Vlievers
is an independent English-language Virtual YouTuber stable that began in early 2021 and ran "officially" until August 2023. The group had no specific theme and set out to do whatever they want to do, from gaming to art to music and audience participation. At its end, it was currently composed of five people:
- Skyrah Bai, a moon princess (initially an angel) who loves people and wants to make the world smile, despite her own sadness;
- Sofiya, who's Invisible to Normals and so loves the technology that allows her to be seen by viewers... though finally being able to make friends may have made her a little attached;
- Sachu, an energetic and excitable dragon with a habit of accidentally causing problems, especially in collab streams;
- Keimay Beesign, a pixie with a bee motif who was raised in the human world, whose streams are mostly art and occasionally gaming; and
- Galilea Ganymede, an alien trying to understand humans. Openly rebranded from her initial persona of Fox Hana, a ditzy foxgirl who sometimes turns into an actual fox, but insists she's human.
The sixth founding member was Len, a completely normal girl (with horns) who specializes in gacha games, JRPGs, and visual novels. She departed the group on June 20, 2021, returning to a solo career; however, the split was amicable, and Len and the remaining Vlievers regularly appear in chat in one another's streams.
After what appear to be creative differences, the group quietly broke up in August of 2023; though their official Discord kept running, most of the talent moved to their own separate servers for announcements and discussion, and all dropped the Vlievers branding. They all kept their identities, though Sachu rebranded to a sheep model but kept their name and channel.
One thing that stands out about the Vlievers is the gamut they ran with respect to kayfabe. Some, such as Sofiya, keep their identities secret and separate from the character, as is common with vtubers, but others, like Len (who was already a game streamer to begin with), simply continue with their original identities with no separation, and Skyrah even regularly shows her real face in cosplay photos and hasn't ruled out livestreaming with her real face either. Galilea is also open about having rebooted her character, rather than graduating "Hana" and coming back pretending to be a new person.
Vlievers provides examples of:
- Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer: Sachu reacts in confusion when chat jokes about singing it during a Tetris 99 stream, and proceeds to try to analyze the song and how and why one could drink that much beer (with
Squick at how passing it around would probably lead to backwash). The joke returned in an unarchived Len karaoke stream where she declared that no one would want to spend the stream listening to her sing the whole thing. - All Myths Are True: Skyrah is acquainted with gods from various pantheons (mostly moon goddesses).
- Alter-Ego Acting: Some do more of this than others; notably, Skyrah will sometimes break character to lore-dump on Skyrah the character in the third person.
- Ambiguously Human: Len is a Horned Humanoid who insists she's a regular human. Hana, too, but there's no ambiguity there as she's a Bad Liar and clearly a fox pretending to be human.
- Animal Motifs: Bees for Keimay and foxes for Hana.
- Art Evolution: Hana has replaced her model once and Sofiya's done it twice.
- Art Shift: More like medium shift, but on December 28, 2021, Skyrah threw a poll on her Twitter asking if viewers preferred traditional live streamers with cameras showing their real faces or Vtubers. She followed this up by doing a traditional live-action stream herself.
- Bad Boss: Skyrah sometimes makes frightening comments about the boss and working conditions at the cafe she works at. Chat was shocked when she mentioned not being able to keep tips, and all Hana could say was, "That sounds fucked up."
- Beach Episode: For the summer of 2021, the gang decided to emulate a beach episode by getting new outfits for their models (various swimsuits fitting their characters: Sofiya in a frilly pink tankini, Sachu in a School Swimsuit, Skyrah and Hana in bikinis in their theme colours, and Kei covered up) and playing summer-themed games. Of course, while some of the games actually fit the theme (like A Short Hike) or could be easily made to (like summer quests and pulling for summer alts in Genshin Impact), Hana gets up to her usual Loophole Abuse and continues to play Doom (2016) because (in her words) the summer heat might as well be hell.
- Born Unlucky: Len has some bad luck, from having to take a long hiatus just after her debut due to computer problems to dying almost immediately in an early Minecraft stream and having that immortalized, not to mention her love-hate relationship with gacha.
- Cast Full of Gay: Skyrah has described herself as the group's token cishet.
- Cherry Blossom Girl: Len has a heavy cherry blossom motif, likely due to her love of Sakura from Fate/stay night and spinoffs.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Hana believes this of the plot of Doom (2016) after reading Olivia's profile.
"Maybe if you got some painkillers, we wouldn't be in fucking hell."
- Crossover: All six regularly talk to and raid the streams of other indie EN Vtubers, as well as having them (and non-Vtuber online personalities, and other friends, and the viewers) on stream at times.
- The Ditz: Hana regularly calls herself dumb and stubbornly insists she won't change or grow at all when she gets lost or makes obvious mistakes in games. And then there's Sofiya, who forgot her own birthday (and also at one point forgot she was invisible, despite that being a big part of her character) and sometimes tries to befriend hostile NPCs.
- Facial Markings: Yue has a red lotus on her forehead; Skyrah's hairstyle hides it.
- Fangirl: Len for Japanese voice actors (particularly Miyuki Sawashiro); she's the type of fan to focus heavily on the VA, watches shows because her favourites are cast, and can rattle off roles for just about anyone.
- Fearless Fool: The gang finds a headless ghost girl haunting them in Phasmophobia, and rather than run away, Sofiya tries to recruit her to join their Vtuber group.
- Forgotten Birthday: Twisted when Sofiya forgot her own birthday until chat reminded her in the middle of a Fire Emblem: Three Houses stream. This was later brought up again as the real reason her birthday got retconned to a different date.
- The Gambling Addict: Len streams a lot of mobile gacha games, and her impulse control on the gacha is... varied, but it's especially bad when a favourite character is on rate up. When one game had a collab with Kakegurui, she spent way more than she had planned to try and get all the crossover characters.
- Gamer Girl: Most of them are women and they all do mostly game streams, even if they diversify their content with other things as well.
- Genki Girl: Sofiya and Skyrah especially tend to be perky and cheerful most of the time, even in the middle of a horror game.
- Gosh Dang It to Heck!: They try to keep family-friendly with minimal success, but Sofiya's the only one who actually avoids swearing (most of the time), often calling people butts and the like instead.
- Guest-Star Party Member: Aside from their regular collabs with LoboTheGhost and Len's collabs with her "siblings"* (which she continued after quitting the group, and Sofiya did once she got her third model and joined said siblings), they will sometimes collab with other vtubers beyond these. As well, in late 2021, Hana started to invite her non-vtuber friends on stream with her on a regular basis, like she had in her pre-vtuber career.
- Horned Humanoid: Len says she's a regular human despite her obvious horns.
- Iconic Item: Sofiya and Skyrah both have hair bows important to their characters; Sofiya's is the only thing people can see of her off-stream, and Skyrah's is a sentimental gift she can't lose.
- Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Skyrah and Keimay both claim not to know what a fetish is and ask Hana to teach them. Hana tries to avoid corrupting either of them (or angering Skyrah's protective mom).
Hana: I don't wanna get murdered by the moon!
- It Was a Gift: Skyrah's red ribbon, which she never wants to be without, was from an old boyfriend of a past life of hers.
- Kindhearted Cat Lover: Kei's cat Cosmo and Sofiya's cat Meownager (whom she refers to as the Vlievers' actual manager) can be regularly heard and referred to on stream, and while Hana doesn't have any cats, she's very weak to other people's cats.
- Little Bit Beastly: Hana is a foxgirl, Sachu has scales, and Kei has bee traits. While Len has horns, she doesn't seem to be part animal and insists she's an ordinary human.
- Melancholy Moon: Skyrah is a moon princess with a heavy moon motif, and her lore as written hints at a Dark and Troubled Past.
- Metaphorically True: Hana insists that it's not grave-robbing to loot a corpse in Slay the Spire, and so clearly she's done nothing wrong.
- Minion with an F in Evil: Both Skyrah and Sofiya will sometimes display Yandere tendencies (with Skyrah commenting about chaining her friends in a dungeon if they're not happy enough and Sofiya being overly attached to the audience being able to perceive her since she's Invisible to Normals), but neither of them are actually very good at being evil, or possessive, or dangerous.
- Nicknaming the Enemy: When the group is playing Raft, they name the shark that keeps trying to kill them "Frank."
- The Night Owl: While most of the group is prone to this, Sofiya especially; she has a documented habit of running guerilla streams in the middle of the night.
- Non-Standard Character Design: Keimay's 2D cartoony model, with a different art style and drawn and animated by Keimay themself, sticks out compared to the rest.
- Not So Above It All: Yue is a health nut who can't stand mentions of sugar and sweets, but when she's taking moon cakes (her other half's Trademark Favorite Food) to her mom, there's always one missing from the container...
- Pink Means Feminine: Of the six original members, three have shades of pink as their theme colour: Sofiya, Hana, and Len.
- Precision F-Strike: Hana once pointed out how weird it is to her when Sofiya actually does curse because she usually tries to censor herself, leading to:
Sofiya: Oh, don't worry. I won't fucking swear.
- Pun-Based Title: "Vlievers" sounds like "believers."
- Retcon: Early on, Skyrah was an angel, but was quickly retconned into a moon goddess' child. When Sofiya got her second model, it came with a whole new set of lore for her invisibility, as well as changing her birthday (which was just as well, as she'd forgotten the old one the last time it came around), and her third model came with a new alter ego she occasionally switches to.
- Running Gag: Hana getting frustrated with everyone else's various Minecraft deaths and disasters, which causes them to poorly cover them up or just draw more attention to them.
- Safe Under Blankets: Hana has taken to wearing a hooded blanket with the colours of the transgender flag (matching her regular outfit) to signify comfy or particularly long streams, or just because she likes it.
- Screaming Warrior: Skyrah tends to get pretty caught up in fights in her games, with no regard to the audio equipment... or sense, occasionally.
- Self-Deprecation: Sofiya has done streams going through her Old Shame (art and comics she drew back in high school) and wondering why she ever thought it was good. Despite this, the viewers have noted that the old stuff isn't even really that bad, especially for how young she was at the time.
- Spell My Name With An S: Some early streams capitalize "Keimay" as "KeiMay," but their name has solidified as Keimay. "Yue" and "Yué" are interchangeably used, as both are valid romanizations of the same name.
- Split Personality: Genki Girl Skyrah and Proper Lady Yue are two personalities in one body with different character designs. Yue can only stream for an hour at a time, so Skyrah is usually in control. Skyrah has Dissociative Identity Disorder; Yué and Skyrah are co-con of each other.
- Sofiya later develops a second persona as well, who appears to be another one of her fragments, and uses her lower voice and red eyes for it. This persona didn't officially have a name, going through a few fan nicknames, before finally settling on "Ia." In March 2022, she introduced a third alt, IMMORTAL/Soapia, a ditzy vampire with an entirely separate character design. After Vlievers dissolved, Sofiya has added more one-off alternates to try out different voices and designs.
- Stylistic Suck: Hana's self-done art for things like her schedules. It's all simplistic art with intentional poor spelling and looks like it was done in MS Paint. One of her fundraising goals is to learn to draw for real.
- Supernatural Gold Eyes: Skyrah's eye colour is caused by her mother taking an immortality potion.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Sofiya definitely isn't spending money on Genshin Impact, that gacha currency just randomly appeared in her account, she swears.
- Team Mom: Hana finds herself reluctantly dragged into this role in Minecraft collab streams, where she constantly has to run after the other members, trying and failing to keep them from dying or ruining their progress.
"And for the love of God, don't explode anything while I'm gone."
- Tempting Fate: When diving into a cave in Subnautica, Sofiya boldly declares that she dares anything in the cave to try to kill her. She promptly dies to an exploding fish.
- Think of the Censors!: Hana hesitates to explain some of the less child-appropriate Bible stories on stream when the topic of being raised in the church comes up, for fear of Twitch censors taking offence. Skyrah proceeds to cheerily explain the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the most roundabout way she can think of.
- This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: Hana's The Great Ace Attorney streams were full of memorable moments, but one of the most satisfying was when she had the final boss cornered: "Ob-FUCKING-jection, bitch."
- Too Hot for TV: The first half of Len's birthday stream is lost content, as she quickly ended the stream and took it down when she accidentally tabbed out of a browser window, revealing hentai in the tab underneath. She prefers not to think about that.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Hana loves KFC. About half of her streams have comically small fundraising goals on the screen with the explicit goal of getting money to buy a bucket of KFC so she doesn't have to cook.
- Skyrah likes lotus seed paste moon cakes and is fond of pomegranates; Yue likes lemons, and seems to be at least somewhat fond of Skyrah's favourites as well.
- Winged Humanoid: Skyrah has fluffy white wings.
Let's believe in dreams as Vlievers!
