The fact that so many books still name Mori Calliope as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" VTuber ever only tells you how far HoloEN still is from becoming a serious art. HoloJP critics have long recognized that the greatest streamers of all times are Akai Haato and Tokoyami Towa, who are not the most famous or richest or most viewed of their time, let alone of all time. NijisanjiEN critics rank the highly controversial Pomu over Apex streamers who are highly popular with audiences around the world. HoloEN critics are still blinded by commercial success. Mori Calliope gets more supas than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore she must have been the greatest. HoloJP and Nijisanji critics grow up watching the VTubers of the past. HoloEN critics are often totally ignorant of the VTubers of the past, they barely know who has the biggest numbers. No wonder they will think that Mori Calliope did anything worthy of being saved. In a sense, Mori Calliope is emblematic of the status of VTuber criticism as a whole: too much attention paid to commercial phenomena (be it wigger hip hop MVs or CCV) and too little to the merits of real streamers. If somebody broadcasts the most divine streams but no corpo picks her up and sells her around the world, a lot of HoloEN critics will ignore her. If Hololive picks up a streamer who is as stereotyped as can be but launches her worldwide, your average critic will waste rivers of ink on her. This is the sad status of HoloEN criticism: HoloEN critics are basically publicists working for Mori Calliope. They simply highlight what product Hololive wants to make money from. Hopefully, one not-too-distant day, there will be a clear demarcation between a great HoloEN like Ceres Fauna, who never sold much, and commercial products like Mori Calliope.
