Re:Zaion suspension: I come out of lurk to ask if anyone else thinks this is more of an issue with the EN management?
As already discussed it's definitely not the yab moments (even if it's piled up). But I can't help but put on my menhera tin foil hat and leer at the absolute state of management after the Yugo/"COVID" AR live fiasco? Like what are they doing over there that's got their talents so all-over the place?
Like if a talent is butting heads with management or having a hard time communicating with them are they more susceptible to just getting put in the time out corner? That seems to be the point of contention that stands out to me the most on the laundry list of issues that seem like a deterrent to the actual issue.
I think members of the first 5 waves have just been frustrated due to the workload involved in the AR concert and whatever other stuff they're doing (debuts and whatnot) only to see the concert cancelled. It'll
probably be rescheduled, but that's got to be frustrating. Especially for Luxiem since it seems like they were doing a lot of work in Japan. We're seeing a few livers go on break in the coming weeks basically because now they can go on
actual breaks instead of just not streaming but doing other behind the scenes work (Alban and Elira more or less stated this). In general it seems like management had been saddling the livers with extraneous work and I honestly think they might have gone overboard. Hopefully now they are relaxing that.
Of course this doesn't really apply to Zaion, as Iluna and Xsoleil weren't slated to be in the concert. While it's hard to give the benifit of the doubt to Niji management these days, I do think this may just be the case of the corpo actually making the right call. While I really like Zaion, I'll admit that talking about romhacks, basically being completely open about pre-Niji game accounts, and having tons of privated vods is not a good look.
As for Yugo, I don't think he would have been that involved in any of the AR or 3D stuff to much of a degree (besides doing some work for Pomu's 3D). Again with Yugo I think it was more of a personality clash. It was fairly evident through Yugo's streams that he had trouble getting along with other people.
I think Niji's general problem with handling foreign branches is a lack of consistency. ID, IN, and KR all feel like they were basically run with a pretty laissez faire approach - hire some local staff and let them run the show, they know the market best - which didn't work, but for differing reasons (KR staff was just incompetent, ID staff was pretty proactive but arguably too controlling). Virtuareal is basically a different company, mostly run by Bilibili. NijiEN on the other hand feels like it is being handled like the more recent NijiJP waves... but it's tough because the members are all across the world in different countries and timezones. This is going to sound overly reductive, but NijiEN's core strength is streaming. They're mostly all good streamers and they like streaming a lot. They can't coast on doing a couple of streams per month and I think that most of them wouldn't want to do that. Whatever other work that is being done shouldn't get too much in the way of streaming IMO. I think Anycolor's approach does work well in Japan (amidst all the turmoil of the past weeks the new JP wave has actually had a pretty good start), and I think EN is clearly a step above their past attempts at reaching beyond Japan, but they still clearly have issues that need to be addressed.