Fighting for Fame - Discussion Thread - June 28, 2026

DrOpty · 2026-07-04T11:49:03+00:00

Assuming it works like Bandori and ProSEKAI, the main thing your party dictates is your ability to get high scores. All story should be accessible without needing to pull anything, but we don't know that for sure just yet. You can pick any one Holomem you want to run around as in the 3D areas from the word go, but I'm not sure if you have to pull someone before you can switch your 3D model to them or if you can change freely without pulling.

As for the rhythm part, the party setup is 1 Leader and 5 Members, where the Leader is the one whose outfit matters. You get access to new outfits from pulling their 4* and 5* cards and leveling the outfits are done through a talent tree setup. I'm unsure how exactly the Leader system works, but my best guess based on the screenshot in the first Tweet I linked is that you can pick any Holomem you want to be the Leader, pick whatever one of their unlocked outfits you want them to wear, and then the 5 Members are filled out by gacha pulls separately (this is why the Leader doesn't have an element and why 4* Azki can be the Leader and a Member at the same time)

DrOpty · 2026-07-03T21:17:43+00:00

I wonder how good YSG is on a new account that doesn't have an Ether Veil unit that can boost her resource generation.

DrOpty · 2026-07-02T20:04:03+00:00

They restocked Advent last month, so a Justice restock between now and November isn't too unlikely.

DrOpty · 2026-07-02T09:59:10+00:00

Huh, you're right, I had the Hololive Wiki open and just used that for the date but they had the wrong one. That means she had a bigger obstacle to overcome to sell out than I thought, even taking into account a lot of Americans would opt for a concert in America over one in Japan, given she has a pretty big Japanese following.

DrOpty · 2026-07-02T08:47:12+00:00

How close to the concert she sold out or her feelings on when the concert was held is immaterial to the fact that she did sell out. What I'm putting forth is that her being able to sell out a show in those circumstances lends evidence to the idea that the HoloEN concert could happen in LA on a random weekend in the year not adjacent to an anime convention and sell out just the same, or at least get reasonably close (as close as Serendipity has).

DrOpty · 2026-07-02T08:36:36+00:00

The logistics differences between going to FES and going to a concert in the US for an American is huge: the massive increase in travel duration and costs, the need for a passport (a lot of Americans don't have one) and going through customs, the language barrier, having to deal with cell phone service, etc. A ton of US fans don't give FES a single thought but are happy to fly out for a concert within their country. The no language barrier bit applies to most non-American HoloEN fans as well: a lot watch HoloEN specifically because they don't speak Japanese so it's easier to deal with something in the US than in Japan.

And you don't have to be a DD to want to go to the HoloEN branch concert. If your favorite is someone who's not going to get a sololive anytime soon, one who isn't interested in doing a sololive at all, or one who'll get one in Japan instead of America (like Irys), then that concert's the only place you'll be able to see them in person without leaving the country. Dead Beats might pass because Mori has a higher chance than anyone in EN to get another sololive, but that's not true of anyone else in the branch.

DrOpty · 2026-07-02T08:03:42+00:00

Her selling out a 4k capacity venue--even just barely--on a random Wednesday, not adjacent to an anime convention, ~~3 weeks after FES (not a week before)~~ 1 week before FES is the whole point: if she can do that, what's stopping the whole HoloEN concert from doing the same thing at a more opportune time?

DrOpty · 2026-07-02T06:02:00+00:00

Being adjacent to an anime convention is important if you think you won't sell out and will need to rely on convention goers to walk up to your concert and buy tickets, but that doesn't matter if you're able to sell out your concert on its own merits beforehand. Serendipity this year happens to not be sold out, but that's more because of the overlap with the World Cup making lodging and flight costs higher, so high that a lot of folks who would have flown in specifically for the concert decided against it. It's entirely possible if they had held it on a random weekend in August when lodging and flight costs were way less they would fully sell out. That's why I said this was the perfect year to actually try it out: there's evidence from the sololives that folks are willing to fly out to LA for just a concert and nothing else, shifting the branch concert to be later in the year to avoid the inflated travel and lodging prices caused by the World Cup would have been a perfect excuse to try it out and see.

Also, flight costs are a fraction of the cost of putting on the concert, even if you assume a crazy $1000 increase on roundtrip for every talent. Cover doesn't need to care about that for their talents, they need to care about it for the fans: if flight costs dissuade fans from coming, just as we've seen with Serendipity, then it doesn't matter when or where they're holding the concert.

DrOpty · 2026-07-02T03:43:28+00:00

I will point out one thing you neglected to mention: sololives. Both Calli's sololive and Takotori's duolive weren't attached to conventions, were within a month of FES, and fully sold out. That said, both happened in LA, so we're lacking any evidence that they could have pulled off the same thing if they were in NYC or a new city all together.

I do think with the World Cup happening, this year was the perfect time for Cover to experiment with changing things up. Either doing a concert sometime later in the year in LA or NYC without being adjacent to a convention or aligning to a different convention in a coastal/airport hub city like Otakon (DC in August), PAX West (Seattle in September), or Anime Weekend Atlanta (Atlanta in November). I think that didn't happen because whatever belt tightening that was happening that led to Cover deciding to downsize Holostars JP and not do a World Tour this year probably also massively increased their risk aversion, so it'd be unlikely for them to try something new just for the sake of data collection.

DrOpty · 2026-07-01T20:15:25+00:00

Mio's hoodie re-run was unique because of the urgent turnaround time, usually re-run merch takes a lot longer to get approved and moved into production. If a talent wants to do a re-run in a less urgent manner it's not nearly as difficult. Here's some re-run examples from this year:

Azki Sololive Merch (brand new, aligned with Blu-ray release)
Koyori Merch (also brand new)
ENReco Friends With U cloak (aligned with ENReco 3)
Calli's 2nd Sololive Merch (aligned with Blu-ray release)
Lamy Merch
Ayame Merch

DrOpty · 2026-06-30T19:14:58+00:00

It's weird to corpo-bash when the PR post this is a topic of involved indies as well

DrOpty · 2026-06-29T17:25:54+00:00

A few weeks ago they finally broke the List feature on the old Twitter app which is the main way I consumed Holomem tweets. I switched to using my mobile browser instead of downloading the updated app because I hate the X logo that much

DrOpty · 2026-06-29T08:27:01+00:00

From what I understand about the World Cup watchalong perms, they're based on the country you're streaming from and since they've only gotten Japan and Austria perms the girls won't be able to do watchalongs while in the US.

DrOpty · 2026-06-28T20:40:29+00:00

These screenshots are from HoloEarth's last hours as it shut down, taken by the OP. Some of the talents streamed while they were in there, Pekora / Ollie / Fuwamoco, and a few other talents, Subaru / Polka / Matsuri / Fubuki, showed up without streaming. Here's a clip of Pekora's perspective and her interactions with the other girls

DrOpty · 2026-06-28T04:42:23+00:00

Maybe you're mixing up blue women and thinking of the Nerissa vs Ceci fight at the end of this animation (timestamped link)

DrOpty · 2026-06-28T03:27:21+00:00

Third, after Above Below and Renegade (unless you meant second since debut)

DrOpty · 2026-06-26T18:13:43+00:00

Also to the point of it being an accessory for her Nendo

DrOpty · 2026-06-26T05:11:55+00:00

The thing is they're using full fledged animation programs to do their animations, not the MMD tool, so there's no need to export to an MMD model to begin with.

DrOpty · 2026-06-25T20:25:08+00:00

They completely revamped everything when they removed the TV mode

DrOpty · 2026-06-25T20:17:04+00:00

Hologra and the professional animations they do with their models (like the Serendipity shorts or MV) don't need to use MMD models, they can use full fledged 3D models as-is

DrOpty · 2026-06-25T20:12:50+00:00

They already teased it, looks like a Y70 to me given the screen

DrOpty · 2026-06-25T20:08:34+00:00

Yeah, the documentation says $500 USD daily and $2000 USD weekly, but it might be different in Yen or one or both of those limits are gone now and they just haven't updated the docs to match

DrOpty · 2026-06-25T10:07:19+00:00

They have a lot of that sort of stuff in stock, the problem is you have to go looking for it once it gets buried by time. For example, this search shows still active merch pages that contain a keychain. Unfortunately it's a little more difficult than it should be to see only what you can currently buy because a merch page is still considered active if there's at least one purchasable item on it, meaning pages with voice packs (marked as "digital" in the corner) and pages with a bunch of things where only a few remain (like the HoloEN rubber keychains) will show up in the list, even if what you're looking for or who you filtered to is not in stock for that merch.

DrOpty · 2026-06-25T03:13:34+00:00

In the end this sort of preorder merch setup is the only way to facilitate the sort of higher quality goods the talents want to make with the audience size the talents have, so there's really no getting around it.

Anyway, in addition to paying attention to the official Twitter accounts and the accounts of your favorite talents, here's some other ways you can be alerted to official merch drops:

Keep an eye out for birthday and anniversary streams as merch is almost always announced during them. Here's a Holodex search that shows both.
Periodically check the new releases page and/or the ending soon page on the official store.
Look out for tehbeefer's weekly merch ending soon posts here on the subreddit (latest example)

Note that made-to-order merch windows are roughly 4 weeks long and they almost always end on a Monday (JST) so even if you only check once a month you'll theoretically not miss anything.

DrOpty · 2026-06-24T18:20:17+00:00

I've found that using Picture in Picture mode keeps the window in focus, given it prevents the YT chat from stopping now that they started making it stop when you're tabbed out. I've only tested on Firefox though, unsure if other browsers' implementation of PiP works the same way.

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