Jerking each other off professionally doesn't mean they're in close contact. It means a guy knows a guy, and they probably share some kind words about each other's companies. They'd keep an eye on what each other are doing.
Nick Rekita is a drug-addict, a cuckold, a child abuser (in the nonsexual sense,
that we know of) and a narcissist who has appeared on stream with coke smeared over his nose and read the same superchat about a farting dragon eleven times in a row.
Yet he
still, to this very day has multiple fellow lawyers defending him and calling all the evidence against him 'circumstantial'. Why? Because they either live in a bubble where they simply don't allow that kind of information to be filtered to them through an objective lens, or they're just as bad as he is and covering for each other.
This is the same problem I have with vtuber managers and support staff. They are fundamentally under no obligations to actually care about their talents whatsoever, and in my direct experience, most automatically choose 'what will get me clout in this industry' over 'what will objectively make my talents money, and by extension myself more money'. This extends to
outright lying to their talents and then trading them in immediately for someone more connected when they have the chance.
Since most vtubers aren't professionals or have any business experience, they have no ability to go to any of the places managers and staff congregate to discuss or network and complain. They shout into the void with google documents that nobody reads, and staff automatically dismiss in the same way you or I would dismiss an anonymous poster on 4chan saying 'I fucked Filian once and she's actually intersex with a cojoined twin and has two pseudopenises as a result'. This creates an extreme negative feedback loop where someone can keep getting jobs not because they're good at managing, but because they're a good self-publicist, which is 95% of getting any job in any market, barring
maybe brain surgery, and even then there's some morbid counterfactuals.
Let me try and illustrate this; someone I know is trying to buy a house at the moment. They are very much solvent and very much in a positive income bracket, but they don't have a good credit score because they've literally never been in enough debt to get a decent one. Despite being able to easily prove how much money they make, no lending company will touch them. Then they get a CPA who specializes in cases like this, and within a week, they get pre-approval for a mortgage of up to a million dollars. In a conversation with their CPA, they ask what the magic words were, and the CPA admits candidly 'look, I don't even try to explain, I just tell them you earn X amount and they believe me without question, because I'm a registered agent and they have no reason to even look at my paperwork unless a government agent is actively breathing down their neck the moment they open the file'.
Now my gut tells me that this is retarded, and that somewhere down the line someone is going to end up dead in a ditch with the words 'never fuck with the IRS' carved into their skin. But that someone is probably going to be ten degrees of separation from the house buyer, the bank, the CPA, and anyone associated with them. It's a case of 'if a tree falls alone in a forest, did it really happen?'
I can think of a dozen ways to expand this outwards into a much larger conversation about business, ethics, human psychology, game theory, and a half-dozen other interwoven topics. But I'm also conscious that I'm writing this while half-dressed in bed on a laptop, so I'll stop here. All I'll say is that I really wish I didn't have the kind of autism I have, and would love to tap into the kind of autism that lets people intuit exactly what meme they need to repost to make everyone in the thread go 'oooooh, so
that's what you mean, I get it now.'
Or maybe you're reading too much into it.
This again, has nothing to do EIEN and we have no proof that anyone connected to EIEN or Vreverie or Prism or Kawaii or Tsunderia, specifically their rotten management teams are now working for Cover, if you can source proof of this I would be genuinely interested.
I reiterate, this is not me bashing you because of some vendetta or fanboyism or whatever, I WOULD BE GENUINELY INTERESTED IN KNOWING ABOUT THIS TOPIC if information was actually provided.
I think I have accidentally created something I never intended to create, so allow me to be clear. I do not know if EIEN has anything to do with Hololive. I have no idea if any managers, staff, vtubers or anyone else from any company outside of Hololive now do in fact work for Hololive, nor have I ever heard any information that would imply there are any direct cases of this happening. If my own words have encouraged such a narrative to develop, then that is my fault and I apologize for it sincerely.
I'm not going to address anything else you posted, because all of it is perfectly sensible and I agree with basically all of it. This is the kind of argument I asked for, and I'm grateful you took the time to make it. So instead I'm going to focus on clarifying the parts I think relate to a narrative I had no intention of creating.
All I have meant to claim is that people aren't grasping the bigger picture if they dismiss this possibility out of hand and act like Hololive is a monolith that is immune to such events taking place. If people thought that I was implying I know of specific incidents of this happening; no, I do not. I am simply aware by now of how this industry operates to a large enough degree that I will always be suspicious, and will never buy into the 'streamer who never knew anyone else before joining' narrative ever again.
My comments about corporations like Kawaii were not intended to come off as implying that
I knew there was secret collusion or insider dealings going on, or that there was some incredibly important hidden truth I knew but couldn't talk about that everyone else was missing. I can only take the L on that front if that's genuinely how I came across.
If you want to call me a retard for not understanding what my words would create, then by all means do so. I just don't know how to effectively transition from conversations about
specific incidents to trends, incentives, market interactions and recurrent patterns in the industry as a whole.
I'm sorry for this, truly I am.
The only thing I want people to understand is that these companies aren't in competition. They are the NFL Leagues. Or democratic governments one step below the positions people vote for, if you want to be extremely cynical.