From our other sites
The story
Runo Toyokaze of Hello! Project’s Tsubaki Factory made a remark during a program exchange — ‘Missing our live is a loss for your life, a loss on the level of not watching VIVANT’ — that was picked up in a 5ch livestream-comment thread. Her offbeat comparison to TBS’s hit drama VIVANT reportedly got the other members laughing. The remark sparked a back-and-forth among Hello! Project fans in the thread over who had and hadn’t actually watched VIVANT, and the discussion spread to cover the differing blog update frequencies of Misaki Ebata and Toyokaze as well.
What people said
Toyokaze: As big a loss as not watching VIVANT.
Nishimura: lol
Misaki Ebata's September blog updates: 23
This one's more interesting.
Guess Tsubaki Factory's pretty busy.
Eba used to update almost every day before "Moremi" (fan term, exact meaning unclear), but her posting frequency has dropped since.
Former Fujimoto fan: 'Um, a girl named Runo Toyokaze…'
Mikado: 'From Tsubaki Factory… See? This is exactly how I keep losing fans.'
There was an exchange like that on TV once.
Maybe she's cleverly using it to plug VIVANT.
Ah…
That makes sense.
They really have zero self-awareness that their own fans are the outcasts of mainstream society
Background and Points of Discussion
VIVANT was a 2023 TBS Sunday Drama series set against an espionage-thriller backdrop in Mongolia, and it became a major talking point at the time, known for reaching even viewers who don’t normally watch TV dramas. Among Hello! Project fans, it’s a familiar pattern for whether someone has kept up with a mainstream hit like this to be treated as a yardstick for having ‘normal’ sensibilities, and in this thread too, opinions split over who had and hadn’t watched VIVANT. Toyokaze’s remark itself was a joking line meant to encourage fans to come to the live show, but the thread strayed from that point into harsher takes like ‘living without keeping up with trends means having a narrow worldview,’ highlighting a gap between fan culture and everyday mainstream media consumption.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project) thread “[Great News] Runo Toyokaze: ‘Missing Tsubaki’s live is a loss for your life — and how big a loss, you ask? As big as not watching VIVANT.’“
Leave a Reply