A hololive VTuber lands a TV opening: Tsunomaki Watame sings “Respawn!!”

The staff of “Nia Liston: The Merciless Maiden” announced on August 12 that the show's opening theme is called “Respawn!!” and is performed by Tsunomaki Watame, a member of hololive. The announcement came with a new visual. The series premieres October 6 on Tokyo MX at 9:25 p.m. Japan time, then on BS NTV and MBS; outside Japan, HIDIVE streams it as it airs.

The story isn't the novelty of a VTuber singing — Watame has been releasing music for years — but the slot she got: the opening of a late-night TV series, with the song announced as the campaign's centerpiece, the same way a band or a label solo artist gets announced. That is a different rung from an image song or a one-off collaboration.

For listeners in LATAM, the practical effect is a catalog one. Anime themes get published on the usual platforms, but VTuber work lives scattered across digital releases, YouTube channels and Japanese physical editions; when one of those voices takes an opening, she also enters the circuit where the rest of the fandom runs into her without looking.

One question stays open, and nobody can answer it with data today: whether the bridge works both ways. An opening pulls listeners toward the artist's channel, but there isn't enough of a track record yet to know whether those listeners stay. We'll look again in October, when the song is playing week after week.