Amelia Watson’s last stream is today.
September was one heck of a month. I had planned on enjoying the last days of Cohost leisurely, because honestly nowhere else in the internet makes me feel as sane as here, but with Ame soft graduating I had to spend as much time as I could seeing her last few streams and seeing the outpouring love from the community. So I want to at least leave some words and thoughts about it all here, and share a bit of why I love Amelia Watson so much.
To start off: What makes Ame so great? I think the first anniversary stream sums it up pretty nicely.
When Hololive English debuted in the height of the pandemic, these 5 girls were thrust into extremely big shoes to fill, without a lot of support to back it up. Management was a mess, and they didn’t have English speaking veterans to help them navigate the waters. Because of lockdown restrictions, they couldn’t make use of one of Hololive’s most distinguishing features – their Japan 3D studio for special livestream and concerts. And worst of it all – they couldn’t meet each other in person.
When the first anniversary rolled around, Ame commissioned 3D models for all of the girls and put together a VRchat map to celebrate their accomplishments. While this was all in order to have a special anniversary stream, it was clearly mostly a way for them to finally be together.
And she didn’t stop there! She commissioned changes to the map for holiday occasions such as Halloween and Christmas so they could keep doing fun things together, and commissioned a complex camera system that could be controlled remotely backstage by a staff with cameras that could track different people, leaving the streamers free to do just perform without having to handle the camera, and that anyone in Hololive could (and did!) use to build their own ideas. All of this commissioned from modelers and artists that she found in her own community, from doing fanart to her – what would eventually turn into becoming a growing team that would help her in all future projects.
She introduced this system and new studio in one of her best streams, the AMETAVERSE – a parody of all the metaverse and NFT talks that were happening around that time.
All of this showcases not only how creative she is, but how selfless and caring she is as well. She put so much effort into building things that could allow not only herself, but also the whole company to bring all their ideas to life, and honestly pushed not only Hololive but also the whole medium forward.
And speaking of the VRChat studio, I’m obligated to share my favorite variant of Amelia Watson: Armando. When all the girls were doing genderbent streams using voice changers for April Fools, Amelia stepped it up by going the extra mile and giving us pure roleplay juice.
Armando Watson everybody
Liking vtubers is a strange thing to me, because at the same time that I’ve always been icked by cult of celebrities, I’ve also always loved idols. Vtubers fall in the perfect intersection of that, specially Hololive vtubers that have very strong idol aspirations. I think part of why it just clicks for me is the concept of it being a character – some are more themselves than others, but with corporation vtubers not completely owning their images and often having other people work with it, such as scripted recordings like Voice packs and the Holo grafitti animations, I feel there’s a degree of separation where the person behind the character can choose what parts of themselves to put into display and what to keep to themselves, keeping a certain level of professionalism and also boundaries between public persona and themselves. It also means the community can have more freedom playing with the characters without playing around with a “real person”, and they become part of creating it and making it alive.
Considering all that, it’s inevitable that I would look up to Ame so much. She’s the perfect embodiment of all these concepts – she’s herself, but also a character; every time she gave something fun to the community, they’d make something creative out of it that she in turn took back and added to her lore and streams – like how Bee Ame was born out of Walfie just drawing Ame in a bee costume because she was playing Mario Galaxy, and Ame taking that and turning it into a whole new character. She created a sandpit for us to play into, and she played with it together. She’s funny, but she’s also sweet. She’s creative and hard working. Ame is the best and I hope I helped someone understand even a little bit of her appeal, or if you already loved her then that it helped you reminisce on why