You Shall Not Obtain the Crown (1)
One thing and another had come to pass, but in the end the situation was patched over in a relatively painless way, and a little time went by.
"Wouldn't you say it's about time we had a rather large event?"
"...President? What on earth are you talking about?"
It was September, the heat of summer still clinging to the air. Hearing this strange remark from the president, Hitomi went blank in the face.
Gyokichi's presence in Professor Senjoji's laboratory was, in itself, understandable enough. They had been childhood friends to begin with, and given the professor's temperament it was entirely plausible she had sent him on some errand to fetch one thing or another. That the two of them, having met, should fall to talking about streaming was no stranger. What she could not help finding odd was that this, of all things, was what had come out of the conversation.
"We've been one storm after another lately, though...?"
It had begun with the third generation's debut, then the Iwabami Kyouka terror incident, then the announcement of Mary Tepes's marriage and the virtual wedding. Fold in everything never officially made public—Hitomi being attacked, and Seoyeon coming within a breath of tearing the Church down over it; Senjoji Chiyo and Osean Lee crossing the line, all the way to the meeting where it was decided the matter would be mentioned on stream a few months later—and still, in the gaps between, events like birthday lives had gone on exactly as scheduled.
Ask the fandom and most of them would tell you this summer had been remarkably dense. To declare, on top of that, that still more events were needed was to raise the prior question of whether the company would even survive as a legal entity.
Hearing her out, Gyokichi grinned. Anyone not accustomed to the people of Anathema Production might well have taken the motion for a beast winding up to swallow its prey whole.
"Ah. I don't mean that we're short on events in sheer number. But consider—people do often say there's a nutrient you can only get in one particular place, don't they?"
"That shows up in cringe posts sometimes."
"In short, a matter of quality rather than quantity. And not quality in the sense of higher or lower. An event of an entirely different kind."
So saying, Gyokichi picked up one of the bundles of printouts heaped all over the laboratory. It was a paper, slapped roughly onto cheap stock—surely one of the things the professor had run off so she could read it by hand rather than on a screen. Ninomae Hitomi's gaze traveled over the Korean title at the top.
"Ah, this isn't the one. I'm quite certain the materials on the Walpurgis festival were right here until just recently."
"No, wait. What on earth was that just now?!"
It was not a title she could possibly let slide, and so Hitomi had no choice but to call him on it. President Gyokichi, of course, ignored the reaction entirely and did nothing but rummage through the heap of printouts.
"Hmm... Judging by what's piled up, it seems we arrived here by way of a paper on magical-girl anime. Walpurgis Night does turn up in those as well, I believe......"
To Gyokichi, who had watched his childhood friend for a long time, this was a familiar affair. Senjoji Chihaya read scholarship the way one falls down a wiki hole—let a curiosity arise mid-text, and she drifted off in that direction. That she should somehow wash up at a paper on magical girls was hardly strange.
...Hitomi's question, mind you, had been why a paper like that existed in the world at all.
"Well. I had meant, if possible, to pivot the subject by neatly producing some plausible material... A shame."
"Walpurgis Night, you said... That's the festival of the anomalies, isn't it."
Hitomi dug no further than that. The way to handle an eccentric was not to pick at every point and scrutinize it, but to give oneself over to the current and let it carry you. The president here might not reach Professor Senjoji's level, but he fell comfortably inside the category of eccentric all the same.
Why bring up a festival of anomalies now? She turned it over for a moment, and then she said it.
"Don't tell me this is all of Anapro, deployed in full?"
"As expected of Miss Ninomae."
Gyokichi cracked his neck to one side, wearing a thoroughly satisfied smile.
"Let's try a sports day of our own."
"A sports day......"
They were thirteen now, certainly, and the numbers had gathered well enough. Let one person drop out to commentate, or simply add Seoyeon to even the count, and they would have the makings of a fair number of events.
"Lately the two third-generation talents have been fighting so often that they're the ones who come up, but originally it was Tachibana Rin and Komori Sae who held the rival positions."
One a serpent god and the other a demon, the pair had often streamed their matches under the grandiose title of the War of Gods and Demons.
"It's been quite some time since they last settled anything, hasn't it. Let's blow the scale wide open, in the spirit of a special."
In short, an Anapro civil war. Wouldn't that be entertaining, President Gyokichi said, and grinned.
"So we're making a map in Prasava and doing it there, like the other companies?"
That game—its design distinctive, if one were feeling generous, every object composed of regular polyhedra—possessed a reasonably decent freedom and a capable enough system, and so it was forever being drafted for events of this sort. Short of building a game's systems up from nothing, one could call it a suitable game for enjoying competitions of many kinds.
"The current plan is to split it across two days, and day two is slated to be done that way."
"Day two? Then what game are we using for day one?"
Hitomi tilted her head. If they were going to modify a game anyway, wouldn't it be easier on everyone to use just one?
"Oh—are you making the first day all the same sort of event?"
No special systems added; you simply played a single game and settled the contest inside it. Bill a time attack of some climbing game that takes forever to clear as a marathon, and put that forward as an event... and even aside from that, there were any number of games, racing games among them, that could spin out all sorts of formats from nothing more than a few added rules. A normal race, a race run only in reverse—even the same game could be made to yield several events.
To this question of Hitomi's, Gyokichi only smiled.
Looking back on it, that may well have been the last chance to stop the president. On the day of the broadcast, that was what Ninomae Hitomi thought.
A company—or rather, any organization that people gather to make—is bound, in the end, to grow a goal, or at least something it professes to be. A VTuber MCN in particular does not easily go without such a thing. Concept and points of appeal matter in the profession, certainly, but there is surely also the fact that the pioneer of the Japanese VTuber MCN, and its greatest success, had professed itself to be idols.
Even so, there are by no means few companies that set out along that idol line only to swing their heading partway through. The moment one begins running idol-like activities—lives among them—in parallel with the streams, people genuinely start dropping like flies. Of course, the VTuber industry being the tremendous red ocean that it is, there are also a fair number of cases in which a business has settled in nicely while keeping an idol concept more or less intact.
Anathema Production was, for the time being, one of those agencies that professed to be idols. More precisely, it was anomalous idols specializing in the yuri trade.
Companies doing yuri business were many, and companies doing idol business were many. Companies doing both at once were probably not so few either. Streaming by way of anomalous roleplay was nothing very special; consider the Japanese VTuber industry, and the unusual case was rather the one without such a setting. Even so, it was not as though Anapro had nothing that set it apart. In each of the three things just mentioned, there was something a little peculiar.
First, the yuri business. In truth, until not long ago, this was an element hardly ever brought up. Even among the fans it never went past chanting tee-tee in chat or cooking up the related memes, and the professing of yuri was, when it came down to it, talk—the company had rarely thrown any real weight behind it. Run a little gachikoi business at a viewership that, by the nature of streaming, could not help skewing male, and no particular restraint came down. We aspire to yuri, at any rate: a pretext, good for leaving viewers pleasantly warm and for keeping the unicorns in line. Among the viewers, the perception amounted to exactly that.
That perception changed all at once, and not long ago. Specifically, after the fact of Mary Tepes's marriage came to light.
There are, quietly, a great many viewers who, when affiliated VTubers occasionally show a warm and affectionate side, enjoy the sight while still nursing a slightly cynical awareness in one corner of the chest. Honestly, we all know it's business, don't we? Granted, those who take the closeness for something wholly fake, or for acting, are surely a tiny minority. Even so, there are plenty who hold it at about this: they probably are genuinely close, and the physical affection is probably real, but for the sake of the stream they play it a little larger than they do off-camera.
And in fact that perception is not far from reality. A streamer, like it or not, whatever personality and whatever nature they possess, is in a profession that requires them, from the moment they appear before viewers, to show only the best possible face. It is not only that one tries to present a good facet of one's own character. The same rule can apply to one's relationships with one's colleagues.
Even setting internet streaming aside, who on earth hopes the members of the idol group they stan are on bad terms with one another? If the relationship is poor, you hide it; if it is good, you emphasize it all the more. That is simple common sense. Anapro had no reason to be exempt from that way of seeing.
...It would have ended as just that, had a genuine in-house couple—no, in-house married pair number one—never made an appearance.
Think of it commonsensically, and the right view is that one of the people affiliated with the company simply happened to end up paired off. The problem was the notoriety (?) of the company president, Nakabashi Gyokichi. He was a man who had made a habit of every sort of bizarre conduct, and so the prevailing opinion was that it would not even be strange if he had genuinely arranged matchmaking meetings between his own VTubers. For a reaction of wait, maybe these ones too...? not to appear in a situation like this—that would be the real miracle.
In a similar way, on the matter of anomalous roleplay as well, Anapro had always been the sort of company mentioned now and then. The name might not have been widely known, but every so often an internet community would see a post with the flavor of company.jpg, excessively serious about RP accuracy. It was a company of roughly that standing.
Small wonder. Not only was the highest authority in the field attached as a consultant on authenticity, but quite a few of the VTubers themselves were people dead serious about getting the details right. Never mind the ones who actually were a practicing shrine maiden, or a werewolf—when it came to Mary, she was a specialist who had studied under that very Professor Senjoji. There were even people who went off and learned Ainu, or Romanian, for the sake of the accuracy. Nothing more needed saying.
And last, if one were to name what was peculiar on the idol front... in truth this part was not, in context, so different from the treatment famous agency VTubers receive. In short, the verdict that they call themselves idols and are in reality a pack of geinin, a troupe of gag comedians.
If there was a slight difference from other companies here, it was this. They were the same in that, short of showing something impressive at a live, they were not treated as idols day to day—but the result did not stop at merely being geinin. The expression that laid that perception bare at its most naked was the Anathema Circus Troupe. They were regarded, that is, not only as clowns but as strongmen besides. By any measure, a verdict sitting a few light-years off from idols.
"......"
Watching Ryuumai Fuu launch herself with all her strength, drive a spinning back kick into Momomomo Chisa, and keep an aerial combo going, Hitomi thought that the verdict, frankly, did not seem wrong.
"No, hold on. This was supposed to be a VTuber sports day, wasn't it?!"
"Bit late to be pointing that out, aren't you, Mary-chan...?"
Needless to say, Ringmaster Nakabashi Gyokichi did not commit the dereliction of duty that would have been failing to stage a circus with his troupe.
It was for that reason that day one of the Anathema Sports Day—otherwise the First Anathema Showdown—was being conducted as a 3D broadcast out of a real motion-capture studio.