Ascended Meme / hololive

Shubas aren't the only birds who can get down.

Due to the uniquely interactive nature of hololive that combines Virtual Celebrity with real-time viewer participation, memes are constantly being made and acknowledged by hololive talents on-stream. Unlike most other works however, a considerable amount of hololive content is directly influenced by or even based on these fan jokes/memes. This page details on the how and the extent to which memes shape hololive itself.

For moments where fan memes make appearances in hololive works outside of the "show" ("show" being hololive streams/videos on a talent's channel and hololive anime shorts), see the Meme Acknowledgment trope listing over at Trivia/hololive. For a general listing of hololive memes/jokes and their definition, see Memes/hololive.

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Multiple streamers

• A rather prominent running gag in both Watame and Botan's communities after the 5th gen debut is that Watame's status as a prey animal meant Botan would eat her. Both of them started to acknowledge this on stream and argue over who would eat who. Sure enough, the day the collab ban for 5th gen ended, Watame and Botan did a stream of Overcooked! 2, with Botan trying to eat her during it. For extra points, not only did the stream's opening and ending depict Watame surrounded by ingredients over a fire, but just before the end of the stream, Botan's closing conversation with Watame heavily implies she was luring Watame in order to cook her. And for the icing on the cake, after the stream, Watame spoke on twitter of the river in the afterlife before she respawned, so apparently Botan succeed at having lamb chops for dinner. It culminated in one of Watame's original songs, ShishiWata Cooking, entirely centered around Botan trying (and failing) to capture and eat Watame.
• After Amelia's debut, fans were quick to compare her to Akai Haato, as both are blue eyed blondes who can be very chaotic and unpredictable, but are also hard working, creative, and kind hearted. After their collabs where they visited each other's Minecraft servers turned out to be very wholesome and heartwarming, the fandom started joking that the two could be mistaken for sisters, a joke that seems to have been adopted by the two:
  Amelia: @akaihaato is so sweet, my sister, I love her! Thank you Haachama~
  Haato: I love you my sister AmeOneechan!!Thank you so much!!!
• Walfie's chibi renderings of the English group ended up immensely popular (with Amelia really standing out). Come April Fool's 2021, the five of them got full models based on Walfie's designs (and despite being introduced on April Fool's Day, they will be permanent fixtures)
• Whenever a Hololive member slams on their desk in frustration, a common joke across the fandom is to remark that "Desk-kun" has "lost 10 HP" from the hit. In the Holo no Graffiti episode "The Intern-alization", Desk-kun actually makes an appearance, growing an arm to punch Chloe in the face and berating her for slapping him all of the time. Likewise, many instances of desk-slamming in the shorts are captioned with a split-second flash of "-10 HP".
• After the Left 4 Dead 2 collab, the Tempus boys lost to their JP Holostars senpai and the punishment is posting their underwear on Twitter. Though their JP seniors join in the fun for solidarity. The whole event is dubbed by fans as "Tempantsu". During the first-ever full-on Left 4 Dead 2 collab between the Tempus Headquarters and the new Tempus Vanguard, the latter lost and they too had to post their underwear on Twitter (though for Flayon's case, he rather showed his underwear on his stream because he's very uncomfortable doing it on social media). Then on April 1, 2023, Axel released a cover of "YATTA" with his genmates and their JP counterparts where they're all wearing their underwear. And as part of April Fools 2023, all of the Tempus boys have underwear merchandise.
• HOLOTORI, which started out as a collective Fan Nickname for the bird-themed idols (Kiara, Reine, Mumei, Subaru via adoption of her duck persona, and Lui), was eventually made into an official unit.

hololive Japan

Original Generation

Suisei Hoshimachi

• Many fans consider Suisei to be a Memetic Psychopath mainly due to her rather fearsome display of skill in killing other players in Project Winter, all while showing no mercy whatsoever. Even in games where she plays a survivor, she leans the other direction and still creeps out actual Traitors in the game for her heart-eating antics. When this topic is brought up, Suisei will also oftentimes pretend she has no idea what fans or other Vtubers are talking about... much like how a psychopath would act. Due to this, she is often called a Suicopath among fans.
• Suisei is famously known for her Tetris skills, to the point where she openly approves the Tetris Queen title by fans whenever she starts Tetris 99. Fittingly enough, her debut appearance in the animated shorts has her killing Ayame, Rushia, and Miko in a game of Tetris. She is also the host and the coach for the 2023 hololive Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 tournament.

Miko Sakura

• Elite Miko ^Explanation Extending from the meme of her GTA play through where she got dubbed an elite by EN fans, Miko would eventually embrace the title and refer to herself as an Elite
• Due to a combination of clumsiness and bad luck, Miko has had several bad experiences with buckets of lava in Minecraft, having accidentally set structures on fire on several occasions, which has led some fans to joke that she now suffers from "Lava PTSD". When a Nendoroid figure of Miko was announced, it was also announced that one of the figure's accessories would be an actual bucket of lava (albeit a realistic-looking one, not one looking like a Minecraft bucket, presumably due to copyright reasons).
• Miko is a baby/Holobaby ^Explanation Due to Miko's odd articulation of words, fans started calling her a baby. While Miko denied these comparisons at first, she eventually accepted and later proudly embraced her status as the first Holobaby, and even began recruiting other Holo members to join the group

1st Generation

Fubuki Shirakami

• Fubuki often gets mistaken for a cat, jokingly or otherwise, which the anime short "How to Become a Cat" references by having her gaslight Polka into thinking she's a cat before getting taken away by the "cat police" (Okayu and Korone).
• Many English-speakers have noted that, in her Im.Scatman video, Fubuki sounds like she's singing "Beat up a pineapple." Come February 2021, she releases a video where she beats up a pineapple.
• Fubuki once ranted about the awesomeness of glasses, and how such spectacles would look good on the hololive girls, in the inaugural edition of holo's Bonjour featuring Marine and Luna. Fast forward to her 3rd anniversary stream, she finally got the option to wear one of three possible pairs of glasses, with half rim and thick frame lenses available as options. To quote Fubuki herself:
  "Glasses are really versatile. First, you can have glasses-wearing girls take them off and suddenly become beautiful, or have girls wearing glasses flashing those cute grins, or have girls stealing the protagonist's glasses and putting them on like, "Haha, got your glasses!" That's just way too cute! Also, boys with glasses! I really like when their glasses have that suspicious looking gleam, and it's amazing how it can look really cool or just be a joke. I really like how it can fulfill all those abstract needs. Being able to switch up the styles and colors of glasses based on your mood is a lot of fun too! It's actually so much fun! You have those half rim glasses, or the thick frame glasses, everything! It's like you're enjoying all these kinds of glasses at a buffet. I really want Luna to try some on or Marine to try some on to replace her eyepatch. We really need glasses to become a thing in hololive and start selling them for HoloComi. Don't. You. Think. We. Really. Need. To. Officially. Give. Everyone. Glasses?"

Haato Akai (Haachama)

• Haato's erratic cooking videos are compared to HowToBasic, earning her the punny nickname of "HaatoBasic". She has since embraced the nickname and comparisons to the other channel, referencing it in video titles (like in this clip), a logo for cooking streams, and even a dedicated rap video.
• Due to Haato's increasingly chaotic behavior after she started referring to herself as "Haachama" in early 2020, some fans started joking that Haachama was actually some kind of Split Personality separate from the original Haato, a premise that Haato started hinting towards herself before eventually making it straight-up canon (see the "Flip Personality" and "Split Personality" entries on her Characters page for further information).
• The joke that "Akai Haato is dead" or "Haachama killed Haato" has been an extremely prominent meme for a long time ever since she started referring to herself as Haachama instead of Haato. On February 7th, 2021, even this joke was made canon as a part of what is essentially a vtuber's Wham Episode ^note Clip was originally part of this singing stream, but not in the way you might have expected. Let's just say it was not pretty...
• Her peculiar pronunciation of "degenelate" was also quickly embraced due to its popularity among Haatons, where she as Haachama approved of and even featured many of such memes in her videos, and even referenced it in several of her streams.

2nd Generation

Ayame Nakiri

• Ayame famously has No Sense of Direction, leading to events like having difficulty finding her own house in Minecraft. As such, the the "Docchi Docchi" MAD was born and went on to become a Running Gag among both fans and other hololive members. hololive's first full album, Bouquet, includes an arrangement of the song overseen by the original creator.

Choco Yuzuki

• A running meme between all the members' streams (including Roberu's) is to use a Superchat message to ask the member in question to be the audience's wife; while most members responses are mixed, either outright accepting or saying "we're friends". Choco in her 2nd anniversary stream roleplayed out a scenario written by Mel that is "accepting a marriage proposal" before revealing her limited run commemoration merchandise: an engraved men's wedding band with a mockup of a konin todoke, or a Japanese marriage registration form.

Subaru Oozora

• Subaru's comically awful first attempt at an ASMR stream was turned into a 3D animated skit on the official channel. Not a scripted interpretation, but just animating what happened during the stream. According to Subaru during her appearance on Kiara's HoloTalk, the pivot from being a sports manager to an anthropomorphic duck was thanks to the reactions to this stream.
• Her duck persona was something she initially denied when it first became popular in her fandom, but she has come to embrace it with gusto like it's part of her very being, up to and including duck-themed imagery in her merch, in officially-produced skits and animations (where sometimes she literally becomes a duck), and even once straight-up admitted that she's a duck all this time on-stream.
• The Shuba Dance meme would be replicated by her and Kiara during Kiara's own 3D showcase stream, and then later integrated into the HOLOTORI Dance MV.

hololive GAMERS

Mio Ookami

• In hololive Kindergarten no. 1's illustration competition, Fubuki submitted a drawing of a humanoid creature resembling a minotaur, with a pigeon's head, horns, and a wolf's tail. Sometime after that stream, Mio's artist, Izumi Sai, redrew and rendered a 2D animation of said creature; later dubbed Hatotaurus. Since then, it shows up very frequently in Mio's streams, as well as appearing alongside her in the Azur Lane collab, and as both a type of enemy and a part of her moveset in the Dawn of the Breakers collab.

Korone Inugami

• The "yubi yubi" meme became so popular on Korone's channel that her 2020 New Year's outfit featured an optional kadomatsu hat with the "yubi" (指) character on it [1]. For her birthday in the same year, she was given a new cake-like headgear with candles shaped like fingers.
• During a Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes collab with Calli, she quipped "Oh, I'm die, thank you forever" in broken English before a bomb detonated. The line was referenced in the animated short "RIP Gamers" when Marine discovers that Korone "died" after eating belated Valentine's Day chocolate.

3rd Generation/hololive Fantasy

Pekora Usada

• Pekora and Moona's friendship through Minecraft is mostly seen as just plain adorable, but it did spawn a meme thanks to Pekora's tendency to shout "HEY MOONA!" whenever they cross paths in the game. During one stream, Pekora made Moona some enchanted Diamond Boots as a gift; they were originally named "Usada Hybrid Shoes", but she changed it to "Heybrid", admitting that it's because of her tendency to use that phrase. Moona has however came out and said that she wishes for people to stop spamming the meme◊ relentlessly unless Pekora actually appears in Minecraft with her, as it was getting way out of hand especially on other people's streams when she appears on server.
• Pekora gets jokingly called a "war criminal" due to her many antics in Minecraft, such as her essentially human trafficking Villagers, among other things. On April 1st 2021, she finally gets arrested for her crimes while trying to host "PekoNews", followed up by her revealing a new prisoner-themed costume.

Marine Houshou

• Marine's cheerful exclamation of "I'm Horny!" during a 3D collaboration with Coco became a meme in the fan community, and was ascended by HoloEN's Kiara and Amelia during a Golden Yagoo quiz collaboration. Marine later recounts running into the Hololive EN manager when visiting the studio who asked that she repeat the line, and later uploaded a fan animation to her channel that was a re-enactment of a moment where she appeared in Gura's stream just to state the line, which she used as the template for a meme contest for the Reddit community.
• All the jokes about Marine's age resulted in a stream where she roleplayed as a 78 year old version of herself who time-traveled back to reminisce about her life with her crew.

4th Generation

Kanata Amane

• Her fondness of Power Point presentations, mostly brought on by how many memes were spawned from her using it in her debut. Kanata jokes about it quite a bit, and tends to bust out Power Point during funny collabs like this one with Choco and Mio, or when making announcements like during her return stream where she made a presentation to explain the events that happened after she was hit by a car only a few days after returning from a mental health hiatus.

Coco Kiryu

• Being the first member of hololive, Sora is naturally regarded as the senior of everyone else. This has led to some fans coining the nickname "Daisenpai" (roughly means "Great Senior"). Much, much later, Coco actually uses said nickname in one of her AsaCoco streams.
• Coco randomly blurts out "Cute dragon noises!?" (in English, to boot) during a horror game stream as a nod to fansubbers who subtitle random nonsensical vocalizations with [cute _____ noises].

Watame Tsunomaki

• Watame's distinctive Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises expression was remade for her 3D model, which she showed off while injecting AsaCoco as a nod to how fans call it the "AsaCoco face". A similar expression showed up for most of the cast when they got new Live2D models (with Fubuki having the most fun with it). The expression also crept into one of the official channel's animated skits, Sneak Peek, with Rushia commenting on how creepy it looks.
• Watame fans started a "Watame-lon" head meme by photoshopping a watermelon onto her head ^note which itself originated from a joke made by overseas viewers during one of Watame's minecraft stream, that she quickly found out about. In one of her Ark streams, she spent the entire 5 hour stream with a watermelon on her head, and then proceeded to post a "Watamelon head rap" video that one of her followers made after.

Towa Tokoyami

• Towa discovered her hitting her own desk became a meme of its own when fans will often quote "Desk-kun -10HP". This is even brought up when she was doing an art stream with Marine as a way to summon her western fans.
• For IRyS's birthday stream, Towa's congratulation call has her address IRyS as "My baby!", referring to the early memes that portrays the former as the love child of Towa and Kanata, due to her species being part angel and part demon.

5th Generation

Nene Momosuzu

• Nene seal, which started from fan edits of seal videos with Nene's voices, is mused upon by Nene herself and eventually, she added seals on her recurring mascots. Come 2022, Nene also added a seal hoodie to her casual outfit.
• Dark Nene, also known as Nene Alter, is a creation of Twitter user Edoman that's a Palette Swap of the normal Nene, where Nene is cute and goofy, Dark Nene is edgy and mischievous. While originally meant to be a one-off joke, Edoman's creation quickly exploded in popularity on Reddit and attracted the attention of Nene herself, who loved it so much that she retweeted several of the Dark Nene shorts and even featured her counterpart on a karaoke stream.

Polka Omaru

• In a burst of Gratuitous English, Polka declared "YAGOO is best girl!" in her debut stream, a recurring joke among English fans.
• Fans have joked since her debut that Polka's pink propeller-shaped idiot hairs look like they should spin. Her Live2D animation update ended up making this official, much to her amusement.

6th Generation -holoX-

La+ Darknesss

• Yamada ^Explanation In her debut, La+ demanded that her followers answer her with "Yes My Dark" (in English). This was swiftly abbreviated to YMD, which was transformed into Yamada. Almost as soon as each of her genmates debuted, each one responded to her with "Yamada."
• She likes earth.^Explanation She said this in Calli's English Lesson stream, but due to Japanese being non-rhotic and also lacking a "th" sound, with loanwords that would have it generally being changed to an "s" sound, it came out sounding like "I like ass". This moment went so viral in the community that when La+ was one of four members chosen to guest star in the mobile game Valkyrie Connect, her character was made Earth element instead of the expected Dark element, complete with a line explicitly referencing the stream in question.

Chloe Sakamata

• Sprigatito is Sakamata ^Explanation Upon the reveal of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, fans have noted that the face of grass-starter Sprigatito resembles Chloe, particularly the large red eyes, vacant smile, and Cute Little Fangs. Chloe saw no resemblance, but fans immediately latched on when she tried to mimic its facial expression. Eventually, Chloe came to accept it, mimicking Sprigatito's default facial expression whenever it comes up and, unsurprisingly, chose it as her starter when she started streaming the game. The fact that its final evolution, Meowscarda, dons a black mask much like Chloe only furthered the parallels.

holostars

Roberu Yukoku

• Roberu has happily accepted his status as "everyone's winning son," even creating a short song about it.
• One of Roberu's most embarrassing blunders in Among Us is claiming he was in the cafeteria on the one map that lacked one. His "cafeteria in my soul" line quickly turned memetic, with it being featured in even the thumbnail of his following Among Us stream.

hololive Indonesia

Generation 1

Moona Hoshinova

• Moona gained her reputation as a Minecraft NPC due to her often playing the game without a streaming POV, offering her resources to streaming talents. Her likeness would later become interactable NPCs for the 2023 HoloID Cup.

Generation 3

Kaela Kovalskia

• Like many other girls, she is memed as an animal, specifically a penguin. This is in part due to her surname sounding like "another famous penguin", who is associated with the meme "Kowalski analysis". Kaela ended up making her Minecraft username "Kaelanalysis".

hololive English

Generation 1 -Myth-

Calliope Mori

• When Calli first started streaming, she lived in a fairly noisy neighborhood with one of her neighbors riding around a motorcycle. It became a staple of her early streams that she originally had said it was a skeleton doing so, with her fans asserting it was Ghost Rider. Since then she has incorporated Ghost Rider (later renamed "Go Strider" to avoid issues with Disney) as a character in her streams, making him out to be somewhat of a Moment Killer whenever she brings her audience out on dates.
• During the EN Dead by Daylight collab, Calli name-dropped the EN Curse, and proposed that the principle be named EN's Law (which states that the probability of technical difficulties occurring in an EN stream is directly proportional to the number of members taking part in it).

Kiara Takanashi

• After the second HoloEN collab where all the girls were placed on an alignment chart of purity and intelligence, Kiara was stated by her audience and her illustrator to be placed at the start of both axes, or the bottom left of the chart (least pure and intelligent). Since then, she has included an arrow pointing to the lower left as a channel emote, and (when she can remember to do so) actively places her avatar in the lower left corner of the screen while streaming. While this is not unique among hololive talent (avatar placement is up to personal preference based on their overlay), Kiara has acknowledged her choice in relation to the aforementioned chart.
• After Korone's "Oh, I'm die. Thank you forever" in her and Calli's Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes collab became a meme, Kiara later said it about being overwhelmed by messages in a "short" superchat reading that had gone on for three hours and taken up half of her stream.
• Kiara has fully embraced the in-joke about her fanbase actually being a cult after it was pointed out to her how devoted her viewers tend to act. This includes having a "Usual Room" background made for when she needs to "re-educate" misbehaving viewers as well as featuring this fan animation on her channel.

Ina'nis Ninomae

• During a Left 4 Dead 2 collab with the EN branch, they decided to fill their 4th spot with one of the managers who happened to be online at the time, and at audience request, she played along with the talent as opposed to sitting at spawn to function as a placeholder to prevent random players from joining and letting them play. The demonstration of her skills (she took down a Tank in melee, with a katana, at 1HP) led to a lot of fans latching onto her, naming her "Enma" (short for English Manager) and creating fanart of her. Later, in an unscheduled drawing stream, Ina did an impromptu character creation exercise to create an "official" design for Enma, and then created a hashtag for people to share their own fanart of her. One particular suggestion got shot down by Enma herself (open button-down shirt with a hololive tee underneath, similar to A-chan) but Ina, in complying with her wishes, simply stated "You can stop me but you can't stop fanartists," making it apparent that despite there now being an official design for Enma, people are still free to interpret her as they wish with Ina's blessing.
• One of Ina's most popular song covers that a lot of clippers use is her rendition of Unravel. She would later acknowledge its popularity and the associated phrase "Ina, play Unravel" by playing Unravel with the stream title being the first 2 lines of the song. In June 2021, Ina would add a monochromatic members emote referencing Tokyo Ghoul.
• A clip of Ina saying "TOMORROW!" in reaction to the February 2022 Nintendo Direct announcing Kingdom Hearts was finally coming to Nintendo Switch the day after that episode became memetic enough for several other Hololive members to imitate it on stream. It even reached the Japanese fanbase, ending up in one of Haachama's meme reviews.

Gura Gawr

• Gura's first Tweet simply said "a", which caught on with the fanbase like wildfire. A few days later during her debut stream, the very first thing she does on camera is just say "A!" and then fade back to the "loading" screen as if the stream was over.
• Given Gura's nature as a shark girl, it was inevitable that her fanbase would start making jokes about the fact that some species of shark have the eggs hatch while still inside the mothers' womb, whereupon the unborn children will attempt to cannibalize each other, usually resulting in only one baby ending up actually being born. While Gura initially didn't confirm whether or not this was canon to her backstory, responding with "I don't remember" when asked about it, she has since started at least implying that it's canon and has made several Black Comedy jokes about it.
• Gura held a [BATHTUB PIZZA] Q&A stream where she recreated "This isn't a beach, this is a bathtub!" ^note Itself a reference to a memetic porn film, even dressing up the Membershrimp as the life guard on the bathtub's edge.

Amelia Watson

• After Walfie's Super-Deformed fanart of her became viral, Amelia seemed to have embraced it with gusto. This went a step further after the release of HoloEN's April Fools chibi models, whereupon the line between Amelia and Smol Ame became virtually nonexistent. Of all five members, Amelia is the only one to use her chibi avatar on a regular basis, and has even developed it into a separate side character for some of her streams.

Project: HOPE

IRyS

• Right when IRyS debuted, the chat started spamming the breadstick emoticon as a makeshift glowstick when she performed, which she took notice of right away. When Chroneco made her official membership emoticons, the Glowbreadstick became official.

Generation 2 -Council-

Sana Tsukumo

• Sana's triple-pearl/planet hair decorations were half-jokingly interpreted as dango as soon as her silhouette was revealed. Despite her official associated emoji being a planet (🪐) a lot of people instead use the dango emoji (🍡) to refer to her which they think is way more fitting. A dango emoji with Sana's colors was eventually added to her official membership emoticons.

Fauna Ceres

• Viewers noticed that Fauna has a tendency to say "uuu" frequently, like a Verbal Tic. It became ascended as one of Fauna's membership emotes is a stylized "U", letting members make their own "uuu"-related puns or just go "uuu" in general.
• It is joked that Fauna's hair falls out during winter, like leaves on a tree. While Fauna denies that this actually happens, a bald Fauna emote was eventually added to the membership emotes.

Kronii Ouro

• After Kronii's reveal, the Kroniicopter became a popular meme as the clock ornament above her head resembled a helicopter's rotors. Kronii would frequently refer to her head ornament as a copter during her debut stream.

Mumei Nanashi

• As the Anthropomorphic Personification of Civilization, it's been a common joke among the Hoomans that it'd only be natural, even mandatory, for Mumei to play the video game series of the same name at some point. She clarified in a superchat reading from September 2021 that she was looking into it, but that getting permission was "difficult", though she didn't get into anything more specific. It wouldn't be until two years later, specifically in April 2023, when she finally got the permissions to stream Civilization V... and proceeded to do just that, with her very first stream of the game being titled "Just Doin' My Job".

Generation 3 -Advent-

Koseki Bijou

• After the sudden blowing up of pre-debut memes comparing her to a fellow rock, Bijou has taken it in stride and incorporated several references to the man in her stream jokes and official channel emotes.

holostars

holostars EN: TEMPUS

Regis Altare

• Altare's occasional non-heroic acts while streaming gave him the label of Demon Lord by everyone else. He has since embraced it to the point where he moonlights as a demon lord. His 3D debut even has him pull off a chuunibyou-style act, boasting his status to the goblins that destroyed his Axel ice sculptures.

Dezmond Magni

• It's maggin time^Explanation A meme spawned by /vt/ members in the spirit of its basis who, after initially being put off by Magni's apparent "mediocre" looks, had a change of heart upon getting a glimpse of his personality and tastes through Twitter (plus a few other factors that probably shouldn't be discussed here.) His pre-debut chat and Twitter feed soon filled with the meme, to his utter confusion. He proceeded to embrace it by making his live tag #MagginTime.

Vesper Noir

• Being a long-time fan favorite meme, Vesper's boar hunting spear finally became canonized with his 2.0 redesign, appearing in the background of his official room render.

holostars EN: ARMIS

Crimzon Ruze

• Azure Ruze started off simply being a nickname for Ruze's voice whenever it loses his distinctive rasp, but as of this stream, he has been canonized as a character who inhabits the same body as Crimzon, along with seven other personas.

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