Vtuber Q&A with Gini Mercury

Hello everyone, and welcome to Entry Level Games. If you’re a first-time reader here, then welcome. We’re a geek culture site that covers gaming news, VTubers and more.

Another thing we like to do is Q&As with folks all across the gaming industry, from CEOs to Voice Actors. We’ve also done Q&As with VTubers before too. In this Q&A, we’ll be talking to a Vtuber named Gini Mercury, who moved into the world of Indie Vtubing.

Introductions

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Virtual YouTubers, they’re essentially YouTubers or Streamers that take on the form of a digital character. They’ve become very popular over the past few years, so much so that they’ve gained an audience worldwide.

In this Q&A, we’ll be talking to Gini Mercury, who may be referred to as an Indie VTuber, since they don’t work for a big organisation. After previous experiences with different agencies, Gini has decided to go solo. We had the opportunity to chat with Gini and ask about this decision, along with other questions our readers would like answered.

If you’d like to listen to the audio version, you can check it out underneath this paragraph. Please be advised the audio version has mature language. If you’d prefer a shorter but still detailed written version, you can find it down below.

Questions and Answers

Question: What or who inspired you to become a Vtuber?

“I have a very unique entry into Vtubing, in that I wasn’t a fan of Vtubers. I never watched Vtubers. The little I knew about Vtubers was that the person the person that inspired me to voice act became a Vtuber. One of the people that inspired me to rap also became a Vtuber. That’s all I knew about Vtubing. I never really knew anything about the content.

I mentioned voice acting. The person that inspired me to voice act was Nyanners. This was a very long time ago when I was in high school. A friend shared with me a little clip of Nyanners, some skit she did for YouTube.

High school me thought that was the funniest. I was like “man, I wonder if I can do this?” So I started practicing and doing voices and stuff like that. Eventually I got pretty decent at it and I got into voice acting. I was doing it freelance on Fiver, so nothing super fancy or major. You’re not gonna hear my voice on anything massive.

What ended up happening was,. at some point I realized voice acting wasn’t for me, because I’m too much of a perfectionist. I was gonna drop it, and around that time I got reached out to by June, who was the CEO of Haven X, which was the first Vtuber company that I was apart of.

That was my introduction to Vtubing. A Japanese man was like “Hey, do you know what a Vtuber is?” and I said “Not really” and he was like “Well, It’s like voice acting but live.” I was like “okay that sounds like fun.” I don’t have to worry about my perfectionist mentality getting the best of me, because it’s one take. I don’t get a redo. That was that. I joined the Vtubing scene as a corporate Vtuber, and it was a very interesting experience.”

Question: How did you decide on your style and design?

“So whilst I didn’t have any sort of inspiration or any sort of knowledge on the Vtuber scene, and how stuff like that worked, I have been an avid DM for D&D for quite a few years. I’m quite experienced with creating characters for stories.

So basically, how the conversation went was, I sat with June, the CEO of the previous company. He was like “Hey, we need to talk about what your character is going to be.” This is something I do appreciate about Haven X. They did let us come up with our own characters to a pretty significant extent. I know a lot of corpos don’t do that.

So I’m Hispanic, I speak Spanish, I’m Latino. He was like “Okay, here’s my idea. I wanna really show off that you’re Hispanic.” I was like “Okay yeah, I see that.” He was like “Okay here’s my idea.” and then he shows me a picture of a Matador fighting a bull., and I’m like “Okay where are you going with this?”

Then he’s like “Okay so my idea is you can be a bull girl.” which is in and of itself is like “Huh?”, and then he says “you can be dressed up like a Matador”. I was like, “Okay, no, there’s multiple problems with this that I’m not getting into.” For one, I’m Hispanic, but I’m not Spanish. I’m not from Spain.

So then he asked me what animal I most relate to, and I was looking at my cat lying on my bed. I was about to cat. I was about to be another cat girl. I gave it some more thought, and then I was like “I really relate to snakes”. Like multiple different aspects of snakes I relate to, to pretty significant levels.

I told him snake, and he doesn’t like snakes very much. He wasn’t super fond of the idea, but we left it on the table. Other ideas included being like a stitched doll, a harlequin. We were going for sort of semi horror themes, because I like horror aesthetically. We had a few ideas we bounced back and forth, but after that we were like “Okay we’re gonna think about it.”

After that I hopped on Code Vein, which is my favourite video game character creator to mess around on for designs. I was like “Alright, I’m gonna just design an anime character. The outfit doesn’t matter, I’m just gonna get an idea of what these things are gonna look like.”

I started with Roza with the red snake design. For colour scheme, we knew we wanted to do red, black and gold. That’s something we were set on. June told me that “Yeah I feel these colours match with you.” He told me that and I looked around my room at all the black and gold coasters and pens and posters.

I sat there and designed Roza. I was like “I’m really feeling this.” I didn’t bother designing the other 3 ideas until like a day later, but that same day I was like “Okay, this is the concept for Roza. What’s a good name?” I didn’t know I was going to call her Roza yet. I wanted something that signifies the colour red. but is also Spanish. The colour rosa is actually pink, but it’s also the word for roses. Roses are often times Red, so I went with that.

I immediately hopped onto Twitter to check art tags, to see if I could use roza. There was lots of Rozas with an s, so I threw in a z. That’s why Roza has a z in it.

Then with the last name, Coatl, I was just trying to go for something that maybe has roots in, not necessarily Hispanic culture, but in Mexico, which is for the most part Hispanic today. I was like “Okay yeah, Coatl, boom done.” It means snake.

Gini is a much simpler story. I designed Gini after I left Haven X. I didn’t have rights to Roza for a good while. I found my passion though, so I didn’t mind restarting. The Hispanic side of my community is amazing, and I guess they saw it coming, so they build themselves a server with the sole purpose of finding me.

The way I came up with Gini was pretty simple. I just kinda took a D&D character I had already made, and I was like “Well there you go, done.” I gave her an actual design, and that was that.” The character I used, I don’t get to play often, since I’m usually DMing (Dungeon Master), so I had the brilliant idea of making it a changeling character. who’s sole purpose was to multiclass into a lot of things.

It was mainly a roleplay character. From the parties perspective, I was just trying different ideas since I never get to play, so I was playing a bunch of different characters, but they were really the one same characters.“

Question: What other VTubers would you like to collaborate with?

“Well, just off the top of my head, solely off of the fact that these are the people that inspired me, in a really roundabout way, to end up where I am now. I would love to collab with Nyanners, just because she’s the person that inspired me to voice act in the first place so many years ago.

Aside from that, if I ever get decently good at rapping, I’d love to do some sort of music collaboration with Mori Calliope. Aside from that, just people that I’ve met that give me a good vibe, that I feel I would vibe well with. Pippa (Pipkin Pippa) I think is really cool too.”

Question: What is one fun fact about yourself that you’ve not yet shared with your audience?

“I thought about this question a lot, and I had a really hard time coming up with an answer. I’m really open with my community. I can’t think of anything that I haven’t told them, except for 1 thing that I can’t tell them until November..

I talk very often with my community in Discord. I don’t see my community as ‘Fans’. I consider them friends. I’m really open with my community.

I can share one thing. The secret I haven’t shared yet, until November, I have already said it on stream multiple times, but I’ve only said it jokingly.”

Question: What is your favourite game of all time?

“That’s a toss up between Bloodborne and Skyrim. I’m inclined to say Skyrim just because I’ve been playing it for so much longer, and I’ve pumped so many more hours into it. The replayability of Skyrim is through the roof.

At the same time I wanna say Bloodborne. I’ve not pumped as many hours into it as I have Skyrim, but you have to consider the fact that every time I’ve played Bloodborne, I’ve played the same game over and over again. It’s definitely between those two.”

Question: Do you have a certain activity or game you’re looking forward to streaming that you haven’t done yet?

“I could think of loads of games that are coming out soon that I’m excited about. At heart I like playing games. That’s my main form of content. Aside from that, I have been planning to do more community stuff.

I wanna start a server wide RWBY themed (D&D) campaign. RWBY is one of my favourite settings of all times. I’ve ran a RWBY themed campaign before for my irl friends, but I think it’d be fun to have in a D&D server in multiple groups all in the same world.”

Question: What advice would you give to those wanting to join Vtuber life?

“The best advice I can give, that I completely genuinely believe to be true, is don’t sell yourself out for a particular type of audience that you think will make you successful. Don’t sell out for success.

Be yourself. Do what you enjoy doing. Don’t just do whatever is popular or whatever is gonna get you the most views. At the end of the day, what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna create an audience that is tied to that thing. An audience that is quite fickle. Long term, I don’t think that’s gonna be what you want.

I’ve stuck to being myself for as much as I can, and as a result I’ve created a community that I can genuinely feel is very loyal. Whatever content change I do, they’re here for me, they’re not here for particular content or experience. They want to support me as the creator.”

Question: Where can people go to find out more about your content?

“Currently, you can find me as Rosa Coatl on YouTube. and Gini_Mercurialis on Twitch. Long-term, you’ll be able to find me under the name Gini Mercury.

A huge thank you to Gini Mercury for taking the time to answer our questions. Do be sure to check out Gini on their YouTube Channel and Twitter Account.

If you’d like to read another VTuber Q&A, you can check out our Q&A with the members of NIJISANJI EN’s LazuLight, our Q&A with the members of NIJISANJI EN’s OBSYDIA, or our Q&A with the members of NIJISANJI ID’s 3SETBBQ.

A special thanks to the various artists credited above for providing the artwork for this piece. For more reviews and gaming news, you can keep up to date at Entry Level Games. Want to speak to the team and interact with other gamers? You can do so over on the Entry Level Games Twitter account. You can also check out my Twitter account for gaming debates and more.