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NIJISANJI VTuber Gundo Mirei Suspended After Controversial Baseball Tweet
posted on by Kim Morrissy
The agency added that it had reprimanded the VTuber for inappropriate statements on numerous occasions in the past, and that she posted the tweet without heeding the warnings. The company is currently scrutinizing Gundo Mirei's publicly available content and vowed to ensure that its talents do not step out of bounds in the future.
On Wednesday, Mirei commented on her ignorance of baseball rules while reacting to the World Baseball Classic. Among other jokes about how she does not know what a "Strike" or "Home Run" are, she tweeted: "If a strong person is standing there, can the person who pitches the ball chuck it at their head or body and make them leave the pitch that way?"
Later, she added a flippant-sounding apology to the thread: "I went too far with my ignorance and made an inappropriate statement, but I'd like to reaffirm that I had zero malicious intentions, as you can see from the rest of the Twitter thread~! My bad!"
The tweet quickly left her core audience, picking up over 30,000 retweets. Even the sport newspaper Sponichi reported on her statements.
NIJISANJI hosts a yearly "NIJISANJI Koshien" baseball gaming event, where the talents stream themselves playing Power Pros with each other. NIJISANJI is notably the only prominent VTuber agency which streams the game.
The agency terminated its contract with the NIJISANJI EN VTuber Zaion LanZa on March 10 due to making numerous false and inappropriate statements. She was suspended in February due to "repeated misconduct."
Gundo Mirei debuted in January 2019. Her character is described as a sadistic female teacher at a boys' school.
The NIJISANJI project launched in 2018 and is run by ANYCOLOR, Inc. (formerly Ichikara Inc.). It is one of Japan's largest Virtual YouTuber projects, hosting over a hundred VTubers. As of May 2021, the project has expanded to three Asian countries (China/Indonesia/Korea) in their local and English languages. NIJISANJI EN launched its first group in May 2021.
Sources: NIJISANJI official Twitter account, Gundo Mirei's Twitter account via Reddit
