Mori Calliope

A virtual YouTube persona (“VTuber”) created by hololive, perky, English-speaking pop-rapper Mori Calliope debuted on the platform in 2020. She had two million subscribers by the time she delivered her first solo album, UnAlive, in early 2022. The follow-up, Sinderella, appeared before the end of the year and landed in the Top 20 of Billboard’s Heatseekers chart.
A Hololive Production (stylized hololive) creation, Mori Calliope made her Internet debut in September 2020 alongside the company’s first English-speaking generation of VTubers: Ninomae Ina’nis, Takanashi Kiara, Watson Amelia, and Gawr Gura, collectively known as Myth (or holoMyth). The cast members won auditions earlier in the year that were inspired by the success of hololive’s Japanese-language virtual experiments. The voice behind Mori Calliope had been performing music for small audiences for several years and heard about the audition through friends. After landing the part, training began in June 2020, and her YouTube and Twitter accounts appeared in July. Mori Calliope’s debut stream of the original rap song “RIP♥” (aka “Excuse My Rudeness, But Could You Please RIP?”) appeared on September 12, 2020. Within a month, she had a half-million subscribers. Tracks like “Cursed Night” and “Douten Hitsuji,” a collaboration with Tsunomaki Watame, followed before the end of the year, as did the EP Dead Beats.
She hit a million subscribers in early 2021 and delivered second EP Your Mori in April. Mori and Rikka (of Holostars, Generation One) paired up for May 2021’s “spiral tones,” and with her subscriber count still climbing, Mori appeared on Myth’s first original song as a group, “Myth or Treat,” that Halloween. It was followed by the release of Your Mori (Lo-fi Edition), in collaboration with dj-Jo. Second Myth song “Journey Like a Thousand Years” premiered in January 2022, and Mori Calliope reached two million subscribers before releasing her first solo album, UnAlive, in March.
The character’s male persona, Calvin Mori, emerged in April of 2022 and went on to release a series of songs including “C-MAN.” Mori Calliope made her Universal Music Group debut with the EP Shinigami Note in July 2022. Members of Myth appeared at Anime Festival Asia in September, and Mori Calliope’s second solo full-length, Sinderella, arrived in December 2022 and debuted at number 11 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart. In the meantime, some of Myth’s splinter groups included TakaMori (Mori and Takanashi Kiara), Bone Bros. (Mori and Gawr Gura), and MoRikka (Mori and Rikka). ~ Marcy Donelson