allegations were bad. There was a reason it was dismissed. Bros regurgitating secondhand information without any screenshots, trying to cancel Vox for what he did, when he was f*cking 17. Some people acted up, but it seemed like most people thought it was a nothing burger, me included. Throughout the following months, Vox would continue to stream. He initially streamed on Bilibili to get away from the outraged YouTube audience, but he eventually slowly eased back to streaming here. Even had an entire 3D all recorded. But after the drama, the Nijisanji community has been largely disconnected from the greater industry and only came in frequent waves via a collab. The Nijisanji EN community has basically labeled a major part of the industry as their enemies or something. But despite the volume of this Twitter fanbase, Vox's numbers continued to decline. One of the more interesting points to note after the fallout was his former friend, his most famous friend Shoto, the person Vox grew together with in the space said he doesn't f*ck with Vox anymore. They're no longer friends. One can only speculate about why this is, but a lot of conclusions point to the full picture his many drama has painted that he might be emotionally manipulative. He was a bad friend. He was an alleged bully. As you can see, it's not a pretty picture. All Vox had left were the few friends he still had in Nijisanji, Nijisanji itself, and his very dedicated audience, but this audience would come to learn an uncomfortable truth about him soon enough. In 2025, Reimu, the person Vox's fanbase harassed for interrupting their date, and Ike, Vox's friend and Luxiem gen mate, left Nijisanji alongside a few others. But nobody would expect that one jealous girlfriend would set off a series of events that nobody could for saw. The ex-girlfriend of Ike Eveland made a video basically accusing Reimu Endou of being a doxxer and a homewrecker, saying that her ass was being flirtatious towards Ike after she and an undisclosed partner broke up. Guess who this undisclosed partner is? This made big waves in the Nijisanji community, prompting a response from Reimu, who now streamed under a different name, Marie FD. The entire drama was a hilarious f*ckfest that has multiple layers, but I'm not going to cover all of it for this video. Instead, I recommend my brother Shri M. Evenstar's coverage of it if you want to see the sh*t show that just happened. But I am going to talk about Vox's involvement because some information in this little Twitter spat painted him in a light that his Sims weren't going to like. For one, this path had an intentional revelation, that Reimu and Vox were in fact, in a relationship. And fun fact, this used to be a speculation that was had by many. Reimu also vented to Ike's ex that Vox would have a crazy parasocial fan that would send him bikini photos. A sh*t ton of horny super chats, would respond to him, and even make self-insert art of herself, featuring being intimate with him. And Vox, unsurprisingly, seems to really like that behavior. By the way, the context of these conversations is that Reimu found out Vox was s*xting with this cosplayer fan of his, because she said she took a look at his phone while he was taking a shower in the same room. And when the fan Vox was s*xting asked if Reimu and Vox were dating, Vox said and I quote ew, no, and it eventually resulted into Reimu and Vox having a fallout, because Reimu just wasn't having any of it anymore. And when Reimu tried to pretend not to know, asking on what Vox would do if said girl would send him lewd photos, Vox responded, saying that he'd cut off their communications right there. My brother didn't know he already got caught and committed to the lie. The person Reimu is referring to here is an infamous cosplayer and member of the Nijisanji EN community, who would frequently engage with Vox a lot and do gender bent cosplays of him as early as 2022. Vox was using his platform to actually engage with horny fans for his s*xual gratification. One can really only wonder if he's only done this to just one person. I'm just saying, a person like this, a person like Vox, just doesn't stop at one girl. But you know what? I get it. Vox Akuma, I completely understand. No, seriously, I do. This is a relationship between two consenting adults. Lots of your favorite online couples started out as a fan creator relationship, such as Pewdiepie and Marzia or Joey and the Anime Man and Akidearest. Sure, we can have the topic of an unfair dynamic of that kind of relationship, but personally, I don't care. As long as said fan isn't a minor, and the creator isn't a minor, and it's also consensual, it's free game, in my opinion. The problem for Vox was that the revelation that he was in a relationship with Reimu, while actively s*xting a side girl, is not good for an audience that is parasocial and is in love with him. I guess it also doesn't speak very well of your character, you know, being an a cheater. But I think at this point, pimping a cheater is one of the less impactful labels that many people are already calling him. There was intense backlash from a fair few Chinese Vox fans that followed after this drama. While...
