>>59295817The issue comes down to the 'does popularity equate to some value of entertainment'. There's some yes and some no, but the real crux of the issue is that there's also some amount of luck in how many people actually stick. For Gura, she was the most memey, clever, and had a decent sense of humor that clicked with a wider audience. That drove everyone to her from the start and she became the go-to face of EN vtubing to the more general audience. When you'd go to a con or see a vtuber picture posted by a fan somewhere, most of the time it was Gura. That means you have even more traffic and have more potential viewers coming in, some percentage of which will actually stick around and become hardcore dedicated fans.
The machine feeds itself and at some point she became 'too big to fail'. Beyond some extreme happening, she will never stop being the face of the HoloEN branch and will always be one of the first contact points for possible new viewers to enter HoloEN viewership. The real issue comes down to the fact that with her extremely sporadic streaming the last year and a half, how many potential gateway viewers has she instantly had 'Nope' their way out of Hololive EN after checking her channel and seeing the meger amount of content?
I 100% subscribe the the notion that management is forcing her to come back during debuts to remind old fans to check in, possibly getting them hooked on new talents because what's it hurt to check out the new debuts? Some number of people who come back when Gura is streaming will move on to one of the new girls when they watch a stream or two between Gura's, and that's just rehooking old, lost fans, something that benifites both Cover and the newest Gens.
