Nekoda Pepero Returns After Two-Month Break, Citing Medication Side Effect

MASQUERADE — Nekoda Pepero of Masquerade (2nd Generation) returned to streaming on Monday after about two months away, telling viewers that a medication she had taken for roughly six months caused the mood swings and low spirits behind her sudden break. She stopped taking it, she said, and recovered quickly.

Opening in her maid persona, Pepero apologized for the worry and inconvenience, then worked through a list of talk topics. She said she had been unusually irritable and had broken into tears during a meeting with her manager, who then halted all her work and removed her access to her social media accounts that same day. She spent about a week unable to get out of bed. Doctors she visited could not pinpoint the problem until a routine prescription visit turned up the side effect, which she said is rarely seen and is listed in small print on the drug’s instructions. Her manager suggested treating the break as paid leave while the drug left her system and a replacement was tried. The break was the first of her five years of activity.

“Please let me keep being a VTuber.” — Nekoda Pepero, while reading viewer messages

She described spending the later weeks of the break close to home. A friend introduced her to slot machines, which she treated as a kind of work, setting herself a fixed stake and a rule to stop for good if she lost it. She said she came out ahead, then grew tired of them. She also moved to a larger apartment a short distance from her old one, and her younger brother, who had just moved to Tokyo, helped her out. A broken external drive during the move wiped her streaming software data, which she said is why a stream planned for Sunday did not happen.

Pepero said she would bring in a new routine of ASMR after each stream, running until midnight, with a goal of keeping it up for a month. She said her birthday stream, which she had planned for late September, is still to come on a date she did not give, and that she plans to return to her usual schedule, with another stream the next day. Chat filled with welcome-back messages in the opening minutes, and viewers sent 64 Super Chats, which she read near the end.

She closed by saying she felt fully recovered, and said she planned to see viewers again the next day.