Your local sun dragon, Hare!
Hare is a cheerful sun dragon who lives on an isolated island with his companion of mysterious origin, Chibi Ryuu. In reality though, he's my VTuber mascot- named after and inspired by this very website. After 4 years of turbulent and often inconsistent streams, Hare's Twitch broadcast has finally stabilized. This "meta" page functions to talk about the character, his lore and gags, and share art made by myself and others. You can see my "grand return" stream above!
The Obvious Place to Start
Hare was conceptualized in the first half of 2021, with his first Live2D model being completed that August. I didn't stream for several months following that- I was mentally recovering from a cyberstalking incident and struggled to "go live" without worrying about being found somehow. Cut to November 29th, and I was finally ready to give it a go. I had exactly one chatter (my friend Ambrosia) and was streaming on a laptop with a headset mic. In the following days and weeks, I would end up meeting several other VTubers, and then befriending them in the coming months. The first one was my friend Vaan, who I was the first Twitch subscriber for and continue to mod for. 2022 was the strongest year for my stream for a very long time- I streamed almost weekly, had friends on and stuff like that. It also marked the beginning of my annual Art Fight streams that July, the one staple of my yearly schedule. I should also comment that my friend Ambrosia eventually became my go-to background artist.
The Enigmatic Chibi Ryuu
There are a lot of mysteries and confusion surrounding Hare's companion Chibi Ryuu. Originally a bongo cat plugin edit for Muse Dash streams, he's cultivated quite a reputation and stands alone as his own character after all this time. The entire gag with Chibi Ryuu is that there's intentionally no explanation for his presence around, or relation to Hare. It might seem obvious that he's related to Hare, what with his name deliberately playing on the name of Chibiusa from Sailor Moon. But some speculate that he may be a "low power" mode of Hare, after claims of Hare "transforming into" him were made. The truth is, there isn't an answer. Chibi Ryuu's strength as a character lies in his quiet and vague presentation, so it would be boring to simply decide "he's this or that". What is known is that he's more proficient at gaming than Hare.
Being a mascot and my oc, Hare has a fair amount of physical goodies, a couple merch items and even an Ukagaka. Most items are personal and one of a kind, others are distributed for free or minimum profit. These include a paper weaving "Orb" by PaperofTimes, a felt doll by Pikopilled, two of a kind keychains by MarennIvy, and two prints. He also has a custom photo card by my best friend. The Hare ukagaka was drawn by chu_chuns here on Neocities and coded by me, you can grab him from the video above. As well, Hare has MANY drawings by myself and others- either traded for or commissioned. He has a bit of a reputation for having an excessive amount of VTuber models and PNGTubers... the truth is, this behavior started with all my non-vtuber ocs, and just extended to him. I don't even want to think about how much money I've spent passionately on Hare, but it must be in the thousands of dollars over the years. No regrets lol.
Other Assorted Facts
There are various bits of trivia and "lore" about Hare, mostly inconsequential info that provides a bit of a glance into his living circumstances and history. So here are some of those!
-Hare lives in a pocket dimension in a fantasized version of the Dragon's Triangle off the coast of Japan. It's like the Bermuda Triangle, and all of his belongings are scavenged from the wrecks of cruiseliners that mysteriously went missing in the area. This is where his clothes, furniture, and any other things come from!
-Hare and Chibi Ryuu are sustained by a magical fishing pond on the island, it seems to never stop spawning in tasty fish for them to enjoy. Chibi Ryuu fishes like a bear, and Hare uses a makeshift rod that he built. Hare is generally very crafty and has built several tools to make sustaining themselves easy.
-Hare's proudest achievement of engineering is managing to brute force build a solar powered laptop using salvaged computer parts. It took him a REALLY long time and lots of good luck to get critical components that weren't destroyed by the water they washed up in. He bums interdimensional fast food wifi to use the internet and communicate when his friends are away.
For the sake of brevity, I'll only be providing insight on my current arsenal of models right now. I may come back and do the classic ones later on, but the current selection is more representative of me anyways. You can see a gallery of all models and pngs here!