>>5856083>Ai made her way in a market before vtubing was really a thing.Except the fact that it was very much a thing within the anime community once more people learned about Kizuna, especially during the VRChat era. Just because it didn't hit your zoomer Discord social club doesn't mean people didn't know about vtubing before HoloEN. Yes Vtubing was a lot more corporate back then, but that's essentially because no one knew what to do with Vtubing aside from making skits. Vtubers were still relatively popular.
Clipfags and the fact Vtubers within Hololive and Nijisanji started to become streamers instead of sending out 3-20 minute videos is the reason the overseas market grew, Coco's "bridge" or even Gura didn't really do much except spread the word even further to something that already had a healthy enough popularity. If anything, vtubers like Aqua should be praised for bringing in that market, since bi-weekly gaming streams was a foreign concept until she started to do them more in 2019.
