This post focuses on the effects of Nijisanji's decision to terminate Selen Tatsuki on Feb 5 2023. This situation is more or less about the VTuber community and I honestly did not expect it to blow up to be such a big issue. VTubers are essentially a mix of the digital and media space mixing where people are shown a 2D or 3D animated character instead of their real-life self. I don't watch much about VTubers outside of Nuxtaku and Rev and I knew that the corporate VTuber corporations were kind of shit, but I honestly didn't think it would ever blow up to be such a big issue that even Asmongold, MoistCr1TiKaL, and even the some lawyers on Youtube were starting to get involved in the issue. Since I spent dozens of hours on the issue, I thought I would write up a post about it and some of the information about this. Anycolor, the parent company of Nijisaji, has suffered quite a bit since they terminated Selen Tatsuki on February 5th. I used this compilation thread for Selen/Dokibird as a source for quite a few things about the events and to get the images of the actual things.
I would have to say that I am a bit biased because the person behind Selen Tatsuki had failed attempts at suicide and despite knowing this, Nijisanji decided to terminate her and throw her under the bus. The actions during the termination and the ones following only points towards Nijisanji being a company that does not really care about their talents.
Selen Tatsuki
Selen Tatsuki is a VTuber under the organization Nijisanji EN branch. More information can be found on a wiki page for this VTuber and the lore. Nijisanji is one of the two biggest VTuber corporations and they focus more on quantity while Hololive (the other large group) focuses more on quality. As I learned more about the issue, it appears that Selen is a very outgoing person and she reaches out commonly to other VTuber organizations for collaboration and she personally creates a lot of events to involve her own community.
Events leading up to the termination
The information was found from the mega thread linked above and I will focus more on what I think is relevant (not speculation). Any tweets from Selen are gone so I pulled up those images from the archive as Selen's account has gone private by the Nijisanji management.
Art contest
The first thing is about an art that Selen ran to involve her community. She ran an art contest to determine her new outfit and the prize money would be paid out by Selen herself. There is an article if you want more information. It is mentioned in the mega thread that Nijisanji also wanted to take the copyright for the art while not compensating anyone involved. Even with Selen paying, from what I saw from various videos across YouTube, I believe Nijisanji had problems with this art contest.
Block from running tournaments
As an outgoing person, she was one of the person who was running events between international people and also other organizations. She was banned from doing so on August 8, 2023.
Last Cup of Coffee (music cover)
On Christmas of 2023, she released a music cover but it was taken down soon later by management. She decided to post the above tweet so it looks like the battle with management continues.
One thing to note is that this song has been in the work for a long time and I recall hearing that Selen decided to actively get the copyright from the people involved because Lilypichu gave permission over a year before the video went live. To note, in a stream by some of their talents later on, they noted that the copyright issues happened from previous graduated talents and that Nijisanji held the copyright towards those characters. So I kind of think that it was kind of bullshit.
This tweet was sent out 2 days after the music cover but in a termination notice by the company later on, Selen was already locked out of the account. This is about Selen trying to take her life and the management decided to post this tweet.
Following these events, the Selen account would go inactive.
Termination
On February 5th, 2024, Nijisanji officially terminates Selen and posts their justification. It was through this termination notice that stated that the reasons behind her suicide attempt was because of bullying by management and other talents in the company. At the same time, it was this termination notice that clarified quite a few things including that the hospital tweet was done by management. Selen did not learn of this termination until she was told by friends. It does look like this is a norm in the VTuber industry though as they follow along with the Idol Industry standards. The full termination notice can be found here.
At this point, the person behind Selen went on her past life VTuber account (the VTuber she played before Selen) Dokibird to respond. The mods under Selen's account decided to go rogue and also promote the Dokibird channel on Youtube and everyone was noticeably mad about the actions of Nijisanji. The talents behind Nijisanji decided to take a break and everything went to shit. There are more tweets but I focused on the specific tweet shown above.
To reassure their investors, the company decided to publish a statement on their official site and they mentioned that the impact of the termination would be financially negligible. However, I wouldn't say so as business partners decided to pull out of their business deals here and here.
On February 12th, some of the talents under Nijisanji went live at the same time Dokibird was online and gave out some statements. This video was essentially a hit piece against Dokibird and I think it is horrible to see as they made statements about what they considered contract violations. Also, they mentioned that they saw the legal documents that were meant to be shared between the legal department. It caused Dokibird to stop her stream to talk to her lawyer.
A few hours after the above stream, their CEO went live with a video that is nothing more than a normal business apology. They didn't really address Selen much outside of the fact that the use of the word negligible was incorrect.
Potentially realizing that the stream by the talents had issues, they made an official statement saying that they did not break any laws by sharing legal documents with their talents. So basically, I think there are issues with this. You can find this response here.
After this, there was a long statement by Dokibird saying that she did not give them permission to share the legal documents outside of the lawyers and she does not want anyone to attack others. She wants this issue to be solved legally if it goes that far. The full tweet can be found here.
Conclusion
I have watched a few streams about the legal issues through Legal Mindset(ex-Florida corporate lawyer) and Runkle of the Bailey(Canadian Lawyer). Dokibird has just been responding to the statements from Njisanji and it only makes Nijisanji seem worst. Personally, it looks like Selen probably did violate the contract through her actions but Nijisanji's action of attacking her directly and publishing information such as her suicide attempt or bullying did not help them on the PR side. Nijisanji probably did fuck up over the privacy side because the legalities of Japan and Canada are different. Njjisanji probably had some miscommunication after getting legal documents from Doki as I think Doki did not want to make things public. Personally, it looks like Nijisanji tried to destroy the reputation of Selen to make themselves look great but it doesn't seem to have worked on the people outside of Japan. It has been mentioned in some of the Legal Mindset streams that the Japanese people did not see any problems with the events occurring.
Feel free to leave a comment if you read my post. If you have any questions, feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer.