I've seen many people detail how she's talked about having very big social anxiety, to the point of just sitting down and eating with people leading to her making mistakes and dropping food. She's apparently also talked about the moment a short while after debuting, when she rocketed past absolutely everyone, even her senpais, and became the first to one million, that she felt physically ill at the thought and started vomiting.
It's very clear that Gura is not someone that thrives in the spotlight. Instead it's the complete opposite. She's basically a big ball of anxiety and imposter syndrome.
I've seen people speculate that her frequent breaks could have been attempts to thin out her fanbase, and make people leave for others that streamed more. But if that's the case, it has spectacularly failed, and instead caused a viscous cycle of coming back to stream, get massive amount of attention for being back, get anxiety, and back on break, rinse and repeat.
I think this is pretty much the template for all of the graduations other than Fauna*: physical or mental health issues. Pretty much everyone that had done low amounts of streaming over the last 2 years are also the talents that have admitted to having major anxiety. As Cover transitioned from being just a streaming company to being a big performance and brand engine, it's natural that the folks who have the worst anxiety would shrivel in the process. (I mean, two of the biggest faces of Holo were Aqua and Gura, a pair of anxiety singularities) Whether this is intentional house-cleaning or the result of Aqua having given people the feeling that it's alright to leave, the talents who are emotionally (Aqua, Shion, Ame, Gura), physically (Mumei, Chloe), or organizationally (Also Chloe) unable to deal with the structure and pace of a corporate job are leaving and I think that's a good thing.
First, it's cutting the deadwood from the tree. It sucks for fans and it's a shame that it kills valuable IPs, but it also prevents people from clinging to a single minimally active talent and not branching out. This also keeps brands from seeking out big but inactive talents for collaborations and other sorts of administrative churn that wastes time. Second, it's protecting the company culture/camaraderie. If there are big but inactive talents that are being catered to or coddled by management, that can breed resentment among folks who are putting in the time and work. Given that Cover seems to lack the internal cattiness and backbiting that many of these corpos have, this is of paramount importance. Third, it sends a message about expectations to future hires in terms of the activity level that is required for a Cover talent. I think management has gone above and beyond what is expected and required of them to allow talents, with even extenuating mental and physical circumstances, to be so inactive for so long. Finally, I really hope this is a chance for these women to get the help they need to live better since remaining in this situation isn't doing their health any favors.
It's a shame to see Goob go because she's a top notch talent. More than likely, she's done all of the right things in terms of therapy and so forth and she just can't get to a point where she's compatible with what being Gura requires of her. God speed shork, may you be much happier in whatever you do next in life.
*Early on, Fauna had some yandere elements to her character and she would lean into what I'd call "creepy cute" elements with her character not being an entirely benevolent character. My suspicion is that management saw that as off-brand for her and, with her rebrand as Nimi Nightmare and her going for a lot of creepy cute elements with her new design and character, I feel somewhat confident that she wanted a significantly different direction for the character she played. Given Council coming out of Omega's idiocy, the talents probably didn't have nearly the agency in defining their characters as Advent and Justice did.
