Azur Lane EN's Official Collab with Nijisanji EN Sparks Backlash — NijiEN in the Middle of a Massive Scandal, Players Declare 'VTuber Collabs Are Cursed'

Another Azur Lane collab partner going up in flames? This time it's Nijisanji EN's turn.

An NGA user recently dug up an older post revealing that Azur Lane's official EN Twitter account had collaborated with Nijisanji EN (often abbreviated as NijiEN) during last year's Halloween season, releasing a music video performed by NijiEN VTubers. Screenshots from X (formerly Twitter) show the collab promotion and related content.

Here's the catch: when this collab resurfaced on NGA in February 2024, Nijisanji EN was in the middle of an absolutely catastrophic scandal. According to commenters, NijiEN had been "imploding on a massive scale" with "a laundry list of terrible moves," and the fallout was "dragging in Western anime/otaku communities and showing signs of spreading even further beyond the VTuber bubble." The timing of this collab struck many players as incredibly tone-deaf.

One commenter bluntly stated: "It's not that collabs are doomed — it's that VTubers as a profession have an insanely high rate of self-destructing." Another was even more scathing: "Seeing your industry rivals blow themselves up and you just can't resist lighting your own firework too, can you? Expecting gacha game companies to stay rational is truly a luxury."

What made this especially spicy was the pattern multiple players pointed out: this wasn't Azur Lane's first VTuber collab disaster. A highly upvoted comment mused: "VTubers who collab with the Yellow Chicken (a beloved nickname for Azur Lane's developer Manjuu) consistently blow up afterward — is there some kind of curse at play here?" While the commenter acknowledged it's logically about "casting too wide a net with people of varying quality," the comical pattern was hard to ignore. Another player dropped the ultimate roast: "From now on, VTuber stans can curse each other by wishing an Azur Lane collab on their enemies."

To be fair, some users tried to provide context: this wasn't technically an official collab, but rather a commissioned song for the Hurricane faction event — "the song was actually pretty good, had a real sea shanty vibe." However, that didn't stop the community from roasting the Yellow Chicken's decision-making, with players calling it "picking the scab off an old wound" and claiming the dev team has been "marinated in VTuber stan juice." Regarding the regional-exclusive collab model (different servers getting different VTuber partnerships), one player noted that region-exclusive content is normal, but the choice to partner with a VTuber agency in the middle of a PR nuclear meltdown was, to put it mildly, questionable timing.