So I've noticed recently that there's a few posts featuring the Hololive English girls crossing over with western media (such as post #4149606, post #4146076, and post #4110903) in the East Meets West pool. On the flip side, post #4133034 was briefly added to the pool until a now-deleted comment brought up the fact that Kiara is German and Minecraft is Swedish, which led to its removal.
Should these posts be in there, or are they kinda more just west meets west? It's a bit murky compared to other vtuber posts being in that pool, especially since the 5 of them are spread out across the globe.
When it comes to vtubers, I see no way to draw the line between what counts as "east" and "west" in a manner that is both logical and completely satisfying.
Prior to Hololive English being launched, there were already vtubers like amano pikamee and kiryuu coco who are fluent in English and spent portions of their life in English-speaking countries, and there are others like inugami korone and himemori luna who regularly do English-only streams (though no one would ever mistake those two for fluent English speakers.)
The only real distinctions between them and Hololive English seem to be:
The company gave them the name "English"
All the holoEN vtubers are fluent in English
The holoEN vtubers have varying levels of fluency in Japanese
The holoEN vtubers stream primarily in English
Conceivably, Hololive or another vtuber agency could do things in the future like: add vtubers who are fluent in English and stream primarily in English to their next "Japanese" generation, dissolve holoEN and retain some of its members but have them start streaming primarily in Japanese, or do a Nijisanji-style reorganization and drop the Hololive English name. If one of these or something similar happens, deciding which Hololive members are "east" and which are "west" based on the above distinctions breaks down.
I'd say the most manageable way to handle situations like this is to just declare that if the home office (i.e. not American game studios owned by Sony USA or something) of an Asian company created it and/or manages it, it's "east."
