Attention lads: the Vesper situation, the Moon Dogg return, and one word on *Aja*

Attention lads,

It has been, by any measure, a significant week. We are going to get to the Vesper situation — and we will, in full, because it deserves it — but before we do, I want to flag three smaller developments that I suspect will not be covered elsewhere and that deserve, at minimum, a mention.

First: Kenji "Zook" Aramaki has announced he will be stepping back from competitive Street Fighter 6 play at the end of the current EVO cycle. This is not a retirement — Zook has been very clear about that, in the stream he gave on Tuesday — but it is, I think, the end of an era, and those of us who have been following his arc since the SFV days know that an era is not nothing. I will have more on this in a dedicated piece next week.

Second: the ongoing situation in the Path of Exile 2 community regarding the "Ascendancy drop rates" has escalated. I do not want to get into the specifics here — the specifics are better explored in the threads themselves — but I will note that the tone has shifted, meaningfully, in the last seven days, and that the developer response on Friday was, in my view, a mistake. More on this as it develops.

Third: Moon Dogg is back. I do not know what to tell you. Moon Dogg is back. Many of you will remember the Moon Dogg arc of 2022. Many of you will have been, as I was, under the impression that the Moon Dogg situation had resolved itself in the months following the September apology video. It has not. Moon Dogg has returned, and Moon Dogg has a new project, and the new project is, I can say with confidence, unwell. I will provide only the briefest summary here: the project is a Discord server, it is invite-only, the invites are being distributed through what Moon Dogg is calling "channels of trust," and the server's stated purpose is a revival of something Moon Dogg refers to as "the original mission." I do not know what the original mission was. I am not sure Moon Dogg does either. Please be careful out there. If someone you know receives an invite, consider asking them, gently, why.

Now. Vesper.

For readers who have not been following, Vesper — full stage name Vesper Haru — is, or was, one of the most consequential VTubers in the English-language Hololive-adjacent scene of the last three years. Her retirement announcement on Monday has, I think, been undercovered by the general-interest gaming press, which has, in its usual way, reduced the story to a headline about subscriber counts and moved on. I want to spend the rest of this column on what I think the Vesper situation actually represents, because I believe — and I am prepared to defend this — that it is the single most important development in the English VTuber ecosystem since the departure of Coco in 2021.

Vesper was, to put it in terms that I think will translate to readers who are not deeply in this scene, a generational talent.

She had, at peak, 4.2 million subscribers across her primary channel and her gaming sub-channel. She was not, however, primarily a gaming streamer. She was a vocalist — a trained one, though the extent of her training was never publicly disclosed — and her musical output, across four original EPs and more than two hundred covers, represented something genuinely rare in the VTuber space: work that could be evaluated on its own terms, outside of the parasocial dynamics that typically govern how we talk about these performers. I have said this before, in other venues, and I will say it again here: Vesper's cover of "Mr. Blue Sky," from the Aurora EP, is, in my honest and considered opinion, one of the best cover performances in the medium's history. Anyone who dismisses it on genre grounds has not, in my view, actually listened to it.

She announced her retirement on Monday morning, JST. The announcement was six minutes long. She did not cry. She thanked her team. She thanked her fans — us — by name, which is to say, by the name she gave us, which I will not print here because the name is ours and it has always been ours. She said she would continue to release music, independently, under her real name, which she also announced for the first time. She said she was 28. She said she had been doing this for seven years. She said she had other things she wanted to do.

She was, throughout, completely composed.

I will tell you — and I am going to be sincere here, lads, because I think this moment deserves sincerity — that I have been watching Vesper since early 2022. I was not an early adopter. I came to her through a friend who sent me a link to a cover, which I watched, and which I watched again, and which, over the course of that year, led me to the full body of work. I have listened to Aurora approximately, I would say, four hundred times. I have the vinyl pressing. I ordered it from Japan. It cost more than I would like to admit and I do not regret the expense.

The Vesper retirement is, for me, the end of one of the defining artistic relationships I have had with a performer in my adult life, and the fact that I never met her, that I do not know her real face, that the relationship was mediated entirely through an avatar and a voice, does not, I find, reduce this fact. It may, in some ways, intensify it.

I understand, lads, that this register is not the typical register of this column, and I will return to the typical register next week. I just wanted to say it. Many of us are, I think, feeling it.

A note on what I believe Vesper's retirement represents structurally. The VTuber ecosystem in English has now reached the point where the first generation of performers — the ones who established the medium, who built the audience, who taught the agencies how the business worked — is aging out. Vesper's retirement is the latest of, by my count, seven first-generation retirements in the past fourteen months. The medium is not dying; the medium is undergoing the generational turnover that any artistic medium undergoes, on the timelines that medium requires. What is noteworthy about the VTuber timeline is how compressed it is. A generation, in this space, lasts approximately five years. We have, in Vesper, lost another one.

I will have more on the structural question in a dedicated piece, probably in two weeks, because I want to give the immediate moment its space.

Anyway. That's the week.

I have been listening, on the drive in, to the 1977 Japanese pressing of Aja, which my friend Jeremy mailed me last month and which I have been holding onto, saving, and which I finally put on Monday morning — the morning of the Vesper announcement, as it happens, though I did not know that yet when I put it on. There is a moment, in "Deacon Blues," where the horn comes in — you know the moment — and I will tell you, without elaboration, that I pulled over at a QuikTrip and sat for a minute. That's all. Be good to each other.

— N.