Nijisanji’s official X/Twitter account announced yesterday the termination of top talent Selen Tatsuki via a lengthy announcement post on January 5th. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move, seeing as the streamer was popular among the VTuber community.
This statement saw responses from many known faces in the VTuber industry, such as indie VTubers Aethel, Annjelife, Lucy Pyre, and CyYu, Holocure developer Kay Yu, and voice actress Cottontail who all expressed their disappointment with the situation and the treatment of talent within the agency. The announcement was quickly adorned with a community note, noting a contradiction in Nijisanji’s statement and linking to an alleged response from Selen Tatsuki to clarify her side of the story.
The link led to a post from indie VTuber Dokibird, who although not officially confirmed due to NDAs signed by agency VTubers, the community considers as Selen’s alt account. Dokibird is a streamer mostly focused on art and FPS games who has been active on Twitch since 2017 and debuted as a VTuber in May 2020. She had been mostly inactive since her graduation stream which took place in May 2021, two months before Selen’s debut in July 2021. Dokibird’s post reads as follows:
In addition to the community note, there have been reports of mods going rogue on Selen Tatsuki’s channel and reinstating a live waiting room on Selen’s channel which linked to Dokibird’s channel, despite Nijisanji privating all of the videos on the channel earlier. This livestream has been quickly taken down since.
The community note linking to Dokibird’s channel has since been taken down, and replaced with a new one contesting Nijisanji’s statements that Selen Tatsuki created issues with creators that worked with her and the agency.
Several artists, including weeniedesu who previously worked with Selen, came out publicly to refute Nijisanji’s claims and add that Selen Tatsuki made sure they were paid even if Nijisanji was slow on payments. In addition, several other artists announced that they will no longer produce Nijisanji merch due to the situation with Selen.
Permissions for Selen’s cover of “Last Cup of Coffee” which had been privated by Nijisanji’s management as soon as Selen put it on her channel, were supposedly the main reason behind her termination. However, LilyPichu, who is the artist behind the original song, confirmed on X/Twitter that she had already given her permission to Nijisanji back in August 2022, so it is unclear which permissions Nijisanji was referring to in their statement:
The official Indonesia Wikipedia X/Twitter account also indirectly commented on the situation, by posting the definition of a Black Company (in Indonesian) and adding the discolored logo of Nijisanji, as well as the numbers 2-4-3-4 which could be spelled as (ni-ji-san-ji) when read in Japanese.
On February 7th, Nijisanji updated its Investor Relations portal with a message to investors titled Impact of the decision to terminate the affiliation contract with the NIJISANJI EN Liver on our financial results. The message only contained two short sentences aimed at reassuring investors about the financial impact of Selen Tatsuki’s termination:
Given that Nijisanji self-admitted suffering “irreparable damage” to its reputation, it is unclear how this message will soothe anxieties about the future profitability of the company. The message was published as the stock price for Nijisanji is down 13% in 2 days since the announcement, from a 3820 JPY closing price on February 5th since the closing price to a 3380 JPY closing price on February 7th.
This controversy comes at a time when the company was already under pressure from English-speaking fans due to a recent series of talent graduations from the EN branch that called into question the management of the branch, the most recent of which is Kyo Kaneko. The VTuber community coming together to defend Selen is a wonderful thing, and we hope that whatever situation led to this series of unfortunate events can be avoided in the future.
Source: Official X (Twitter)
©ANYCOLOR, Inc.
The comments are temporarily unavailable for maintenance.