Minato Aqua

Minato Aqua (湊あくあ) is a female Japanese Virtual YouTuber associated with hololive, as part of its second generation of VTubers alongside Murasaki Shion, Nakiri Ayame, Yuzuki Choco, and Oozora Subaru.

Introduction Video
Aqua's introduction.

Personality
Aqua is a bumbling airhead who somehow manages to become the victim of every joke she gets involved in. She is also childish and prone to throwing tantrums, smashing her keyboard, and hyperventilating when things don't go as planned (which is most of the time). She enjoys playing pranks and causing mischief, but it almost always backfires due to a combination of poor planning and bad luck. To make matters worse, Aqua makes no attempt to avoid embarrassing situations, to the point that many wonder if she might actually be masochistic. She has asked other hololive members, including Uruha Rushia, to bully her on several occasions.

However, while Aqua appears to be an incompetent crybaby, she is deceptively skilled at highly technical video games like Sekiro, Dark Souls, Apex Legends (Diamond rank) and League of Legends (Diamond rank). She is also a prolific streamer, with a record of five streams in a single day.

According to other hololive members, Aqua is kind and responsible but extremely introverted while off-camera, and only opens up while streaming.

Appearance
She is a virtual maid who wears a marine-themed maid uniform and a white mob cap decorated with an anchor, though it has also been described as a "tissue box". Despite her name and appearance, she has nothing to do with water. She has purple hair (resembling a red onion), with twin spiral ponytails decorated with navy-blue ribbons. She also has a few streaks of light-blue hair in her bangs and along the inner edge of her ponytails, and a light blue ahoge.

Background
Her Twitter account and YouTube channel was created on 1 August 2018 although she did not start her activities on YouTube until her self-introduction which was uploaded on 8 August.

2019
On 22 March, she announced that she would receive a 3D model in April. It was later announced, alongside a sneak peek of her model, that she would debut her 3D model on 8 April with it being slightly delayed from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM. More sneak peeks were posted on 7 April before the debut was finally live on the next day.

On 25 March, she did a live-stream where she covers some songs but she accidentally played a song from an anime with vocals before abruptly ending the stream and deleting the video. She later tweeted about the incident on Twitter.

On 30 April, she starred in the music video and album cover for Virtual Diva AZKi's 7th original song "Fake.Fake.Fake".

2020
On 2 January she debuted her 2D new year kimono costume during a stream being her second 2D costume overall.

On 24 January along with the other hololive girls up to the third generation, she debuted her 3D idol outfit at hololive's 1st fest Nonstop Story.

Fake Retirements
During a livestream she started talking about retirement-related topics after singing the song 未練レコード (a sad song about the lingering feelings after breaking-up). After posting links to her livestream on Twitter, hololive immediately retweeted it and commented saying "Thank you, we will never forget you Aqua-chan."

Aqua was so shocked that she was quiet for almost a minute before making a "retirement speech" and turning the screen black and whispering to her audience telling them to say "we love Aqua the most, don't go", before returning unwillingly to sing 桜ノ雨. She then started imitating other hololive members saying their farewell to her, but later continued singing as if nothing happened, remembering viewers of Sasaki Saku who retired for some months after singing that song.

This has become a running joke and whenever she sings touching songs or sometimes while ending her stream people would type おめでとう which means congratulations and is used in this case as if she is graduating for being a virtual youtuber.

During a Minecraft stream on 2 February 2019 she did another retirement speech, bringing her audience to take a look at hololive's server, before creating a model of herself and blowing it up with TNT. which were supposed to be the fireworks celebrating her retirement.

Events

 * On 4 April 2019, she made an appearance in hololive's collaboration with Dawn of the Breakers as one of the characters alongisde Roboco, Aki Rosenthal, Natsuiro Matsuri, Shirakami Fubuki, Yuzuki Choco, Oozora Subaru, and Ookami Mio.
 * On 8 April 2019, it was announced that she would collaborate with Square Enix's new mobile game titled LAST IDEA (ラストイデア) which was broadcasted live on the next day at 9:00 PM. The collaboration event began in the game on 23 July 2019.
 * In response to this collab, she expressed that she was nervous as this was her first time.
 * On 27 November 2019, she made an appearance in hololive's collaboration with Azur Lane as one of the characters, alongside, Shirakami Fubuki, Nakiri Ayame, Ookami Mio, Natsuiro Matsuri, Murasaki Shion and Tokino Sora, she was available from 27 November to 10 December.
 * On 28 January 2020, it was announced on Dengekionline that she would made an appearance in the game Neptunia Virtual Stars as one of the VTuber guest characters alongside Tokino Sora, Roboco, Sakura Miko, Shirakami Fubuki, Yuzuki Choco, Inugami Korone, Shirogane Noel and Houshou Marine.

Fans and Nicknames

 * Her fanbase is officially called Aqua Crew (あくあクルー) while the fans call her Dai Tenshi Aqua (大天使あくあ), meaning "Great Angel Aqua". She uses this name as her ID in some games.
 * One variation of this name is A.M.T. (Aqua Maji Tenshi), which is mainly used by Chinese fans.
 * "Aqua Crew" is a homonym of "あくあ狂う", which means "Berserking Aqua". This name is often used when Aqua gets frustrated and starts crying and smashing her keyboard.
 * Chinese fans call themselves "fur seal".
 * Because she often play games alone, some fans nicknamed her Sololive.
 * Aqua saved herself multiple times using water in Minecraft, so some fans gave her the nickname Aquaman.
 * Another nickname derived from Minecraft is Poseidon, given to her after getting two tridents in seven minutes in a livestream and 4 in total after a seven hour stream.

Trivia

 * Whenever she puts all focus on gameplay, she often makes unintelligible battle cries such as "nya", "rua", and "wryy".
 * She spent half a month grinding PvP in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate after it was released in 7 December 2018, hoping to get to VIP ranking. She mainly plays as Cloud, Joker, and Lucina.
 * Her favorite animes are Yosuga no Sora and Lovelive!, but she doesn't know the song 届かない恋 from White Album.
 * She is a fan of the comic artist Tsukudani Norio 佃煮のりお, as well as Inuyama Tamaki who was designed (and voiced) by her.
 * She likes reading light novels, but could barely read them due to most of the texts not annotated with furigana; and instead spends most of her time reading manga (with annotated furigana).
 * She uses a lot of exclamation marks in her tweets (！！！) this behavior has spread to other virtual YouTubers.
 * Aqua has been noted by other members of hololive as being particularly slight, short and petite in terms of stature. During Aqua's Wii Fit stream in addition to revealing her height to be 4 feet and 10 inches (148 cm) she accidentally revealed her weight to be a mere 95 pounds (43 kg). When Aqua first met Murasaki Shion in-person, Shion (who is already comparatively short) apparently remarked at how "small" Aqua was and condescendingly patted her on the head, much to Aqua's dismay. Aqua's short and light build is something other hololive members frequently lightly tease her over, but simultaneously something they cite as a part of what makes her cute. Aqua's height of 4' 10" is coincidentally the typical length of a mop-handle, which has resulted in a ongoing meme among her fans where fan-art depicts her as mop; sometimes with a red onion and a tissue box on top of the handle.
 * She is really close to Kagura Mea, with rumors spreading the two knowing each other even before they become VTubers, while others speculated that they were high-school classmates. Both have done a lot of collaborations with each other, with their pairing being know as 稱めあくあ (meaqua). She has also gone to Mea's house on multiple occasions to do streams with her going as far as to call her girlfriend on a tweet from 8 March 2019.
 * She made a group called the hololive Resistance army Iron Aqua Group. She is the leader and creator of the group in Minecraft, with a large underground base full with TNT. According to her, she is ready to rebel at any moment. She showed the place to Matsuri, and she became a member of hololive Resistence too. Unfortunately for Aqua, Matsuri betrayed her during Tokino Sora's visit. Aqua's morale remained high while facing Sora until she called her an enemy, which caused her to stop speaking properly.
 * Her "group" was latter referenced when she appeared on Dawn of the Breakers where her unit name is called hololive Resistance.
 * She likes to say お前、弱い、あたし、強い（You are weak, I am strong）whenever she faces a boss when playing games like Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. She often gets fixed up even before she could finish the whole sentence.