>>1554601It misses the most obvious and important point: people started watching virtual streamers en mass once they appeared all of a sudden, because it was giving them something that theretofore wasn't being given to them by prior media. Something similar to why kemono friends
or mlp became phenomena as well. Consider the implications of this.
No institution or multi-national entity or other major power center ran ads on broadcast telling people to watch girls with anime avatars do stuff on the internet. It was almost completely a function of 'community outgrowth'; sharing word-of-mouth, and algorithms autonomically noticing and highlighting a trend without operator intervention. To put a finer point on it, you could say that such a development was almost inevitable even; there were needs not being met, an open void, with vtubers being an example of something grown up and sucked in to fill it. In fact, you could say that such a pathway of genesis is the only way something like that *could* have come about, in the present era.
Why would any viewer bother to pay attention to such things when broadcast media is already everywhere within easy reach? Rather, you can hardly escape it even, even if you wanted to. Which is not an accident. The reason why we can speak of such a thing as a 'vtuber boom' in the first place, is the same reason why those same institutions would never have made such a thing to begin with.
Because the overweening trend in legacy media to date - in news, in movies, in shows, in print, in art - is that their presently dominant curators no longer offer anything except weaponization, material whose one and only purpose is the infliction of harm on the viewers it is supposed to target. The apotheosis of this character is that it does not even bother with trying to dress up it's shivs in veneers of entertainment or edification, just pure demoralization, pure pronouncement of power.
Is it so hard to understand in that light? If you had a choice between something poisonous to your spirit, and something that wasn't, that would be a foregone conclusion. Which is why a great deal of the game is of course in taking away that choice. If there is one task the incumbent priesthood never tires in, it is in the convergence of any and all other institutions into becoming yet another soundingboard for broadcasting it's articles of faith, irrespective of whatever purpose they may have been 'supposed' to be about originally. Indeed, there certainly may well come a time when serious efforts are drawn up for converging 'vtubing' as well, in the not so distant future.
In short, young men watch chubas because to them, it is like they stumbled upon an island of warmth in a seemingly endless winter trying to suffocate them.
