>>12874624My serious blog post answer/theory:
We're at the tail-end of the first Vtuber boom to reach the anglosphere.
When previous booms happened, the people exposed by them were all either japs or turbo weebs (I recommend checking old /jp/ threads), which meant they could engage with the new trends much faster and directly. There was a bunch of garbage, too, but also the idea that there was such a thing as a "Vtuber culture" and what that meant was up for grabs.
In the case of the late-2019/2020 boom, The west ended up being drawn into it. The issue was that communication was done through a bunch of filters: language barrier, clippers, anime tropes that easied people into it and the duopoly of Nijisanji and Hololive as rule-setters (in practice a Hololive monopoly by the second half of 2020).
This messy contact, in turn, created a Vtuber boom of its own that's exclusive to the west (#ENVtuber on any platform and such). But this only cemented those previous filters and carved them into stone. So, the new english speaking Vtubers all feed of the same references, the same rules, the same tropes that were all imported from Japan through a bunch of SEA redditors and chinese weebs back in 2019, and there's a feeling they are all stuck there.
