You know, I think it's hilarious that people still cling onto this false hope that English vtubing isn't a completely dead medium (and has arguably been dead ever since middle of 2022 if we're being super duper pedantic) and are now forcing these memes like "oh yeah indies are gonna reclaim us from the corpo toxic sludge" while also ignoring that the ENTIRE reason indies could even persist in the EOP hellscape is due to corpos branching out in the first place. Now that PLs are openly discussed, now that T___r has made this board ostensibly just a giant playpen or a bait breeding ground dependent on time of day and general mood, now that the wool has been lifted from our eyes and everyone is at least tacitly aware of prevalent viewbotting + astroturfing + grifting economics and how much they seem to acutely affect Western vtubing while being suspiciously absent overseas (at the very least not to an extent that anyone would fuss about it due to the audience still outnumbering the West in terms of actually watching screams, buying merch, not responding to obvious antis, not being a fucking retard in general) And now you've also got this weird psyop where despite half of the currently active indies being literally part of agencies and playing the same sponsored games, sticking to strict schedules, participating in gay events which are simultaneously pushed as open to anyone but are also forever cursed with the foreknowledge that a literal fucking Discord server will gatekeep and girlboss and force actual fake drama if you DARE exceed past the predetermined numbers they will allow you to "leech" (acting word because there currently doesn't exist a word in English to adequately describe what could be considered CCV cannibalism when in actuality most of these people never had any content worth watching in the first place and all of their dedicated viewers may as well have them muted on a second monitor and their phone effectively no different from botting) That brief period where 2views were actually unironically putting in more effort than 3/4/5views has passed mostly because not a single one managed to go beyond 3view status because as it turns out being like Geega and just absorbing general aspects of nerd culture and vomiting them back out as endless non-sequiturs and/or being like Doki and just existing as a pressure release valve for people who feel personally wronged by Anycolor despite the entire story being a complete fucking lie and/or being like the people who united like the Vtuber Avengers against Cinder (Sinder? Who fucking cares no one even watched her prior to muh dramatuber rerun where the end result is typical "woman all bad moment but because I'm actually feminist and refuse to just watch brotubers I will keep feeding into the content environment which facilitates woman all bad moments teehee silly!!") you can't actually evolve as a content creator, or if you do you'll just end up as a glorified sitter for people who are mystery meat IRL and have not even a fraction of the creativity of some random JP neet who can pump out fanart, make timestamps for every individual stream while also making sure to hang onto your every word even though you haven't actually said anything in five minutes and are just making moaning noises while you game. Which reminds me, even if all of this seems like complete formless nonsense to you let's be honest, like let's just rip the bandaid off right now and acknowledge that even after the strange decision to abandon VR Chat as a suitable method for most vtuber streams (unless you're Fillian who is already irrelevant due to being less of an actual person with thoughts and feelings than Neuro and is more just like an even more autistic version of Zentreya aka vtuber Forsen in which the whole stream solely exists because the uncontrollable chat mogs the streamer) and in addition to HoloEN & NijiEN being now more known for *spoony voice* BETRAYYYAALLLLL you just cannot ignore the piss poor game selection vtubers all seem to have now. It is legitimately not feasible for them to just turn on Donkey Kong Country or Need for Speed Underground or F.E.A.R. because even in the absence of MUH PERMS (which everyone also seemingly knows is a lie but just ignores because "management hecking bad always belive all women even when after graduating they stick to the same games") everyone sticks to the same games.