Akai Haato wants to change. The first generation hololive virtual YouTuber was surprisingly candid in a public livestream from September last year, airing her frustrations with the hololive system and admitting that her fellow streamers sometimes feel like strangers.
“It kind of makes you think… I’m doing my best, but maybe my best just isn’t enough.”
Compared to her contemporaries, Haato hasn’t been afforded anywhere near the same kind of opportunities. Even though her subscriber count has always floated around the upper middle of hololive’s rankings, she’s never been able to hold a solo concert or plan an event beyond anything on her YouTube channel. Another candid post in August 2025 even described a situation where she once asked management to run a photo exhibition, but was rejected outright because of her lack of popularity.
To make matters even worse, the Akai Haato of today is very different from the Akai Haato of five years ago. Some of her most popular live streams and videos are still related to the horror arc where she fought with an alternative personality, but that was just a phase that ended as quickly as it started. It would be no exaggeration to say that Haato currently finds herself stuck between a rock and a hard place: unable to appeal to her current audience and unable to access opportunities that might open up new ones.
All of this combined to make the last year into one of repeated hiatuses and continued rumors about an impending graduation. Cover was actually forced to put out a statement in October 2025 to address the proliferation of false information, arguing that it constituted libel and could potentially warrant legal action. Haato hasn’t posted personally on social media ever since, preferring to leave any updates to her in-house manager instead.
In any case, those who didn’t give up on Haato through the inactivity will have noticed a renewed sense of purpose as of late. Since the beginning of this year, the virtual YouTuber has been uploading regularly once again with a focus on travel and tourism content. Her new dream? Becoming a worldwide idol who “represents Japan.”
This tagline was actually first used in a video from October 2025 where Haato climbed Mt. Fuji for the first time, but this can be viewed in hindsight as a prototype for the kind of content that would come later on. A more regular schedule would settle into place from April 2026, starting with a trip to the Philippines to visit her father. No less than 21 similar videos have been posted this year, constituting an impressive schedule for someone once considered on the way out.
Speaking personally as someone who never really engaged with Haato in the same way after her horror experiment ended, it took some time for this new content to click. What eventually tipped the scales was the disastrous trip to Ishikawa in August 2026, where the virtual YouTuber found herself thwarted by local tourism at every possible opportunity. Anyone who has travelled off the beaten path in this country will understand the experience of walking for hours to see some kind of amazing view, only to be greeted by a bunch of dead grass.
The “Gacha Travel” video from last month offers a similar experience. By picking a random prefecture out of a hat, Haato finds herself on the way to Yamaguchi Prefecture on a completely empty shinkansen with no plans other than what can be gleaned from a quick Google search. In the end, the best experience was drinking some local booze and eating special potato chips in her hotel room.
With this in mind, Haato has ended up making several pieces of content that definitely “represent” what it can be like to travel throughout Japan, but not exactly in a positive light. Even though this was almost certainly not her intention, there is merit to be found here. Her style and presentation is also getting better and better with each upload, showing that practice makes perfect in content creation as it does with most things in life.
It would be inaccurate, however, to say that these videos have successfully captured a new audience just yet. Not only do none of them hold a candle to the horror videos in terms of view count, the cooking videos that Haato has released since coming back from hiatus are still performing much more consistently. Her Neapolitan recipe has garnered 362,000 views as of the time of writing, compared to 51,000 and 60,000 views for the Atami video and Hakone video respectively released either side.
Aside from the horror arc, one of the main reasons why Haato became so famous within hololive five years ago was her food content. The fourth most viewed video on her channel remains a 50 second rap that makes reference to her disastrous cooking, such as that time she put a zebra tarantula in miso ramen. When coupled with the popularity of recent recipes, this would seem to suggest that a certain section of her audience is more interested in the old style of videos.
Still, Haato remarked herself in the September 2025 live stream that changing her image as a performer will undoubtedly take time. You could say that a certain amount of creative destruction might be needed: a radical process of decoupling to filter out old fans while bringing new fans on board that engage more with the new content. That would certainly help to remedy the current mismatch between Haato’s subscriber count and her actual audience.
At the same time, the recent rise of Juufuutei Raden as an ambassador for the arts shows that a different kind of virtual YouTuber is possible. If Raden can get a collaboration with The National Gallery in London, then why can’t Haato go into partnership with JR to promote tourism in overlooked areas? Her dark past may pose a problem, but at a certain point the numbers will speak louder than anything else.
