Interest
'Nice Boat' Trends as Sekai Makes VTuber Debut on School Days Anime's 15th Anniversary
posted on by Kim Morrissy
The English catchphrase "Nice boat" started trending on Japanese Twitter on Tuesday after DenFamiNicoGamer reported that School Days heroine Sekai Saionji debuted as a Virtual YouTuber.
The stream launched on the midnight of July 3 to commemorate the anime's 15th anniversary. Sekai's voice actress Shiho Kawaragi performed the character and hosted the stream on her personal YouTube channel. 0verflow, the developer of the original School Days visual novel, provided the illustrations for the Live2D model.
On December 24, 2020, the other heroine of School Days—Kotonoha Katsura—made her debut. Kawaragi explained that she was inspired by the Kotonoha VTuber to dabble in VTubing herself, and began working towards this goal in 2021. She expressed a proactive interest to collaborate with Kotonoha's voice actress Tae Okajima on further VTuber antics.
Kawaragi will hold her second VTuber stream as Sekai on Wednesday.
The School Days erotic visual novel inspired a 12-episode television anime series in 2007, and then two original video anime spinoffs in 2008. The story follows the love triangle that develops when a boy enlists his close female friend to help him attract the attention of a girl in their same school.
The anime gained unexpected media attention when its final episode was preempted by a real-life axe murder in Japan. Instead of the final episode, the television stations aired a series of unrelated scenery images and the following text: "The programming has changed due to certain circumstances." The substituted boat scenery images led to the "nice boat" catchphrase that has spread throughout the overseas anime fandom and even into Japan.
Source: DenFamiNicoGamer
