>>59556745You have to remember that this hobby started in /jp/. In 2016-17.
Kizuna Ai was a big thing that attracted a lot of people back then, but the majority of chuuba content was Japanese at the time.
This means that even as far as back then, there was a general culture of "doing your reps" because the options for EOPs were so limited (and well, EOPs tended to be retards who believe literally anything posted in Japanese).
I think it was during 2018-19 that Youtube community CC feature grew in popularity and became a means through which EOPs could consume chuuba content.
But that got trashed by Youtube, and /jp/fags once again reminded the EOPs that doing your reps was pretty much a requirement to enjoy chuubas.
This culture carried over to late 2019 - early 2020. Asacoco was a funny program pandering more to western humor, but it was entirely in Japanese for the first 3-4 months.
And even after April when Coco started adding CC to it, the subtitles would usually take 24-48 hours to be uploaded - by which time most of the board would've moved on to the next episode or the next stream.
/jp/ only allowed 1(ONE) VTuber thread for the longest time (/vyt/). For most of 2019 it was dominated by Nijisanji, but as Hololive grew, there was an eventual split into Hololive-Nijisanji thanks to the nijijanny interfering a lot with hololive discussion. The legacy of /vyt/'s random shitflinging fights over the OP that would take up half the thread is the reason the spiritual successor of /vyt/ (this thread) uses non VTuber OPs so that no one can whine about it.
Western VTubers were a literal non-entity in this scenario, simply due to the main discussion boards for chuubas being at /jp/. Maybe some of them were in other boards but I'm not really aware of any of them having enough mindshare to be discussed. It's only when /vt/ was created that there opened up a space to discuss /vsj/ and other small corpos.
There were of course, EOP friendly chuubas who spoke in English occasionally - Hana Macchia and Pikamee were the main ones at the time. But until Myth came into the scene, western VTubing was pretty much dead in the water.
