LogFAQs > #951815176

Pretty sad to learn now that Roppo Rikuru from the Floral vtuber group (a group linked to a doujin game circle called Neon Soft) is retiring now. a second member (Siyo) announced her retirement a few months ago and that's due to happen in a couple of weeks too...

I've been following the group since the original member (Itsutsu) cropped up on the big vtuber index site at https://virtual-youtuber.userlocal.jp and it's always been somewhat unusual. Back then, it stood out to me since the channel was just housing videos for a public crowdfunding campaign, which was unusual for the time (also itsutsu was just cute, so there was that too). Once it started, while the campaign was ultimately just a standard one to kickstart a small virtual talent agency with the aforementioned two other members, they had... certainly unique plans for it, as it was made to be connected to Neon Soft's main visual novel series. Itsutsu originated as a side character from one of the games, so they wanted to make the project a sort of tie-in project. They had this vn-style radio drama series basically that gradually went off the rails as it slowly eased in ad-lib parts, collabs with random indies and eventually even livestreams. And then they made solo channels for Rikuru and Siyo.

Sadly Rikuru, who focused on streaming tragically niche games like DQ11, Trials of Mana, Luigi's Mansion 3, Rime and others, despite maintaining an extremely stable near-daily upload schedule a lot of the time, never saw any real success anywhere. She was easily the best singer too. It's been nearly two years now, and about one and a half since activity started on her solo channel, but she still only gets (or got) around 10 viewers per stream.

Siyo blew the rest of the group out of the water as soon as she switched to doing asmr content about a year ago and never looked back. I'm talking over 10 times as many subs as the Rikuru and Itsutsu combined and anywhere between 20 and 100 times as many views generally. She also started becoming super obnoxious then, an absolute screamer type. How she maintained that success is a mystery (to be fair to her credit, she proved she was also a decent artist too), but her content reset likely didn't sit well with the other two. Itsutsu went on a long, near-half-year hiatus and Rikuru was basically the only one doing anything during that time (Siyo's too busy to manage even one stream per week generally, adding insult to injury on her constantly growing popularity compared to them). Her viewcounts didn't change. She managed to barely cross 1k subs and that's about it really for lifetime milestones. Well, she also started posting music briefly too just to prove that she could actually sing unlike the other two. That also went largely unnoticed.

Since Itsutsu came back, she claimed a pretty large following on Bilibili, just leaving Rikuru with a negligible fanbase. Even the group discord never talks about her outside of automated bot posts...

So really this is just a story of injustice. The worst part is that between her and siyo quitting, the floral group is through now. But perhaps it has been since a year ago even. It's been over 9 months since Siyo and Rikuru made any contact on twitter even. And almost even longer for Siyo and Itsutsu. Itsutsu's bilibili account used to be the group's account, so that's been a sign of bridges being burned for a long time too.

Anyway none of this is very important obviously. What is is that Rikuru was (at least tied) best floral. RIP floral. :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eim5PNQrCkU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQPkx7n-o2M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCyUH1zdX20&t=4823s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO0n7RVI8Vg