>>47268472It's a dying concept even in the idol industry. At one point it's a set of (implicit and oftentimes flexible) rules in order to maintain an industry standard for an 'idol', who are expected to be a sort of ideal in order to best attract fans - stuff like humble, cute, truthful, attractive, pure, etc. It was enforced by the industry responding quickly to fan outrage and jettisoning
The concept has not applied to vtubing since 2020. Even for the 'idol' company Hololive, the most that it means is that the girls can sing and dancing on stage (and even this is not a hard rule; very few holomems do true lives and editing software can make even Choco's tone-deaf singing sound wonderful). It means that the girls have to maintain some level of vocal lessons and stage performance, but aside from that, they have a lot of leeway in how they maintain their own brand.
The main difference is that 'idol culture' requires two things: fan backlash AND the company to reciprocate by punishing the talent. Cover, especially after realizing that they can cut off an entire country and still be okay, generally stopped giving two shits about how a talent decide to maintain their image. As a result, you have holomems that run the gamut of personalities and styles, including ones that completely flaunt things that would have gotten idols canned a decade ago. And without enforcement, the concept effectively lose its fangs - you can raise as big of a stink about something you perceive to be unidol-like, and the chuuba will just silently replace you with two fans that are okay with it.
And yeah, 'idol culture' has always been ill-defined. Different people have different boundaries and standards for what an 'idol' is, so the entire thing is always a fuzzy mess, which gets exacerbated by bias and the general trolling culture of 2ch-ish image boards.
