Maybe I'm just becoming more blackpilled ever since I started paying more attention to twitter, but it has all the signs of engagement bait bandwagon. The engagement bait meta is usually in phases. Most recently was "I want to be friends, can we be friends?" tweets, but there have been "Hey how would you react if I followed you?", "I'm looking for streamers I can raid and watch!" with no intent to follow up, etc.I fail to particularly see the big grift of this beyond positive word of mouth. People making independent fanart/fanmerch without direct connection to the VTuber means that there is no direct financial grift boom aspect to it.
At least that's what I would've said if that final line wasn't there. Ew.
This one feels particularly egregious since it's basically a thinly veiled beg for people to make free fanart/fanmerch in response to Gumpai's bullshit. I guarantee there will be more tweets in this vein for the next several days (weeks?)
EDIT: Also yeah what @Hff201 said
It's not an explicit grift but it is clout-chasing. The initial wave of support seemed like earnest support for Kusa, especially from the Phase girls and some of the indies they've made stuff for since it was a member of their community being targeted; now it's broken out of that particular bubble it's just become easy, shallow retweet-bait for anyone who wants to virtue signal about the new current thing. Pretty much a "we love artists!" round two.