>>43851803Yes but you cannot merely gatekeep forever.
At some point immunizing the scene from them becomes more important.
Part of that for instance is breaking taboos, giving things names or identities so people can refer to them.
For instance the wizard game situation was very good because it gave people an event they can always reference whenever they want to attack those people, just remind them what they did to Pikamee and Silver, how they made them cry. Emotional appeals like those shut people down easily.
It also normalized attacking them and resisting against them, something that to a lot of the normie types can seem difficult at first, they need to see other people do it first so they can do it as well.
And when Silver called them cockroaches she gave them a name, an identity, you can talk about them that way and everyone will know what you mean without having to directly name them or narrow down thing too much.
Is this cringe and annoying? Yeah absolutely, this is the realm of social politics, controlling a narrative and optics. It's just a sad reality that on any western hobby eventually this becomes a thing, you can either choose to ignore it and just let them sweep you or put some resistance against it and see how that works.
Which is why it's always interesting watching it unfold.
Vtubing has a few perks over other scenes.
For starters many corpos are japanese including the big two.
Second there's no "vtuber media" or "vtuber journalists" like there are for games, which means those japanese companies won't be easily fooled and manipulated by the journalists giving them a false impression of what the west is like.
Third there is no middleman, there's no localizing group, no nintendo of america treehouse telling devs they need to cover up characters, no sony of america asking for changes in a game, no crunchyroll changing a translation, etc.
But of course big social pressure is still a factor.
The Gura pedo daki situation is a good example of something that could have an impact if it went too far. Maybe this time it did not blow up enough to really send shockwaves that reached Japan but Cover is going public, there will be investors, so the possibility that a Gura or Shion daki goes trending hard on twitter and every cloud chasing normie under the sun calls Cover a pedo company could actually influence Cover's future skins or vtuber models some day.
We'll see.
