I’m a fan of Kiara Takanashi!

Third, and possibly last, installment of my series about Kiara Takanashi. The first part contained some vague and unfocused amalgamation of a story about my latest ‘obsession’.
The second part describes how I got hooked.

Following is an approach to clarify what the future of fandoms entails. Conclusions come from my personal experience.
To clarify; It’s not my goal to write this for other people’s eyes, even though I gave that impression. The main reason is to fill the empty void of this domain and, secondary, to have some retrospective for my peruse.

Don’t like to read that much? Check the FAQ section that also intends to summarize the experience a bit.

Fans and their future

Two reasons prevent me from predicting the future; Uncertainty and Unknowns. Those issues are theoretical and intangible, so I’ll also explain my mini-break from HoloLive after the following technical yada-yada.

Have you ever heard about “known knowns”? It’s a category on the Johari window intended to simplify the analysis of relations with the self. The relevant part of this theory is about the “unknown unknown”. There exist too many parameters, including unknown unknowns, that influence the future. This fact makes a trustworthy guess incalculable. Most people only see the public side of a superstar, let alone understand the business, popularity, and quality aspects. There is so much going on to keep a superstar’s world turning. It’s even harder to predict the fandom future for global superstars. Different places in the world have unique social and personal cultures that I don’t know.
Increasing the “known knowns”, or even “known unknowns” is a very intense process. Comparable to fumbling in the dark and groping anything to find something familiar. That doesn’t sound like a very efficiënt process. The knowledge coming from this search is typically protected under company Intellectual Property and not always publicly announced for the betterment of the world. I can’t blame them because prospected results, incentives, and investments require delicate management. Public infrastructure is incapable of doing that at this point. Keeping this information out of the public domain is sad but necessary.

The Hololive community has created a grid using purity and intelligence. Kiara, for example, is linked to the bottom-left part of the grid. This position makes her both lewd and unintelligent. Keep in mind that reality is more complex than a four-quadrant distribution can represent. The result is not a mischaracterization per se, but don’t reduce her to only those properties!

The topic is on human behavior, which modern analysis frameworks haven’t robustly modeled as stable. There is still much more theory to discover, which means the practical applications are hit-or-miss. You need a fandom expert who dedicated his life to the business before theorizing a unique formula for a specific superstar. That formula becomes a reference for questions like “How will X impact popularity/reception/income?” but not “What’s the next big thing?”.
The latter question is more high level and harder to answer. Frankly, it requires more even more experience across multiple domains to answer. Put simply, a lot of experience is necessary and luck to stumble onto “the thing”.

Next up is uncertainty, or rather the certainty for events to happen. Everybody with an education and their mother should have heard about Shrödingers Cat. That thought experiment is a good analogy to think about certainty as a concept. In his mind, he tortures the cat with radiation, but what he did is not that important. sick bastard
What we learn about the analogy is that observations happen at moments in time. The observation makes it official, an immutable mark in history. In the best-case scenario, you observe directly; Q: “What’s in the box?” A: “A dead cat!”.
But the world isn’t perfect, and science builds on trembling foundations. Most observations happen indirectly. Indirect doesn’t necessarily mean less trustworthy. That depends on how well you understand the measurement context. For example; You need to measure the temperature of the surface of the sun.
Good luck getting an earth’s thermometer into space for measurement. You won’t even get close to the sun. And even if you did, the temperature itself would be a value too high to measure. But we do know the sun’s temperature, at least up to a number close enough to the actual value. We can measure the radiated energy or look at its color. 5,772 Kelvin, and we’re almost 100% certain. There is little margin of error left for unaccounted sources that could affect this temperature.

Trying to predict the future is comparable to performing an observation in a set amount of time. Ideally, we want to observe our (favorable) situation directly, but that isn’t possible. The future is open-ended. Theoretically, it’s possible to model all knowns of the world, calculate their certainties and make a highly likely guess about the future. Such a system is the plot device of the third season of TV-Show Westworld (no spoiler).
There is also the fun paradox where certainty about the future reduces the chance of it occurring. If a bad situation would play out with 100% certainty, would you undergo it voluntarily? I’m not sure about my answer.

TLDR; I don’t know, and I’m not going to make guesses.

I quit HoloLive for five days, around the beginning of May 2021. I spent my time and money on three HoloLive VTubers.
It was cold turkey, a complete disconnect from all HoloLive media channels, and my spare time became available again. I felt disoriented, had to readjust, and desperately needed something to do.
I felt the need for something to change. I wasn’t doing anything else besides HoloLive. I got urges for doing something productive, and that made me cranky. Pushing the hypothetical reset button didn’t bring balance, and I had to figure that out myself afterward. I didn’t prepare a plan of action, and I wonder who does plan such things diligently.

I took up programming again, but that’s HoloLive related, played a few games in League of Legends, and read more. There was more variation than before. I remember feeling great, but the claws of modern media tried to pull me back into their system. And I succumbed.
Now, twenty days later, I’m writing this post. Exhausted, frankly. Not just, but mostly, Kiara is taking up most of my free time again. None of that feeling of freedom is left over.

I wonder if it’s out of habit, addiction, or being bored. There is no balance. I’m being smothered, and I did this to myself.
“Why?” is a good question. I like her very much, as explained in part 2. But I also cannot correctly moderate myself. In practice, I’m very black/white about time investment. There is no middle ground; I do or do not.
What good did all that ivory tower talk about fighting dualism do? Pretty hypocritical. I have too much spare time that’s a given. A consequence of me taking up as few responsibilities as possible. Do I want my freedom to be constrained?

FAQ Quick-shots

Specific points of my story must have made no sense to people living outside my imagination. First of all, good, because living in my skull entitles me to rent. I haven’t seen any money transferred to my account balance yet.
Second, that’s a bit sad. I don’t wish for anyone to feel excluded.

So I split myself in two, with minimal brain damage, and answered questions formulated by me. We do this FAQ-style because FAQ is LOVE.

1. What’s wrong with you?
   I need a hobby, it’s that simple… and I need to think less. A challenging hobby solves both issues. What’s left is creating commitment to my choice.

2. Doesn’t this mulching physically hurt?
   It’s tiring for sure, but only if I want to write this all down in a coherent text.
   So far, no neck injuries from my big brain. /s

3. Isn’t this just romantic love?
   Theoretically, it cannot be. I don’t know Kiara at all. I do admit that this situation is very “My mind is telling me noo-ooo… but my body, my body’s is telling yea-eaaaaah-es”.

4. Why Kiara?
   She’s very good at entertaining. So much so that I lose myself. This fact hurts my core.
   She trespassed into my cells like a virus, wreaking havoc and altering my DNA. All my mind does is run around in circles. Isolation procedures were unsuccessful so far.

5. How much are you invested for real?
   I don’t consider myself a community person. As a general rule, I only act for selfish reasons. I’m trying to change that up, hopefully to the joy of everyone. My fan-related creative work had the purpose of improving myself. The fandom acted as a starting point of my creative process.
   My life is not dependant on staying invested in HoloLive forever, so I can and will leave whenever I decide to.

6. What do you hope will happen in the future?
   I have never thought about that. It’s up to the superstars to decide because that’s part of their job.
   As an egocentric consumer, I’m privileged to complain and leave. I sure as hell respect the people in showbusiness for that.

I publish immediately for peace of mind. I regularly revisit my content to look for opportunities to improve.

“Man, I’m tired! I’ll sleep on the plane.” - Bad idea factory