A series of experimental videos from the Hololive VTuber Akai Haato (or Haachama) have been restored to YouTube after being set to private.

Akai Haato is a first generation Hololive VTuber whose character design features red heart hair ornaments (Akai Haato being a Japanese homonym for “Red Heart”). However Haato has developed an alternate persona Haachama and has used this persona for more crass humor and dark videos.

Recently, Haato released multiple videos that appeared to be telling a story about the Akai Haato and Haachama personalities. These videos included grim imagery including beheadings and kidnapping and were ultimately set to private.

According to fellow Hololive VTuber Kiryu Coco, the videos were privated due to rule changes within Hololive. These changes according to the VTuber Wiki were allegedly meant to keep Hololive’s standards ahead of YouTube’s “arbitrary rule changes”; in the case that YouTube’s rules became too strict.

Haato was one of two Hololive VTubers suspended for three weeks during the controversy where YouTube analytics describing Taiwan as an independent nation were shown on stream. This incident resulted in backlash from Hololive’s Chinese fanbase and resulted in the dissolution of Hololive China.

It’s unknown at the time of publishing why the videos were unprivated. Speculatively the decision to unprivate the videos was made after internal discussion at Cover Corp but ultimately no formal announcement regarding the removal and subsequent return of the videos has been made.

After the videos were privated, Haato announced she was taking a hiatus from content creation and hoped that she would be able to finish the series in the future.