Minato Aqua

Minato Aqua (湊あくあ) is a female Japanese Virtual YouTuber endorsed by hololive.

Introduction Video


Aqua's introduction.

Personality
Aqua is kind,polite but also mischievous maid who likes sushi, sing during streams, videogames and cute things, known as a hard working virtual youtuber with a record of five streams in a single day.

She likes to play a lot of videogames and can be very competitive, Aqua is known for her good perfomances even in competitive games, like being ranked Platinum 1 in League of Legends, making improvised victory songs and taunting her opponets when things go well,however she can also "break" and get frustrated, yell, and smash the keyboard and ending streams abruptly when things don't go as planned.

Her mischievous side can be seen multiple times, like asking Uruha Rushia to bully her, or faking her retirement on multiple occasions.

Appearance
She is a virtual maid who wears blue a marine-themed maid uniform with a white mob cap having an archor as decoration, ironically despide her appearance she is afraid of water. She has purple hair with twin ponytails decorated with blue ribbons, she however also has light blue hair, with two strand of hair, and an ahoge and the inner side of her hair being of this color as shown when her hair is untied.

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 will receive a 3D model in April. It was later announced, alongside a sneak peek of her model, that she will 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.

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.

Fans and Nicknames

 * She calls her fans Aqua crew ( あくあクルーあくあ狂う) while the fans call her Aqua Maji Tenshi, （大天使あくあ） meaning Aqua is seriously an angel, which she also uses as her ID in some games.
 * Chinese fans call themselves "fur seal".
 * Because she often play games alone, some fans nicknamed her Sololive.
 * Aqua saved herself mutiple 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.


 * When she gets frustrated she starts doing things like smashing the keyboard, pretending to cry and doing high-pitch voices, fans call her Berseking Aqua ( あくあ狂う).

Trivia

 * Whenever she puts all focus on gameplay, she would unintentionally make intelligible battle cries such as "Nya”、“Rua”, and “Wry”.


 * 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.
 * Her favorite animes are Yosuga no Sora and Lovelive!, but interestingly 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 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.
 * 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: Hololive Resistance army Iron Aqua Group: Leader and creator in Minecraft, which as a large underground base full with TNT, according to her ready to rebel at any moment. She showed the place to Matsuri, and she became a member of Hololive Resistence too, unfortunately    for her Matsuri betrayed her during Tokino Sora's visit, Aqua's morale was 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，Weak，I，Strong）whenever she faces a boss when playing games like Dark Souls 3 and Seikro: Shadow Dies Twice. She often gets fixed up even before she could finish the whole sentence.