AkioAIR was a small Taiwan-based agency with English-speaking streamers. The company's CEO was Jason Kuo (郭宇軒). They made a really stupid decision by hiring a minor to be a part of their second generation, or "season," of talents, and after tweeting that they had made that decision, all of their talents quit in less than 4 weeks and they became known as one of the blackest black companies to ever company blackly. Read on to see how it happened.
Timeline of the drama (dates and times are generally in the Eastern time zone of the US. Other time zones are thought to exist but are purely theoretical):
April 26 - May 31, 2021: AkioAIR conducts their first round of recruitment.
January 13, 2022: AkioAIR bizarrely holds another round of recruitment to cast a single pre-designated character. It would later come to be known that this was because the first person cast to be Kion Dojima had quit before debut.
March 11-12, 2022: Over 11 months after starting auditions, the first "Season" of AkioAIR, "REfract," debuts with 5 members: Athena Nightingale, MEW Horizon, Nonoah, RoaFen, and Kion Dojima.
January 6, 2023: AkioAIR announces that RoaFen would be graduating from the company the next day (her character's birthday) due to differences with the company.
Note that the above events are not directly related to the drama surrounding the Season 2 hiring that led to the company's collapse, but I include them as they help fill out the picture of mismanagement problems at the company that were part of the broader problem leading to their demise.
August 19, 2023: Someone on /vt/ claiming to be a new Akio talent claims Akio is a black company and that Jason forces talent to play games and socialize with him and misappropriates funds. These posts go largely ignored outside 4chan.
August 21-27: AkioAIR begins to tweet silhouettes of their "Season 2" members and accounts start to go live. The members, and what we now believe to be their relative previous identites, are as follows, in order of debut announcement.
The silhouette for Princess Nophi says "banged ur mom."
Rumors begin to swirl about the identity of the streamers. Nophi being Valera Kitsu/Charlotte Kaneko is relevant because she was forced to perform creepy roleplay in MysteriaLive. She is believed to live somewhere in Europe, possibly Belgium. However, outside VT schizothreads, this identity-searching largely goes unnoticed.
At least one of the leakers on /vt/ mentioned below claimed to be a new talent who previously went by the name Kivi/KiviVT and posted cropped images of Delfi's model. It doesn't make any sense for her to have identified herself while leaking and degrading her company on /vt/ like she did and not get fired for it, so it may be possible that someone else who had access to early artwork of Delfi is falsely posting to slander Delfi and/or Kivi, but Akio management didn't fall for it. (Another less likely explanation is that the leaker really is Delfi/Kivi but Akio either never noticed the /vt/ posts or decided not to act on them for whatever reason. Kivi would later explicitly state she was not the leaker.)
September 5: Things kick off when AkioAIR tweets a wall of text image saying that Nophi is a minor and asking artists not to lewd her. Backlash is fierce and immediate. Why hire a minor? Why tell the world she is a minor? In discussion, /vt/ rumor posts start to surface and reports of Kitsu's treatment in MysteriaLive resurface. The "banged ur mom" silhouette image is brought up, and NSFW accounts are found among Nophi's follow list. Some people (particularly ones that had been rejected by Akio) point out that Akio's own application requirements require applicants to be 18 years old.
September 6: Having largely ignored the backlash to their previous tweet, AkioAIR tweets out a teaser for a music video for the new gen and announces they will debut on September 15-16. Replies are unimpressed. Discussion continues. Dramatubers Kuri Rinji and Khyo make videos.
September 6-7: Twitter activity for all new member accounts except Nophi and Delfi ceases, though it would be a few days before people notice. Maria Paradisia resurfaces to tweet "I'm tired." Megumi Kuragiri likes it.
September 9: AkioAIR tweets another text-image. Unfortunately it appears they will double down on debuting Nophi. It says management will take over Nophi's Twitter account for her safety, and asks us to not harass their other members. The message includes a confusing word-salad paragraph about how Nophi is a minor but isn't being treated like one, or something like that. No clarification is forthcoming.
September 13: A /vt/ post claims some talents have walked and that Jason is trying to find new talents to play their roles.
September 14: AkioAIR tweets that debuts scheduled to start on the 16th will be postponed "due to unfortunate circumstances and considerations for our talents' health." Bunie tweets announcing a redebut and week-long emergency donothon. Maria returns and considers a donothon. Megumi Kuragiri announces a return. Hanabi tweets, but had been tweeting somewhat regularly before then and doesn't announce a return.
September 17: Season 1's Athena Nightingale removes mention of Akio from her Twitter profile, though it still exists on her YouTube channel. Athena is Akio's largest member in terms of subscribers by a large margin.
September 18: Season 1's MEW Horizon, who had been on health hiatus, tweets saying "Please avoid mentioning AkioAIR matters on my stream" and "Things are difficult now and only time will tell." Also, Maria does a Twitter space where she admits to being stressed and cries. She says she can't talk about where she's been.
September 20: In a tweet at about 1:45 AM ET on a Wednesday, AkioAIR announces Season 2 will debut on Saturday, September 30. This is a week later than the date they announced in their previous tweet about postponing the debut. At the time of writing the backlash to this tweet is relatively muted compared to the others, but the late hour at which it was posted (for North America) may be a factor in that.
September 21: Maria Paradisia announces a comeback stream on the 23rd.
September 23: Athena Nightingale posts "hoot hoot" on the community page of her pre-Akio YouTube channel, which had only one other post since she joined Akio. Maria promises to return to regular streaming in the near future but avoids giving details about her supposed time with Akio.
September 24: Athena tweets an announcement about leaving Akio and continuing to stream at her prior YouTube channel, and that she would be going by the name Athy. For reasons not yet known, this tweet is deleted within three hours. Unfortunately nobody archived it but we have a screenshot of it as a post to a Discord server by a Twitter bot as well as the full-size image that was posted with it thanks to it being reposted by a parody account.
September 28: Athy tweets "I want to stream so badly
," implying there is some reason why she cannot currently stream. This is her first tweet (excluding Throne bot posts) since the deleted one unless she quickly deleted another one that we missed. Megumi Kuragiri announces a comeback stream on October 4 with a well-made animated skit.
September 29: In a very early morning tweet, Akio's account tweets that AkioWATER, the pairing of dolphin-themed Azuri Delfi and frog-themed Nophi De Montclair, will debut on September 30 at 12:00 noon and 1:00 PM respectively. The accompanying video is a clip of a remixed "Ver. WATER" version of Season 2's debut song, Serendipity, with just those two talents. Regarding the other four talents of Season 2, the tweet says "Considering the circumstances and health issues, we decided to delay their debut until they are ready once again." Athy vaguetweets again: "I miss everyone."
September 30: HOLY CHRIST. A lot happens on this and the following day so let's split it up by time. Each time is in the Eastern time zone.
October 1:
October 2:
October 3: Very early in the morning, under a personal account, MEW tweets a long statement. She states that she felt she was given special treatment by Jason as she knew Mandarin and could help bridge the gap between the talent and the managers in Taiwan. She expresses frustration that a company project that was supposed to offer a stable salary ended up offering nothing and as she had quit other jobs to work on that project, she was financially burdened. She said she was involved in the S2 recruitment process and protested strongly against Nophi's hire but was the lone voice of reason. She says in July 2023 she was pressured into joining Jason on a trip to Japan after repeated refusals and that inadequate compensation for lodging again burdened her financially. Shockingly she said Jason had told Nophi to hide the fact that she knows Tagalog as "SEA is not attractive," despite southeast Asia being a massive market for vtubers and streamers in that market often becoming beloved in the English-speaking fandom, and MEW is Malaysian herself. She validates rumors that Jason had manager Yuufi apply for another corpo to see what their processes were and that Yuufi made it to the level that she signed an NDA and was apparently given access to confidential documents. She corroborates Athy's accusations of consistently late payment.
October 4: Amemachi Hanabi, who was almost certainly Hoshizuki Orion in AkioAIR, announces a comeback stream. She hints she has lawyered up. Wawa (Nophi) also streams and says she's lawyered up. Oddly she implies she is new to vtubing despite having been in the industry for about two years across three agencies. Megumi also streams and discusses putting together a vtuber group with other talents. Hmm, who might those be?
October 5: A streamer named Luminous Cove has been compiling screenshots of DM leaks and messages that FalseEyeD has been sharing on his streams and compiling them into a Google Docs slideshow. The most recent (as of this update) PDF export of this document can be downloaded from this post.
December 14: Wawa/EepyWawa, the minor who performed as Princess Nophi and streamed periodically after leaving AkioAIR, announces she will cease streaming as of December 18th, citing time constraints and other responsibilities.
December 16: Megumi Kuragiri/Teyra Fenthera joins The Virtual Asylum forums and Discord server under the username @Smegmar, becoming a particularly prominent user of the latter. As of the time of this writing she hasn't given many specifics about her time in AkioAIR apparently due to ongoing legal considerations, but she occasionally speaks tangentally about it.
February 16: Megumi Kuragiri redebuts, with a new moth-like model and cozy-horror aesthetic, as part of her "agency LARP" (not-for-profit vtuber group) Digital Dropouts. Eventually it is confirmed that Metorial (former MEW Horizon) will be another member of this group, but she has not redebuted as a member of it as of this update (March 18).
February 22, 2024: It seems that some sort of agreement, deadline, or settlement of the legal aspects of this issue may have happened around this date. The former performers of Nonoah and Kion Dojima, who had been largely inactive since the company collapse, announce their intent to return to streaming at exactly the same time on Twitter. EepyWawa and KibiVT, who performed as the two members of "Season 2" who made it to debut before dropping out, also announce their return to streaming as Poyo Poyo and Zuri Kaini, members of a new five-member group called V-Tomo (the other three members appear to be unrelated to AkioAIR at this time).
Some point between March 2 and 5, 2024 (If someone knows a more precise date, let me know): The AkioAIR web site becomes inaccessible, only showing a CloudFlare error when one tries to access it. Archive.org contains an accessible archive of the site.
March 17, 2024: YouTube channel Legal Mindset, operated by a lawyer who has been covering many stories on the vtuber space starting with the Selen Tatsuki termination, hosts a stream covering the story with a Twitch streamer by the name JJuniesmoothie (Junie) who seems to have been almost entirely unknown to myself and other people who have been following or involved with the story. The stream had a small number of factual errors and, in my opinion, fell short of covering the story in a way that would be easily comprehensible to those who would be unfamiliar with it. Megumi was present in the stream chat and tried to raise her concerns, but was treated coolly and eventually banned by a mod. Poyo Poyo, Princess Nophi's current identity, complained about someone dredging up a painful story for profit and not contacting anybody who was directly involved with it.
Special thanks to Kalion for first posting the tweet that kicked this all off to the general thread (the discussion was split off into its own thread and this OP was added later) and to all of my fellow inmates who have been contributing info in this thread and archiving tweets and /vt/ posts.
AkioAIR announced via tweet that one of the talents for their soon-to-debut second generation ("season") was underage. Tweeters wondered why AkioAIR would hire a minor in the first place, then place a target on said minor's back by announcing this instead of saying nothing. It was uncovered that that talent had previously worked for other agencies and was treated in a very inappropriate manner by the management of at least one of them. Despite severe backlash, AkioAIR doubled down on working with the minor, even after seemingly four of the five other members of the gen, plus one of the previous gen, quit in protest. The remaining S2 members debut on September 30, but quit the following day citing mismanagement and the pressure the situation has placed on them. The remaining S1 members quit that evening. The agency has no members left. Throughout the period former members have been posting statements alleging serious mismanagement issues, legal threats, and emotional manipulation by CEO Jason Kuo, as well as late pay. Most former members of the agency have gone on to continue their streaming careers independently.
Timeline of the drama (dates and times are generally in the Eastern time zone of the US. Other time zones are thought to exist but are purely theoretical):
April 26 - May 31, 2021: AkioAIR conducts their first round of recruitment.
January 13, 2022: AkioAIR bizarrely holds another round of recruitment to cast a single pre-designated character. It would later come to be known that this was because the first person cast to be Kion Dojima had quit before debut.
March 11-12, 2022: Over 11 months after starting auditions, the first "Season" of AkioAIR, "REfract," debuts with 5 members: Athena Nightingale, MEW Horizon, Nonoah, RoaFen, and Kion Dojima.
January 6, 2023: AkioAIR announces that RoaFen would be graduating from the company the next day (her character's birthday) due to differences with the company.
Note that the above events are not directly related to the drama surrounding the Season 2 hiring that led to the company's collapse, but I include them as they help fill out the picture of mismanagement problems at the company that were part of the broader problem leading to their demise.
August 19, 2023: Someone on /vt/ claiming to be a new Akio talent claims Akio is a black company and that Jason forces talent to play games and socialize with him and misappropriates funds. These posts go largely ignored outside 4chan.
August 21-27: AkioAIR begins to tweet silhouettes of their "Season 2" members and accounts start to go live. The members, and what we now believe to be their relative previous identites, are as follows, in order of debut announcement.
- Teyra Fenthera: Megumi Kuragiri
- Vix E Grey: Bunie/BunieNade
- Princess Nophi: Valera Kitsu of MysteriaLive and Charlotte Kaneko of AuroraLiveVR
- Azuri Delfi: Kivi/KiviVT
- Hoshikuzu Orion: Amemachi Hanabi
- Chiyorii Kogara: Maria Paradisia of Tsunderia (Need a good link for this)
The silhouette for Princess Nophi says "banged ur mom."
Rumors begin to swirl about the identity of the streamers. Nophi being Valera Kitsu/Charlotte Kaneko is relevant because she was forced to perform creepy roleplay in MysteriaLive. She is believed to live somewhere in Europe, possibly Belgium. However, outside VT schizothreads, this identity-searching largely goes unnoticed.
At least one of the leakers on /vt/ mentioned below claimed to be a new talent who previously went by the name Kivi/KiviVT and posted cropped images of Delfi's model. It doesn't make any sense for her to have identified herself while leaking and degrading her company on /vt/ like she did and not get fired for it, so it may be possible that someone else who had access to early artwork of Delfi is falsely posting to slander Delfi and/or Kivi, but Akio management didn't fall for it. (Another less likely explanation is that the leaker really is Delfi/Kivi but Akio either never noticed the /vt/ posts or decided not to act on them for whatever reason. Kivi would later explicitly state she was not the leaker.)
September 5: Things kick off when AkioAIR tweets a wall of text image saying that Nophi is a minor and asking artists not to lewd her. Backlash is fierce and immediate. Why hire a minor? Why tell the world she is a minor? In discussion, /vt/ rumor posts start to surface and reports of Kitsu's treatment in MysteriaLive resurface. The "banged ur mom" silhouette image is brought up, and NSFW accounts are found among Nophi's follow list. Some people (particularly ones that had been rejected by Akio) point out that Akio's own application requirements require applicants to be 18 years old.
September 6: Having largely ignored the backlash to their previous tweet, AkioAIR tweets out a teaser for a music video for the new gen and announces they will debut on September 15-16. Replies are unimpressed. Discussion continues. Dramatubers Kuri Rinji and Khyo make videos.
September 6-7: Twitter activity for all new member accounts except Nophi and Delfi ceases, though it would be a few days before people notice. Maria Paradisia resurfaces to tweet "I'm tired." Megumi Kuragiri likes it.
September 9: AkioAIR tweets another text-image. Unfortunately it appears they will double down on debuting Nophi. It says management will take over Nophi's Twitter account for her safety, and asks us to not harass their other members. The message includes a confusing word-salad paragraph about how Nophi is a minor but isn't being treated like one, or something like that. No clarification is forthcoming.
September 13: A /vt/ post claims some talents have walked and that Jason is trying to find new talents to play their roles.
September 14: AkioAIR tweets that debuts scheduled to start on the 16th will be postponed "due to unfortunate circumstances and considerations for our talents' health." Bunie tweets announcing a redebut and week-long emergency donothon. Maria returns and considers a donothon. Megumi Kuragiri announces a return. Hanabi tweets, but had been tweeting somewhat regularly before then and doesn't announce a return.
September 17: Season 1's Athena Nightingale removes mention of Akio from her Twitter profile, though it still exists on her YouTube channel. Athena is Akio's largest member in terms of subscribers by a large margin.
September 18: Season 1's MEW Horizon, who had been on health hiatus, tweets saying "Please avoid mentioning AkioAIR matters on my stream" and "Things are difficult now and only time will tell." Also, Maria does a Twitter space where she admits to being stressed and cries. She says she can't talk about where she's been.
September 20: In a tweet at about 1:45 AM ET on a Wednesday, AkioAIR announces Season 2 will debut on Saturday, September 30. This is a week later than the date they announced in their previous tweet about postponing the debut. At the time of writing the backlash to this tweet is relatively muted compared to the others, but the late hour at which it was posted (for North America) may be a factor in that.
September 21: Maria Paradisia announces a comeback stream on the 23rd.
September 23: Athena Nightingale posts "hoot hoot" on the community page of her pre-Akio YouTube channel, which had only one other post since she joined Akio. Maria promises to return to regular streaming in the near future but avoids giving details about her supposed time with Akio.
September 24: Athena tweets an announcement about leaving Akio and continuing to stream at her prior YouTube channel, and that she would be going by the name Athy. For reasons not yet known, this tweet is deleted within three hours. Unfortunately nobody archived it but we have a screenshot of it as a post to a Discord server by a Twitter bot as well as the full-size image that was posted with it thanks to it being reposted by a parody account.
September 28: Athy tweets "I want to stream so badly
," implying there is some reason why she cannot currently stream. This is her first tweet (excluding Throne bot posts) since the deleted one unless she quickly deleted another one that we missed. Megumi Kuragiri announces a comeback stream on October 4 with a well-made animated skit.September 29: In a very early morning tweet, Akio's account tweets that AkioWATER, the pairing of dolphin-themed Azuri Delfi and frog-themed Nophi De Montclair, will debut on September 30 at 12:00 noon and 1:00 PM respectively. The accompanying video is a clip of a remixed "Ver. WATER" version of Season 2's debut song, Serendipity, with just those two talents. Regarding the other four talents of Season 2, the tweet says "Considering the circumstances and health issues, we decided to delay their debut until they are ready once again." Athy vaguetweets again: "I miss everyone."
September 30: HOLY CHRIST. A lot happens on this and the following day so let's split it up by time. Each time is in the Eastern time zone.
- 12:24 AM: Athy makes another "I quit" tweet. Compared to the neutral tone, colorful design, and brevity of the previous tweet, this one is black text on a white background, several paragraphs long, and explicitly lays out her payments for leaving; late payments, Nophi's hiring, and legal threats and emotional abuse when she tried to split with the company amicably.
- 10:17 AM: Rather than hyping up the new debuts which will start about 100 minutes later, Akio's Twitter account tweets a rebuttal to Athy's claims as a 7-page Google Docs document. See this post for a PDF version. The document outlines three cases where Athy violated her contract (one being unstated, the latter two being her two announcements of quitting) and that her actions have damaged the company, and that they will keep the possibilty of a lawsuit on the table unless Athy apologizes.
- 12:00 PM: Before a further promotional tweet from Akio, Azuri Delfi debuts. During her debut the Akio account gets around to retweeting stream announcements from both Delfi and Nophi. Both debut streams go off without notable incident.
- 7:45 PM: Moto Kumakko, small independent streamer, tweets about her time in Vyspire, Akio's training branch. She accuses Jason Kuo directly of favoritism, disrespecting other agency talents, and making legal threats.
- 8:22 PM: Megumi Kuragiri tweets that she is preparing to speak out about her time with AkioAIR, thus confirming speculation that she was one of the S2 talents.
- 8:23 PM: Bunie quote tweets Megumi's posts and says she too will be speaking out. (The instant timing of her response may mean they had been planning to do this behind-the-scenes.) Again, this confirms Bunie was one of the S2 talents.
- 11:12 PM: Bunie tweets her statement. She states she learned of Nophi being a minor about a week after signing the contract and was immediately uncomfortable about it but her concerns were put aside by Jason. She mentions being uncomfortable with having a British aesthetic pushed upon her character, and that management was uncommunicative, and this stress compounded upon stress from the recent death of her father and related events. Her "last straw" came when the talents discovered Jason had leaked their designs early, as well as the tweet about Nophi. On the 8th, Bunie emailed Akio asking to resign, and the legal threats began the next day, and demands for financial restitution to continue working with Akio. Bunie got lawyers involved but things have not been resolved.
- Some point in the evening: A Twitter account with the handle TW_VenVen is discovered by /vt/. It's apparently operated by an artist working with Akio and has been posting angry rants in Chinese about the situation since the 15th, clearly angry at the talents that have quit and threatening legal fury. Archives can be found on this post.
October 1:
- 11:57 AM: VenVen makes another angry tweet (among others throughout the day) which seems to indicate he is an investor in AkioAIR and wants his investment protected.
- 9:00 PM: Nophi and Delfi simultaneously release announcements that they have left Akio under their personal accounts. Nophi complains of being put in a bad situation regarding the disclosure of her age and complains of Jason's possessive and creepy behavior, and that he actually slept through her and Delfi's debuts due to staying up to draft the response to Athy. Delfi said she felt obligated to stay with the company due to Jason's investment in her but also complains of feeling uncomfortable with Jason's behavior. Six minutes later, Megumi releases her statement saying that her past association with NSFW content led her to feel uncomfortable working alongside a minor and that her association with Akio has harmed her reputation.
- Time unknown: Drama streamer FalseEyeD shares screenshots of private messages between Athy and Jason corroborating some of her claims.
- Time unknown: Screenshots of DMs between Vix E. Grey, Jason, and a manager named Chiru are shared on /vt/.
- Time unknown: Dee the Sphinx, apparently a reincarnation of RoaFen's performer, posts a song as an unlisted YouTube video to show her support for her friends at Akio.
- 11:29 PM: Kivi (former Azuri Delfi) denies being the person who leaked information on /vt/ under her name.
- 11:36-37 PM: The three remaining S1 talents, plus Athy, all tweet some variation of "gg". It is presumed they decided to quit the company. MEW Horizon sets her Twitter background to screenshots of all the tweets. AkioAIR has no talents left.
October 2:
- Some point in the early morning (or maybe late on the 1st): A screenshot of DMs between Jason and Vix E. Grey is shared to /vt/ that directly shows Jason initially refusing to share assets with Vix until she plays Overwatch with him. The screenshot contains a Google Drive link with a Photoshop file of Vix's model, though it is eventually taken down.
- 2:51 AM: A Twitter user claims to have been initially cast as Kion Dojima but dropped out before debut. In subsequent tweets she corroborates the pattern of Jason's behavior regarding legal threats and shaming about the investment the company made in her.
- 9:33 AM: An artist alleges AkioAIR offered him only $50 for Athena Nightingale's design. (This is an incredibly low price for a single piece of professional artwork, much less an entire design.)
- 7:12 PM: MEW Horizon, still using her Akio-branded account, tweets "Is it my turn now?"
October 3: Very early in the morning, under a personal account, MEW tweets a long statement. She states that she felt she was given special treatment by Jason as she knew Mandarin and could help bridge the gap between the talent and the managers in Taiwan. She expresses frustration that a company project that was supposed to offer a stable salary ended up offering nothing and as she had quit other jobs to work on that project, she was financially burdened. She said she was involved in the S2 recruitment process and protested strongly against Nophi's hire but was the lone voice of reason. She says in July 2023 she was pressured into joining Jason on a trip to Japan after repeated refusals and that inadequate compensation for lodging again burdened her financially. Shockingly she said Jason had told Nophi to hide the fact that she knows Tagalog as "SEA is not attractive," despite southeast Asia being a massive market for vtubers and streamers in that market often becoming beloved in the English-speaking fandom, and MEW is Malaysian herself. She validates rumors that Jason had manager Yuufi apply for another corpo to see what their processes were and that Yuufi made it to the level that she signed an NDA and was apparently given access to confidential documents. She corroborates Athy's accusations of consistently late payment.
October 4: Amemachi Hanabi, who was almost certainly Hoshizuki Orion in AkioAIR, announces a comeback stream. She hints she has lawyered up. Wawa (Nophi) also streams and says she's lawyered up. Oddly she implies she is new to vtubing despite having been in the industry for about two years across three agencies. Megumi also streams and discusses putting together a vtuber group with other talents. Hmm, who might those be?
October 5: A streamer named Luminous Cove has been compiling screenshots of DM leaks and messages that FalseEyeD has been sharing on his streams and compiling them into a Google Docs slideshow. The most recent (as of this update) PDF export of this document can be downloaded from this post.
December 14: Wawa/EepyWawa, the minor who performed as Princess Nophi and streamed periodically after leaving AkioAIR, announces she will cease streaming as of December 18th, citing time constraints and other responsibilities.
December 16: Megumi Kuragiri/Teyra Fenthera joins The Virtual Asylum forums and Discord server under the username @Smegmar, becoming a particularly prominent user of the latter. As of the time of this writing she hasn't given many specifics about her time in AkioAIR apparently due to ongoing legal considerations, but she occasionally speaks tangentally about it.
February 16: Megumi Kuragiri redebuts, with a new moth-like model and cozy-horror aesthetic, as part of her "agency LARP" (not-for-profit vtuber group) Digital Dropouts. Eventually it is confirmed that Metorial (former MEW Horizon) will be another member of this group, but she has not redebuted as a member of it as of this update (March 18).
February 22, 2024: It seems that some sort of agreement, deadline, or settlement of the legal aspects of this issue may have happened around this date. The former performers of Nonoah and Kion Dojima, who had been largely inactive since the company collapse, announce their intent to return to streaming at exactly the same time on Twitter. EepyWawa and KibiVT, who performed as the two members of "Season 2" who made it to debut before dropping out, also announce their return to streaming as Poyo Poyo and Zuri Kaini, members of a new five-member group called V-Tomo (the other three members appear to be unrelated to AkioAIR at this time).
Some point between March 2 and 5, 2024 (If someone knows a more precise date, let me know): The AkioAIR web site becomes inaccessible, only showing a CloudFlare error when one tries to access it. Archive.org contains an accessible archive of the site.
March 17, 2024: YouTube channel Legal Mindset, operated by a lawyer who has been covering many stories on the vtuber space starting with the Selen Tatsuki termination, hosts a stream covering the story with a Twitch streamer by the name JJuniesmoothie (Junie) who seems to have been almost entirely unknown to myself and other people who have been following or involved with the story. The stream had a small number of factual errors and, in my opinion, fell short of covering the story in a way that would be easily comprehensible to those who would be unfamiliar with it. Megumi was present in the stream chat and tried to raise her concerns, but was treated coolly and eventually banned by a mod. Poyo Poyo, Princess Nophi's current identity, complained about someone dredging up a painful story for profit and not contacting anybody who was directly involved with it.
Sep 20: Formatting improvements. Fix date of Maria's Twitter space. Add new Season 2 debut date tweet. Add links to dramatuber videos.
Sep 22: Add Delfi identity speculation. Add Maria's comeback announcement.
Sep 24: Fix Chiyorii's name. Add Athena/Athy developments for the 23rd and 24th.
Sep 29: Yuufi account inactivity. "AkioWATER" announcement tweet. Latest Athy tweets.
Sep 30: Athy's second resignation tweet.
Oct 1 (morning): Catch up on the events of the 30th. Add Megumi's comeback announcement.
Oct 1 (evening): Add statements by Nophi/wawa, Delfi/Kivi, and Megumi.
Oct 2: Catch up on the exodus of the evening of the 1st and related events, and events of the 2nd so far. Oof.
Oct 3: Add MEW's posts Update beginning of timeline to fill in drama that happened before the S2 announcement and add mention of RoaFen. Add Dee the Sphinx's video.
Oct 7: Add summary of streams in the 4th. Add document of screenshots from False's streams.
March 17, 2024: Give a well-overdue update of events up to and including the Legal Mindset stream.
Sep 22: Add Delfi identity speculation. Add Maria's comeback announcement.
Sep 24: Fix Chiyorii's name. Add Athena/Athy developments for the 23rd and 24th.
Sep 29: Yuufi account inactivity. "AkioWATER" announcement tweet. Latest Athy tweets.
Sep 30: Athy's second resignation tweet.
Oct 1 (morning): Catch up on the events of the 30th. Add Megumi's comeback announcement.
Oct 1 (evening): Add statements by Nophi/wawa, Delfi/Kivi, and Megumi.
Oct 2: Catch up on the exodus of the evening of the 1st and related events, and events of the 2nd so far. Oof.
Oct 3: Add MEW's posts Update beginning of timeline to fill in drama that happened before the S2 announcement and add mention of RoaFen. Add Dee the Sphinx's video.
Oct 7: Add summary of streams in the 4th. Add document of screenshots from False's streams.
March 17, 2024: Give a well-overdue update of events up to and including the Legal Mindset stream.
Special thanks to Kalion for first posting the tweet that kicked this all off to the general thread (the discussion was split off into its own thread and this OP was added later) and to all of my fellow inmates who have been contributing info in this thread and archiving tweets and /vt/ posts.
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