Red alert! Hit the dick! I tell you as Hololive grows bigger and bigger you won’t be going too long without hearing some big news involving somebody either working for or working within the company. Today’s news comes out of left field as it appears artist Mizuryu Kei, who had previously been working for Cover (the company behind Hololive) suddenly and explosively announced his complete professional separation from all things Hololive. He went as far to warn fans that he’ll be deleting any of his works that pertain to Hololive from his official accounts soon and to grab them now if they want them. 

Now the question on everyone’s mind is: what the fuck happened? Right now speculation is of course dominating the discussion as hard facts are limited. Kei wrote that he received responses from Cover that were unacceptable and unreasonable for a company and that he won’t be working with them again, but that still leaves us with little in the way of the reason behind this. One of our translators noted that Japanese twitter speculates he was asked to remove all of his lewd content and doujins. I assume this would be to protect Hololive’s image and if it is, can I just say that ole Snooze’s “Will Lewding Vtubers Be Accepted?” article was a little prophetic. However, other explanations are on the table such as this exchange on Twitter:

As the users discussed, this may be more of a case of classic copyright issues. It’s possible Cover looked at his popular doujins and said “hey… don’t we have the rights to those characters? When did he draw those? He can’t use them without our permission, can he? He should pay us!” though that strategy works a hell of a lot better when the person you’re about to go after for copyright abuse doesn’t work for the company in some capacity. That being said, it’s never good to rely on a testimony that says “the source is complicated”. The hell does that mean? 

As of right now the exact cause of this partnership degrading is unknown but assuming Kei doesn’t have a change of heart overnight it might be best to secure any lewd Hololive art from him that you enjoyed. Folks over at ehentai have already started collecting an emergency stash or two that I’ll leave here in case anyone wants to take part. If more concrete details emerge about what led up to the separation I’ll be back to take a look. Otherwise, this is just a sad day where my dreams of more Hololive doujins have taken two steps back. Have you read any doujins from Mizuryu Kei? What do you think caused the breakup? Let us know below peko!