Kizuna AI / YMMV - TV Tropes

Americans Hate Tingle: Ai herself became subject to this trope when one of her 2021 videos became infamous for merely briefly discussing the concepts of NFTs and The Metaverse as ways she can further interact with her fans. A post-episode discussion about how NFTs work also showed up in episode 3 of Kizuna No Allele, to the chagrin of quite a few Western fans. The disconnect likely arises from how NFTs are perceived in Japan versus the rest of the world; the Japanese government sees NFTs and tech adjacent to them as a legitimate vehicle for fundraising, with Japanese companies following suit (e.g. Konami and Square Enix implementing them in their games). Meanwhile, the West is more familiar with NFTs as a tool used only to enable get-rich-quick pyramid schemes (e.g. "Bored Apes" and NFT games like Axie Online) and the cult-like following the technology's developed, often derisively called "cryptobros".
- This cultural divide also transferred into Kizuna No Allele. In Japan it was popular enough to get a second season greenlit immediately after it aired. By contrast, the West pretty much only know it for the aforementioned NFT discussion and consider it So Okay, It's Average at best or a chore to watch at worst, not helped by Oshi no Ko airing the same season.
Epileptic Trees: The sudden appearance of the Ai "clones" in mid-2019 spawned theories and questions, some of which would be answered, others not, still others mooted. Is Kizuna Ai following the "Vtuber group" trend of nijisanji, Game Club Project, and hololive? Did something happen between activ8/upd8 (the channel's management company) and Ai-chan's original voice actress? The company itself stayed radio silent for a long time while the channel continued to put out videos on an almost-daily basis, many of which did not have Ai-chan's original VA at all. If a character is a "Virtual AI", does that mean the voice behind is expendable?
- A few people who learned Ai-chan's true identity (up-&-coming voice actress Nozomi Kasuga) discovered she had been cast in a couple of anime set to air later in 2019, and she had openly expressed a preference for singing – she was always the one singing Ai-chan's covers and original songs. It is logical to believe that, rather than being fired, Upd8 knew Kasuga would be busy and tried to find a way to keep the daily uploads (from two channels) going in the meantime. Regardless of the truth, they handled it extremely poorly.
- Fans in China have stipulated that, should activ8/upd8 debuted the two additional voices using separate identities from day one, they would not have such a big negative reaction. This is from the observation that Ai-ge, the Chinese affiliation that debuted earlier with a slightly different character design, is virtually shielded from all the VA change fallout, to the point she is still using the original Kizuna Ai derived character design, while Love-chan and Aipii has to get entirely different designs.
Fan Nickname:
- The VTuber community calls Kizuna Ai "Oyabun"/親分 ("Big Boss"), which is coined by Kaguya Luna after Kizuna Ai had the most subscribers among VTubers at the end of 2017, which is also a huge gap with the other fellow "Four Heavenly Kings" Kaguya Luna, Mirai Akari and Nojaloli.
- The two lookalikes were initially called "clones" or "Kizuna Clones" until the channel had a fan vote to decide their names. The girl wearing the yellow asterisk hairclip was named "Ai-pii", while the girl wearing the blue number sign hairclip was named "Love-chan".
- The "Godmother of VTubers" is a title some give her, since she was the very first big VTubers, and played a big role in the popularity of the idea years later.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The channel has several notable fanbases outside its origin country of Japan.
- Kizuna Ai is loved by Koreans and has garnered a large fanbase in Korea. Early in the channel's existence, up to half the comments on any video of hers would be in Korean.
- She's also got a good number of Spanish-speaking fans.
- Eventually, English speakers started noticing her, thanks to a few prominent anime-focused YouTubers (such as The Anime Man) discovering her and hyping her to their fans. English is one of the few languages into which all of Ai-chan's videos have been subtitled (livestreams excluded since they have no subtitle option).
- There's a major fanbase for her in China, which is especially notable since YouTube is Banned in China, so there was an entire translation team to re-upload her videos to Chinese sites and sub them. All of the videos, including some livestreams, have been subbed, and there is a good amount of viewership and fan-content for her. When said translation team got notice that they would be shut down over copyright claims, they released a heartwarming final video with many fans voicing their gratitude for the team. Though people were kinda confused when the shutdown was retracted. Late in 2017, Activ8 started uploading Ai-chan's videos to bilibili with Chinese subtitles.
  - Her Chinese fanbase is large enough that A.I. Channel created a Chinese-themed Ai-chan who speaks Mandarin (popularly known as "Ai-ge") just for bilibili, though she also posts on Youtube.
Hilarious in Hindsight: Ai's entire schtick as a supposed Artificial Intelligence became this in 2022 when Neuro-sama, an actual machine learning AI, made her debut as a VTuber.
I Knew It!: Fans who already knew the identity of Ai-chan's original voice actress kept silent about it for a long time so as not to ruin the immersion. Unfortunately, because of the "clones"/upd8/activ8 debacle on mid-2019, discussions about Ai-chan's identity or VA spread like uncontrollable wildfire. And then on April 24 2020, it was confirmed that Nozomi Kasuga is the original voice actress.
Memetic Mutation:
- FAKKYU ^Explanation
- TURTLES ^Explanation
- "My SkyNet can't be this cute" ^Explanation
- "INSTORU! "^Explanation
- "This... Has Turned into a Difficult Situation" ^Explanation
Moe: She's an adorable Genki Girl and amusing to watch, while often rousing people's protective instincts when she fails or is scared.
Older Than They Think: Kizuna Ai may be the most popular Virtual YouTuber and the one who codified the trend that was followed by others, but Ami Yamato is noted to be one of the earliest pioneers of using an animated virtual avatar for vlogging. In addition, the technology for an animated character on a screen to interact with people in real-time has existed since the 1990's.
Once Original, Now Common: Kizuna Ai Codified the VTuber trend and gained rapid popularity as a result. However, the subsequent rise of multiple other Vtubers (ranging from quirky independent operators to large companies such as hololive and Nijisanji with their diverse cast of characters) has made it more difficult for Kizuna Ai to stand out in the eyes of the general VTuber fanbase. The Ai clones debacle alienating preexisting fans just made matters worse.
Signature Song: "Melty World"
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: This has happened more than once, unsurprisingly for a channel that has been around for several years now.
- Most notable is the "Clone Saga". At the end of May 2019, Ai-chan started a series of videos called "Kizuna AI's Everyday" that began with cloning herself and ruminating about her existence, and ended with multiple voice actresses. What was thought to be a multi-day joke at first turned out not to be as two of the "clones" stuck around. The first regular video featuring one of the clones (in this case Love-chan) was retroactively downvoted to hell. The re-introduction of the final clone, who turned Chinese after a language patch install, was similarly disliked right from the start. Other videos also have large downvote ratios. Through the summer of 2019, these clones – except Ai-ge, who immediately got her own channel – became more and more prominent, with the original voice sometimes not heard at all. This led to fear that "Original" Ai-chan had been fired or quit, sparking backlash from fans beginning on Chinese site bilibili before snowballing to Reddit and eventually onto A.I. Channel itself. Upd8/Activ8, Kizuna AI's parent company, maintained radio silence, which only made the situation worse.
  
  Ai-chan's original voice continued to appear in music videos, but the clones handled the gaming channel and often the main channel. Worried & angry fans immediately compared the situation to what had happened at Vtuber channel Game Club Project.^Explanation In the face of silence, fans became angrier. The situation was fixed, but, well, see "Win Back The Crowd" below.
- Some videos, like this one, broke away from the usual formula by not having Kizuna Ai's greeting/intro nor the outro song.
- This video got a lot of flak because it shows Kizuna Ai with an "ahegao face", making it accumulate more than 11,000 dislikes.
Watch It for the Meme: Probably nobody watches her gameplay of Biohazard 7 right now without skipping to her infamous swearing moment.
Win Back the Crowd: The upd8/actv8/"Kizuna clones" debacle of 2019 was so controversial in the fandom that it caused her channels' subscriber counts and monthly views to plateau for the rest of that year. After some Word of God statements and identifiers for the clones, her graphs slowly started to climb back up. After the announcement on April 24th 2020 revealing Kizuna Ai's venture into a new company, plus Nozomi Kasuga outing herself as Ai-chan's voice and announcing she would be directly involved in Ai-chan's affairs, the graphs have been steadily rising again, as fans were pleased about the news.
- Poor Ai-ge is still working at this, at least on Youtube. She was created as a direct response to Ai-chan's popularity in Chinese-speaking countries. But because it was those same fans who started the fuss about Nozomi Kasuga possibly being fired by Upd8/Activ8, Ai-ge did not receive a warm welcome, to put it mildly. Her introductory video on Youtube was heavily disliked. She's more popular on bilibili though, with over half a million subscribers there compared to as of this edit less than 30,000 on Youtube (about 1% of the main channel's). The majority of her videos are only on bilibili, although she has been uploading more of her content for the rest of the world.

YMMV / Kizuna AI

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