>>47170696Winter 2017 when Kizuna AI started blowing up everywhere on the internet. She was only 2 to 3 months old at that point.
There was a half year when the only Vtubers were Eilene, Kizuna, and a few others.
Around this time Live2D started getting popular and I saw some people in the West using it in meme cases like an /a/non who recorded himself fapping with a girl avatar.
By November there was a ton of newfag JP OG indies and the rest is history.
The first time I saw her I seriously thought she was a talking AI. It's mindboggling we're not so far off now.
>Do you remember what started it all?If Kizuna never got big then none of this would ever exist. Kizuna becoming famous was what sparked the OG vtuber subculture.
However Eilene was already vtubing before Kizuna so it's entirely possible that if Eilene managed to become Youtube famous she would have set everything in motion instead. There is an alternate parallel timeline where Eilene became the godfather of Virtual Youtubers instead of Kizuna, who was only one of its stars. Even stranger is the fact that vtubing would have started in the West and then spread to Japan rather than the other way around. There would also be a wider spectrum of avatars, some would be anime models but others would be more Western style models. Imagine late 2010s Youtube right before the final streaming shift but with virtual avatars.
Incredibly odd to think about.'
I think it was inevitable with the beginning of the Age of Aquarius. Virtual Youtubers are unquestionably one of the signs of the new Age, and if they didn't explode as they did in our world this particular phenomena of the Age would have taken another form. /x/ ties into this.
