ame story

Summer 2018:
Soyokaze Ame debut
Ame was a cute and really energetic indie Vtuber who spoke the Hakata dialect.
She put Ultra Instinct effort into fitting into the Vtuber community and she made friends with other ASMR Vtubers even including Choco from Hololive.
She got a ton of sponsors, albeit short and small ones, and she managed to partner with a doujin circle to dish out like 2 ASMR dramas on dlsite (kinda like Patra).
She even talked to her RL parents on stream and they supported her activities and dream.
Her dream was to become a voice actress (for anime, presumably).
Everything went fine, she even got permission to participate in a call-in stream from Inuyama Tamaki.
She got several model upgrades, too, and her model was pretty expressive.

Anyway, after her 1 year anniversary during which she first started to set up her FANBOX... Ame disappeared.
For 6 months.
After 6 months, she announced her graduation through a huge letter.
Due to unforseen circumstances, she couldn't continue doing her activities.
Considering the nature of the letter, I personally think that she wasn't able to achieve her VA dream or else the letter would have sounded more positive.

At the end of the letter, she further surprised her fans by introducing Minakaze Ame.
The person behind Minakaze Ame was a fan of Soyokaze Ame and she also spoke the Hakata dialect.
They discussed about continuing the legacy, and 1st gen Ame allowed now 2nd gen Ame to continue the activities.
They updated the name to Minakaze Ame together and they also designed her new model.
Minakaze's model has a fox youkai mask or whatever you call it, the side-hanging mask thing. That symbolizes the soul of Soyokaze Ame.
Her fans were sad, but they all accepted Minakaze Ame.

They worked on this song together: https://youtu.be/rxZ4Rj-wYrI
Minakaze Ame sang it, and Soyokaze Ame composed the original rap part of the song.

Naturally, because Ame was basically an entirely new person, every ASMR Vtuber Soyokaze was close with now was a stranger to Minakaze. None of them stayed in contact with her. Not Choco, not anyone else.
However on 2nd gen Ame's twitter you could see that she was retweeting Ice Lab members.
Turns out that she was already friends with Ice Lab members.
After a while she announced that she would join Ice Lab because it was a place that helped her out a lot so she considered it her home.

Sadly for her, she joined right when Ice Lab management started to screw them over so Ame didn't receive any monetary compensation.
You know the rest of the story.
Azulim 2.0 except it happened to the entire group, kind of.
BUT the weirdest thing is... Minakaze Ame (the Vtuber model) remains in Ice Lab.
Ice Lab now has a new management, presumably(hopefully) a good one.
The old bad one is now gone I think, however at that point the tanned one already carried all 5 members towards NTらじ, their new company.
The thing is this... now a NEW, a THIRD GEN Ame is acting as Ame.
The person behind 2nd gen Ame was originally hijacked so she made a Twitter alt like the rest of the girls.
But for some reason, instead of retrieving her old Vtuber model and YouTube channel like the zombie and mummy girl, actually an entirely different person took over Minakaze Ame.

There was some backlash, albeit not much because these girls aren't that popular to begin with. But Ame was actually the most popular out of all 5 girls.
3rd gen Ame wrote a huge letter to explain the situation, but some people didn't like it.
Basically, it seems like they had plans of just throwing away Ame (idk why and idk what 2nd gen Ame's stance on this is. Maybe she just didn't want to act as Ame anymore, but I won't speculate).
And a girl who was a fan of Minakaze Ame got wind of that.
She probably knew that because she was related to the doujin circle who helped the original Ame to release her dlsite stuff.
Anyway, she kinda begged the new management that she didn't want the legacy to end like this, so she said that she wanted to become Ame herself.
Apparently they gave the OK.

The 3rd Ame was blamed because they said if Minakaze Ame was supposed to sink, they had wished that she had sunk instead of dragging things out with yet another new voice actor who wasn't even particularly close with the other Ames and she didn't really discuss this with them either (we don't know if this is true though, she simply didn't mention in the letter whether she personally knew Minakaze Ame or not).

Anyway, so now... Ice Labo with new management has one member, 3rd gen Minakaze Ame.
She's a 100% newbie. No ASMR experience, no Hakata dialect, no streaming experience, nothing.
People generally accepted her existence by now which I think is good, but her channel definitely isn't growing much right now.
At least she is showing visible effort to improve. She improved with each ASMR stream for example, though she hasn't done much yet.

As for 2nd gen Ame? She's still the dorky Hakata dialect person on twitter and she's now doing ASMR stuff with the other 4 girls (including the pink haired one who also lost her Vtuber model). I'm honestly curious to know her stance on someone else basically being Minakaze Ame, but I don't think she will ever talk about it. Maybe she wanted to leave the Ame legacy behind, who knows.

In the end, I see it like this. 3rd gen Minakaze Ame carries on the Vtuber legacy, but 2nd gen Ame (she is called "Rei" on twitter now) carries on the soul of Soyokaze and Minakaze Ame. And Rei will probably (hopefully) obtain a new Vtuber model along with the other one who lost hers.