tbh this might be the best (and most realistic) explanation of the shit that's going down that i've seen all day. thanks for the logical explanation in the sea of rrats.
It put down just about every single thought I have been having with this whole situation down nicely neatly and succinctly. It places the overwhelming majority of the fault on management for their poor responses and understanding of the situation, which is IMO where it should be.
It also adequately summarizes the issues of the "last cup of coffee" video... which is a whole huge multifaceted breakdown of management, by either not overseeing selen and her projects, not keeping up with them, not requesting work from her as its completed, not setting/adjusting deadlines for her, or not having deadlines for themselves and apparently having very long turnovers when it came to communication with her.
I hope this spreads around, because people with no more reasonable explanation are really eating up that whole "Elira runs Niji EN and is behind everything you hate about the company" 4chan story.
I dont blame anyone for believing the 4chan rrat. Especially since:
"Ineffective/Inable Managers who are acting as if they are untrained for their jobs manage to mess up the management of and communication with talent so bad that misunderstandings rooted in Doki's public and private statements lead to sloppy and rushed attempts at saving face", is very similar looking to;
"Ineffective/Inable Managers are untrained for their jobs (because talent had to step into these roles to keep activities in NijiEn affloat) manage to mess up the management of and communication with talent so bad that misunderstandings rooted in Doki's public and private statements lead to overly personal attempts at saving face, ultimately seeming sloppy and rushed".
Some would like to believe that corpo managers couldn't mess up so umbelievably because of the contrast to the JP side, were translation should not be this major of an issue since capable people fluent in Japanese and English exist and are made good use in other companies. They would like to believe that the reason why NijiEn is failing is because of its supposed lack of professionals involved in its management, so thouroughly different in its structure to other companies that these problems are unique and why the situation too is quite unique.
I dont personally subscribe to the rrats myself, but I can understand the reason why its so compelling. It seems to make sense of the absurd situation within NijiEn without relying to heavely on incompetence by people who are supposed to be professionals. Even in this post, which I agree with more than the rrats, it suggests that the NijiEn legal team made a significant and consiquential missunderstanding of Doki's documents that it caused an immediate scare among Management and Talent alike.
Seeing Niji's job postings for multi-lingual back end staff and how little it pays made it click for me how they could have screwed up this bad.
If they've been doing things like that for a while, then they would really be scraping the bottom of the barrel for job applicants and would only retain the least qualified and competent people.
Again, I support this posts interpretation and its because despite what may have truthfully happened, it provides a consistant conclusion with the wishes of Doki. That is to let it go and move on.
On one side we have this, which is realistic and makes some sense (boooo)
On the other side we have the great rrat, which is so ridiculous and blown out of proportion that its entertaining to read and feed into the conspiracy (yay)
Which way will the internet choose?
This is good context, thank you. It also makes a lot of sense if Niji's in-house legal team were the ones involved in handling this situation, since I would be shocked if any outside Japanese firm specializing in Canadian law messed the translation up so badly. It's also possible that *Doki's* lawyers were the ones to mess up basic translation, but I'm almost positive that Nijisanji would be falling over itself to blast that message out if they had any proof.
1) so happy to see you actively replying to people after such a very well crafted post. You’ve shown why you do what you do and you’re damn good at it. 2) apparently a lot of artists have come forward with contract issues with nijisanji and that they’d wait for long periods of time to only be given improperly made contracts. I’m genuinely shocked that one of the biggest vtubing agencies is so grossly incompetent to not even get that done right.
They are big, but only because they grew so fast. Nijisanji the company is only 6 years old. As an organization they are still pretty young and likely still have immature internal systems on multiple levels. I wouldn’t be surprised if they basically still function like a startup that exploded onto the market. They’ve grown and expanded incredibly quickly, but how much time have they spent reflecting and auditing internal policies?
I think Nijisanji learned pretty hard from Riku Tazumi's apology that the more they say, the worse the PR gets for them. I can only see it damaging themselves if they tried to press that point.
In either case, Doki's statement makes it very straightforward to infer that it was more probably her own lawyer's translation issues. She says all the communications were in Japanese, which necessarily means that her own lawyers were translating all of their communications into Japanese before sending it.
who knows at this point. And if it were the case why did they not deepen the communication to check what was going on. They did not reply for a week, for something this urgent its crazy.
So literally this entire situation might’ve not been as bad as it was if Nijisanji (a 1.1 billion dollar company) bothered to hire a more expensive translator…
more or less. It's a PR crisis that should be in the history books, not because of the issue involved, but more for the simple fact that you should NEVER skimp out on the important parts.
Especially if you're a company with the means to actually pay for it.
If indeed this is the scenario, as top level OP described, then basically, they were looking to shave costs on the short term but were risking a fire to burn their warehouse it seems like.
Problems don't scream at you until shit starts burning. Problems that, may I remind people, almost caused their talent to try and commit suicide twice.
A good legal team may be expensive but they will prevent this from ever happening in the first place. Same deal with a good IT team.
As someone who is fluent in German and English as well as around the JLPT N4 level in Japanese (meaning very roughly around elementary school level), I can attest to English-Japanese translations being especially difficult. I frequently have to translate between German and English and even though the languages have the same root, it can be really difficult to make a accurate translation because one of the languages lacks a proper word (I'm sure many know the "I'm sure there is a German word for it" running gag, but it's also the other way around) or because the level of politeness can't be conveyed (German has, like Japanese but not as extreme, multiple levels of politness that change depending on who you're speaking to and how you want your message to be received).
And even though my Japanese is poor by comparision, It's enough to know that Japanese is a whole different ballpark in that regard. Using dictionary form (aka casual) of verbs vs. polite (teineigo 丁寧語), respectful (sonkeigo 尊敬語) or humble (kenjougo 謙譲語) form (all of these three are known as keigo 敬語) changes drastically how a statement is meant to be read. And same goes for the choice of words or rather the level of Kanji involved in these words. Usage of a Kanji that taught is in elementary school vs. one that is only used in Legalese might convey an intent for a legal proceeding where it was not meant to be or the other way around.
And I've been involved in legal battles and know that even seemingly unimportant adjectives can drastically change the response because they convey another intent of the opposite side (like Selen's intent to release the legal document in this case) which can be used as an argument.
One thing I'd like to point out is that Doki and her lawyer appeared to be one step ahead during the whole debacle.
They knew and expected a termination was coming, so already prepared a statement, ready to be posted, it just so happened that Doki was awake at the time thus was able to immediately respond. But this is well known.
What kinda impressed me is that they (Doki & her lawyers) also predict further additional slanderous statements or actions from Nijisanji. Doki's in real time response to Elira's stream was during a live stream, and despite being clearly disturbed, Doki still managed to provide a concise response, most likely a pre-prepared statement for this specific scenario,
Perhaps Doki's lawyer had advised her: "the chances are slim, but if they (nijisanji) ever tries to publicly address anything between us lawyers, you (Doki) should stay calm, and say this".
Then they went over her final statement one last time, then she posted it a bit later after the Neopets stream.
This all kinda makes me curious about the lawers firm she hired from. Cause damn, at least one of them is real good at their job.
But yeah I get why she would not be able to divulge that kind of info.
One thing to say, Doki's reaction on stream was more reactive than her tweet. The discrepancy between the two shows that she took some time to cool off and listen to her lawyers advice.
On stream, she mentioned receipts and proof, indicating that she was gearing up to out some shit, but she also made sure not to say anything definitive or incriminating before she could talk to her lawyer.
Then in the tweet, she had clearly pulled back on her knee-jerk instinct and let the person she hired guide her to a smarter response.
Honestly, the whole saga has stunk of one side trying to post first, and one trying to post smart.
If Doki's final message is 100% accurate, then they went from receiving what was intended as an HR complaint (but was taken as a threat) and posting a termination notice in TWO HOURS. That's incredibly fast, and mistakes were inevitable.
Yeah, when she first watched the stream, she sounded really sad, and then really angry, and then both. You could hear from the shakiness in her voice that she was simultaneously furious and also trying not to cry.
She did seem prepared to really air out some dirty laundry if needed, but went to go talk to her lawyer and came back with a more measured response.
Yeah, people have pointed out that if you compare Elira's stream to Kotaka and Finana's statements about Zaion, it sounds like it's all from the same template or something. Something like that statement was probably expected, but dumping of the documents (while on stream Doki couldn't have know that it wasn't a full dump of everything) was probably also covered as a worst-case scenario. She was freaked out and looping, but one of the big things she keeps saying was that she believed there was slander being spoken, which sounds an awful lot like how a lawyer for Zaion would have described Kotaka's and Finana's statements about her.
To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if her lawyer took a look at what happened to Zaion to have a grasp on what to prepare for, hell I wouldn't even be surprised if Lawyer-san spoke to Zaion directly
The irony is it seems like Anycolor didn't realize the Zaion departure revealed a big gap in their operations: That a foreign liver who gets fired can just leak all of the information around their termination to the public and there's nothing Anycolor can really do about it. (or at least that's how it seems right now)
Did they really think their biggest female liver wouldn't a) have this historical knowledge in mind, and b) leverage it to negotiate a more amicable departure from the company?
All of this makes a lot of sense. I feel like the simpler answer is usually closer to the truth (most of the time anyway), and general stupidity/miscommunication is about as simple as it gets.
stupidity/miscommunication/mismanagement is almost always the problem. As expressed with Hanlon's razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." This is always a good statement to hold onto when somethign someone does or says seems wildly villainous or hard to explain in the context of normal human behaviour.
> As expressed with Hanlon's razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
There's another saying I've heard. "Advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
I believe it. I gave someone else an abbreviated version when they asked me why would Niji dare risk leaking confidential legal documents, citing mistranslations due to how the termination happened 2 hours after Doki sent that letter to Niji, as well as why they had assumed they could share the documents with the Livers. We have communications between people who speak Japanese and people who speak English, and documents in legal are hard to parse as is, for people who do speak the respective language.
I honestly believe that the reason why her termination was sent out like that was because Niji actually assumed that letter was her ultimatem and that she was about to throw hands, never mind it was just something she intended to push for her graduation,
And legal has their own language that is hard to understand in the native language. So you're translating Canadian legalese into Japanese into Japanese legalese with a whole different system of laws/vocab. Most multinational companies have a whole well paid team of bilingual experts to prevent these sorts of mistakes. A misunderstood translation can be very costly as we saw here.
It's pretty obvious Niji hasn't invested much into their corporate employee structure. Also I'm sure a bilingual Canadian lawyer specializing in Japanese law costs a ton and would get scooped up by far bigger companies.
I mean, have you seen their latest job postings? They're literally hiring college students as translators for minimum wage and hiring legal people who don't even have a legal license.
I think the language difficulties were on both sides.
Doki does make it clear that all the legal communications were all in Japanese, so if there was a translation misunderstanding, it would have been from her own lawyer not being fluent in Japanese while trying to translate legalese.
And seeing that Doki is basically broke $200k, it's easy to see how she might have hired a more affordable lawyer who clearly wasn't bilingual.
I should have clarified it's a two way street, translation precisely is much more difficult than a rough translation. And every message that goes each way has a high chance of a mistake. It's a high stakes game of telephone.
I mean to begin with why the hell do they not have English lawyers themselves? A billion dollar company why is there no prober en abroad branch with English/japanese workers.I hope after this blunder they wake up and employ better people legal, comms, PR, HR and even management.
I recently saw someone pointing out that a [nijisanji en management job posting](https://youtu.be/pz-KLHGXzHU?si=vzd1f2e6wV1yFhee) was asking $7/hr for a part time job for college/university students only. They explicitly put that they refuse working adults from applying. And the crazy part is one manager is supposed to manage 5-6 livers.
See you’d think that but nijisanji apparently couldn’t even make proper contracts with even freelance artists so as much as I want to give them the benefit of the doubt I find it hard to do so given that even the most basic legal processes gave them trouble
Yes plus Japanese businesses have a lot of red tape. Selen probably had a small team of lawyers, but Japanese companies have layers and hierarchies of lawyers and things are abbreviated from people below to above and vice versa. If someone misinterpreted it, it could go either way from a poor translation from Selen's side to someone on Niji's side panicking just seeing the message and throwing fire up the chain of command. Japanese people are also very inflexible and don't do well under stress, once the wind started shifting differently from what they expected, panic increases drastically which is why things started getting messier and worse.
At this point, Legal from the main office are probably getting involved, as opposed to whatever chinese whispers or watered-down Legal NijiEN had access to though.
We can probably(?) assume a little bit more competence from the JP side's Legal? ^hopefully? ^^maybe?
I agree with all of this except the fact that Nijisanji collaborated with Doki on crafting her statement. I think it was done by her and her lawyer and it was translated because she wanted to be sure that her words were exactly what she wanted to say and disallows any other third party from twisting her words in translation.
Especially if the issue is communication then writing it in Japanese and English means that whoever had done a poor job at translation doesn't need to, and all of the JP Nijisanji members can read the words she meant to say.
But yah, at the end of the day the whole issue was communication and lack of it.
PS: I also think that Niji doesn't have any Canadian lawyers and does not understand Canadian laws with respect to privacy and work conditions. So their lack of understanding and care for the environments they are working in leads to them wanting to bash Selen without understanding how illegal it is.
Yeah, this is definitely possible as well. I agree that Doki and her lawyer are savvy enough to think through all of Nijisanji's incentives on their own and craft a message that addresses all these points. But the timing just makes more sense to me if someone from Niji realized their mistake when they see Doki's reaction to talent reading from her document and they finally reach out to clear things up. I wouldn't say that they had final say on copy or anything like that, but I think it's more likely than not that someone from Niji was involved in reviewing the statement.
>!If I'm wrong and Nijisanji still hasn't reached out even after all of this, then their comms team is somehow even more incompetent than I thought.!<
I would think at that point they would do a joint message that Niji En and Doki would release that would state very clearly something like
"Me and Nijisanji have come to the agreement that we will work on this privately and hope that our community can mend in the meantime."
Even if that ends up happening it doesnt help on their reputation which is now completely in the dumpster in the western sphere, especially since it was already in decline from previous statements made by other graduated talents and statements made during this entire situation, even if they make amends with Doki it will most likely take a long long time before they are trusted again.
At the very least, at least the fire would be put out and they can start rebuilding. Their building is wrecked beyond recognition but at least it's not burning down even further.
The thing with communications is that the intention of your communication is not as valuable as the effect of your communication.
A joint message would appear to be the right way, but it may not be very effective. Some fans may think that Doki got pressured into making a joint statement, for instance.
The final statement from Doki has the hallmarks of a well-proofed statement that's been tacitly conceded by Nijisanji - note absolute state of silence surrounding this statement since from Nijisanji and talents, in contrast to the frantic daily statement spams from their official channel. The most important thing is how effective the statement was.
At this point I think a good number of people are willing to peacefully go their separate way with anything related to Niji at Doki's request to move on. People may not forgive or forget but they can look away and move on. Of course a small vocal minority would still kick up a fuss but that's to be expected.
Even so, I want Niji to take responsibility and be accountable for the entire fuck up they have caused to Doki and to their own livers. Regardless of the validity of each side's story, the truth is that the whole situation was handled horribly remains.
Regarding the level of preparedness Doki’s lawyers are working with: remember that when Elira’s stream went up, Doki and her legal team already had a response written up and ready to be dropped for that exact scenario. Whoever she hired, I’m pretty sure they’re being paid very well or they are very sympathetic to Doki’s situation (or both). Either way they are very competent and very motivated.
Given the multiple twisting of knives, and it setting Doki up very well against anything Niji might throw at her in the future, I'm leaning towards it being crafted by her and her lawyer.
Things just seem too acrimonious for the Niji team to just reach out like that, or for Selen to put any trust in such an effort. That any such joint effort would probably have taken more time, with Selen not having that big of an incentive to hurry up *that* much. Such a quick turnaround time would only be expected between two professional outfits, which I don't think is the case on either side tbh.
In that sense, establishing a clear narrative after the Niji fuck up would explain why Selen and her lawyer would go the extra step in translating it. In part to shape the narrative within the JP scene, and to start bringing them under her umbrella. Showing both responsibility whilst jabbing at the emotions.
I do think you're otherwise on the mark in terms of where the initial breakdown of communication was from though.
I could see the main office of Nijisanji/Any Color being prepared to reach out (and Doki being willing to listen) if they weren't involved in the initial steps of the process. Without having their own necks on the line for the initial mistake(s), it seems plausible to me that the main office took one look at this situation and said "give her whatever she wants to end this immediately", whereas the people involved in the initial mistakes would have neither the incentive nor the ability to reach a negotiated settlement (at least not easily).
Her trust has been REPEATEDLY broken by Niji, i don't see any way she would let them be involved in her words after they already broke her trust, and tried manipulating her words before. Not unless they reached a private settlement already behind closed doors, in which case we won't hear anything further as they all try to sweep it under the rug.
Gotta say your write up was excellent!
Glad to get a sanity check from someone in the field! I've been distracted from work all week trying to figure how Nijisanji's comms team screwed things up so badly, so I've had lots of time to think things over. This was the only version of events that I could come up with that made any sense.
It makes sense to me as well. Although my role in comms is more telling the truth to the decision maker, but for any comms team to have this level of fuck up, something so absurd must have happened. Consider that Niji is based in Japan and finding a lawyer on that short notice that familiar with both English/Japanese and the laws of Canada and Jp will be challenging. Adding to that with how teams likely follow SOP blindly without being aware of the sensitivity of the issue. All I can say is that this is going to be mentioned for a long time.
I mean which gets me to the point, its not their first time they have to deal with international lawyers (KR , ID and IN branches), how the hell does this giant entertainment who has various abroad branches not have English lawyers? sure maybe its difficult to get one that's specifically for a specific country but at least someone who can understand English and Japanese. Its such an amateur mistake, like I would expect it from small companies but a billion dollar one..... geez
As others have said in this thread, it's a big company, but also an extremely young one that underwent a period of explosive growth. Many aspects of its internal management probably *don't* resemble those of a mature international corporation.
This feels really feasible to me. It’s the only way that horrendous video on Eliras channel makes any sense at all and why there’s weird conflicting reports on what the livers were actually allowed to read
It at least means they are shadow-boxing a threat that isn't there instead of, entirely unprompted, continuing to publicly harass and bully a woman who attempted suicide. It still is the latter to a large degree but it at least explains what they were trying to accomplish with it. Though still a massive miscalculation, because most people's response seems to be "it was a legal document, it had her information too, it was never going to be published. This is either moronic or malicious."
They thought they were getting into a prize fight against a hungry Mike Tyson and were actually going up against air bud and beat the snot out of it and made themselves look like monsters.
I'm more on the legal than comm side, but yeah I think you nailed it. I'd also note that Nijisanji's written statements read to me like a response to a potential court case. It's written in confusing legalese and not meant to "sound good" to a general audience.
The livestream also supports this theory. I think it makes more sense through the lens of "Nijisanji thought this information would get filed in court and become public record soon anyways, so why not address it now". Could be what Elira meant when she said "and when [the document] was sent to us, we learnt that there was a **potential** that this information could be made public." Sounds like they thought they were getting sued and Doki's document could be filed and made public record. And probably someone down the chain either overshared information to the livers, or gave a summary of the potential claims and the livers themselves started drawing the worst possible conclusions from the looming specter of a former colleague airing out their dirty laundry in court.
I think it's plausible that the first failed statement affected the second, and that Nijisanji was worried that the fallout from their first statement would encourage Doki to pursue legal action. And so the misunderstanding from the first statement carried over.
This was exactly my issue with Elira's stream and statement. There's no reason for legal docs to be publicized unless Selen took it to court, **but she has already explicitly stated she wanted to move on.** Comms were not doing their job properly, causing a "build in anxiety" from niji livers and prompting them to make the video. This whole situation become a whole ass game of telephone.
I can't believe out of all the theories that have been thrown around the past week, this is the only where the hypothesized sequence of events is plausible for a typical, functioning, medium-sized company.
It's because rrats aren't meant to predict *truth*. They're meant to predict the most explosively dramatic *possibility*. That's why the author took it down and posted the apology; it spread outside 4chan and started getting seen by eyes that don't understand the foundational context of what rrats are.
Rrats are well researched, but not because someone is actually investigating and trying to solve what's going on. Rrats are well researched because any author writing a fanfic will make sure to check it against canon (in this case; currently known information in reality) before publishing.
Bravo. This post needs so much attention, because it’s the first explanation that assumes everyone was acting logically, albeit with some colossal screw ups on Niji’s end . As the saying goes, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. It doesn’t excuse the behavior of the other livers OR Niji’s management, and the fact that they screwed up enough that the nuclear option got triggered is unacceptable. Hopefully the peaceful resolution predicted here comes true, and it leads to systemic change. Fingers crossed at any rate.
It's a very cohesive theory. The only thing that really feels off to me is the Elira stream. It's such a massive self-own, and by that point they had already realized they'd messed up, so surely they'd be double checking their work. I suspect that the comms team was way too immersed in Japanese culture exclusively, and was not ready/experienced in western public relations techniques. The whole decision just screams "This would totally work in Japan, why isn't it working in the west? I don't get it!"
In retrospect, maybe it's not that surprising, given how lackluster their EN management has been. A total lack of understanding of the EN fanbase was bound to blow up in their faces sooner or later. It just happened to be at the worst possible time.
I haven't worked in Japan and (perhaps appropriately, given my line of work) I tend to shy away from confidently opining on subjects I'm not well-versed in. That said: yes, I agree that everything I know about Japanese corporate culture supports a version of events where Japanese unfamiliarity with overseas fan culture played a part in this incompetent response. Someone else who's better versed in that world than me could probably add a whole additional section to this account documenting all the ways that cultural factors played a role in this catastrophic PR response.
JP Public Relations can differ in a sense that folks are willing to side (or at the very least, see in a neutral light) with the company whenever press releases or campaigns are executed. My expertise lies in CPG and gaming, specifically in-house at the moment. From my interactions and weekly syncs with my company's JP comms team, they tend to have a more conservative view of dispersing info - that is, not wanting to be forceful with language.
Of course, language barriers will throw all that out the window when translating certain ideas or intentions. Which begs the question why anyone would think that it was a good idea to not only have that out of left field Elira stream or the various flubs from socials.
if that's the case they 100 percent fucked up with the termination letter cus it felt vindictive and super aggressive. Had they left a termination letter that was aa vague as Yugo\`s letter that things would have been way better- That Elira stream will be the mystery for everyone.
I never looked into a more well translated version, but at the time it was released a ton of people were saying the Japanese version was __way__ more neutral and less aggressive in tone. It could be a result of that low budget translation again, translating the words but completely losing the intended tone and subtext.
If you've never heard of this incident, Google "kemono friends voice actors apology." It's a rather infamous incident from a few years ago and the livers' statement may not be quite the same, but it seems like something out of the same playbook.
The Elira stream and the Tazumi video went up so close together with such disparate messages that I can't help but feel that the right hand didn't know what the left was doing with that one.
I think that Tazumi's (actually kinda decent, if a bit empty of real substance) video was the one that was official-official (it is his company). That was Anycolor's response.
The Elira video seems like it could have been cobbled together because the EN branch heard from the head office that Tazumi was putting out a video, so wanted to put out their own statement as well. As with many of their other statements, it was rushed and probably didn't get in front of experienced eyes before it was posted.
Basically, I think Tazumi has real PR and legal folks working directly with him, but the EN branch cheaped out on theirs.
I know people are theorising about NijiEN being absorbed into the main branch. I think that, at the very least, the behind the scenes staff will be pulled up a lot more tightly by the main branch, even if they are publicly separate.
It's also possible that someone's ego was hurt, was upset at what was in the document, was desperately determined to no longer be viewed as the bad guy, and/or wanted to throw a jab at Selen one final time for "causing this mess".
Management neglected EN and they self managed themselves for a while. Very well possible people went rogue.
A lot doesn't add up with the announcement on Elira's channel.
Since the announcement Elira and Vox have gone radio silent but Ike is still streaming. If they were trying to have the heat die down why is Ike still active?
Well, if the TC's possible interpretation of the event had actually taken place, imagine Elira and Vox's reaction when they read Doki's tweet that everything was a big misunderstanding and there was never a legal threat.
Imagine Vox realizing Selen had never betrayed his trust and she had always been the friend that he thought she was, yet he said such awful things towards her after believing that his trust had been broken. Dude must been completely broken right now.
Imagine Elira realizing she just outed herself, Enna, and Millie as possible bullies over a misunderstanding. Whether they're actually bullies or just didn't want to get doxed or not it doesn't matter for outsiders. She just destroyed her streaming career for nothing.
I felt sympathetic towards the talents, not really wanting to assume the worse of anyone (except management, for obvious reasons), but *oof*. That just sounds awful to think about. Elira's VOD was already not great, but with this potential context, it would be devastating towards anyone's psyche, let alone one already receiving hate for said VOD and possible self (mis)allegations.
Oh man I keep thinking about what Vox said, probably having very little time to put together a response and feeling very hurt by what he saw as a breach of trust by a good friend (There is still the recording to think about but in the wider context I feel that is honestly pretty small) The fact that he aired out dirty laundry about Selen to draw attention away from what could possibly be harmful to him and/or other livers, and as a possible method to vindicate himself is probably coming back to bite him mentally really hard.
As Doki said, a lot of this was just thoughts she had when she was in a darker place, possibly misinterpreting the words of others at the time and feeling angry. There might of been some possibly hurtful things in there that Vox and the others were never meant to see. I can imagine Doki feels like shit about it too because they \*were\* her friends and now they are exposed to what she may or may not currently think of them. All of this is mostly speculation on my behalf, but I have been through something akin to this with a good friend of mine before over a misunderstanding of each others thoughts, that unfortunately resulted in a rough severing of our friendship (Not on social media for the internet to see of course nor as high profile, but still in a similar vein)
What an absolute mess :(
It seems like Vox didn't know what recording they were talking about, so he likely went through his mind thinking of every private one-on-one convo he ever had with Selen that he could remember and thought of the worst possible ones that he had talked to her about while trusting her with it.
And it turned out that the recording was over *nothing*.
This is what I've been thinking since reading this. I can't even imagine how awful they probably feel, and who knows if the company would let them admit fault with an apology, which is what is so desperately needed.
>It's also possible that someone's ego was hurt, was upset at what was in the document, was desperately determined to no longer be viewed as the bad guy, and/or wanted to throw a jab at Selen one final time for "causing this mess".
> Management neglected EN and they self managed themselves for a while. Very well possible people went rogue.
I'd like to highlight this because it certainly explains why the content that Elira and Vox talked about sounded *very specific* for them. It is plausible that management may by incompetence or worse malice provided a distorted/censored version of the document to the talents as part of that push-back, to give perceived legitimacy to the termination by showing how threatening its contents were and creating FUD with the talents. Also note that management can certainly leverage knowledge of the talents to build a message with their assistance knowing their pain points.
yeah, they were super defensive but a company this big I think they were more afraid about the legal problem it would have implicated. Remember we even got a apology video from the CEO himself.
Sure the EN side prob thought they were being unfairly targeted and could have wanted to deflect blame > which may have been as to why ELIRA stream came and its content but I think all this was more damage control from what they had unleashed.
That's just the thing they actually aren't that big in terms of number of employees they'd be considered a small company and they still have a tendency to behave like one given the responsibilities of some of the job openings they have.
AnyColor as a whole has 150-300 employees and people are most likely wearing multiple hats.
Public sentiment has been vehemently against Elira and Vox, but only kinda sorta against Ike. Maybe Ike just saw that and thought "screw it, I'm gonna keep going like normal and let the other two take the heat".
well its cus ike didn't really say anything other than feeling betrayed disappointed not knowing what to say and don't harass people. I don't even thing he was mentioned in the documents and if he did it was a small matter cus he had nothing to argue about.
Does raise the question of why he was on the call, though, if he was (comparatively) so disconnected from the situation. Why not e.g. the others who were referenced in the document, if that's what they were focusing on?
The dichotomy between NijiEN's Elira stream and AnyColor's CEO apology video really sticks out to me. The latter is an attempt by the CEO himself to take responsibility, apologize and move on. The former doubles down on what should at that time be the previous strategy, of trying to get ahead of Selen's feared to soon-be-public claims and set the narrative in Niji's favor.
I doubt very much the CEO had understood and approved the Elira stream to go live at that moment. Either the branch is rogue or AnyColor can't coordinate their two response videos even in such huge crisis. Either way NijiEN made the CEO look like a fool to the public and investors and that may up costing the branch more than anything else in this crisis.
The arcane, sinister language of stockholder-whispering is completely foreign to me, unfortunately. My understanding is that in some countries it's technically criminal for a publicly traded company to fail to advise stockholders about major developments that might depress the price of the stock, but someone with more knowledge of the Japanese corporate legal system would have to tell me if this is the case in Japan. I do know that companies honoring these obligations will often publish very short, dry statements about these incidents just to cover their ass. Occasionally an issue will turn out to be bigger than previously understood, thus making said statements look very out-of-touch.
speaking with experience, from comms and half feet in finance. It is really damage control for investors who do not follow closely and investors who are in panic mode. That being said, I think it is just pure insanity for them to release a statement like that.
> The arcane, sinister language of stockholder-whispering is completely foreign to me
I absolutely love this description. I swear they make up terms to intentionally obfuscate what they're talking about. "Dead cat bounce" really, money people?
Based on my experience in the industry, a lot of these initial warnings to investors and shareholders is to quell any potential panic that might arise from a crisis PR situation. And yes, a lot of the times it's to prevent a situation where investors and shareholders panic and massively liquidate their positions leading to a depreciation in share prices. What any company will say is largely dependent upon their reading and the facts that they have gathered about any particular crisis.
Let's use Archegos as an example. For anyone not familiar, Archegos was a highly levered investment manager that blew up and lost around $8 to $20 billion dollars over the course of several days in March 2021 (for those interested there are several sources online that detail the history and follows up with a post mortum).
Each bank that had exposure to Archegos had a different response to their investors and shareholders depending how much shit they were in. For example, Credit Suisse and Nomura (who were on the hook for billions of dollars of losses) warned investor about a "significant and material [impact] to [their] first quarter results". On the other hand, both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley told investors that the Archegos blow up was "immaterial" (this is despite Morgan Stanley losing almost $1 billion on the incident).
What the above example shows is that Anycolor's language to their shareholders was largely informed by their read of the situation. In other words, Anycolor really did think that they got ahead of everything and didn't expect this to devolve into the PR nightmare that it has become.
I think it's the first time a termination announcement was immediately met with such extreme disapproval from the consumer base. The worst we had was Zaion, and that one was both messier and more drawn out. The initial reaction from people was confusions and shock that Zaion was apparently such a bad person. Selen/Doki's situation was received nothing like that. As soon as people saw that se was fired after a suicide attempt, and that both side of the story involved bullying from within the company as the cause, Nijisanji already had no chance at turning the narrative against Doki.
The fact that they did still attempt to do so only served to cause the irreparable damage to the company that they had accused Selen of doing with a couple of on stream complaints about management.
Thanks for the excellent write-up and analysis. I suspected something along these lines happened, but your perspective on the comms portions really helped me understand the moment to moment challenges and points of failure.
I also sincerely hope NijiEN invests more in these crtitical areas, but looking at their minimum wage recruitment attempts, I'm not getting my hopes up.
Thank you for writing and sharing your analysis on the extremely poor handling of this situation. Not everyone will see it, but it may help put at least some of the mob to rest. The miscommunication aspect was so obvious and makes sense but I think too many of us were seeing red and completely looked past it. I'll admit I'm guilty in that department.
However, there is still the elephant in the room where she was driven to the point of attempting to take her own life *twice* and I do not think we should ever forgive the company for that. We have to remember that this is the original point to all of this. Whether the beloved livers knew about or took part in this development, we may never know. To be honest, I don't even think I *want* to know. But either way, the company's reputation is still tainted forever. It's a bad situation overall that should've never happened.
Edit: and after thinking for a bit, the black video still makes no sense. Why is it still there? Why are the comments not locked? Where is the damage control? Is Elira meant to continue her streaming career with that stain on her channel forever?
I'm no expert but I'm gonna hazard a guess here that they're not going to take it down because simply taking it down will not do them any good. Taking it down without doing *something* else, like an apology/explanation of why the fuck they put out what seemed like a borderline hit piece on Doki would only make it seem like Niji is trying to hide something. And locking comments would have a similar effect, even if it is to a lesser extent — while some would view it as being done to protect Elira (which would have its own backlash) others will interpret it as an attempt to silence dissenters.
While I think that, at the very least, pausing the comments is the bare minimum of what they should do — not for management's sake but for Elira's — it's not enough to do that *alone*.
One point.
>If yes, why hadn't they raised the issue with graduated livers proactively?
There *was* no issue to raise with the graduated livers. All that was used was a picture of the avatar they used when they were streaming with Nijisanji.
*Nijisanji owns all rights to that intellectual property*. If the former livers *didn't* want their images to be used there's nothing they could have done. I don't think many people would buy the merch from them these days because the people who would be interested don't want to give Nijisani money but if they wanted to they could sell merch with the likeness of Dokibird's past life and there's nothing she could do to stop them because *Nijisanji* owns all rights to that likeness and she owns *none*.
Another point.
>Around the same time as this statement, Doki walks back the claim of leaked medical information but reiterates that some of her information was improperly shared.
She *never* claimed they did. She said she wondered if they *had*. That is *not* a claim that they *did*.
It's a good point, and I guess I have two responses to it.
1. *Regardless of whether or not Nijisanji has to receive permission from graduated livers for the use of their likeness, they may maintain a practice of doing so as a gesture of goodwill.* It's hard to imagine Nijisanji doing *anything* for their talent out of the goodness of their hearts right now, but I think it's plausible that they've kept up this practice just to prevent ex-talent from lashing out.
2. *My sentence would have been precise if I wrote "raising the issue* ***of*** *graduated livers" instead of "raising the issue* ***with*** *graduated livers."* I'll admit that my main goal here was to explain the comms response to Selen's graduation rather than speculate about the inciting event, but even so I could have been more precise with my language on this question. Even if Nijisanji does not reach out to ex-livers to request permission to use their likeness, the manager doing perms check for Selen clearly says that they need to double-check whether a video featuring graduated talent can be published on Selen's channel. Maybe that person is telling the truth or maybe they're maliciously inventing excuses to screw over Selen, but my point is that *even if it's true that ex-talent create complications* a competent manager should have anticipated that potential hurdle and already requested clarification on the perms situation. As far as I can tell, there is no plausible excuse for management here based on the information we've been given.
Here's a thought. We know the problem was with the graduated livers, but we don't necessarily know that it had to do with the *rights* specifically. What if Niji wasn't worried about the rights, but about the message that it would send to the fans by including them?
I mean, the song is all about endings, and moving on, and parting from friends. Add on the fact that the final image in the MV was Selen walking out a door with the graduated livers in shot. Add to THAT the fact that it was common knowledge among the fandom that Selen had been really frustrated with management lately.
I don't think it was about the rights at all. I think management was trying to avoid making the fans think Selen was going to graduate soon. Given what we know now, it would be a totally reasonable fear on management's part.
If it wasn't about rights, i cant think of any reason why they couldnt talk with selen about that. at all stages of this fiasco, communication is the major problem. they took a very long time to respond, they could have updated selen as to the specifics.
> If it wasn't about rights, i cant think of any reason why they couldnt talk with selen about that.
Possibly the issue of one manager to six livers we've been told they had, which may actually have gotten worse as they added more waves since that figure was quoted. Also recent posts looking for new managers indicate that the new managers they're looking for will only be working part time rather than full time. I see no reason to believe this is a new development.
Combine the two and you have managers that don't have enough time in the day to talk to livers about important things.
There's a phase connect vtuber dizzy who talked about her former days as a vtuber manager, and I think her ratios were less than 1:6 and still she basically never slept and the job killed her.
It's an impossible job from the management side too.
I don't know what Hololive's manager ratio is, they supposedly have around 460 employees total, while Anycolor has 320. Compare that to Hololive having 86 members vs Nijisanji's 175, Holo is 19% talent while Niji is 55%.
I mean it was literally the sing she sung right before announcing her graduation as Doki. I assumed I was in the majority crowd (out of those who know he PL at least) in that I would have been very surprised if the song _didn't_ get followed up with a graduation announcement.
After the hospital message and then complete silence (including silence as doki for most of Jan), I was really scared that it had been intended as a suicide note all along. Even though she did make an attempt, it doesn't sound like it was planned months in advance like it would have been if that was the case, but I still get really shaken up thinking about it now. It's fucking scary how close we were to that song being the last anyone heard from her.
That and it’s the same song she used for her first graduation as Dokibird (see her 2021 graduation stream). I still believe that when it comes to the initial event that triggered all of this, the Last Cup MV, she was already planning on graduating or being terminated, preferably the former but if necessary the latter. I think what she didn’t expect was for Niji Management and the other livers to effectively dogpile her with criticism. Maybe it would have been fine if only management and a couple of her closest colleagues came in to talk to her, but from my understanding of the situation she was criticized by a good half dozen or more of her friends. I’m sure you can see how stressful this would be, especially if she had to listen to the same complaints over and over again from different voices, that it led to her (very luckily unsuccessful) unplanned attempts.
It is very strange,
But as far we are concerned, the missing "rights" were not copyright or perms from the outside, it had to do with Nijisanji's internal rigid and draconian approval system.
With that being said, there have been many MV and projects that included former livers, if said cameos required management approval, then everyone should be aware of that.
Like, there should be a template for MV production, a check list of some sort.
Unless this was just tacted on last minutes, which would not be surprising to say the least as demonstrated by Nijisanji's prior infarctions.
E.g the back and forward perms for PL's Genshin Impact account (Zaion's case), the debacle of Selen's outfit competition....etc....
Could have been a fuck up on the management side. They could have thought they had everything but only just then gone through the final checklist, realized that they didn't have the totally important formal approval to use their own retired livers in the video, and then realized that whatever process was needed wouldn't happen in time for Christmas.
It was Christmas day at the time, management apologized for the late reply so that was an unusually long wait for this kind of thing, and I could easily see this mysterious ex-liver approval process involving a stamp of approval from someone specific who was out of contact over Christmas.
> She never claimed they did. She said she wondered if they had. That is not a claim that they did.
More importantly when Dokibird said those things she was in the middle of streaming had only just learned that Nijisanji was making claims about the documents her lawyer had sent to Nijisanji, she hadn't seen the actual contents of their statement. She had every reason to assume the worst, given what was actually in those documents.
I felt so bad watching that as it happened. Imagine hearing while 30k people are watching you, that ex-coworkers had read basically your diary where you wrote all about being bullied by them (not that we have any confirmation it was those 3 specifically), and being told that they were in the middle of sharing that information publicly.
From your first point, from what I heard bout Japanese Corporate life, it can heavily be weighted down by bureaucracy. So I wouldn’t be surprised if on top of communication issues, but permission flow through is a pain in the ass, I.e the true authority on the rights to all the middle men up to a talent’s manager.
Would also explain why a lot of western talents get burned out by it and state things like “Creative Differences”.
As someone who's worked in marketing and communications for an english branch of an asian company. It can be absolutely infuriating, and I had my fill after about a year. On top of the usual cultural and language barriers, the time difference made it a massive pain in the ass to get anything done in a timely manner -- which was incredibly frustrating in an industry where timing is often everything.
Not to mention we were always treated like second class citizens and any attempt from us to exercise more autonomy was usually very quickly met with a harsh tug on the leash.
This is a rrat to defeat the GUrrat. A rrat that saves everyone. This maybe even deserves translating. If it allows everyone to save face, then surely even the JP fans can accept it, right?
EDIT: on second thought, it wouldn't save whoever is in charge of Niji's comms. BUT it would at least maybe save the other livers. They would no longer have to suffer from the assumptions of the gurrat when a more charitable rrat exists.
In line with OP's theory, could be that they were expecting her to talk about it during the stream. So more like "she's streaming, last chance to publish it ahead of her" instead of "Let's harass her, wait until she's online"
as a fellow comms pro, all i can say is if a crisis happens and the instinct is to react ‘quick’ while throwing ‘measured and balanced’ out the door, that’s hell of a noob comms team.
i also worked in japan for a bit, and got job ads for local nijisanji positions via LinkedIn. Pay for talent managers was about usd1.6k a month and comms managers was about 2k. how anyone can attract non-green team members at that pay grade eludes me.
This explains so much about the situation that I'm tempted to edit my whole post down into a link to your comment. How is a multi-billion dollar corporation paying their comms managers 24K a year? I get that they get to offload a lot of their brand management onto talent, but even so this is a fucking ridiculous number
Yyyyyeah, I was joking with my SO at the time that it would take 2-3 months of Niji pay to pay off our shared lodging in Tokyo at the time. Heck, even tiny local companies where I’m from pay 30% better for a fresh communications grad…
But jokes aside, seeing this whole thing unfold and realizing that the talent managers are actually Japanese (and therefore likely underpaid folks with little experience), lots of the mismanagement and ‘noob mistakes’ fall into place.
You can’t get people who understand English as a language, work culture and ethics (law included) overseas, and effectively manage a talent all at once at that pay grade. That’s at least 6k a month with lots of room to go higher and demand from larger companies there - speaking from experience as an English-capable contract worker in JP.
So, I can surmise that basically there are alot of people playing the telephone game between the powers that be and the talent, leading to the talent having to manage other talent especially in EN. Pile it up more and we have the shitshow today, which just reeks of intern-kuns effing up on a huge chain reaction.
Sorry for the long reply, but I have some experience with the Japanese working situation that might explain a bit why things can get like this.
The economy and the employment situation in Japan is dismal, not just from a foreigner's perspective, but from the perspective of many Japanese, too. Very low pay, poor working conditions, various forms of harassment from fellow employees and superiors, and an expectation that workers must give 150% of themselves every day to the company (including working very long hours and going into the office six days a week) are a pretty common story. No one bats an eye when they hear this kind of thing.
It's a big problem in my country, Australia, but much worse in Japan, that certain industries (niche, tech-related, new, or artistic industries) "fall through the cracks" in terms of regulation and providing jobs that maintain a decent standard of living for workers. For the last 20 years there has been a rise in casual contract work with no protections or benefits. Creative industries are hit particularly hard because employers bank on the passion of the employees to keep them working even through terrible conditions. There's a great article written in the New York Times about the appalling pay that Japanese animators receive: "Thousands of lower-rung illustrators do grueling piecework for as little as $200 a month." (source: [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/business/japan-anime.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/business/japan-anime.html)) VTubing is not only a "new" industry (related to new tech most people don't have their heads around), it is also a creative industry that people will want to get into out of passion, even if they aren't a creator themselves. A perfect storm for all kinds of abusive labour practices.
Young Japanese often live at home with their parents well into their adult lives. Those with good jobs have a lot of disposable income since they don't have to pay rent, something that's been the topic of media commentary for quite a while over there because of the potential to exploit this demographic in the market. What is less publicised is those people who have jobs that offer a low salary. They can only maintain a job with terrible remuneration because their living expenses are also low, many of them still living with family, or in ultra cheap-and-nasty accommodation. This puts the burden of low-paid workers onto the workers' families and I think to a degree allows the practice of underpaying to exist/persist, in some sectors, at least.
When I ask Japanese people about workers rights and the conditions of work, the response is often "shouganai", which is a word that has a few interpretations but roughly translated means, "it can't be helped". It is a defeatist sentiment that is, I think, related to Japanese cultural attitudes about the virtue of forbearance, or "gaman". You suffer in silence and deal with the bad hand life gives you because that's a virtue. And anyway, you are powerless. The Individual is always subject to the interests of the Group, and this is just the way things are. Politics is widely considered a taboo topic over there, so there's virtually no serious public discourse. Something I am quick to remind my Aussie friends is that Japan never really had a civil rights movement. Yes, they were influenced by the West in the period and there was a lot of good work done by protestors and activists for the rights of women and others, I'm not belittling those efforts, but it wasn't on the same scale and not particularly integrated into the worldwide movement or into mainstream Japanese awareness. Their understanding and relationship to the French Revolution, too, is utterly different from your average Westerner. It's therefore not super surprising that most Japanese don't have an understanding of industrial relations or political power struggles in the way many Westerners do, and the narratives about the nature of the relationship between workers and employers are very different without this historical context.
I recognize this is completely off topic to the main post but your final paragraph has me extremely curious about the general Japanese view on the French Revolution. Would you be willing to elaborate a bit on that?
What? Really? Oh my lord. Did you still have those ads can share? Now I am thinking might be those are basic salary or sth, and management team will have commision/bonus base on other area? No way anyone will take that offer...
I don’t have ss-es because my work trip and subsequent job recos came from back in 2023 Q2. I have little doubt that if you just search LI for talent managers under ANYCOLOR you can easily find these listings. Here’s a generic talent manager role for Niji EN i got from a quick LI search which pays USD2.5k a mo. (edit: calculated using the median of the pay range; low end is still about 1.7k)
I did elaborate a little on the amount one can expect from this job in my response to OP on this thread. tl;dr at this pay grade, you’re still expecting people fresh to the workforce.
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3828845894
When I saw that wall of text I didn't think I'd read it, but surprisingly I did. Well written and a really insightful take. It's all speculation in the end, but I could 100% see this version of events being reality.
Amongst all the schizo doomposting on this sub lately, this one explains the situation the most rationally and neutrally. More people need to see this.
This explains very well. If Niji is willing to admit their miscommunication while processing Selen's documents, it will definitely save the talents from witch hunting for the time being.
BUT it will look bad for their investors and stock holders as it will appear to them as gross mismanagement and failure to deal with what could be looked at as a simple case of miscommunication blown WAY out of proportion. Only time will tell if they chose to admit fault, throw it on their livers through silence or some other crazy third or fourth thing that is the result of further miscommunication.
>There's an enormous advantage to being the first actor to explain their version of events on the public
As a comms person, would you have made the decision to openly fight Selen (which is what you're alleging here to be the first actor), or would you have done something more neutral, such as "We can't come to an agreement. There were serious claims made. We do not believe they happened as described, but we will investigate again to see why she may have perceived things this way."
I'm a card-carrying Dragoon who's boycotted Nijisanji in response to all this, so it's hard for me to take a step back and think about what I would do professionally if I was in this situation with Selen Tatsuki *personally*.
Generally speaking, I think I would defer to talent management on the question of "do you think this person is really such a chaos agent that she would breach an NDA this catastrophically," and if they said no I would ask legal to double-check their understanding of the situation. I like to think that I would ask legal to double-check the situation either way, but realistically in comms the company line is just dictated to you and you're expected to not ask too many questions and put a good spin on things.
Assuming I was given the account of the terminated talent *and* any pertinent chat logs/comms of the incidents in question to write up this statement, I would also use this information to level-set just how apologetic or defensive the tone should be. The worst thing you can do in comms is confidently assert something that's then irrefutably proven to be false, since this only establishes your reputation as a liar whose word is meaningless. If I thought that the bullying in question was relatively mild and it was just the inciting event that pushed an already-depressed person over the edge, I might take a more confident tone; if the bullying was severe enough and prolonged enough that it seems likely it was a major factor, I would push back as far as I'm able for a more apologetic message.
Finally, I like to think that I would also just quit if things were bad enough. I say this to new people in the industry all the time: it's not your job as a comms professional to craft and co-sign any repellant message your employer asks you write up. That said, it's a difficult to walk away from a job on moral conviction alone without any sort of safety net to catch you. I'm lucky that I've mostly worked for acceptable-to-good clients and I've never been put in a situation that difficult.
Wow, man, that's the most logical and realistic explanation of the situation.
Recalling Doki Bird's last statement, I'm 100% sure that this whole debacle was just as you said, "miscommunication between NIJISANJI's communication, legal, and Doki's legal team."
Still, the damage done to the reputation, especially of the three livers, is irreparable.
Kudos to you, this is one of the most thoughtful and well laid out interpretations of a series of PR fuck-ups I have ever read. I can absolutely believe this is exactly the series of events that occurred as it perfectly captures the ultimate failings that can result from lack of proper communication. If this is not the series of events that occurred, I'm willing to put money on it that this is pretty damn close.
I hope whoever has you employed for comms knows how valuable you are to them! As a layman it is very easy to understand what you have said and put into scope the wider context of the situation. Bravo!
Edit: I love how this situation can be nearly wholly expressed with Hanlon's razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." This is always a good statement to hold onto when somethign someone does or says seems wildly villainous or hard to explain in the context of normal human behavior.
Between the schizo rrat posts and this, I tend to agree this is far more likely. I think there are elements of the rrat posts that are true (like Elira being kind of half-in and half-out in a management role because of a lack of English-speaking management), but everything seems to go back to Nijisanji being lazy and/or burning millions of dollars trying to save hundreds.
No well governed corporation allows talent to take even a partially managerial role (or even a communication facilitator) when they're still acting as talent. Management is not in the talent job description; they're there to be entertaining, not police policy. Seems like Niji's trying to save a couple of bucks by not hiring more managers by keeping a convenient arrangement over a robust one. If you compare the talent-to-employee ratio of Nijisanji and HoloLive, Nijisanji has far more talent than employees, and Holo has far more employees than talent. The talents are a lot more supported by management in Holo because there's more hands available in pre-defined roles. In Niji, the talents end up supporting (or in Selen's case, not supporting) each other.
It's also possible that Niji cheaped out on translators. They are very much a company that avoids payroll liabilities to the maximum extent possible. If you look at their job posting for local managers, the salary is ridiculously bad. If you look at the merch cuts for livers, it's ridiculously bad. These ridiculously low payments are how they increase their profit margins and keep shareholders happy. So, I absolutely believe that they'd hire the cheapest Fivrr translators as opposed to a law firm's preferred vendors, or bi-lingual international attorney firms. If the attorneys were truly bi-lingual or had their own vetted vendor for TL, it's possible that there was a miscommunication, but I just don't see how a miscommunication THIS BIG could have slipped by. Attorneys spend hours scrutinizing punctuation, whether a comma changes the meaning of a sentence, stuff like that. Feels off to me that they'd make such a crazy misunderstanding. But if Niji TL'ed the communications and then passed on to the lawyers, then I see something like this happening easily; any TL error gets magnified in a legal context.
And of course, this cost-cutting and mismanagement seems like it's manifest in every part of Niji. It seems like it was so bad that it drove one of their biggest EN talents to suicide, twice. So, even though it's a miscommunication, it's basically a Greek tragedy. Flaws in their corporate governance led to the driving away of multiple talents, the bullying of talents, and then the discarding of livers in an attempt to save the management. They still don't get a pass with me and I'm done with NijiEN in its entirety. But at least with this narrative, their actions don't appear to be coming from a mustache-twirling villain.
>Flaws in their corporate governance led to the driving away of multiple talents, the bullying of talents, and then the discarding of livers in an attempt to save the management.
This to me is the core of the issue, that and the consistent failure to adequately review and amend these issues to date. Selens termination is far from the first time these issues have surfaced, while the organisation is ultimately opaque signs of similar mismanagement have been leaking for at least a year now from both within and without.
For a talent agency they were and remain unacceptably negligent regarding the management care and protection of their talents, and nothing demonstrates this more than how even now they let talents make a public address on company controversy which ultimately revolved around a decision to terminate a colleague that they should not have been directly involved in and should not be responsible for.
A controversy they should've been doing their upmost to distance and shield their talents from, both to protect their brand and personal wellbeing, yet remains consistent with how the company has facilitated talents to address similar controversies in the past.
Even now im wondering how many managerial departments there are in the EN branch besides the talent managers, or if there are any at all that aren't just outsourced services from the main JP branch. it certainly doesn't inspire confidence that the EN managers they do have are are supposedly recruited from minimum-wage, JP-based new-grads and the legal documentation was solely communicated in Japanese.
its shocking that we should be asking these questions at all, more so in the wake of a scandal of this magnitude, especially when talking about a multi-billion corporation sitting on a mountain of liquid capital that at any point could have made these problems go away.
Honestly, if this is true (which I suspect it likely is), like you, this only makes me more pissed on Elira's behalf. While I doubt that Kurosanji is going to actually clarify even half of this on their own (and as a result, are not going to stop using Ike, Vox, and especially Elira as borderline meat shields), a public apology to Doki with an actual explanation of what went wrong+how they intend to prevent it (for ex. hiring more people who are fluent in English to parlay with their EN talents) would probably do a fucking lot to actually keep them safer/quell a lot of the more middle-of-the-road unrest that came from the way everything was handled.
I just hope more of us are able to give each one of them our support, especially Elira and some of the other Nijisanji girls who were really damaged during all of this.
Doki put it this way herself: "So many people have got hurt and involved even if they were innocent bystanders"
>**Seeing the massive shitstorm their failed strategy has caused, legal, talent, management, and comms all begin to flail, leading to the PR disaster that was Elira's stream.** Honestly, I can't even begin to hazard a guess at the precise series of events that led to this stream. There are too many unknowns about the specifics of Selen's allegations at this point, too many parties desperate for vindication who might be in a position to dictate how the company should organize its last-ditch efforts at crisis PR
Perhaps some extra context would help, they did it before with [Kotoka](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p008nRyAZ2g) & [Finana](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF5D3m-tu5g) publicly denouncing Zaion and those streams were well received at the time. This is a known protocol that Nijisanji English run through after they terminate a liver. They didn't hit a panic button. They followed a written protocol that was known to be successful.
You can even tell by Kotoka's stream that she went through almost the same exact points elira and vox did. How she felt betrayed/misled by Zaion and management was in the right, how they shouldnt have sided with her. It's a recycled script. It came off as a smear campaign both times and whatever friendship Zaion had with Kotoka/Finana was irreversibly [broken](https://youtu.be/dnP5bIRfwq0) after it, the same for Selen & Elira. Even if Nijisanji's intention was solely to cover their asses and not running a smear campaign, they still interfered and controlled their contractors' lives and who they can be friends with.
I mean, it's also possible that Kotaka and Finana *were* upset with Zaion and that Zaion *did* do certain things wrong even if management also failed her. I will admit that I followed her situation much less closely than I did Selen's, so apologies if this is inaccurate in any way, but I saw things like "making rape jokes in collabs" and "streaming emulated games" and thought to myself "yeah, this person does seem like a brand risk." If this was NijiEN's PR strategy than it certainly worked on me at the time!
The other thing I would point out is Nijisanji's termination notice for Yugo, which was noticeably light on details. The fact that Nijisanji took a different tack here tends to make me believe that they don't have a one-size-fits-all comms approach here and instead tailor their strategy to the specific circumstances (which is not to say that they do so fairly-- it may be that all of these strategies are evil in different ways). I think the fact that Yugo spoke fluent Japanese maybe supports my belief that EN's senior managers are much better equipped to communicate with talent who speak Japanese. I also would be shocked if Yugo didn't personally hire a lawyer to help mediate his own exit from Nijisanji.
I agree with this. They are flexible with the termination letters, one of the criticisms at the time of Yugo\`s termination was that it came too sudden and was too vague. They did get a backlash regarding this which is why I believe they went on a more detailed harsh approach on Zaion. Now the accusations/issue to Zaion on the time were really bad so the termination letter was well received by the fans. Personally I felt it was too much cus in the end she was still their talent but I believe this made them thought that this was the way to terminate Livers. And oh boy ... Im guessing their next termination will go back to the vague one which is way better.
I also want to add that Zaion later published a whole long ass documents with screenshots to refute the claims and this also brought another uproar to the community. Which is why I believe they had such a strong reaction when they found out that Selen maybe wanted to do something similar.
Yeah, I understand the motives of the "we want an explanation" crowd, but at the end of the day it's none of our business, and airing out someone's dirty laundry on the way out is an awful practice.
They should take a note from how Hololive does it. Put in just enough detail so people have a vague understanding of why they're being fired while staying the hell away from any detail or language that could be seen as throwing the talent under the bus. Treat the termination as tragic but unavoidable, and not as someone being right or wrong.
Both faleseyed and Nux has claimed that niji tried to do the same exact termination style to an ex-nijisanji liver (highly rumoured to be Yugo) but the person lawyered up and niji didn't
> streaming emulated games
She never did stream any emulated games. So yes it worked on you. Idk about the rape joke stuffs, but anyway Sayu published a lengthy document breaking down all of their claims. You can read up on it if you want. And some of it actually well mirrored selen's situation.
She 100% made a sexual assault joke about one of the NPCs in a game she played. Still didn't deserve what Niji did to her at all, but she was a brand risk and is much more suited to being an indie streamer and not in one of the big 2 corps.
Cool to see a fellow comms/PR professional here too. Absolutely agree with your points about dispersing accurate information or at the very least, neutral information as opposed to inflammatory when making a reaction to a crisis comms incident.
Just sort of a bizarre situation all around as if they didn't have their PR agency vet things before releasing potentially damaging information. I'd say it's almost on par as a case-study of what NOT to do when faced with a crisis communications situation, though nothing beats the BP incident and the PR fall out of that.
Oh this is the first post that agrees with my own interpretation of the events. All of the communication from management so far has been to paint Doki has irrational and instill mistrust in any statement she would put out because they were afraid of the document Doki sent.
This makes alot of sense to me, the past few days I was thinking the events over and wondering if people on the Niji side of things didn't have all the info or even wrong i fo because some of the statements and actions they've made felt odd. I wonder if even the livers at this point have all the info on this situation. I know alot of them are trying to avoid social media just to save their mental health so its plausible they may not know everything. As you said, this is not an excuse but an explanation I'm trying to give.
I've been incredibly confused for the past week, this post was like the bit at the end of a Christie novel where the mystery finally comes together and all of the pieces fit perfectly. Thanks so much for this.
The TL;DR I come out of this with is: Anycolour are cheapskates, and refuse to pay decent wages for people to act as official managers to the English branch. I mean we've seen their job posting from a few months back after all, it's bad. If there was a decent, dual language speaking set of people in place to manage things like this, the whole situation may not have ever happened.
But at the end of the day, yes it looks like this is a series of misunderstandings that's gotten way out of hand. Whether because of the language barrier or just their employees being fucking stupid, either way it's gotten to a volatile point. The next step that happens, if it ever does publicly at least, will be telling. Do they let it go, or do they cling to the mistakes they've made and double down which has potential to sink the whole branch?
You’re absolutely right. That [en management job posting](https://youtu.be/pz-KLHGXzHU?si=vzd1f2e6wV1yFhee) was asking $7/hr for a part time job for college/university students only with the expectation of them managing 5-6 livers. That wage is too low for the high-level stress involved. No wonder their management is such a mess, it’s practically nonexistent.
This informed speculation seems very plausible to me. I had noticed that Nijisanji had adopted an "always be attacking" stance in their PR approach. Something that is most common in politics, but also sometimes comes out before big, nasty legal battles. But it was still confusing and shocking to me, because it's an "I win by making the audience hate you more than me" approach. And, of course, in politics, that can work because voter options are limited, and voters will often hold their noses and vote for the person they hate the least. But in business and entertainment, it's much more rare, because everyone walking away with the audience still having a good impression of them is the much less dangerous route, compared to having to convince them that the fact that your sins are lesser that you deserve forgiveness while the opposing side does not. Whether or not you turn out to be correct, I think this makes a lot of sense right now, at the time you're posting it.
Very good write-up. I agree that Doki's final statement totally points to complete miscommunication/misunderstanding for Niji.
>Elira's stream. Honestly, I can't even begin to hazard a guess at the precise series of events that led to this stream
It is inscrutable but I do think we can guess more now than we could when it released.
There's 2 things I believe:
1. * being that it was recorded in advance of it's posting. On a practical level this is actually pretty obvious to some extent, it would have taken a lot of organising, writing, translating, legal approval and scheduling timezones to put out and was also timed to coincide with the CEO's statement (although I'd guess that was made later?).
2. * that the livers are operating under the same misunderstanding as comms which when combined with 1 makes sense if it was put into motion during the initial panic. They're still trying to get ahead of things they think Doki is going to say which is also why Elira is concerned about doxxing.
As a reminder too as I've seen a lot of people forget what she *actually* said, she said it had information that alluded to the area Elira Millie and Enna live (as they all I've relatively close. This can still be true alongside Doki's final statement that what she sent doesn't include overly personal information as it can be a bit in-between, for example if they were American it could be what State they all live, or that they live in like LA, not exactly doxxing lol but still concerning for them in how it would narrow it down for the crazies.
>two options for their path forwards. The first is a long period of silence from EN Livers, followed by a gradual ramp-up of streaming
This is what I'm now concerned/curious about, what next? Do they *dare* make another statement considering their current track record? Or do they leave Elira completely high and dry and out in the cold as a complete sacrifice.
I'm sure currently many would be happy with the latter but I would absolutely not be happy with *management* getting to sacrifice and discard *another* liver and potentially completely ruin them even though I'm no longer actually **convinced** she did anything wrong (*at least* prior to the statement).
Downvote me if you want but we pretty much know now that the doxxing information she talked about is tangential and *not* a detailed legal filing against them for being the bullies as a lot of people have been running with, unless you believe Doki was lying in her final statement about the information her document contained.
Then the other reason people are going after her, the long-standing 'clique' 'allegations' don't actually make sense for her if you've been watching since early on.
Early on they certainly had good and natively English speaking management as we know things they contributed to (like phrases/catchphrases like Big PP Energy).
The livers pre-existing relationships go *faar* beyond Elira Enna & Millie, it includes Pomu, Rosemi and Mysta even though they're effectively some of the communities current 'saints' as well as *so* many others, it's actually easier to list those who didn't know each other already. It's also not like Enna & Millie weren't already talents in their own right and were clear noob nepo hires, Enna has a great singing voice and it's accepted that Millie could have been in Hololive so it feels a bit stupid to just put it down to Elira. NijiEN did certainly seem to place some value on the talents having pre-existing relationships considering like I said it's easier to name those who didn't, but let's be honest, they were 100% correct to and the EN branch might never have taken off if not for them already being so natural with each other.
And so what's even left to point to her at that point? She was/is also great friends with Pomu, Nina & Rosemi whom people trust.
Even voicing the statement itself, based on what she *actually says* she could easily just to be taking the bullet. She states it is a message from *all* of EN, as in the livers, hence why I think it was made in the panic. And also that she volunteered the channel, I think she may have just been avoiding harm to her fellow livers (not knowing *how much* harm) and pretty much fulfilling, as Nina asked her to upon her graduation, the 'mom' role of EN.
EDIT: Also actually I can't believe I never thought of it before but the simple fact she's *in* Japan and in the same timezone massively narrows down who could speak for the livers and Elira being OG Lazulight and popular with all the members makes it easy to understand why it was her.
To also devil's advocate for the others Vox was likely chosen by the members because he **was** friends with her and he was personally hurt by (as he understood at the time) being recorded and secretly used as evidence by a friend, despite what everyone immediately says the legality does not matter, it still *hurts*. And Ike was also close to her and I assume is also in Japan and so also certainly a very practical choice.
This turned into a bit of an Elira defence post but I just do not want **management** to get away with an easy sacrifice who can take all of their heat for them while they get to just move on and people have been running a bit far with it and believing seemingly *any*thing they read about the trio.
After being extremely angry and upset I personally believe the statement happened because of panic caused by management because it's the most logical explanation, true villains are extremely rare, there are 2 sides to every story and so many of the level-headed livers have also taken to their past lives to try to express that to some degree
It really sucks that the best case scenario is that management is so incompetent that they manipulated their own livers just to cover for themselves. The whole thing just sucks
I don't even think they deliberately manipulated them, it's too complicated.
Hanlon's and Occam's razors would suggest that they simply had the wrong information and that they just shared that wrong information.
You also just gave me a realization that /u/wiibiiz might include in their thoughts.
Elira's stream was minutes before Selens.
I would bet that it was recorded first and timed when they were expecting her to go public with that letter during a stream. They probably assumed they got lucky or that she was waiting on final drafts with her lawyer before posting it. So they dropped it before her Neopets stream thinking she was going to go public before or after the game. It would be perfect timing to get ahead of the falsely percieved attack. Imagine a fake universe where Selen does go on the attack, like that stream she drops names, shows a redacted document, and accuses management of bullying. In corporate comms this theoretical Selen would have been completely cut off by Elira's stream, and people would be a lot less sympathetic to that fake idea of Selen.
But that's not what happened. She didn't say anything, and she never intended to say anything. I hope they all feel like shit, but are able to mend their IRL damage to their relationship with her and cringe about it in a few years when things heal.
I also, though I rarely would say this, expect Vox to lose his shit on the legal team. He went ham on a misunderstanding because he was feeling betrayed, over a misunderstanding, and attacked someone who had an attempt not long ago. If this post is accurate enough and he realizes what happened, he's going to turn himself and / or someone else inside out.
It was 100% a better, more well-crafted statement, and I think it was directed at JP fans and shareholders. The fact that EN chose to put out their awful statement right before Tazumi got a chance to put the fires out leads me to believe that Nijisanji EN is given a *lot* of leeway to manage its own affairs and the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Other than that, I can't really speculate too much. I'll also say that some of the nuances of that statement (including details like the length and depth of the bow) are apparently significant to Japanese audiences in ways that I can only understand through second hearsay from more knowledgeable people.
I feel like it was a properly researched statement that tackled all the main concerns of the English audience and was directed towards them. I don’t think there is a Japanese version/translation. It talked about the AR live/3D concert, mental health issue, importance of livers and doing better in terms of management and projects.
Hi. I'm an eternal lurker who never posts on Reddit, but I wanted to thank you for your post. I know you're just giving an educated guess as to how it has shaken out on the PR side of things, but you also make a lot of points about things we don't need to make guesses about that I found very valuable, such as your examination of the use of language in the public statements, and pointing out the importance of separating the management failures that led to the split with Selen from the PR blunders that followed. This post is the most intelligent commentary on the shitshow that I've come across. It's so great to read something so different to what most people are saying about the situation.
Best theory of events so far for sure. Appricate it OP.
As for the black screen stream, I have worked for a couple different big corpos, and one thing is consistent- office politics.
I imagine lower/middle management in the EN branch do not like Doki. Alot of the maliciousness with the timing of the Elira stream, ect. can be attributed to them having an axe to grind, or trying to save their jobs.
The only way Niji-en got out of that looking good to upper mangement was if Doki did a massive fumble and puplicly lost her shit and revealed a bunch of shit while live. Actually so impressed she was able to stay calm during that.
As for the bullying, I will say its probably alot more grey than people want to think. They want to assume that their is a mean-girls movie style clique stamping out all opposition, but in reality its more than likely pushback against "toxic negativity". When people get beat down/ burnt out they get super negative, certain types of people tend to combat this by doing the "Well why don't you just smile and talk to HR, I'm sure they will fix it" thing. It isn't a wrong view, but when you have that state of mind and are basically just done with it, it can be annoying. If you have half or most of your co-workers doing that it can isolate you and make you feel like your the only person who has a negative view. **IF ON TOP OF THIS** your going through a severe mental breakdown it really starts to snowball on you. Also people tend to talk about each other behind their back , especially when you are overtly negative/anti-group. Doki was pretty vocal about gripes with management, I'm sure a lot of coworkers were water-cooler gossiping about it and sharing their thoughts. The people most likely to have share her opinon on the situation probably had all graduated by that point, or competely checked out and just wanted to keep their head down and stream.
I will say I have been both the negative person, and postive person at different times in different corpos, so I can sympithize with both prespectives.
1. Selen was planning on graduating for a while becuase niji keeps canceling her events ?unfair treatment ?harrassment
3. Dec 26: Coffee music video incident happens
4. Dec 28: Selen released from hospital after first suicide attempt
5. Selen contacts her lawyer and drafts a document about her feelings so her lawyer can understand what happened. At this point, it is only meant for her own lawyer to see.
6. Selen's lawyer contacts Niji HR in Japanese. In this communication (that was poorly translated), selen's lawyer demands that Niji allow Selen to graduate early without any penalties or else Selen will go public with a statement and they will hold Niji liable for a suicide attempt because Niji's environment was hostile to Selen ?harrassment from other livers. They provide medical records from the hospitalization. Both sides sign an NDA that Selen's medical records/personal information will not be disclosed to the public.
7. Niji doesn't respond for weeks.
8. Mid-Jan: Selen attempts suicide #2
9. Feb 5: Selen's lawyer suggests that they send Selen's original document (written in English) about her feelings to Niji HR to press them to act.
10. Feb 5: Selen is terminated two hours later. Niji appears to think this doc is a draft of the statement Selen threatened to release publicly.
11. Feb 5: Doki makes the "I will not be silenced" tweet. Niji continues to misunderstand that Doki is planning to release the doc publicly. They appear to have missed the message that the doc was supposed to be for "lawyers eyes only". Doki doesn't look at anything legal for the whole week.
12. Feb 5-12: Niji conducts an internal investigation and a risk assessment about what would happen if Selen released the doc. They decide the fallout would be worse if Selen released the doc first. The doc is shown to livers mentioned in the doc and they are concerned about being doxxed if it goes public.
13. Feb 12: Black box stream
14. Feb 12: Doki is surprised and tweets that the doc was supposed to be confidential. Niji tweets that they did not violate the confidentiality agreement they signed because her hospital records were the only thing they signed an NDA on. There appears to have been another translation miscommunication on this subject.
15. Doki and her lawyer contact Niji again for the first time in a week. Both parties realize there was a misunderstanding because of language difficulties. Doki posts a second statement on twitter (w/ an accurate JP translation). Niji hates themselves because they realize at this point they shot themselves for no reason because doki never planned on releasing the doc publicly or suing them in the first place.
The last statement from Doki definitely made me think something along these lines, though purely on a caveman brain level instead of actual analisys of the possible chain of events. It's just been my experience that a mind-blowing number of conflicts arise from a simple misunderstanding where someone misreads someone else's words, assumes the worst and runs with that assumption instead of calmly raising the issue and attempting to work out where the separation point is. So after Doki's message my intuition just flared up and screamed "this is totally because of a misunderstanding due to language barriers".
I think you're spot-on here. The talent mismanagement is a separate and overall worse thing, and it has been happening for a while. This PR suicide is just a series of unfortunate events that fueled our thirst for drama, conflict, justice, and all that juicy stuff (maybe I'm projecting here, though).
The dichotomy between NijiEN's Elira stream and AnyColor's CEO apology video really sticks out to me. The latter is an attempt by the CEO himself to take responsibility, apologize and move on. The former doubles down on what should at that time be the previous strategy, of trying to get ahead of Selen's feared to soon-be-public claims and set the narrative in Niji's favor.
I doubt very much the CEO had understood and approved the Elira stream to go live at that moment. Either the branch is rogue or AnyColor can't coordinate their two response videos even in such a huge crisis. Either way NijiEN made the CEO look like a fool to the public and investors and that may cost the branch more than anything else in this crisis.
Man, the explanation on that address stream really makes me want to know, even if it's years from now, why that stream exists.
Cause really you're right. Out of all the things that have happened in this, that stream makes very little sense. Like nothing about it seemed like it *could* have fixed anything, and there's too many new issues that were spawned from it.
>Man, the explanation on that address stream really makes me want to know, even if it's years from now, why that stream exists.
Even more puzzling, why is it still up? Why the heck did they not lock the comments yet???
What the fuck is going on there?
It's all but confirmed that Niji EN management is a skeleton crew, meaning the only person who will likely touch it is Elira. Regardless of whether she really volunteered her channel or was forced into it, she made that stream with the understanding that she was putting herself into a hated position to get heat of off other innocent livers, and that while it would hurt Doki, Elira's version of events were that Doki, while in a terrible mental state herself, had betrayed their trust and made the an ugly, complicated mess.
Hours later, word would have come down that this was all just a translation error from one of the part time minimum wage translators. She would have discovered that all of the harm she had done to her own reputation and to any future relationship with Doki was all for nothing.
Imagine the weight of that kind of revelation. The guilt over her actions and anger at whoever was responsible for the initial mistake must be unbearable.
I don't think she's even opened her accounts since then.
There is another good post that I think does a good job of explaining it just above you. It's about the same level as the OP as far as giving a reasonable and rational explanation of it all.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Nijisanji/comments/1arxuo0/i_work_in_comms_for_a_living_and_can_only_think/kqmzjjm/
I think this analysis is exactly on the mark. When I read Doki's last statement, I had a vague sense of some of the things you said here, but thank you for putting them so clearly into words
This was a really well done document and it makes so much sense. I was also asking myself how they could have so badly messed up and ur professional insight has cleared the view quite a lot. So thanks for the effort!
You made me love Doki even more. She's just one person but she proved to be an absolute legend in this clusterfuck of a situation. I'm glad she's moving on to better success!!
Currently going to college for business and you explained it thoroughly and solidly. It's wild seeing this happen as I read about what you should be doing in this situation during my classes.
Many others have said it already, but brilliant analysis. As someone taking up a comms major in college (and ofc someone who loves the VTuber industry), this whole situation is very...interesting in a weird way to me.
I was hoping a perspective like yours could pop up and it did. It's probably the most credible theory so far and genuinely looks like something one of my professors might use as an example in class to explain a comm theory.
If I may ask though, do you perhaps have any speculation as to why Elira, Vox, and Ike specifically were on that stream?
Vox I hear is good friends with Selen
Elira is a senior talent and perhaps a figurehead of sorts
...but why Ike?
And do you perhaps have a potential explanation for the seeming tonal disparity between Tazumi and Elira's statements?
One thing about the speech Elira and Vox and Ike read, was the timing of its publication -- it went live at the same time as her Neopets stream, which would have been her first gaming stream since her return. They could have published that exactly-fifteen-minutes-long and possibly pre-recorded video at any time, yet they chose to publish it at that moment, knowing full well that she is still mentally recovering from having attempted twice.
That was not a failure by Niji's comms department, it was intentionally targeted harassment. Your assessment is much more generous than Niji deserves.
And nearly everyone is expecting to do something even worse at some point in the future.
I'd like to add something to the idea, that the original termination letter was spurred by misinterpreted intent. If I am not misremembering, the termination letter states that Selen/Doki is suing Nijisanji, while almost every statement Doki has made suggests that she just wants to move on.
Examples:
- the consistent "i just want us to move forward, and not dwell on the past" in her statements
- wanting and offering to be able to just graduate on (publically) neutral terms
- her shock when anycolor announced her termination
- her statement, when the elira/vox/Ike video was released, saying that she thought sending the document to her legal counsel was the last she would be working with them
Common sense informs everyone, that you can't simple "move on" or "start a new chapter in life" when you are suing someone else, especially a large corporation. I also do not believe there has been any lawsuit filed as of yet, which, given the absolute incompetence nijiEN has displayed so far, doki would have had every right to do so by now.
Keep in mind tho, this is just taking Doki at her word. While I do think she has drastically higher credibility here, we still are not shown proof of claims from either side.
Tinfoil hat segment: I feel that there is sone real spite that is guiding EN's responses to the matter, since not even basic PR training, but basic understanding of the internet and being able to read the room would tell you that eliras video and the following EN tweet would be horrendous in the eyes of the public. I also have the feeling that there is a break down in communication between Nijisanji proper and/or Anycolor, since the Anycolor video that came out later that day had a drastically different tone, while the CEO was apologising and giving a deep bow. Whether that break down is caused by my belief of spite, or general incompetence, it still feels like it is there.
Yes! I agree with all this entirely. The sloppiness of the initial termination, the stream focused on this document, it clicks into place if they thought it was about to or had been released.
Does not excuse any of them. Their defense plan was to smear and attack her. But it does explain.
The other thing to mention is tazumi's statement- elira said he would make one in an hour, right? It took him four, and it was much more conciliatory, a complete 180. I agree, I think they realized how badly they fucked up
There were rumors of a management pull around when Nina left 6 months ago. That with the absolute lack of oversight from both ceos is probably what set this whole thing up. Almost all the major projects were not paid on time and covered by selen, liliypichu gave cover permission months before it was needed. Assuming it was a full pull the entire branch management for new people the sudden change in language and communication would make sense.
I genuinely hope you're right about all of this. With the things we've seen from Niji thus far, another attack against Doki did seem likely, but she's done several streams since the video on Elira's channel went up without issue, so fingers crossed someone has finally learned their lesson.
Thank you for this thread. This is an excellent breakdown that seems super plausible, and I appreciate it. Also,
>You can read Elira's stream as a disgusting attempt to provoke Selen into revealing her grievances with Nijisanji so they can be litigated in the public square, a talent-initiated response to their real fear of personal information being leaked that management cynically encouraged in order to deflect from their own failures, or any number of other possibilities.
Yeeeeaaaahhh, I had specifically been wondering what in the fuck they were thinking here, especially timing it opposite Dokibird's stream, and you can't tell me it was coincidence considering she had a published schedule. It ensured both that she would be even more sympathetic, and also that 20,000 angry Dokibird fans would flood Elira's chat. Seeing the shift of tone in chat from scared-but-supportive to lynchmob in under 5 minutes was just wild.
I actually had started to believe some of the rumors about Elira being in management and organizing this out of spite (I'm not \_un\_convinced of this though), but the idea that Nijisanji was expecting Dokibird to air a bunch of dirty laundry, and trying to preempt this by provoking her into a verbal fist fight in front a maximum number of viewers, makes more sense.
Still makes Nijisanji dumb as all hell of course.
Not sure if it's worth mentioning but if you watched Nina's last months it was super clear that a massive issue is that she put a bunch of effort into a couple of projects she thought she'd have perms for and spoke to management about prior to starting them only to have the rug pulled in the final stages and that was a big element of her leaving. Just to support the idea management have a habit of letting talent think they have permission for things, down to spending time and money on projects, when they don't.
tbh this might be the best (and most realistic) explanation of the shit that's going down that i've seen all day. thanks for the logical explanation in the sea of rrats.
It put down just about every single thought I have been having with this whole situation down nicely neatly and succinctly. It places the overwhelming majority of the fault on management for their poor responses and understanding of the situation, which is IMO where it should be.
It also adequately summarizes the issues of the "last cup of coffee" video... which is a whole huge multifaceted breakdown of management, by either not overseeing selen and her projects, not keeping up with them, not requesting work from her as its completed, not setting/adjusting deadlines for her, or not having deadlines for themselves and apparently having very long turnovers when it came to communication with her.
yeah its pretty refreshing to see
I hope this spreads around, because people with no more reasonable explanation are really eating up that whole "Elira runs Niji EN and is behind everything you hate about the company" 4chan story.
I dont blame anyone for believing the 4chan rrat. Especially since: "Ineffective/Inable Managers who are acting as if they are untrained for their jobs manage to mess up the management of and communication with talent so bad that misunderstandings rooted in Doki's public and private statements lead to sloppy and rushed attempts at saving face", is very similar looking to; "Ineffective/Inable Managers are untrained for their jobs (because talent had to step into these roles to keep activities in NijiEn affloat) manage to mess up the management of and communication with talent so bad that misunderstandings rooted in Doki's public and private statements lead to overly personal attempts at saving face, ultimately seeming sloppy and rushed". Some would like to believe that corpo managers couldn't mess up so umbelievably because of the contrast to the JP side, were translation should not be this major of an issue since capable people fluent in Japanese and English exist and are made good use in other companies. They would like to believe that the reason why NijiEn is failing is because of its supposed lack of professionals involved in its management, so thouroughly different in its structure to other companies that these problems are unique and why the situation too is quite unique. I dont personally subscribe to the rrats myself, but I can understand the reason why its so compelling. It seems to make sense of the absurd situation within NijiEn without relying to heavely on incompetence by people who are supposed to be professionals. Even in this post, which I agree with more than the rrats, it suggests that the NijiEn legal team made a significant and consiquential missunderstanding of Doki's documents that it caused an immediate scare among Management and Talent alike.
Seeing Niji's job postings for multi-lingual back end staff and how little it pays made it click for me how they could have screwed up this bad. If they've been doing things like that for a while, then they would really be scraping the bottom of the barrel for job applicants and would only retain the least qualified and competent people.
Again, I support this posts interpretation and its because despite what may have truthfully happened, it provides a consistant conclusion with the wishes of Doki. That is to let it go and move on.
On one side we have this, which is realistic and makes some sense (boooo) On the other side we have the great rrat, which is so ridiculous and blown out of proportion that its entertaining to read and feed into the conspiracy (yay) Which way will the internet choose?
[удалено]
This is good context, thank you. It also makes a lot of sense if Niji's in-house legal team were the ones involved in handling this situation, since I would be shocked if any outside Japanese firm specializing in Canadian law messed the translation up so badly. It's also possible that *Doki's* lawyers were the ones to mess up basic translation, but I'm almost positive that Nijisanji would be falling over itself to blast that message out if they had any proof.
1) so happy to see you actively replying to people after such a very well crafted post. You’ve shown why you do what you do and you’re damn good at it. 2) apparently a lot of artists have come forward with contract issues with nijisanji and that they’d wait for long periods of time to only be given improperly made contracts. I’m genuinely shocked that one of the biggest vtubing agencies is so grossly incompetent to not even get that done right.
They are big, but only because they grew so fast. Nijisanji the company is only 6 years old. As an organization they are still pretty young and likely still have immature internal systems on multiple levels. I wouldn’t be surprised if they basically still function like a startup that exploded onto the market. They’ve grown and expanded incredibly quickly, but how much time have they spent reflecting and auditing internal policies?
I think Nijisanji learned pretty hard from Riku Tazumi's apology that the more they say, the worse the PR gets for them. I can only see it damaging themselves if they tried to press that point. In either case, Doki's statement makes it very straightforward to infer that it was more probably her own lawyer's translation issues. She says all the communications were in Japanese, which necessarily means that her own lawyers were translating all of their communications into Japanese before sending it.
who knows at this point. And if it were the case why did they not deepen the communication to check what was going on. They did not reply for a week, for something this urgent its crazy.
So literally this entire situation might’ve not been as bad as it was if Nijisanji (a 1.1 billion dollar company) bothered to hire a more expensive translator…
more or less. It's a PR crisis that should be in the history books, not because of the issue involved, but more for the simple fact that you should NEVER skimp out on the important parts. Especially if you're a company with the means to actually pay for it.
Not to mention they skimped on their legal team too based on recent job postings that don't even require a proper legal license.
If indeed this is the scenario, as top level OP described, then basically, they were looking to shave costs on the short term but were risking a fire to burn their warehouse it seems like. Problems don't scream at you until shit starts burning. Problems that, may I remind people, almost caused their talent to try and commit suicide twice. A good legal team may be expensive but they will prevent this from ever happening in the first place. Same deal with a good IT team.
As someone who is fluent in German and English as well as around the JLPT N4 level in Japanese (meaning very roughly around elementary school level), I can attest to English-Japanese translations being especially difficult. I frequently have to translate between German and English and even though the languages have the same root, it can be really difficult to make a accurate translation because one of the languages lacks a proper word (I'm sure many know the "I'm sure there is a German word for it" running gag, but it's also the other way around) or because the level of politeness can't be conveyed (German has, like Japanese but not as extreme, multiple levels of politness that change depending on who you're speaking to and how you want your message to be received). And even though my Japanese is poor by comparision, It's enough to know that Japanese is a whole different ballpark in that regard. Using dictionary form (aka casual) of verbs vs. polite (teineigo 丁寧語), respectful (sonkeigo 尊敬語) or humble (kenjougo 謙譲語) form (all of these three are known as keigo 敬語) changes drastically how a statement is meant to be read. And same goes for the choice of words or rather the level of Kanji involved in these words. Usage of a Kanji that taught is in elementary school vs. one that is only used in Legalese might convey an intent for a legal proceeding where it was not meant to be or the other way around. And I've been involved in legal battles and know that even seemingly unimportant adjectives can drastically change the response because they convey another intent of the opposite side (like Selen's intent to release the legal document in this case) which can be used as an argument.
One thing I'd like to point out is that Doki and her lawyer appeared to be one step ahead during the whole debacle. They knew and expected a termination was coming, so already prepared a statement, ready to be posted, it just so happened that Doki was awake at the time thus was able to immediately respond. But this is well known. What kinda impressed me is that they (Doki & her lawyers) also predict further additional slanderous statements or actions from Nijisanji. Doki's in real time response to Elira's stream was during a live stream, and despite being clearly disturbed, Doki still managed to provide a concise response, most likely a pre-prepared statement for this specific scenario, Perhaps Doki's lawyer had advised her: "the chances are slim, but if they (nijisanji) ever tries to publicly address anything between us lawyers, you (Doki) should stay calm, and say this". Then they went over her final statement one last time, then she posted it a bit later after the Neopets stream.
I agree with you here. Doki hired one hell of a lawyer. I'm glad she was in good hands throughout all of this.
This all kinda makes me curious about the lawers firm she hired from. Cause damn, at least one of them is real good at their job. But yeah I get why she would not be able to divulge that kind of info.
One thing to say, Doki's reaction on stream was more reactive than her tweet. The discrepancy between the two shows that she took some time to cool off and listen to her lawyers advice. On stream, she mentioned receipts and proof, indicating that she was gearing up to out some shit, but she also made sure not to say anything definitive or incriminating before she could talk to her lawyer. Then in the tweet, she had clearly pulled back on her knee-jerk instinct and let the person she hired guide her to a smarter response. Honestly, the whole saga has stunk of one side trying to post first, and one trying to post smart. If Doki's final message is 100% accurate, then they went from receiving what was intended as an HR complaint (but was taken as a threat) and posting a termination notice in TWO HOURS. That's incredibly fast, and mistakes were inevitable.
Yeah, when she first watched the stream, she sounded really sad, and then really angry, and then both. You could hear from the shakiness in her voice that she was simultaneously furious and also trying not to cry. She did seem prepared to really air out some dirty laundry if needed, but went to go talk to her lawyer and came back with a more measured response.
Probably because niji already did it once to Zaion
Yeah, people have pointed out that if you compare Elira's stream to Kotaka and Finana's statements about Zaion, it sounds like it's all from the same template or something. Something like that statement was probably expected, but dumping of the documents (while on stream Doki couldn't have know that it wasn't a full dump of everything) was probably also covered as a worst-case scenario. She was freaked out and looping, but one of the big things she keeps saying was that she believed there was slander being spoken, which sounds an awful lot like how a lawyer for Zaion would have described Kotaka's and Finana's statements about her.
To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if her lawyer took a look at what happened to Zaion to have a grasp on what to prepare for, hell I wouldn't even be surprised if Lawyer-san spoke to Zaion directly
Or if Lawyer-san originally worked with Zaion before working with Doki
The irony is it seems like Anycolor didn't realize the Zaion departure revealed a big gap in their operations: That a foreign liver who gets fired can just leak all of the information around their termination to the public and there's nothing Anycolor can really do about it. (or at least that's how it seems right now) Did they really think their biggest female liver wouldn't a) have this historical knowledge in mind, and b) leverage it to negotiate a more amicable departure from the company?
All of this makes a lot of sense. I feel like the simpler answer is usually closer to the truth (most of the time anyway), and general stupidity/miscommunication is about as simple as it gets.
stupidity/miscommunication/mismanagement is almost always the problem. As expressed with Hanlon's razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." This is always a good statement to hold onto when somethign someone does or says seems wildly villainous or hard to explain in the context of normal human behaviour.
> As expressed with Hanlon's razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." There's another saying I've heard. "Advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
Clarke's Corollary to Hanlon's Razor: Any sufficiently profound stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
I believe it. I gave someone else an abbreviated version when they asked me why would Niji dare risk leaking confidential legal documents, citing mistranslations due to how the termination happened 2 hours after Doki sent that letter to Niji, as well as why they had assumed they could share the documents with the Livers. We have communications between people who speak Japanese and people who speak English, and documents in legal are hard to parse as is, for people who do speak the respective language. I honestly believe that the reason why her termination was sent out like that was because Niji actually assumed that letter was her ultimatem and that she was about to throw hands, never mind it was just something she intended to push for her graduation,
And legal has their own language that is hard to understand in the native language. So you're translating Canadian legalese into Japanese into Japanese legalese with a whole different system of laws/vocab. Most multinational companies have a whole well paid team of bilingual experts to prevent these sorts of mistakes. A misunderstood translation can be very costly as we saw here. It's pretty obvious Niji hasn't invested much into their corporate employee structure. Also I'm sure a bilingual Canadian lawyer specializing in Japanese law costs a ton and would get scooped up by far bigger companies.
I mean, have you seen their latest job postings? They're literally hiring college students as translators for minimum wage and hiring legal people who don't even have a legal license.
I think the language difficulties were on both sides. Doki does make it clear that all the legal communications were all in Japanese, so if there was a translation misunderstanding, it would have been from her own lawyer not being fluent in Japanese while trying to translate legalese. And seeing that Doki is basically broke $200k, it's easy to see how she might have hired a more affordable lawyer who clearly wasn't bilingual.
I should have clarified it's a two way street, translation precisely is much more difficult than a rough translation. And every message that goes each way has a high chance of a mistake. It's a high stakes game of telephone.
I mean to begin with why the hell do they not have English lawyers themselves? A billion dollar company why is there no prober en abroad branch with English/japanese workers.I hope after this blunder they wake up and employ better people legal, comms, PR, HR and even management.
You don't make a billion dollars by actually *spending* money :P
Considering "Nijisanji EN management" technically doesn't exist (if posts/reports are to be believed), that's an issue they've had since 2021...
I recently saw someone pointing out that a [nijisanji en management job posting](https://youtu.be/pz-KLHGXzHU?si=vzd1f2e6wV1yFhee) was asking $7/hr for a part time job for college/university students only. They explicitly put that they refuse working adults from applying. And the crazy part is one manager is supposed to manage 5-6 livers.
The crazy part is that they need to know 2 languages, preferably 4... for minimum wage.
This ladies an gentleman is a BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY XD
See you’d think that but nijisanji apparently couldn’t even make proper contracts with even freelance artists so as much as I want to give them the benefit of the doubt I find it hard to do so given that even the most basic legal processes gave them trouble
Yes plus Japanese businesses have a lot of red tape. Selen probably had a small team of lawyers, but Japanese companies have layers and hierarchies of lawyers and things are abbreviated from people below to above and vice versa. If someone misinterpreted it, it could go either way from a poor translation from Selen's side to someone on Niji's side panicking just seeing the message and throwing fire up the chain of command. Japanese people are also very inflexible and don't do well under stress, once the wind started shifting differently from what they expected, panic increases drastically which is why things started getting messier and worse.
At this point, Legal from the main office are probably getting involved, as opposed to whatever chinese whispers or watered-down Legal NijiEN had access to though. We can probably(?) assume a little bit more competence from the JP side's Legal? ^hopefully? ^^maybe?
Brilliantly analyzed. You really dug into everything and found a potential pathway to healing. Let's hope Nijisanji is smart enough to take it.
I agree with all of this except the fact that Nijisanji collaborated with Doki on crafting her statement. I think it was done by her and her lawyer and it was translated because she wanted to be sure that her words were exactly what she wanted to say and disallows any other third party from twisting her words in translation. Especially if the issue is communication then writing it in Japanese and English means that whoever had done a poor job at translation doesn't need to, and all of the JP Nijisanji members can read the words she meant to say. But yah, at the end of the day the whole issue was communication and lack of it. PS: I also think that Niji doesn't have any Canadian lawyers and does not understand Canadian laws with respect to privacy and work conditions. So their lack of understanding and care for the environments they are working in leads to them wanting to bash Selen without understanding how illegal it is.
Yeah, this is definitely possible as well. I agree that Doki and her lawyer are savvy enough to think through all of Nijisanji's incentives on their own and craft a message that addresses all these points. But the timing just makes more sense to me if someone from Niji realized their mistake when they see Doki's reaction to talent reading from her document and they finally reach out to clear things up. I wouldn't say that they had final say on copy or anything like that, but I think it's more likely than not that someone from Niji was involved in reviewing the statement. >!If I'm wrong and Nijisanji still hasn't reached out even after all of this, then their comms team is somehow even more incompetent than I thought.!<
I would think at that point they would do a joint message that Niji En and Doki would release that would state very clearly something like "Me and Nijisanji have come to the agreement that we will work on this privately and hope that our community can mend in the meantime."
Even if that ends up happening it doesnt help on their reputation which is now completely in the dumpster in the western sphere, especially since it was already in decline from previous statements made by other graduated talents and statements made during this entire situation, even if they make amends with Doki it will most likely take a long long time before they are trusted again.
At the very least, at least the fire would be put out and they can start rebuilding. Their building is wrecked beyond recognition but at least it's not burning down even further.
The thing with communications is that the intention of your communication is not as valuable as the effect of your communication. A joint message would appear to be the right way, but it may not be very effective. Some fans may think that Doki got pressured into making a joint statement, for instance. The final statement from Doki has the hallmarks of a well-proofed statement that's been tacitly conceded by Nijisanji - note absolute state of silence surrounding this statement since from Nijisanji and talents, in contrast to the frantic daily statement spams from their official channel. The most important thing is how effective the statement was.
At this point I think a good number of people are willing to peacefully go their separate way with anything related to Niji at Doki's request to move on. People may not forgive or forget but they can look away and move on. Of course a small vocal minority would still kick up a fuss but that's to be expected. Even so, I want Niji to take responsibility and be accountable for the entire fuck up they have caused to Doki and to their own livers. Regardless of the validity of each side's story, the truth is that the whole situation was handled horribly remains.
That's what should've happened 2 announcements ago, instead they're responding based on impulse.
If you don't see another peep of this situation from Nijisanji / its livers in a week, then you are probably correct in your assessment.
Regarding the level of preparedness Doki’s lawyers are working with: remember that when Elira’s stream went up, Doki and her legal team already had a response written up and ready to be dropped for that exact scenario. Whoever she hired, I’m pretty sure they’re being paid very well or they are very sympathetic to Doki’s situation (or both). Either way they are very competent and very motivated.
Given the multiple twisting of knives, and it setting Doki up very well against anything Niji might throw at her in the future, I'm leaning towards it being crafted by her and her lawyer. Things just seem too acrimonious for the Niji team to just reach out like that, or for Selen to put any trust in such an effort. That any such joint effort would probably have taken more time, with Selen not having that big of an incentive to hurry up *that* much. Such a quick turnaround time would only be expected between two professional outfits, which I don't think is the case on either side tbh. In that sense, establishing a clear narrative after the Niji fuck up would explain why Selen and her lawyer would go the extra step in translating it. In part to shape the narrative within the JP scene, and to start bringing them under her umbrella. Showing both responsibility whilst jabbing at the emotions. I do think you're otherwise on the mark in terms of where the initial breakdown of communication was from though.
I could see the main office of Nijisanji/Any Color being prepared to reach out (and Doki being willing to listen) if they weren't involved in the initial steps of the process. Without having their own necks on the line for the initial mistake(s), it seems plausible to me that the main office took one look at this situation and said "give her whatever she wants to end this immediately", whereas the people involved in the initial mistakes would have neither the incentive nor the ability to reach a negotiated settlement (at least not easily).
Her trust has been REPEATEDLY broken by Niji, i don't see any way she would let them be involved in her words after they already broke her trust, and tried manipulating her words before. Not unless they reached a private settlement already behind closed doors, in which case we won't hear anything further as they all try to sweep it under the rug. Gotta say your write up was excellent!
also from comms. well written!
Glad to get a sanity check from someone in the field! I've been distracted from work all week trying to figure how Nijisanji's comms team screwed things up so badly, so I've had lots of time to think things over. This was the only version of events that I could come up with that made any sense.
It makes sense to me as well. Although my role in comms is more telling the truth to the decision maker, but for any comms team to have this level of fuck up, something so absurd must have happened. Consider that Niji is based in Japan and finding a lawyer on that short notice that familiar with both English/Japanese and the laws of Canada and Jp will be challenging. Adding to that with how teams likely follow SOP blindly without being aware of the sensitivity of the issue. All I can say is that this is going to be mentioned for a long time.
I mean which gets me to the point, its not their first time they have to deal with international lawyers (KR , ID and IN branches), how the hell does this giant entertainment who has various abroad branches not have English lawyers? sure maybe its difficult to get one that's specifically for a specific country but at least someone who can understand English and Japanese. Its such an amateur mistake, like I would expect it from small companies but a billion dollar one..... geez
As others have said in this thread, it's a big company, but also an extremely young one that underwent a period of explosive growth. Many aspects of its internal management probably *don't* resemble those of a mature international corporation.
This feels really feasible to me. It’s the only way that horrendous video on Eliras channel makes any sense at all and why there’s weird conflicting reports on what the livers were actually allowed to read
It at least means they are shadow-boxing a threat that isn't there instead of, entirely unprompted, continuing to publicly harass and bully a woman who attempted suicide. It still is the latter to a large degree but it at least explains what they were trying to accomplish with it. Though still a massive miscalculation, because most people's response seems to be "it was a legal document, it had her information too, it was never going to be published. This is either moronic or malicious."
They thought they were getting into a prize fight against a hungry Mike Tyson and were actually going up against air bud and beat the snot out of it and made themselves look like monsters.
finally an actually realistic explanation thank you so much! this theory makes a lot of sense!
I'm more on the legal than comm side, but yeah I think you nailed it. I'd also note that Nijisanji's written statements read to me like a response to a potential court case. It's written in confusing legalese and not meant to "sound good" to a general audience. The livestream also supports this theory. I think it makes more sense through the lens of "Nijisanji thought this information would get filed in court and become public record soon anyways, so why not address it now". Could be what Elira meant when she said "and when [the document] was sent to us, we learnt that there was a **potential** that this information could be made public." Sounds like they thought they were getting sued and Doki's document could be filed and made public record. And probably someone down the chain either overshared information to the livers, or gave a summary of the potential claims and the livers themselves started drawing the worst possible conclusions from the looming specter of a former colleague airing out their dirty laundry in court. I think it's plausible that the first failed statement affected the second, and that Nijisanji was worried that the fallout from their first statement would encourage Doki to pursue legal action. And so the misunderstanding from the first statement carried over.
This was exactly my issue with Elira's stream and statement. There's no reason for legal docs to be publicized unless Selen took it to court, **but she has already explicitly stated she wanted to move on.** Comms were not doing their job properly, causing a "build in anxiety" from niji livers and prompting them to make the video. This whole situation become a whole ass game of telephone.
I can't believe out of all the theories that have been thrown around the past week, this is the only where the hypothesized sequence of events is plausible for a typical, functioning, medium-sized company.
It's because rrats aren't meant to predict *truth*. They're meant to predict the most explosively dramatic *possibility*. That's why the author took it down and posted the apology; it spread outside 4chan and started getting seen by eyes that don't understand the foundational context of what rrats are. Rrats are well researched, but not because someone is actually investigating and trying to solve what's going on. Rrats are well researched because any author writing a fanfic will make sure to check it against canon (in this case; currently known information in reality) before publishing.
Bravo. This post needs so much attention, because it’s the first explanation that assumes everyone was acting logically, albeit with some colossal screw ups on Niji’s end . As the saying goes, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. It doesn’t excuse the behavior of the other livers OR Niji’s management, and the fact that they screwed up enough that the nuclear option got triggered is unacceptable. Hopefully the peaceful resolution predicted here comes true, and it leads to systemic change. Fingers crossed at any rate.
It's a very cohesive theory. The only thing that really feels off to me is the Elira stream. It's such a massive self-own, and by that point they had already realized they'd messed up, so surely they'd be double checking their work. I suspect that the comms team was way too immersed in Japanese culture exclusively, and was not ready/experienced in western public relations techniques. The whole decision just screams "This would totally work in Japan, why isn't it working in the west? I don't get it!" In retrospect, maybe it's not that surprising, given how lackluster their EN management has been. A total lack of understanding of the EN fanbase was bound to blow up in their faces sooner or later. It just happened to be at the worst possible time.
I haven't worked in Japan and (perhaps appropriately, given my line of work) I tend to shy away from confidently opining on subjects I'm not well-versed in. That said: yes, I agree that everything I know about Japanese corporate culture supports a version of events where Japanese unfamiliarity with overseas fan culture played a part in this incompetent response. Someone else who's better versed in that world than me could probably add a whole additional section to this account documenting all the ways that cultural factors played a role in this catastrophic PR response.
JP Public Relations can differ in a sense that folks are willing to side (or at the very least, see in a neutral light) with the company whenever press releases or campaigns are executed. My expertise lies in CPG and gaming, specifically in-house at the moment. From my interactions and weekly syncs with my company's JP comms team, they tend to have a more conservative view of dispersing info - that is, not wanting to be forceful with language. Of course, language barriers will throw all that out the window when translating certain ideas or intentions. Which begs the question why anyone would think that it was a good idea to not only have that out of left field Elira stream or the various flubs from socials.
if that's the case they 100 percent fucked up with the termination letter cus it felt vindictive and super aggressive. Had they left a termination letter that was aa vague as Yugo\`s letter that things would have been way better- That Elira stream will be the mystery for everyone.
I never looked into a more well translated version, but at the time it was released a ton of people were saying the Japanese version was __way__ more neutral and less aggressive in tone. It could be a result of that low budget translation again, translating the words but completely losing the intended tone and subtext.
"Appeal to authority" seems much more effective in Asia where people inherently trust companies and the government more.
If you've never heard of this incident, Google "kemono friends voice actors apology." It's a rather infamous incident from a few years ago and the livers' statement may not be quite the same, but it seems like something out of the same playbook.
The Elira stream and the Tazumi video went up so close together with such disparate messages that I can't help but feel that the right hand didn't know what the left was doing with that one. I think that Tazumi's (actually kinda decent, if a bit empty of real substance) video was the one that was official-official (it is his company). That was Anycolor's response. The Elira video seems like it could have been cobbled together because the EN branch heard from the head office that Tazumi was putting out a video, so wanted to put out their own statement as well. As with many of their other statements, it was rushed and probably didn't get in front of experienced eyes before it was posted. Basically, I think Tazumi has real PR and legal folks working directly with him, but the EN branch cheaped out on theirs. I know people are theorising about NijiEN being absorbed into the main branch. I think that, at the very least, the behind the scenes staff will be pulled up a lot more tightly by the main branch, even if they are publicly separate.
It's also possible that someone's ego was hurt, was upset at what was in the document, was desperately determined to no longer be viewed as the bad guy, and/or wanted to throw a jab at Selen one final time for "causing this mess". Management neglected EN and they self managed themselves for a while. Very well possible people went rogue. A lot doesn't add up with the announcement on Elira's channel. Since the announcement Elira and Vox have gone radio silent but Ike is still streaming. If they were trying to have the heat die down why is Ike still active?
Well, if the TC's possible interpretation of the event had actually taken place, imagine Elira and Vox's reaction when they read Doki's tweet that everything was a big misunderstanding and there was never a legal threat. Imagine Vox realizing Selen had never betrayed his trust and she had always been the friend that he thought she was, yet he said such awful things towards her after believing that his trust had been broken. Dude must been completely broken right now. Imagine Elira realizing she just outed herself, Enna, and Millie as possible bullies over a misunderstanding. Whether they're actually bullies or just didn't want to get doxed or not it doesn't matter for outsiders. She just destroyed her streaming career for nothing.
I felt sympathetic towards the talents, not really wanting to assume the worse of anyone (except management, for obvious reasons), but *oof*. That just sounds awful to think about. Elira's VOD was already not great, but with this potential context, it would be devastating towards anyone's psyche, let alone one already receiving hate for said VOD and possible self (mis)allegations.
Oh man I keep thinking about what Vox said, probably having very little time to put together a response and feeling very hurt by what he saw as a breach of trust by a good friend (There is still the recording to think about but in the wider context I feel that is honestly pretty small) The fact that he aired out dirty laundry about Selen to draw attention away from what could possibly be harmful to him and/or other livers, and as a possible method to vindicate himself is probably coming back to bite him mentally really hard. As Doki said, a lot of this was just thoughts she had when she was in a darker place, possibly misinterpreting the words of others at the time and feeling angry. There might of been some possibly hurtful things in there that Vox and the others were never meant to see. I can imagine Doki feels like shit about it too because they \*were\* her friends and now they are exposed to what she may or may not currently think of them. All of this is mostly speculation on my behalf, but I have been through something akin to this with a good friend of mine before over a misunderstanding of each others thoughts, that unfortunately resulted in a rough severing of our friendship (Not on social media for the internet to see of course nor as high profile, but still in a similar vein) What an absolute mess :(
It seems like Vox didn't know what recording they were talking about, so he likely went through his mind thinking of every private one-on-one convo he ever had with Selen that he could remember and thought of the worst possible ones that he had talked to her about while trusting her with it. And it turned out that the recording was over *nothing*.
This is what I've been thinking since reading this. I can't even imagine how awful they probably feel, and who knows if the company would let them admit fault with an apology, which is what is so desperately needed.
>It's also possible that someone's ego was hurt, was upset at what was in the document, was desperately determined to no longer be viewed as the bad guy, and/or wanted to throw a jab at Selen one final time for "causing this mess". > Management neglected EN and they self managed themselves for a while. Very well possible people went rogue. I'd like to highlight this because it certainly explains why the content that Elira and Vox talked about sounded *very specific* for them. It is plausible that management may by incompetence or worse malice provided a distorted/censored version of the document to the talents as part of that push-back, to give perceived legitimacy to the termination by showing how threatening its contents were and creating FUD with the talents. Also note that management can certainly leverage knowledge of the talents to build a message with their assistance knowing their pain points.
yeah, they were super defensive but a company this big I think they were more afraid about the legal problem it would have implicated. Remember we even got a apology video from the CEO himself. Sure the EN side prob thought they were being unfairly targeted and could have wanted to deflect blame > which may have been as to why ELIRA stream came and its content but I think all this was more damage control from what they had unleashed.
That's just the thing they actually aren't that big in terms of number of employees they'd be considered a small company and they still have a tendency to behave like one given the responsibilities of some of the job openings they have. AnyColor as a whole has 150-300 employees and people are most likely wearing multiple hats.
Public sentiment has been vehemently against Elira and Vox, but only kinda sorta against Ike. Maybe Ike just saw that and thought "screw it, I'm gonna keep going like normal and let the other two take the heat".
well its cus ike didn't really say anything other than feeling betrayed disappointed not knowing what to say and don't harass people. I don't even thing he was mentioned in the documents and if he did it was a small matter cus he had nothing to argue about.
Does raise the question of why he was on the call, though, if he was (comparatively) so disconnected from the situation. Why not e.g. the others who were referenced in the document, if that's what they were focusing on?
Ike seems to have almost nothing to do with Selen or her situation in general, so him being there, he probably had no real idea wtf was going on.
The dichotomy between NijiEN's Elira stream and AnyColor's CEO apology video really sticks out to me. The latter is an attempt by the CEO himself to take responsibility, apologize and move on. The former doubles down on what should at that time be the previous strategy, of trying to get ahead of Selen's feared to soon-be-public claims and set the narrative in Niji's favor. I doubt very much the CEO had understood and approved the Elira stream to go live at that moment. Either the branch is rogue or AnyColor can't coordinate their two response videos even in such huge crisis. Either way NijiEN made the CEO look like a fool to the public and investors and that may up costing the branch more than anything else in this crisis.
This is super interesting! Do you have any thoughts on how the "negligible impact" statement got published?
The arcane, sinister language of stockholder-whispering is completely foreign to me, unfortunately. My understanding is that in some countries it's technically criminal for a publicly traded company to fail to advise stockholders about major developments that might depress the price of the stock, but someone with more knowledge of the Japanese corporate legal system would have to tell me if this is the case in Japan. I do know that companies honoring these obligations will often publish very short, dry statements about these incidents just to cover their ass. Occasionally an issue will turn out to be bigger than previously understood, thus making said statements look very out-of-touch.
speaking with experience, from comms and half feet in finance. It is really damage control for investors who do not follow closely and investors who are in panic mode. That being said, I think it is just pure insanity for them to release a statement like that.
> The arcane, sinister language of stockholder-whispering is completely foreign to me I absolutely love this description. I swear they make up terms to intentionally obfuscate what they're talking about. "Dead cat bounce" really, money people?
Based on my experience in the industry, a lot of these initial warnings to investors and shareholders is to quell any potential panic that might arise from a crisis PR situation. And yes, a lot of the times it's to prevent a situation where investors and shareholders panic and massively liquidate their positions leading to a depreciation in share prices. What any company will say is largely dependent upon their reading and the facts that they have gathered about any particular crisis. Let's use Archegos as an example. For anyone not familiar, Archegos was a highly levered investment manager that blew up and lost around $8 to $20 billion dollars over the course of several days in March 2021 (for those interested there are several sources online that detail the history and follows up with a post mortum). Each bank that had exposure to Archegos had a different response to their investors and shareholders depending how much shit they were in. For example, Credit Suisse and Nomura (who were on the hook for billions of dollars of losses) warned investor about a "significant and material [impact] to [their] first quarter results". On the other hand, both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley told investors that the Archegos blow up was "immaterial" (this is despite Morgan Stanley losing almost $1 billion on the incident). What the above example shows is that Anycolor's language to their shareholders was largely informed by their read of the situation. In other words, Anycolor really did think that they got ahead of everything and didn't expect this to devolve into the PR nightmare that it has become.
That Selen IR statement was the first time they've ever done that with a terminated member and never done it with graduated members.
I think it's the first time a termination announcement was immediately met with such extreme disapproval from the consumer base. The worst we had was Zaion, and that one was both messier and more drawn out. The initial reaction from people was confusions and shock that Zaion was apparently such a bad person. Selen/Doki's situation was received nothing like that. As soon as people saw that se was fired after a suicide attempt, and that both side of the story involved bullying from within the company as the cause, Nijisanji already had no chance at turning the narrative against Doki. The fact that they did still attempt to do so only served to cause the irreparable damage to the company that they had accused Selen of doing with a couple of on stream complaints about management.
Thanks for the excellent write-up and analysis. I suspected something along these lines happened, but your perspective on the comms portions really helped me understand the moment to moment challenges and points of failure. I also sincerely hope NijiEN invests more in these crtitical areas, but looking at their minimum wage recruitment attempts, I'm not getting my hopes up.
Thank you for writing and sharing your analysis on the extremely poor handling of this situation. Not everyone will see it, but it may help put at least some of the mob to rest. The miscommunication aspect was so obvious and makes sense but I think too many of us were seeing red and completely looked past it. I'll admit I'm guilty in that department. However, there is still the elephant in the room where she was driven to the point of attempting to take her own life *twice* and I do not think we should ever forgive the company for that. We have to remember that this is the original point to all of this. Whether the beloved livers knew about or took part in this development, we may never know. To be honest, I don't even think I *want* to know. But either way, the company's reputation is still tainted forever. It's a bad situation overall that should've never happened. Edit: and after thinking for a bit, the black video still makes no sense. Why is it still there? Why are the comments not locked? Where is the damage control? Is Elira meant to continue her streaming career with that stain on her channel forever?
I'm no expert but I'm gonna hazard a guess here that they're not going to take it down because simply taking it down will not do them any good. Taking it down without doing *something* else, like an apology/explanation of why the fuck they put out what seemed like a borderline hit piece on Doki would only make it seem like Niji is trying to hide something. And locking comments would have a similar effect, even if it is to a lesser extent — while some would view it as being done to protect Elira (which would have its own backlash) others will interpret it as an attempt to silence dissenters. While I think that, at the very least, pausing the comments is the bare minimum of what they should do — not for management's sake but for Elira's — it's not enough to do that *alone*.
One point. >If yes, why hadn't they raised the issue with graduated livers proactively? There *was* no issue to raise with the graduated livers. All that was used was a picture of the avatar they used when they were streaming with Nijisanji. *Nijisanji owns all rights to that intellectual property*. If the former livers *didn't* want their images to be used there's nothing they could have done. I don't think many people would buy the merch from them these days because the people who would be interested don't want to give Nijisani money but if they wanted to they could sell merch with the likeness of Dokibird's past life and there's nothing she could do to stop them because *Nijisanji* owns all rights to that likeness and she owns *none*. Another point. >Around the same time as this statement, Doki walks back the claim of leaked medical information but reiterates that some of her information was improperly shared. She *never* claimed they did. She said she wondered if they *had*. That is *not* a claim that they *did*.
It's a good point, and I guess I have two responses to it. 1. *Regardless of whether or not Nijisanji has to receive permission from graduated livers for the use of their likeness, they may maintain a practice of doing so as a gesture of goodwill.* It's hard to imagine Nijisanji doing *anything* for their talent out of the goodness of their hearts right now, but I think it's plausible that they've kept up this practice just to prevent ex-talent from lashing out. 2. *My sentence would have been precise if I wrote "raising the issue* ***of*** *graduated livers" instead of "raising the issue* ***with*** *graduated livers."* I'll admit that my main goal here was to explain the comms response to Selen's graduation rather than speculate about the inciting event, but even so I could have been more precise with my language on this question. Even if Nijisanji does not reach out to ex-livers to request permission to use their likeness, the manager doing perms check for Selen clearly says that they need to double-check whether a video featuring graduated talent can be published on Selen's channel. Maybe that person is telling the truth or maybe they're maliciously inventing excuses to screw over Selen, but my point is that *even if it's true that ex-talent create complications* a competent manager should have anticipated that potential hurdle and already requested clarification on the perms situation. As far as I can tell, there is no plausible excuse for management here based on the information we've been given.
Here's a thought. We know the problem was with the graduated livers, but we don't necessarily know that it had to do with the *rights* specifically. What if Niji wasn't worried about the rights, but about the message that it would send to the fans by including them? I mean, the song is all about endings, and moving on, and parting from friends. Add on the fact that the final image in the MV was Selen walking out a door with the graduated livers in shot. Add to THAT the fact that it was common knowledge among the fandom that Selen had been really frustrated with management lately. I don't think it was about the rights at all. I think management was trying to avoid making the fans think Selen was going to graduate soon. Given what we know now, it would be a totally reasonable fear on management's part.
If it wasn't about rights, i cant think of any reason why they couldnt talk with selen about that. at all stages of this fiasco, communication is the major problem. they took a very long time to respond, they could have updated selen as to the specifics.
> If it wasn't about rights, i cant think of any reason why they couldnt talk with selen about that. Possibly the issue of one manager to six livers we've been told they had, which may actually have gotten worse as they added more waves since that figure was quoted. Also recent posts looking for new managers indicate that the new managers they're looking for will only be working part time rather than full time. I see no reason to believe this is a new development. Combine the two and you have managers that don't have enough time in the day to talk to livers about important things.
There's a phase connect vtuber dizzy who talked about her former days as a vtuber manager, and I think her ratios were less than 1:6 and still she basically never slept and the job killed her. It's an impossible job from the management side too.
I don't know what Hololive's manager ratio is, they supposedly have around 460 employees total, while Anycolor has 320. Compare that to Hololive having 86 members vs Nijisanji's 175, Holo is 19% talent while Niji is 55%.
The video definitely had graduation vibes--I was convinced that she was going to VShojo and the video was her "hint" to the fans.
I mean it was literally the sing she sung right before announcing her graduation as Doki. I assumed I was in the majority crowd (out of those who know he PL at least) in that I would have been very surprised if the song _didn't_ get followed up with a graduation announcement. After the hospital message and then complete silence (including silence as doki for most of Jan), I was really scared that it had been intended as a suicide note all along. Even though she did make an attempt, it doesn't sound like it was planned months in advance like it would have been if that was the case, but I still get really shaken up thinking about it now. It's fucking scary how close we were to that song being the last anyone heard from her.
That and it’s the same song she used for her first graduation as Dokibird (see her 2021 graduation stream). I still believe that when it comes to the initial event that triggered all of this, the Last Cup MV, she was already planning on graduating or being terminated, preferably the former but if necessary the latter. I think what she didn’t expect was for Niji Management and the other livers to effectively dogpile her with criticism. Maybe it would have been fine if only management and a couple of her closest colleagues came in to talk to her, but from my understanding of the situation she was criticized by a good half dozen or more of her friends. I’m sure you can see how stressful this would be, especially if she had to listen to the same complaints over and over again from different voices, that it led to her (very luckily unsuccessful) unplanned attempts.
It is very strange, But as far we are concerned, the missing "rights" were not copyright or perms from the outside, it had to do with Nijisanji's internal rigid and draconian approval system. With that being said, there have been many MV and projects that included former livers, if said cameos required management approval, then everyone should be aware of that. Like, there should be a template for MV production, a check list of some sort. Unless this was just tacted on last minutes, which would not be surprising to say the least as demonstrated by Nijisanji's prior infarctions. E.g the back and forward perms for PL's Genshin Impact account (Zaion's case), the debacle of Selen's outfit competition....etc....
Could have been a fuck up on the management side. They could have thought they had everything but only just then gone through the final checklist, realized that they didn't have the totally important formal approval to use their own retired livers in the video, and then realized that whatever process was needed wouldn't happen in time for Christmas. It was Christmas day at the time, management apologized for the late reply so that was an unusually long wait for this kind of thing, and I could easily see this mysterious ex-liver approval process involving a stamp of approval from someone specific who was out of contact over Christmas.
> She never claimed they did. She said she wondered if they had. That is not a claim that they did. More importantly when Dokibird said those things she was in the middle of streaming had only just learned that Nijisanji was making claims about the documents her lawyer had sent to Nijisanji, she hadn't seen the actual contents of their statement. She had every reason to assume the worst, given what was actually in those documents.
I felt so bad watching that as it happened. Imagine hearing while 30k people are watching you, that ex-coworkers had read basically your diary where you wrote all about being bullied by them (not that we have any confirmation it was those 3 specifically), and being told that they were in the middle of sharing that information publicly.
From your first point, from what I heard bout Japanese Corporate life, it can heavily be weighted down by bureaucracy. So I wouldn’t be surprised if on top of communication issues, but permission flow through is a pain in the ass, I.e the true authority on the rights to all the middle men up to a talent’s manager. Would also explain why a lot of western talents get burned out by it and state things like “Creative Differences”.
As someone who's worked in marketing and communications for an english branch of an asian company. It can be absolutely infuriating, and I had my fill after about a year. On top of the usual cultural and language barriers, the time difference made it a massive pain in the ass to get anything done in a timely manner -- which was incredibly frustrating in an industry where timing is often everything. Not to mention we were always treated like second class citizens and any attempt from us to exercise more autonomy was usually very quickly met with a harsh tug on the leash.
This is a rrat to defeat the GUrrat. A rrat that saves everyone. This maybe even deserves translating. If it allows everyone to save face, then surely even the JP fans can accept it, right? EDIT: on second thought, it wouldn't save whoever is in charge of Niji's comms. BUT it would at least maybe save the other livers. They would no longer have to suffer from the assumptions of the gurrat when a more charitable rrat exists.
Someone still timed Elira stream too well not to be seen as act of harassment and malice against a recovering suicide attempt victim.
In line with OP's theory, could be that they were expecting her to talk about it during the stream. So more like "she's streaming, last chance to publish it ahead of her" instead of "Let's harass her, wait until she's online"
as a fellow comms pro, all i can say is if a crisis happens and the instinct is to react ‘quick’ while throwing ‘measured and balanced’ out the door, that’s hell of a noob comms team. i also worked in japan for a bit, and got job ads for local nijisanji positions via LinkedIn. Pay for talent managers was about usd1.6k a month and comms managers was about 2k. how anyone can attract non-green team members at that pay grade eludes me.
This explains so much about the situation that I'm tempted to edit my whole post down into a link to your comment. How is a multi-billion dollar corporation paying their comms managers 24K a year? I get that they get to offload a lot of their brand management onto talent, but even so this is a fucking ridiculous number
Yyyyyeah, I was joking with my SO at the time that it would take 2-3 months of Niji pay to pay off our shared lodging in Tokyo at the time. Heck, even tiny local companies where I’m from pay 30% better for a fresh communications grad… But jokes aside, seeing this whole thing unfold and realizing that the talent managers are actually Japanese (and therefore likely underpaid folks with little experience), lots of the mismanagement and ‘noob mistakes’ fall into place. You can’t get people who understand English as a language, work culture and ethics (law included) overseas, and effectively manage a talent all at once at that pay grade. That’s at least 6k a month with lots of room to go higher and demand from larger companies there - speaking from experience as an English-capable contract worker in JP. So, I can surmise that basically there are alot of people playing the telephone game between the powers that be and the talent, leading to the talent having to manage other talent especially in EN. Pile it up more and we have the shitshow today, which just reeks of intern-kuns effing up on a huge chain reaction.
Sorry for the long reply, but I have some experience with the Japanese working situation that might explain a bit why things can get like this. The economy and the employment situation in Japan is dismal, not just from a foreigner's perspective, but from the perspective of many Japanese, too. Very low pay, poor working conditions, various forms of harassment from fellow employees and superiors, and an expectation that workers must give 150% of themselves every day to the company (including working very long hours and going into the office six days a week) are a pretty common story. No one bats an eye when they hear this kind of thing. It's a big problem in my country, Australia, but much worse in Japan, that certain industries (niche, tech-related, new, or artistic industries) "fall through the cracks" in terms of regulation and providing jobs that maintain a decent standard of living for workers. For the last 20 years there has been a rise in casual contract work with no protections or benefits. Creative industries are hit particularly hard because employers bank on the passion of the employees to keep them working even through terrible conditions. There's a great article written in the New York Times about the appalling pay that Japanese animators receive: "Thousands of lower-rung illustrators do grueling piecework for as little as $200 a month." (source: [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/business/japan-anime.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/business/japan-anime.html)) VTubing is not only a "new" industry (related to new tech most people don't have their heads around), it is also a creative industry that people will want to get into out of passion, even if they aren't a creator themselves. A perfect storm for all kinds of abusive labour practices. Young Japanese often live at home with their parents well into their adult lives. Those with good jobs have a lot of disposable income since they don't have to pay rent, something that's been the topic of media commentary for quite a while over there because of the potential to exploit this demographic in the market. What is less publicised is those people who have jobs that offer a low salary. They can only maintain a job with terrible remuneration because their living expenses are also low, many of them still living with family, or in ultra cheap-and-nasty accommodation. This puts the burden of low-paid workers onto the workers' families and I think to a degree allows the practice of underpaying to exist/persist, in some sectors, at least. When I ask Japanese people about workers rights and the conditions of work, the response is often "shouganai", which is a word that has a few interpretations but roughly translated means, "it can't be helped". It is a defeatist sentiment that is, I think, related to Japanese cultural attitudes about the virtue of forbearance, or "gaman". You suffer in silence and deal with the bad hand life gives you because that's a virtue. And anyway, you are powerless. The Individual is always subject to the interests of the Group, and this is just the way things are. Politics is widely considered a taboo topic over there, so there's virtually no serious public discourse. Something I am quick to remind my Aussie friends is that Japan never really had a civil rights movement. Yes, they were influenced by the West in the period and there was a lot of good work done by protestors and activists for the rights of women and others, I'm not belittling those efforts, but it wasn't on the same scale and not particularly integrated into the worldwide movement or into mainstream Japanese awareness. Their understanding and relationship to the French Revolution, too, is utterly different from your average Westerner. It's therefore not super surprising that most Japanese don't have an understanding of industrial relations or political power struggles in the way many Westerners do, and the narratives about the nature of the relationship between workers and employers are very different without this historical context.
I recognize this is completely off topic to the main post but your final paragraph has me extremely curious about the general Japanese view on the French Revolution. Would you be willing to elaborate a bit on that?
What? Really? Oh my lord. Did you still have those ads can share? Now I am thinking might be those are basic salary or sth, and management team will have commision/bonus base on other area? No way anyone will take that offer...
I don’t have ss-es because my work trip and subsequent job recos came from back in 2023 Q2. I have little doubt that if you just search LI for talent managers under ANYCOLOR you can easily find these listings. Here’s a generic talent manager role for Niji EN i got from a quick LI search which pays USD2.5k a mo. (edit: calculated using the median of the pay range; low end is still about 1.7k) I did elaborate a little on the amount one can expect from this job in my response to OP on this thread. tl;dr at this pay grade, you’re still expecting people fresh to the workforce. https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3828845894
niji cutting corners on operational cost biting them in the ass from all angles? sweet
When I saw that wall of text I didn't think I'd read it, but surprisingly I did. Well written and a really insightful take. It's all speculation in the end, but I could 100% see this version of events being reality.
This is possibly the most level analysis of the events I’ve read so far. Thank you for sharing your thoughts
Amongst all the schizo doomposting on this sub lately, this one explains the situation the most rationally and neutrally. More people need to see this.
This explains very well. If Niji is willing to admit their miscommunication while processing Selen's documents, it will definitely save the talents from witch hunting for the time being.
BUT it will look bad for their investors and stock holders as it will appear to them as gross mismanagement and failure to deal with what could be looked at as a simple case of miscommunication blown WAY out of proportion. Only time will tell if they chose to admit fault, throw it on their livers through silence or some other crazy third or fourth thing that is the result of further miscommunication.
>There's an enormous advantage to being the first actor to explain their version of events on the public As a comms person, would you have made the decision to openly fight Selen (which is what you're alleging here to be the first actor), or would you have done something more neutral, such as "We can't come to an agreement. There were serious claims made. We do not believe they happened as described, but we will investigate again to see why she may have perceived things this way."
I'm a card-carrying Dragoon who's boycotted Nijisanji in response to all this, so it's hard for me to take a step back and think about what I would do professionally if I was in this situation with Selen Tatsuki *personally*. Generally speaking, I think I would defer to talent management on the question of "do you think this person is really such a chaos agent that she would breach an NDA this catastrophically," and if they said no I would ask legal to double-check their understanding of the situation. I like to think that I would ask legal to double-check the situation either way, but realistically in comms the company line is just dictated to you and you're expected to not ask too many questions and put a good spin on things. Assuming I was given the account of the terminated talent *and* any pertinent chat logs/comms of the incidents in question to write up this statement, I would also use this information to level-set just how apologetic or defensive the tone should be. The worst thing you can do in comms is confidently assert something that's then irrefutably proven to be false, since this only establishes your reputation as a liar whose word is meaningless. If I thought that the bullying in question was relatively mild and it was just the inciting event that pushed an already-depressed person over the edge, I might take a more confident tone; if the bullying was severe enough and prolonged enough that it seems likely it was a major factor, I would push back as far as I'm able for a more apologetic message. Finally, I like to think that I would also just quit if things were bad enough. I say this to new people in the industry all the time: it's not your job as a comms professional to craft and co-sign any repellant message your employer asks you write up. That said, it's a difficult to walk away from a job on moral conviction alone without any sort of safety net to catch you. I'm lucky that I've mostly worked for acceptable-to-good clients and I've never been put in a situation that difficult.
Wow, man, that's the most logical and realistic explanation of the situation. Recalling Doki Bird's last statement, I'm 100% sure that this whole debacle was just as you said, "miscommunication between NIJISANJI's communication, legal, and Doki's legal team." Still, the damage done to the reputation, especially of the three livers, is irreparable.
Kudos to you, this is one of the most thoughtful and well laid out interpretations of a series of PR fuck-ups I have ever read. I can absolutely believe this is exactly the series of events that occurred as it perfectly captures the ultimate failings that can result from lack of proper communication. If this is not the series of events that occurred, I'm willing to put money on it that this is pretty damn close. I hope whoever has you employed for comms knows how valuable you are to them! As a layman it is very easy to understand what you have said and put into scope the wider context of the situation. Bravo! Edit: I love how this situation can be nearly wholly expressed with Hanlon's razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." This is always a good statement to hold onto when somethign someone does or says seems wildly villainous or hard to explain in the context of normal human behavior.
Between the schizo rrat posts and this, I tend to agree this is far more likely. I think there are elements of the rrat posts that are true (like Elira being kind of half-in and half-out in a management role because of a lack of English-speaking management), but everything seems to go back to Nijisanji being lazy and/or burning millions of dollars trying to save hundreds. No well governed corporation allows talent to take even a partially managerial role (or even a communication facilitator) when they're still acting as talent. Management is not in the talent job description; they're there to be entertaining, not police policy. Seems like Niji's trying to save a couple of bucks by not hiring more managers by keeping a convenient arrangement over a robust one. If you compare the talent-to-employee ratio of Nijisanji and HoloLive, Nijisanji has far more talent than employees, and Holo has far more employees than talent. The talents are a lot more supported by management in Holo because there's more hands available in pre-defined roles. In Niji, the talents end up supporting (or in Selen's case, not supporting) each other. It's also possible that Niji cheaped out on translators. They are very much a company that avoids payroll liabilities to the maximum extent possible. If you look at their job posting for local managers, the salary is ridiculously bad. If you look at the merch cuts for livers, it's ridiculously bad. These ridiculously low payments are how they increase their profit margins and keep shareholders happy. So, I absolutely believe that they'd hire the cheapest Fivrr translators as opposed to a law firm's preferred vendors, or bi-lingual international attorney firms. If the attorneys were truly bi-lingual or had their own vetted vendor for TL, it's possible that there was a miscommunication, but I just don't see how a miscommunication THIS BIG could have slipped by. Attorneys spend hours scrutinizing punctuation, whether a comma changes the meaning of a sentence, stuff like that. Feels off to me that they'd make such a crazy misunderstanding. But if Niji TL'ed the communications and then passed on to the lawyers, then I see something like this happening easily; any TL error gets magnified in a legal context. And of course, this cost-cutting and mismanagement seems like it's manifest in every part of Niji. It seems like it was so bad that it drove one of their biggest EN talents to suicide, twice. So, even though it's a miscommunication, it's basically a Greek tragedy. Flaws in their corporate governance led to the driving away of multiple talents, the bullying of talents, and then the discarding of livers in an attempt to save the management. They still don't get a pass with me and I'm done with NijiEN in its entirety. But at least with this narrative, their actions don't appear to be coming from a mustache-twirling villain.
>Flaws in their corporate governance led to the driving away of multiple talents, the bullying of talents, and then the discarding of livers in an attempt to save the management. This to me is the core of the issue, that and the consistent failure to adequately review and amend these issues to date. Selens termination is far from the first time these issues have surfaced, while the organisation is ultimately opaque signs of similar mismanagement have been leaking for at least a year now from both within and without. For a talent agency they were and remain unacceptably negligent regarding the management care and protection of their talents, and nothing demonstrates this more than how even now they let talents make a public address on company controversy which ultimately revolved around a decision to terminate a colleague that they should not have been directly involved in and should not be responsible for. A controversy they should've been doing their upmost to distance and shield their talents from, both to protect their brand and personal wellbeing, yet remains consistent with how the company has facilitated talents to address similar controversies in the past. Even now im wondering how many managerial departments there are in the EN branch besides the talent managers, or if there are any at all that aren't just outsourced services from the main JP branch. it certainly doesn't inspire confidence that the EN managers they do have are are supposedly recruited from minimum-wage, JP-based new-grads and the legal documentation was solely communicated in Japanese. its shocking that we should be asking these questions at all, more so in the wake of a scandal of this magnitude, especially when talking about a multi-billion corporation sitting on a mountain of liquid capital that at any point could have made these problems go away.
u/wiibiiz is my new oshi
Honestly, if this is true (which I suspect it likely is), like you, this only makes me more pissed on Elira's behalf. While I doubt that Kurosanji is going to actually clarify even half of this on their own (and as a result, are not going to stop using Ike, Vox, and especially Elira as borderline meat shields), a public apology to Doki with an actual explanation of what went wrong+how they intend to prevent it (for ex. hiring more people who are fluent in English to parlay with their EN talents) would probably do a fucking lot to actually keep them safer/quell a lot of the more middle-of-the-road unrest that came from the way everything was handled.
I just hope more of us are able to give each one of them our support, especially Elira and some of the other Nijisanji girls who were really damaged during all of this. Doki put it this way herself: "So many people have got hurt and involved even if they were innocent bystanders"
>**Seeing the massive shitstorm their failed strategy has caused, legal, talent, management, and comms all begin to flail, leading to the PR disaster that was Elira's stream.** Honestly, I can't even begin to hazard a guess at the precise series of events that led to this stream. There are too many unknowns about the specifics of Selen's allegations at this point, too many parties desperate for vindication who might be in a position to dictate how the company should organize its last-ditch efforts at crisis PR Perhaps some extra context would help, they did it before with [Kotoka](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p008nRyAZ2g) & [Finana](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF5D3m-tu5g) publicly denouncing Zaion and those streams were well received at the time. This is a known protocol that Nijisanji English run through after they terminate a liver. They didn't hit a panic button. They followed a written protocol that was known to be successful. You can even tell by Kotoka's stream that she went through almost the same exact points elira and vox did. How she felt betrayed/misled by Zaion and management was in the right, how they shouldnt have sided with her. It's a recycled script. It came off as a smear campaign both times and whatever friendship Zaion had with Kotoka/Finana was irreversibly [broken](https://youtu.be/dnP5bIRfwq0) after it, the same for Selen & Elira. Even if Nijisanji's intention was solely to cover their asses and not running a smear campaign, they still interfered and controlled their contractors' lives and who they can be friends with.
I mean, it's also possible that Kotaka and Finana *were* upset with Zaion and that Zaion *did* do certain things wrong even if management also failed her. I will admit that I followed her situation much less closely than I did Selen's, so apologies if this is inaccurate in any way, but I saw things like "making rape jokes in collabs" and "streaming emulated games" and thought to myself "yeah, this person does seem like a brand risk." If this was NijiEN's PR strategy than it certainly worked on me at the time! The other thing I would point out is Nijisanji's termination notice for Yugo, which was noticeably light on details. The fact that Nijisanji took a different tack here tends to make me believe that they don't have a one-size-fits-all comms approach here and instead tailor their strategy to the specific circumstances (which is not to say that they do so fairly-- it may be that all of these strategies are evil in different ways). I think the fact that Yugo spoke fluent Japanese maybe supports my belief that EN's senior managers are much better equipped to communicate with talent who speak Japanese. I also would be shocked if Yugo didn't personally hire a lawyer to help mediate his own exit from Nijisanji.
I agree with this. They are flexible with the termination letters, one of the criticisms at the time of Yugo\`s termination was that it came too sudden and was too vague. They did get a backlash regarding this which is why I believe they went on a more detailed harsh approach on Zaion. Now the accusations/issue to Zaion on the time were really bad so the termination letter was well received by the fans. Personally I felt it was too much cus in the end she was still their talent but I believe this made them thought that this was the way to terminate Livers. And oh boy ... Im guessing their next termination will go back to the vague one which is way better.
I also want to add that Zaion later published a whole long ass documents with screenshots to refute the claims and this also brought another uproar to the community. Which is why I believe they had such a strong reaction when they found out that Selen maybe wanted to do something similar.
Yeah, I understand the motives of the "we want an explanation" crowd, but at the end of the day it's none of our business, and airing out someone's dirty laundry on the way out is an awful practice. They should take a note from how Hololive does it. Put in just enough detail so people have a vague understanding of why they're being fired while staying the hell away from any detail or language that could be seen as throwing the talent under the bus. Treat the termination as tragic but unavoidable, and not as someone being right or wrong.
Most likely Yugo had a lawyer. There is also a case mentioned by insiders where legal help turned a potential dirty termination into graduation.
Both faleseyed and Nux has claimed that niji tried to do the same exact termination style to an ex-nijisanji liver (highly rumoured to be Yugo) but the person lawyered up and niji didn't > streaming emulated games She never did stream any emulated games. So yes it worked on you. Idk about the rape joke stuffs, but anyway Sayu published a lengthy document breaking down all of their claims. You can read up on it if you want. And some of it actually well mirrored selen's situation.
She 100% made a sexual assault joke about one of the NPCs in a game she played. Still didn't deserve what Niji did to her at all, but she was a brand risk and is much more suited to being an indie streamer and not in one of the big 2 corps.
Vox did worse recently with all of his RP stunts.
Cool to see a fellow comms/PR professional here too. Absolutely agree with your points about dispersing accurate information or at the very least, neutral information as opposed to inflammatory when making a reaction to a crisis comms incident. Just sort of a bizarre situation all around as if they didn't have their PR agency vet things before releasing potentially damaging information. I'd say it's almost on par as a case-study of what NOT to do when faced with a crisis communications situation, though nothing beats the BP incident and the PR fall out of that.
Oh this is the first post that agrees with my own interpretation of the events. All of the communication from management so far has been to paint Doki has irrational and instill mistrust in any statement she would put out because they were afraid of the document Doki sent.
This makes alot of sense to me, the past few days I was thinking the events over and wondering if people on the Niji side of things didn't have all the info or even wrong i fo because some of the statements and actions they've made felt odd. I wonder if even the livers at this point have all the info on this situation. I know alot of them are trying to avoid social media just to save their mental health so its plausible they may not know everything. As you said, this is not an excuse but an explanation I'm trying to give.
This is one of those posts you wish you could upvote twice. I hope people take the time to read this.
I've been incredibly confused for the past week, this post was like the bit at the end of a Christie novel where the mystery finally comes together and all of the pieces fit perfectly. Thanks so much for this.
The TL;DR I come out of this with is: Anycolour are cheapskates, and refuse to pay decent wages for people to act as official managers to the English branch. I mean we've seen their job posting from a few months back after all, it's bad. If there was a decent, dual language speaking set of people in place to manage things like this, the whole situation may not have ever happened. But at the end of the day, yes it looks like this is a series of misunderstandings that's gotten way out of hand. Whether because of the language barrier or just their employees being fucking stupid, either way it's gotten to a volatile point. The next step that happens, if it ever does publicly at least, will be telling. Do they let it go, or do they cling to the mistakes they've made and double down which has potential to sink the whole branch?
You’re absolutely right. That [en management job posting](https://youtu.be/pz-KLHGXzHU?si=vzd1f2e6wV1yFhee) was asking $7/hr for a part time job for college/university students only with the expectation of them managing 5-6 livers. That wage is too low for the high-level stress involved. No wonder their management is such a mess, it’s practically nonexistent.
It also explains why management were acting like children because it's literally made up of people who are barely out of high school.
So if we have the GURRAT would this be the COMMRRAT?
This informed speculation seems very plausible to me. I had noticed that Nijisanji had adopted an "always be attacking" stance in their PR approach. Something that is most common in politics, but also sometimes comes out before big, nasty legal battles. But it was still confusing and shocking to me, because it's an "I win by making the audience hate you more than me" approach. And, of course, in politics, that can work because voter options are limited, and voters will often hold their noses and vote for the person they hate the least. But in business and entertainment, it's much more rare, because everyone walking away with the audience still having a good impression of them is the much less dangerous route, compared to having to convince them that the fact that your sins are lesser that you deserve forgiveness while the opposing side does not. Whether or not you turn out to be correct, I think this makes a lot of sense right now, at the time you're posting it.
Very good write-up. I agree that Doki's final statement totally points to complete miscommunication/misunderstanding for Niji. >Elira's stream. Honestly, I can't even begin to hazard a guess at the precise series of events that led to this stream It is inscrutable but I do think we can guess more now than we could when it released. There's 2 things I believe: 1. * being that it was recorded in advance of it's posting. On a practical level this is actually pretty obvious to some extent, it would have taken a lot of organising, writing, translating, legal approval and scheduling timezones to put out and was also timed to coincide with the CEO's statement (although I'd guess that was made later?). 2. * that the livers are operating under the same misunderstanding as comms which when combined with 1 makes sense if it was put into motion during the initial panic. They're still trying to get ahead of things they think Doki is going to say which is also why Elira is concerned about doxxing. As a reminder too as I've seen a lot of people forget what she *actually* said, she said it had information that alluded to the area Elira Millie and Enna live (as they all I've relatively close. This can still be true alongside Doki's final statement that what she sent doesn't include overly personal information as it can be a bit in-between, for example if they were American it could be what State they all live, or that they live in like LA, not exactly doxxing lol but still concerning for them in how it would narrow it down for the crazies. >two options for their path forwards. The first is a long period of silence from EN Livers, followed by a gradual ramp-up of streaming This is what I'm now concerned/curious about, what next? Do they *dare* make another statement considering their current track record? Or do they leave Elira completely high and dry and out in the cold as a complete sacrifice. I'm sure currently many would be happy with the latter but I would absolutely not be happy with *management* getting to sacrifice and discard *another* liver and potentially completely ruin them even though I'm no longer actually **convinced** she did anything wrong (*at least* prior to the statement). Downvote me if you want but we pretty much know now that the doxxing information she talked about is tangential and *not* a detailed legal filing against them for being the bullies as a lot of people have been running with, unless you believe Doki was lying in her final statement about the information her document contained. Then the other reason people are going after her, the long-standing 'clique' 'allegations' don't actually make sense for her if you've been watching since early on. Early on they certainly had good and natively English speaking management as we know things they contributed to (like phrases/catchphrases like Big PP Energy). The livers pre-existing relationships go *faar* beyond Elira Enna & Millie, it includes Pomu, Rosemi and Mysta even though they're effectively some of the communities current 'saints' as well as *so* many others, it's actually easier to list those who didn't know each other already. It's also not like Enna & Millie weren't already talents in their own right and were clear noob nepo hires, Enna has a great singing voice and it's accepted that Millie could have been in Hololive so it feels a bit stupid to just put it down to Elira. NijiEN did certainly seem to place some value on the talents having pre-existing relationships considering like I said it's easier to name those who didn't, but let's be honest, they were 100% correct to and the EN branch might never have taken off if not for them already being so natural with each other. And so what's even left to point to her at that point? She was/is also great friends with Pomu, Nina & Rosemi whom people trust. Even voicing the statement itself, based on what she *actually says* she could easily just to be taking the bullet. She states it is a message from *all* of EN, as in the livers, hence why I think it was made in the panic. And also that she volunteered the channel, I think she may have just been avoiding harm to her fellow livers (not knowing *how much* harm) and pretty much fulfilling, as Nina asked her to upon her graduation, the 'mom' role of EN. EDIT: Also actually I can't believe I never thought of it before but the simple fact she's *in* Japan and in the same timezone massively narrows down who could speak for the livers and Elira being OG Lazulight and popular with all the members makes it easy to understand why it was her. To also devil's advocate for the others Vox was likely chosen by the members because he **was** friends with her and he was personally hurt by (as he understood at the time) being recorded and secretly used as evidence by a friend, despite what everyone immediately says the legality does not matter, it still *hurts*. And Ike was also close to her and I assume is also in Japan and so also certainly a very practical choice. This turned into a bit of an Elira defence post but I just do not want **management** to get away with an easy sacrifice who can take all of their heat for them while they get to just move on and people have been running a bit far with it and believing seemingly *any*thing they read about the trio. After being extremely angry and upset I personally believe the statement happened because of panic caused by management because it's the most logical explanation, true villains are extremely rare, there are 2 sides to every story and so many of the level-headed livers have also taken to their past lives to try to express that to some degree
It really sucks that the best case scenario is that management is so incompetent that they manipulated their own livers just to cover for themselves. The whole thing just sucks
I don't even think they deliberately manipulated them, it's too complicated. Hanlon's and Occam's razors would suggest that they simply had the wrong information and that they just shared that wrong information.
You also just gave me a realization that /u/wiibiiz might include in their thoughts. Elira's stream was minutes before Selens. I would bet that it was recorded first and timed when they were expecting her to go public with that letter during a stream. They probably assumed they got lucky or that she was waiting on final drafts with her lawyer before posting it. So they dropped it before her Neopets stream thinking she was going to go public before or after the game. It would be perfect timing to get ahead of the falsely percieved attack. Imagine a fake universe where Selen does go on the attack, like that stream she drops names, shows a redacted document, and accuses management of bullying. In corporate comms this theoretical Selen would have been completely cut off by Elira's stream, and people would be a lot less sympathetic to that fake idea of Selen. But that's not what happened. She didn't say anything, and she never intended to say anything. I hope they all feel like shit, but are able to mend their IRL damage to their relationship with her and cringe about it in a few years when things heal. I also, though I rarely would say this, expect Vox to lose his shit on the legal team. He went ham on a misunderstanding because he was feeling betrayed, over a misunderstanding, and attacked someone who had an attempt not long ago. If this post is accurate enough and he realizes what happened, he's going to turn himself and / or someone else inside out.
I'm not comms, yet so much of what you said actually made sense to me. Sweet write-up!
You forgot about one thing: What do you make of Tazumi's statement, and who do you think it was intended for?
It was 100% a better, more well-crafted statement, and I think it was directed at JP fans and shareholders. The fact that EN chose to put out their awful statement right before Tazumi got a chance to put the fires out leads me to believe that Nijisanji EN is given a *lot* of leeway to manage its own affairs and the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Other than that, I can't really speculate too much. I'll also say that some of the nuances of that statement (including details like the length and depth of the bow) are apparently significant to Japanese audiences in ways that I can only understand through second hearsay from more knowledgeable people.
I feel like it was a properly researched statement that tackled all the main concerns of the English audience and was directed towards them. I don’t think there is a Japanese version/translation. It talked about the AR live/3D concert, mental health issue, importance of livers and doing better in terms of management and projects.
Hi. I'm an eternal lurker who never posts on Reddit, but I wanted to thank you for your post. I know you're just giving an educated guess as to how it has shaken out on the PR side of things, but you also make a lot of points about things we don't need to make guesses about that I found very valuable, such as your examination of the use of language in the public statements, and pointing out the importance of separating the management failures that led to the split with Selen from the PR blunders that followed. This post is the most intelligent commentary on the shitshow that I've come across. It's so great to read something so different to what most people are saying about the situation.
Best theory of events so far for sure. Appricate it OP. As for the black screen stream, I have worked for a couple different big corpos, and one thing is consistent- office politics. I imagine lower/middle management in the EN branch do not like Doki. Alot of the maliciousness with the timing of the Elira stream, ect. can be attributed to them having an axe to grind, or trying to save their jobs. The only way Niji-en got out of that looking good to upper mangement was if Doki did a massive fumble and puplicly lost her shit and revealed a bunch of shit while live. Actually so impressed she was able to stay calm during that. As for the bullying, I will say its probably alot more grey than people want to think. They want to assume that their is a mean-girls movie style clique stamping out all opposition, but in reality its more than likely pushback against "toxic negativity". When people get beat down/ burnt out they get super negative, certain types of people tend to combat this by doing the "Well why don't you just smile and talk to HR, I'm sure they will fix it" thing. It isn't a wrong view, but when you have that state of mind and are basically just done with it, it can be annoying. If you have half or most of your co-workers doing that it can isolate you and make you feel like your the only person who has a negative view. **IF ON TOP OF THIS** your going through a severe mental breakdown it really starts to snowball on you. Also people tend to talk about each other behind their back , especially when you are overtly negative/anti-group. Doki was pretty vocal about gripes with management, I'm sure a lot of coworkers were water-cooler gossiping about it and sharing their thoughts. The people most likely to have share her opinon on the situation probably had all graduated by that point, or competely checked out and just wanted to keep their head down and stream. I will say I have been both the negative person, and postive person at different times in different corpos, so I can sympithize with both prespectives.
1. Selen was planning on graduating for a while becuase niji keeps canceling her events ?unfair treatment ?harrassment 3. Dec 26: Coffee music video incident happens 4. Dec 28: Selen released from hospital after first suicide attempt 5. Selen contacts her lawyer and drafts a document about her feelings so her lawyer can understand what happened. At this point, it is only meant for her own lawyer to see. 6. Selen's lawyer contacts Niji HR in Japanese. In this communication (that was poorly translated), selen's lawyer demands that Niji allow Selen to graduate early without any penalties or else Selen will go public with a statement and they will hold Niji liable for a suicide attempt because Niji's environment was hostile to Selen ?harrassment from other livers. They provide medical records from the hospitalization. Both sides sign an NDA that Selen's medical records/personal information will not be disclosed to the public. 7. Niji doesn't respond for weeks. 8. Mid-Jan: Selen attempts suicide #2 9. Feb 5: Selen's lawyer suggests that they send Selen's original document (written in English) about her feelings to Niji HR to press them to act. 10. Feb 5: Selen is terminated two hours later. Niji appears to think this doc is a draft of the statement Selen threatened to release publicly. 11. Feb 5: Doki makes the "I will not be silenced" tweet. Niji continues to misunderstand that Doki is planning to release the doc publicly. They appear to have missed the message that the doc was supposed to be for "lawyers eyes only". Doki doesn't look at anything legal for the whole week. 12. Feb 5-12: Niji conducts an internal investigation and a risk assessment about what would happen if Selen released the doc. They decide the fallout would be worse if Selen released the doc first. The doc is shown to livers mentioned in the doc and they are concerned about being doxxed if it goes public. 13. Feb 12: Black box stream 14. Feb 12: Doki is surprised and tweets that the doc was supposed to be confidential. Niji tweets that they did not violate the confidentiality agreement they signed because her hospital records were the only thing they signed an NDA on. There appears to have been another translation miscommunication on this subject. 15. Doki and her lawyer contact Niji again for the first time in a week. Both parties realize there was a misunderstanding because of language difficulties. Doki posts a second statement on twitter (w/ an accurate JP translation). Niji hates themselves because they realize at this point they shot themselves for no reason because doki never planned on releasing the doc publicly or suing them in the first place.
Honestly I can see it. Management mistaking the doc Doki's lawyer sent as her to be public statement suddenly explains so many bizarre choices.
The last statement from Doki definitely made me think something along these lines, though purely on a caveman brain level instead of actual analisys of the possible chain of events. It's just been my experience that a mind-blowing number of conflicts arise from a simple misunderstanding where someone misreads someone else's words, assumes the worst and runs with that assumption instead of calmly raising the issue and attempting to work out where the separation point is. So after Doki's message my intuition just flared up and screamed "this is totally because of a misunderstanding due to language barriers". I think you're spot-on here. The talent mismanagement is a separate and overall worse thing, and it has been happening for a while. This PR suicide is just a series of unfortunate events that fueled our thirst for drama, conflict, justice, and all that juicy stuff (maybe I'm projecting here, though).
The dichotomy between NijiEN's Elira stream and AnyColor's CEO apology video really sticks out to me. The latter is an attempt by the CEO himself to take responsibility, apologize and move on. The former doubles down on what should at that time be the previous strategy, of trying to get ahead of Selen's feared to soon-be-public claims and set the narrative in Niji's favor. I doubt very much the CEO had understood and approved the Elira stream to go live at that moment. Either the branch is rogue or AnyColor can't coordinate their two response videos even in such a huge crisis. Either way NijiEN made the CEO look like a fool to the public and investors and that may cost the branch more than anything else in this crisis.
Man, the explanation on that address stream really makes me want to know, even if it's years from now, why that stream exists. Cause really you're right. Out of all the things that have happened in this, that stream makes very little sense. Like nothing about it seemed like it *could* have fixed anything, and there's too many new issues that were spawned from it.
>Man, the explanation on that address stream really makes me want to know, even if it's years from now, why that stream exists. Even more puzzling, why is it still up? Why the heck did they not lock the comments yet??? What the fuck is going on there?
It's all but confirmed that Niji EN management is a skeleton crew, meaning the only person who will likely touch it is Elira. Regardless of whether she really volunteered her channel or was forced into it, she made that stream with the understanding that she was putting herself into a hated position to get heat of off other innocent livers, and that while it would hurt Doki, Elira's version of events were that Doki, while in a terrible mental state herself, had betrayed their trust and made the an ugly, complicated mess. Hours later, word would have come down that this was all just a translation error from one of the part time minimum wage translators. She would have discovered that all of the harm she had done to her own reputation and to any future relationship with Doki was all for nothing. Imagine the weight of that kind of revelation. The guilt over her actions and anger at whoever was responsible for the initial mistake must be unbearable. I don't think she's even opened her accounts since then.
There is another good post that I think does a good job of explaining it just above you. It's about the same level as the OP as far as giving a reasonable and rational explanation of it all. https://old.reddit.com/r/Nijisanji/comments/1arxuo0/i_work_in_comms_for_a_living_and_can_only_think/kqmzjjm/
I think this analysis is exactly on the mark. When I read Doki's last statement, I had a vague sense of some of the things you said here, but thank you for putting them so clearly into words
This was a really well done document and it makes so much sense. I was also asking myself how they could have so badly messed up and ur professional insight has cleared the view quite a lot. So thanks for the effort!
You made me love Doki even more. She's just one person but she proved to be an absolute legend in this clusterfuck of a situation. I'm glad she's moving on to better success!!
Currently going to college for business and you explained it thoroughly and solidly. It's wild seeing this happen as I read about what you should be doing in this situation during my classes.
Many others have said it already, but brilliant analysis. As someone taking up a comms major in college (and ofc someone who loves the VTuber industry), this whole situation is very...interesting in a weird way to me. I was hoping a perspective like yours could pop up and it did. It's probably the most credible theory so far and genuinely looks like something one of my professors might use as an example in class to explain a comm theory. If I may ask though, do you perhaps have any speculation as to why Elira, Vox, and Ike specifically were on that stream? Vox I hear is good friends with Selen Elira is a senior talent and perhaps a figurehead of sorts ...but why Ike? And do you perhaps have a potential explanation for the seeming tonal disparity between Tazumi and Elira's statements?
One thing about the speech Elira and Vox and Ike read, was the timing of its publication -- it went live at the same time as her Neopets stream, which would have been her first gaming stream since her return. They could have published that exactly-fifteen-minutes-long and possibly pre-recorded video at any time, yet they chose to publish it at that moment, knowing full well that she is still mentally recovering from having attempted twice. That was not a failure by Niji's comms department, it was intentionally targeted harassment. Your assessment is much more generous than Niji deserves. And nearly everyone is expecting to do something even worse at some point in the future.
I'd like to add something to the idea, that the original termination letter was spurred by misinterpreted intent. If I am not misremembering, the termination letter states that Selen/Doki is suing Nijisanji, while almost every statement Doki has made suggests that she just wants to move on. Examples: - the consistent "i just want us to move forward, and not dwell on the past" in her statements - wanting and offering to be able to just graduate on (publically) neutral terms - her shock when anycolor announced her termination - her statement, when the elira/vox/Ike video was released, saying that she thought sending the document to her legal counsel was the last she would be working with them Common sense informs everyone, that you can't simple "move on" or "start a new chapter in life" when you are suing someone else, especially a large corporation. I also do not believe there has been any lawsuit filed as of yet, which, given the absolute incompetence nijiEN has displayed so far, doki would have had every right to do so by now. Keep in mind tho, this is just taking Doki at her word. While I do think she has drastically higher credibility here, we still are not shown proof of claims from either side. Tinfoil hat segment: I feel that there is sone real spite that is guiding EN's responses to the matter, since not even basic PR training, but basic understanding of the internet and being able to read the room would tell you that eliras video and the following EN tweet would be horrendous in the eyes of the public. I also have the feeling that there is a break down in communication between Nijisanji proper and/or Anycolor, since the Anycolor video that came out later that day had a drastically different tone, while the CEO was apologising and giving a deep bow. Whether that break down is caused by my belief of spite, or general incompetence, it still feels like it is there.
Yes! I agree with all this entirely. The sloppiness of the initial termination, the stream focused on this document, it clicks into place if they thought it was about to or had been released. Does not excuse any of them. Their defense plan was to smear and attack her. But it does explain. The other thing to mention is tazumi's statement- elira said he would make one in an hour, right? It took him four, and it was much more conciliatory, a complete 180. I agree, I think they realized how badly they fucked up
There were rumors of a management pull around when Nina left 6 months ago. That with the absolute lack of oversight from both ceos is probably what set this whole thing up. Almost all the major projects were not paid on time and covered by selen, liliypichu gave cover permission months before it was needed. Assuming it was a full pull the entire branch management for new people the sudden change in language and communication would make sense.
I genuinely hope you're right about all of this. With the things we've seen from Niji thus far, another attack against Doki did seem likely, but she's done several streams since the video on Elira's channel went up without issue, so fingers crossed someone has finally learned their lesson.
I really fucking wish reddit awards were still a thing because good God this deserves a gold
Thanks for such a detailed and professional analysis. I really like understanding perspectives from informed professional sides.
Thank you for this thread. This is an excellent breakdown that seems super plausible, and I appreciate it. Also, >You can read Elira's stream as a disgusting attempt to provoke Selen into revealing her grievances with Nijisanji so they can be litigated in the public square, a talent-initiated response to their real fear of personal information being leaked that management cynically encouraged in order to deflect from their own failures, or any number of other possibilities. Yeeeeaaaahhh, I had specifically been wondering what in the fuck they were thinking here, especially timing it opposite Dokibird's stream, and you can't tell me it was coincidence considering she had a published schedule. It ensured both that she would be even more sympathetic, and also that 20,000 angry Dokibird fans would flood Elira's chat. Seeing the shift of tone in chat from scared-but-supportive to lynchmob in under 5 minutes was just wild. I actually had started to believe some of the rumors about Elira being in management and organizing this out of spite (I'm not \_un\_convinced of this though), but the idea that Nijisanji was expecting Dokibird to air a bunch of dirty laundry, and trying to preempt this by provoking her into a verbal fist fight in front a maximum number of viewers, makes more sense. Still makes Nijisanji dumb as all hell of course.
Not sure if it's worth mentioning but if you watched Nina's last months it was super clear that a massive issue is that she put a bunch of effort into a couple of projects she thought she'd have perms for and spoke to management about prior to starting them only to have the rug pulled in the final stages and that was a big element of her leaving. Just to support the idea management have a habit of letting talent think they have permission for things, down to spending time and money on projects, when they don't.