An ASUS collaboration event with Hololive scheduled for December 17th has been canceled. The cancellation is allegedly due to the involvement of the Chinese branch of ASUS.
ASUS, a Taiwan-based company with international branches in Japan and China have allegedly canceled their collaboration event with Hololive. The cancellation of the stream was announced by Hololive star Fubuki Shirakami on Twitter without any official reason.
Shortly after the announcement, a Reddit thread was started on r/hololive. The thread speculates on the reason behind the cancellation and includes screenshots from Chinese social media site Bilibili where the Chinese ASUS Community Manager spoke out against the collaboration and threatened to get involved.
The subreddit, which is moderated by staff and some of the talent from the agency removed the thread. Staff member T-chan giving the reason:
It’s fine to discuss reasons behind the cancellation in the context of hololive and its talents, but this is creating a lot of potentially heated (and political) discussion. Whether or not these images are accurate is beyond the scope of this subreddit. We DO NOT want our fans on reddit starting a witch hunt.
For now, yes, the stream has been cancelled. The reasons behind it are pending.
T-chan.
(Author’s Note: On Reddit, a thread being removed typically means it’s removed from the frontpage of the subreddit and thus it’s still readable with a direct link)
According to the thread’s original poster, the post contains screenshots of the ASUS “Republic of Games” (ASUS’s gaming subdivision) promising to interfere with the stream and using unprofessional language to describe Hololive.
Hololive cut ties with its Chinese audience earlier this year after talents Hiryu Coco and Akai Haato were temporarily suspended after outrage from Chinese viewers over referring to Taiwan as an independent nation.
During the suspension, Hololive took the time to consider their response and rather than continue to punish Coco and Haato they instead chose to eliminate the Chinese branch of Hololive and gave up all assets to let the talents continue to use if they pleased.
At the time of publishing, Cover Corp has not confirmed the reason behind the stream’s cancellation. While the alleged unprofessional behavior of ASUS’s Chinese branch on Bilibili is documented, it’s unknown if that had any bearing on the stream’s cancellation.
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