Gawr Gura

This name is officially written using the Japanese name format, the family name is Gawr.

Gawr Gura is an English Virtual YouTuber associated with hololive, debuting as part of its English (EN) branch first generation of VTubers alongside Ninomae Ina'nis, Takanashi Kiara, Watson Amelia and Mori Calliope.

Profile
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Personality
Gura is friendly and readily likeable, and often amuses her viewers with foolish antics. She has no sense of direction, often misspells and mispronounces words, has trouble remembering her own age, and consistently fails to solve basic math problems, leading viewers to affectionately call her a "dum shark". Memorably, one viewer declared that "Gura has a heart of gold and a head of bone."

She can also be lazy at times. She often forgets about perishable items until they start to rot, and eats baby food "because you don't have to cook it... [or] chew on it."

However, despite her poor math and spelling skills, Gura is quick-witted, clever, and has vast knowledge of Shark Facts. When questioned on why she was not "boing boing," she excused it by claiming that she was "hydrodynamic." Her skill with fast-paced rhythm games is exceptional, and she is highly ambitious. She also occasionally makes lewd jokes, and is familiar with modern meme culture, which she references often.

Background
On 23 April 2020, following the success of the Japanese-language hololive VTuber group, Cover Corporation announced auditions for English-speaking members. The initial round of auditions ran until 24 May.

During her audition, Gura drew a cute character in a "power stance" with their hands on their hips, which she credited as setting a good impression. Gura recalls being asked about the SCP Foundation, a wiki of articles describing fictional artifacts and beings, although she had to admit that she didn't know what it was.

Gawr Gura's design was known to other members of holoEN as early as 2 July 2020, when Amelia Watson drew the first ever piece of Gawr Gura fanart. This was not the finalized design, however, and an unspecified design change was made before Gura's debut. Gura's YouTube channel was created on 16 July 2020, and her Twitter account in the same month. Internal pre-debut test streams were conducted between all members of hololive English, where in one case a bug caused Gura to spawn in without any clothes.

On 8 September 2020, Ninomae Ina'nis was first revealed in a short promotional video alongside the other four members of hololive -Myth-. A simultaneous announcement was made at the hololive Twitter account, and the hololive English Twitter account. At the same time, Gura made her first tweet, famously consisting of the single letter "a."

Debut
Gura's debut stream was scheduled for 12 September 2020 at 2PM PDT, although she was 12 minutes and 32 seconds late to her own debut stream due to a technical issue. She was the fourth of the five original members of hololive English to debut on the same day. Over 45,000 viewers tuned in to watch the event, in which she wowed viewers with a rendition of Tatsuro Yamashita's 1980 city pop single Ride on Time.

In a six-month review of her debut, she described being so nervous that she could feel her heart beat in her head, and had stomach problems as she was too nervous to eat before the stream. Prior to the stream, she watched the debut videos of a number of hololive Japan streamers in order to prepare.

The debut events were concluded with the first hololive English collaboration event at 6:35PM PDT, in which Gura streamed together with the other four members of hololive English.

2020
Gura quickly rose in popularity, becoming the fastest-growing VTuber ever, gaining 100,000 new subscribers every two to five days. On 20 October, just 37 days after her debut, Gura overtook both Shirakami Fubuki and Inugami Korone to become the #1 most subscribed hololive VTuber on YouTube.

On 22 October, Gura became the first hololive member to reach 1,000,000 subscribers, the third VTuber overall after Kizuna AI and Kaguya Luna, and the first English-speaker ever to do so.

On 30 November, Gura reached 1,500,000 YouTube subscribers.

2021
On 17 January, Gura reached 2,000,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel, being the first hololive member to do so and the second VTuber ever to reach that milestone after Kizuna Ai.

On 22 January, Gura celebrated her 2,000,000 subscriber milestone with a karaoke stream.

On 1 April, all holoMyth members revealed new chibi models based on popular fan designs by Walfie.

On 14 April, Gura reached 2.5 million YouTube subscribers.

On 30 April, hololive's Twitter account announced that every member of holoMyth would get their second 2D costumes.

On 6 May, Gura debuted her second 2D costume, in this costume Gura has cat ears and her hair is styled with a side ponytail, her clothes consist of a white blouse and a blue jumpsuit skirt, her skirt as the design that resembles a shark's mouth open on the side, Gura also has a bag with a really similar design. This debut was at the time the stream with the largest simultaneous viewer count of any VTuber in history, peaking at 194,280 concurrent viewers. It was later surpassed by Kiryu Coco's graduation live stream which was held on 1 July.

On 18 June, Gura reached 1 million Twitter followers.

On 20 June, Gura celebrated her birthday with a Jaws movie watch-along and a birthday stream in which she released merchandise: a squishy cheek mouse pad, T-shirt, voice pack and unique postcard illustrated by Icomochi. During the birthday stream she also announced that she would debut her first original song "REFLECT" on 22 June at midnight, local time.

On 22 June, Gura released her first original song "REFLECT" on YouTube. It surpassed 1,000,000 views in 10 hours and 25 minutes after its premiere.

On 30 June, Gura's subscriber count on YouTube officially passed that of Kizuna AI's, making Gura the most subscribed VTuber in any streaming platform in the world.

On 4 July, Gura reached 3,000,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel, being the first hololive member, as well as the first VTuber in the world, to reach this milestone. Earlier on that same day, her song "REFLECT" surpassed 5,000,000 views on her YouTube channel.

On 12 September, during Myth's 1 year anniversary celebration, the group revealed the group's official logo and they announced that every member would get their third 2D model.

On 14 September, Gura hosted a Super Mario Party collab stream with Houshou Marine, Minato Aqua, and Ninomae Ina'nis (as well as A-chan providing translation), and at the end of the stream, it was announced that they would form a new unit "UMISEA," in which all four members sharing the theme of ocean. Several videos and streams featuring the unit is set to release throughout mid-September.

On 20 October, she reached 3,500,000 YouTube subscribers.

Discography

 * ''Main page: Gawr Gura/Discography

Events

 * On 12 March 2021, as part of their six months celebration the holoMyth members announced that they would get an official BGM image soundtrack featuring Camellia, with a release date of 14 March. The song inspired by Gura is titled "Sharkventure!!"
 * On 23 June 2021, hololive's Japanese Twitter account announced that every holoMyth member would appear in "Anime Expo Lite 2021" throughout 3 July and 4 July 2021.
 * On 29 September 2021, DoKomi's Twitter account announced that Gura and Ninomae Ina'nis would appear in "DigiKomi."

Mascots and Fans



 * Gura's mascot is named Bloop, a "long time friend who stays in a bubble 'for the better'." Bloop has an "emergency ration" 「非常食」 can on his head. According to Gura in a multiple-choice question, Bloop is emergency food. And in other instances, she has implied that Bloop isn't exactly a morally upstanding individual, and is likely bordering on evil based on how she described his plush version.
 * Unlike the rest of the holoMyth mascots, Bloop was designed by Gura's artist Amashiro Natsuki, as seen in her concept illustration. However Ina made the design for the chibi version.
 * Bloop shares its name with the Bloop, an ultra-low-frequency, high amplitude underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1997. Previously thought to have been caused by a marine animal, it is now believed to have been caused by movement of glaciers.
 * Her fanbase are officially called "Chumbuds."
 * Her channel members are referred to as MemberShrimp. This is a reference to Gura seeing her chat use the word "simp," to which she replied "I just saw the word 'simp' go by. What is simp? Do you mean shrimp?" Calling monetary supporters of VTubers "shrimps" has spread beyond Gura's fans, particularly after streaming platform Twitch banned the word "simp."

Quotes

 * "a."
 * "Shaaaaaark!"
 * "See, sometimes, in life, you try and hit life with a 'hoocha!', but then life decides to hit you with a 'hoocha!'. You know what you do, in this predicament? When life hoochas you? You go AGAIN!"
 * "Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. You know what? Not every adventure comes to a happy ending. Sometimes you just gotta retrace, go back, and start over."
 * (On 12 November 2020) "It's officially Christmas!"
 * "I don't know, maybe it's not great progress compared to other people, but I'm happy with my progress. And you know what? Quite frankly, that's all that matters. If you spend too much time worrying about, you know, other people's progress and how it matches up to yours then... I don't know, you might forget what really matters, and that's your progress, you know?"
 * "You can't be mad at me... I'm cute!"
 * "Bodka. Vodka. Spasibo? Boodka. Vodka. VAAdka. Bodka? Vohdka. Boodka, bood- *clears throat* bAAH-dke. Uh, hmm-hm-hm-ha. *inhales* nyAaAaAAeeeyoouh eugh agh *exhales* nice. Ni- Uup! Mic on. Hiii!"

Name

 * In Japanese, Gura's name is written 「がうる・ぐら」 ("gauru gura").
 * She gives her surname first, Japanese style, even when speaking in English. Takanashi Kiara and Ninomae Ina'nis also do this, while Calliope Mori and Amelia Watson use the English name order when speaking in English.
 * Gura is the only member of holoMyth to write her name entirely in hiragana. This is consistent with her childlike demeanor and academic skills, since hiragana-only writing is usually reserved for children's books.
 * Her surname Gawr comes from the gar, an ancient holosteian order of ray-finned fish. Her first name Gura comes from the Latin gula, meaning "gluttony."

Lore

 * Gura comes from Atlantis, an ancient lost underwater city appearing in legend. On her first solo stream on 13 September 2020, in which she played the shark simulator game Maneater, she said that Atlantis didn't have French fries, so she's not interested in returning.
 * Atlantis does not have many laws in the same manner as modern land nations. However, punishments are more severe, including public executions at a colosseum. Gura described once seeing a person eaten alive by a megalodon. A major conflict took place around 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, involving something about seashells.
 * Various underwater species live there. Giant hermit crabs engage in racing, and can move surprisingly quickly. Lobster people also exist.
 * Food in Atlantis is healthy, but boring, consisting mainly of fish and seaweed.
 * In the Fish Tank, Gura revealed that Atlantis has been gone for thousands of years, and now only ruins exist. Visiting them is difficult due to the high ocean pressure at this depth. Ame hopes to visit it one day when the flat earth tips over and all the water spills out.
 * Her birthday, 20 June, is the same date the 1975 film Jaws was released. Gura says that this is not her actual birthday (which she cannot remember), but rather the anniversary of her arrival on land after she left Atlantis.
 * Gura names her own species as "Gura shark." During one of her Fall Guys streams, she joked that "Gura" was an acronym for "Giant Underwater Rubber Animal."
 * Later she stated that she doesn't quite know what kind of shark she is, but she probably was the descendent of one of the big ones. She went on to list the megalodon, great white and salmon shark as some of the possibilities.
 * The clapping sound often heard in her streams can be attributed to her tail thrashing around excitedly.
 * Gura attributes the stitches in her tail to an event long ago where her tail was trapped beneath a boulder in an underwater ravine. She cannot remember how she got the bite marks in her tail.
 * Her skin doesn't get wrinkly no matter how matter how long she stays in the bath.

Gura's age

 * Gura has trouble remembering her own age.
 * In her debut stream, she first gave her age as "somewhere in the 9,000s [...] I'll go with 9,361, yeah, we'll go with that. Once you get past around the 5k mark, [...] it starts to blur. But I wouldn't expect humans to understand that." She then immediately forgot the age she just gave, saying "I don't remember what I said, let's pick another number," and selected 9,927.
 * On 13 October 2020, she gave her age as 4,295, 9,495, and 9,485.
 * In a Ring Fit stream, she entered her age as "99" because it only accepts two digits.
 * In a six-month rewatch of her debut, she gave 9,492, saying "It's always different, and it always will be." Gura quoted the famous meme "It's over 9,000!," a well-known reference to Dragonball Z.
 * In her first birthday stream on 20 June 2021, she had a birthday card wishing her a happy 9,485th birthday.
 * In her 2021 birthday collab stream, she claimed to be 9,655, then agreed when Anya Melfissa said 9,600.

Likes and dislikes

 * She likes food. She also enjoys a hobby known in Atlantis as "PWWIE" (people watching without intent to eat), but she claims humans don't taste good so viewers don't have to worry.
 * When Moona Hoshinova joked during a Minecraft stream that she wanted to turn Gura into shark soup and Watson Amelia commented that "It's a good thing detectives aren't very tasty," Gura replied with "I beg to differ, I beg to differ." Unless she was joking, this implies that detectives taste better than normal humans.
 * Her favorite food is salmon, which she has misspelled as "salman." She enjoys drinking a carton of "salmon milk." She also likes eating pizza, McDonald's hamburgers, mint chocolate chip ice cream, and baby food.
 * Gura's favorite games are Muse Dash, Taiko no Tatsujin, Rhythm Heaven, Borderlands, and Resident Evil. Her favorite video game in her childhood was Barbie Horse Adventures: Wild Horse Rescue.
 * She likes Konosuba and even had the pleasure to read the entirety of volume 1 on stream in partnership with Bookwalker. Her audience also took pleasure in knowing the stream doubled as an audiobook as the series has yet to have an English release in the format.
 * Gura especially has an affinity for cowboy and wild west culture, such as ranch animals like horses and grubs, instruments such as banjos and a preference for revolvers/six-shooters.
 * Gura dislikes hot sand, and her biggest fear is having people hear her stomach noises (which she wrote in her debut stream as "loud stomak").
 * Her favorite color is blue.
 * Gura's favorite type of shark, other than herself, is the salmon shark.
 * Gura is close friends with Watson Amelia. In one stream, Gura sang You Are My Sunshine but changed the lyrics to be about Amelia. The pair often collab together and are most commonly shipped together under the name #amesame.
 * Gura hates wearing pants. She has even given the question "If you could get away with not wearing pants, would you?" as her reason before jokingly shouting "BAN PANTS!" on stream, though has noted it does indeed get in the way of her tail. However, she has said she doesn't mind wearing skirts.

Gura's antics

 * Gura is famous for her mathematical miscalculations, once saying: "Numbers, the numbers! I'm bad with the numbers, we know this!" She once calculated that 9+10 equals 11; 2020-2011 equals 10; half of twelve is 5; 9x9 equals 36; and that 5x5 equals 35.
 * She has a poor sense of direction, and has difficulty telling left from right. In their first five-member Minecraft collab, sent the entire hololive EN digging for 20 minutes in the wrong direction because she misread a map. Later, while giving Ina directions, she hit a block with a pickaxe to direct her rather than use the word "left".
 * Gura often misspells or mispronounces words. In her debut stream, she misspelled salmon as "salman" (leading to a fan comic where Gura eats a fast food deliveryman named Salman), stomach as "stomak," Twitter as "Tiwtter," and twister as "tiwster. "She once pronounced "almond milk" as "Ame milk." She spelled "iron" as "arm," "baby pickaxe" as "babie picaxe," and mispronounced "she will die" as "she while dee." She claimed not to recognize the term "simp," which she corrected to "shrimp," although that might have been a joke. In recent streams, her spelling has been much better, though she can still fumble over her words sometimes.
 * She once mistook bread for a potato.
 * She has a habit of jinxing herself, also known as "tempting fate;" there are many instances of her confidently making a statement only for it to immediately backfire on her. In Among Us, she said "Somebody kill someone! Not me, right?" immediately before being killed by Ame; in the first Minecraft collab, while watching Kiara dangerously build over a ravine, she said "eh, she's got it" right before Kiara fell; and in Left 4 Dead 2 she taunted a zombie by saying "he can't climb," only to be proven wrong a few seconds later. Inversely, she is starting to become aware of her jinxing so Gura jinxes herself into the lead positions of Mario Kart by saying how terrible she is going to do.
 * Before her debut, there was an incident known as the "Naked Gura Incident" in which the other HoloEN members saw her without her clothes on. This was almost certainly due to a technical issue, but that hasn't stopped them from teasing her for it.
 * During her "Bathtub Pizza" stream, Gura explained that people from Atlantis don't wear clothes because they're underwater, so she showed up naked thinking that people on land don't wear clothing all the time, only to discover she was "under-dressed, to say the least." She has since then learned about wearing clothes.
 * Gura has also gone to say she hates wearing pants and prefers to be naked. Though she has said she won't mind wearing skirts.
 * Affectionately referred to as "Same-chan" (サメちゃん) by Japanese audiences, Gura regularly charms her senior members of hololive with her cuteness and kindness, sometimes making them act unlike their usual selves. For example:
 * Gura sent a private video message to Murasaki Shion in which she sang a special birthday song in Japanese, causing her to abandon her typical bratty attitude to gush about Gura's cuteness.
 * In another instance when her chat was poking fun at Gura's chest, Uruha Rushia tried to protect Gura by redirecting the "flat" jokes towards herself, even though she would normally respond to such jokes with death threats.
 * Shirogane Noel, who normally only has eyes for Shiranui Flare, tried to learn English purely to both meet and cuddle with Gura like a body pillow.
 * Fellow holoEN member Ninomae Ina'nis, usually gentle and even-tempered, says that anyone who makes Gura cry will "face the wrath of Ina" and "won't see the light of day." She made the same promise for all of the holoEN girls, although tears of joy are an exception.

Miscellaneous

 * At 141 cm, Gura is the second shortest member of hololive as a whole, next to Himemori Luna's 140.
 * At debut, she described her goals as playing Twister with the other holoMyths in a 3D collaboration, playing the scariest horror games with a heart rate monitor, and learning to play the banjo.
 * As of her 6-month anniversary rewatch of her debut, she has been learning the banjo and still wants to accomplish the other two goals, with the horror game possibly being Resident Evil Village or Outlast 3 when they are released.
 * Gura amazed viewers in her debut by singing "Ride on Time" by Tatsuro Yamashita, impressing them with her singing skill, music taste, and flawless Japanese pronunciation (despite not actually being fluent in Japanese). This is the origin of her nickname "City Pop Shark."
 * Gura's first tweet was the single letter "a."
 * After being 15 minutes late to her own debut, Gura looked around for a few moments, said "a" with reverb, and and cut back to the intro animation. This joke was well-received by the audience, and "a" became her most recognized meme.
 * Gura used to begin streams with a "shark fact" - a random piece of shark-themed trivia. The facts varied from actual trivia about sharks to nonsensical/humorous bits she could come up with on the spot. During a Japanese-language lesson stream, Takanashi Kiara suggested that "shark fact" in Japanese should translate to "same chishiki" (a pun on "mame chishiki," a Japanese idiom literally meaning "a bean of knowledge"). During a German-language lesson stream in March 2021, Kiara complained about the lack of shark facts in recent streams.
 * One particular shark fact of note that is that sharks eat each other in the womb. This particularly gruesome fact seems to carry over to shark people as well, as Gura slipped in her Dead by Daylight collab with Anya and has "threatened" Kiara of the possibility when playing Uno cards.
 * She claims that she is not "boing boing" (an onomatopoeia for "big-breast" popularized by Uruha Rushia), because aquatic beings need to be hydrodynamic.
 * While Gura doesn't mind being called flat, or even pretends to be offended for fun, she will eventually become irritated at her audience's lack of originality if they keep repeating the same jokes, causing her to bite back with thick layers of sarcasm.
 * She can get hiccups from laughing too much.
 * Before debut, Gura attempted to coin the catchphrase "sha-ha-ha-ark," a sort of iconic laugh, which she used once in her debut stream. It didn't work well, and was quickly abandoned.
 * Gura initially planned to keep her hat on for the entire debut, and keep her twintails a secret for as long as possible, to reveal at a later date. During the debut, she decided to reveal it anyway.
 * Gura is sometimes referred to as a Samegaki, a play on "gaki" archetypes of cute poorly behaving loli characters (such as Mesugaki or Kusogaki) sometimes found in anime and lolicon. She is sometimes referred to this when she does something underhanded such as cheating a head start in Mario Kart.
 * Gura has a pet cat named "Pita," who likes to crawl into her armpit.
 * Gawr Gura's intro theme was originally commissioned for Watson Amelia. Ame ended up not using the music, so Gura used it instead.
 * Although Gura's fan mark is officially 🔱 (trident, representing the one present in her official render), she is also represented by the emoji 🦈 (shark) on some occasion (particularly on A-chan's schedule tweets).

Media

 * Gawr Gura Ch. hololive-EN - YouTube channel
 * Gawr Gura's corporate profile on hololive.hololivepro.com (EN)
 * Gawr Gura's corporate profile on hololive.hololivepro.com (JP)
 * Gawr Gura's corporate profile on hololive.tv (EN)
 * Gawr Gura's corporate profile on hololive.tv (JP)
 * @gawrgura - Twitter account

Twitter hashtags

 * #gawrgura - General / Stream talk
 * #gawrt - Fan art
 * #chumbuds - Fans