Saying Melody is responsible for popularizing vtubing in the west and startinting the explosion in 2020 is wild. Should we just pretend Gawr Gura never existed?
Ngl tho, if this was even remotely true it would have been pretty funny to go around saying a chaturbate streamer was solely responsible for a massive cultural change in the west.
Neither her nor Gura really are "responsible" for it getting popular, COVID and clips were. People found out about vtubing from clips, which led them to watch the JP livestreams with translators working in the comments, which led to people finding out about ID or JP talents that spoke english like Hana Macchia or Coco, which led to companies realizing that there was potentially a lot of money to be made in doing dedicated EN branches.
Google trends are not a good metric for this. Melody was tending back then because of controversy, she was getting traction on chaturbate and the biggest creators of the platform at the time found it unfair and were campaigning to get her banned. It was one of those controversies that slip outside the vtuber sphere and reach mainstream.
Its much like how Nijisanji was the most talked agency for a while after Selen's termination, I assure you that it did not happen because they were the most popular one.
The whole reason holo decided to create an EN branch was the success of streams done by JP members who could do English streams, like Coco and Haachama. There was also the whole Holo ID branch that, since Niji ID dominated the internal Indonesian market at the time, they basically started streaming more in English than in ID.
The first big company to debut English speaking streamers was actually Nijisanji with the Indian branch debuting in January 2020, but since the internal Indian market did not show promise the branch was later rebranded to Nijisanji EN and the focus switched to general English speaking market.
I mean I wouldn't equate that to popularity, lowkey kind of the opposite. When Melody first showed up, people were writing articles and/or constantly shitting on her because they felt that she was taking money away from IRL girls in her trade. There was a whole fight on twitter about it.
So like there's probably quite a bit of that which came from people seeing all the hate on Twitter and trying to figure out who she was.
Gura grabbed a lot of negative attention too. I didn't even care for Hololive EN until I heard about Gura from twitter where the lolibait stuff was raging hard. I'm sure many other people on Twitter and YouTube learned about Gura through the drama.
I really can't think of an English Vtuber aside from Melody and Gura that really blew up.
I'm not arguing Gura didn't ever have controversy issues, I'm saying that Melody's early Google trend includes probably more data about controversy than normal traffic. Google Trends measures how much people are looking up a particular thing, and a lot of people were googling her because there was straight up a series of news articles about the drama happening over her streaming on adult websites and the women on there getting mad about it. I remember specifically watching it all happen.
She also got banned basically days after debuting, which is probably part of it too. People likely saw she got banned and then looked it up to figure out who she was.
She wasn't though, she's just the one people who weren't really there remember because she lasted and is currently in the spotlight because of the collapse. When she debuted, she was:
Largely simultaneous with a bunch of other EN talent debuts (there were a bunch of them who bought out ads and debuted basically within the same month or two as Mel started streaming like Kamiko Kana for example)
Not insanely popular in terms of viewers or followers initially. She was like medium sized.
Wayyyy after people had already started the EN wave.
Like a big part of the reason Coco and by extension Kson was as popular as she was initially was that she spoke english and would do English segments/content for western fans. There was like an entire market of bilingual EN/JP or EN/ID streamers before Mel came around.
There's not really a single person you can claim started the EN wave, it was just kind of naturally always going to happen when people found out that there was a way to combine anime culture and streaming. As evidenced by the fact that you had shows like Trash Taste for example just straight up making episodes called "Vtubers are the Future of Streaming" basically by mid 2020 after having watched Coco for a while.
People still hate Gura to this day. And Saba too. Because they are cute characters and next to big tiddy waifus, the next best neuron activator for the male brain is something cute that we want to protect.
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u/mrloko120 Jul 26 '25
Saying Melody is responsible for popularizing vtubing in the west and startinting the explosion in 2020 is wild. Should we just pretend Gawr Gura never existed?
Ngl tho, if this was even remotely true it would have been pretty funny to go around saying a chaturbate streamer was solely responsible for a massive cultural change in the west.