>>62099855Basically what happened is that the gyaru subculture was totally unsustainable. It was expensive compared to say, being a gothloli or going vkei, and a social stigma developed around being a gyaru as they aged up into adult women. By the late 2000s they were already mostly dead.
Otaku friendly gyaru became trendy in the 2010s in fiction only after real gyaru were already dead. If you look at earlier depictions of gyaru in anime they're mostly bullies and bitches but, and this part is just speculation, I think a lot of the writers didn't see the worse of the subcultures and basically just settled into romanticizing the gyaru that didn't exist anymore.
So by 2020, gyaru returned as a cosplay subculture and then something high school modern otaku started doing in a cheaper more affordable fashion because otaku in general aren't really stigmatized anymore and just have a lot of overlap with traditional "normie" stuff in the same way that esports used to be something for sweaty no-lifers even among gamers, but is now regularly attended to by social gamers.
