That looks pre-recorded, and the second person talking with Lina is clearly following a script, I don't think they could do it that well on one sitting, and the animations are probably not automatic.

Probably some pre-recorded, agreed upon advertisement to promote a new channel.

She said she did that by using his stream key which she somehow obtained from his computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effHrj0qmwk&lc=UgzNfomvdiD0j...

Well then it must be legit. Who among us hasn't accidentally leaked a cryptographic secret key to a screeching vtuber who has the exact same accent as we do.

Ok ok you've got a point. I'm probably too naive to take someone like Marcan at his word.

Even if you had the stream key¹, I wouldn’t expect you to be able to take over a stream with that kind of clean cutting from marcan to loading throbber to Asahi Lina. Without any knowledge of what YouTube Live actually does about conflicting input streams, I would expect the takeover to (a) be instant, (b) fail, or (c) produce a garbled mess. What the thirteen second throbber delay would be adequate for is starting up whatever software you need to play the part of Asahi Lina.

I have no specific knowledge, but it seems very clear to me that at the very least marcan is a collaborator in the persona of Asahi Lina; and absent further contrary evidence, them being the same makes sense.

—⁂—

¹ And if stream key exfiltration actually happened, I find it hard to imagine anything but acrimony arising.

This line at the end of the article also indicates that Asahi Lina either is marcan, or is personally directly and proportionally sponsored by marcan.

> If you want to support my work, you can donate to marcan’s Asahi Linux support fund on GitHub Sponsors or Patreon, which helps me out too!

Yeah so that's called a joke.