It depends on the situation but yeah with the big companies you are basically an actor, it's very much like Idol culture where your management kinda owns everything about you untill you leave and keeps everything from when you were with them* *GENERALLY

Yeah I believe the term comes from the corporate entertainment culture of idol groups, where the group is a rotating cast of younger entertainers and they eventually "graduate" out of the group (in the best case to a solo career). It's pretty fucked up in both contexts.

Its like how youtubers would take a brand deal with machinima or whatever in 2014 for brand recognition, then when they went downhill fast all of the youtubers got their channels destroyed from being stuck either giving most of their revenue to a shit company or starting over from nothing.

Honestly this seems less grim than leaving a chunk of yourself behind

Kids, when the red gem on your Vtuber av's hand starts glowing, just run, get out of the city, they can't catch you if you get out of the city, go forth and live in the digital woods and meet old people- bsky.app/profile/boringkate.com/post/3mj6ai7wbrc2i

so your running into the difference between corporate and indi vtubing corporate vtubers work for an agency this agency runs the show marketing merch etc in exchange they own all the ip indies have none of that they run it all solo or with a small team they self employ but they get to own everything

imagining explaining this to an old rocker like "so basically, imagine if someone else decided what David Bowie could do with the character of Ziggie Stardust" and immediately getting slapped