In a series of now-deleted tweets on Monday night, rumored artist of the manga series revealed alongside the Hololive Alternative multimedia project Mizuryu Kei (NSFW images on profile) announced that he would be cutting all ties with Cover Corp after being ‘repeatedly subjected to responses unacceptable for a company.’ He has since rescinded these comments and apologized for tweets that he made ‘while emotional,’ but the damage appears to be already done.
One of the threats that Mizuryu made during this tirade was that he would be deleting all of his Hololive-related works from Pixiv and DLSite, advising fans who wanted to buy them to do so while they were still available. But even after deleting these tweets, his Hololive doujinshi remain delisted; what’s more, the original tweet announcing a Hololive Alternative manga has also been deleted. As a result, the state of the whole project is in disarray.
After all, without the manga rumored to be penned by Mizuryu Kei, what is the Hololive Alternative project exactly? Sure, we have that awesome animated PV, but Shirakami Fubuki has since clarified that the project isn’t actually an anime: that was just a promo. The manga was just about the only concrete thing we had to look forward to; everything else remains shrouded in mystery.
In response to Mizuryu’s tweets, the word ホロライブ (Hololive) began to trend on Twitter on Monday night, with fans voicing their disappointment that the artist had been dropped from the project and speculating on what might have happened. Of course, we don’t want to get into rumors or peddling narratives here, so we’ll try to stick to the facts… but some things don’t add up.
The most reasonable interpretation of this whole Mizuryu Kei/Hololive Alternative affair is that Cover Corp found out about the artist’s more sexually explicit Hololive artwork and asked him to take it down if he wanted to continue working on the project: this is to be expected given that the company wants to protect the public image of their talents.
Furthermore, one of Mizuryu’s now-deleted tweets says that he had been working with Cover for ‘around half a year,’ leaving plenty of time for an explicit Houshou Marine doujinshi that the artist penned to come out in December and complicate things somewhat. In this sense, his more adult artwork might not have become a sticking point in their partnership until recently, despite Mizuryu’s storied career in such a field.
Nevertheless, if Cover’s ultimatum was ‘delete your doujinshi or leave the project,’ then why would Mizuryu do both? Not only are his doujins unavailable, the announcement has also been rescinded, suggesting that he has either left or been dropped from the project. Clearly, there is something more going on behind the scenes that has yet to be made clear, so we look forward to Cover’s statement on the matter.