On Sunday, August 7th, I had the opportunity to talk one-on-one with hololive ID’s own Kureiji Ollie at a fan event held for Crunchyroll Expo 2022. As I sat in line waiting for the hall doors to open, I was surrounded by the chattering of excited voices waiting to their favorite hololive talents. Two lines stood side-by-side, the one I stood in awaiting Ollie, and the one to my right, packed with fans awaiting Gawr Gura, another hololive talent. The voices deafened, when another perked up. The doors were about to open, and we would be soon face-to-digital-representation-of-a-face with the one-and-only Kureiji Ollie.

My time with Ollie ran a little longer than it was supposed to. From my time in line, it seemed that the event was plagued by technical issues – though each one very minor, they appeared frequent in pattern – but the mood in the room never waivered. Staff were incredibly friendly and helpful, and respectful of the guests as the guests were to staff. All of this to say that I’m almost certain my time ran longer due to either an unannounced issue, or a staff worried that those issues might have negatively affected the experience otherwise. But I would have been happy with the experience regardless, partly as a fan, but mostly because of the constant effort from everyone there to ensure that things ran smoothly.

I was ushered to the far left corner of the room to meet Ollie, who took no time to ask my name and quickly find some common ground to open up on. She spoke a great deal about her love for streaming as a vtuber and how happy the job makes her, and what it feels like to have fans around the world. Long-time viewers of her stream will be aware of her ability to speak to English, Japanese, and Indonesian fans in their native languages at a speed that makes every sentence feel almost simultaneous. But not far into the conversation, we settled on chess.

In July of 2021, Kureiji Ollie participated in Chess.com’s official “Tournament Arc 2”, an online chess tournament that pitted popular streamers against each other. On the very first day of the tournament, Ollie was placed against streamer Kizzie_Kay for the very first match of the day. What followed was a match so erratic that it trended on twitter after the event. Ollie took an early point, but seemed to be outmatched until blunder after blunder left Kizzie_Kay leading round two into a draw, and round three into an overall win for Ollie. It was that match that we talked about for most of my time with her, and despite her repeated insistence that her skill at chess was poor, everything else she said told me the opposite. It’s clear she still holds an affinity for chess, as she described to me why the London Opening was her favorite, and why it’s clearly the superior chess opening (because CDawgVA uses it).