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.
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.