It's not just that they're trying to one-up each other, it's that if their primary draw is the coomer content they have to constantly one-up themselves to keep their audiences from losing interest. It mirrors the real-life porn industry where the girls who start off doing vanilla shit always, without fail, end up doing more extreme shit on camera because they've exhausted all the normal "plug entering socket" material but still need to make content to sell.(I was gonna post this in the main thread yesterday but i had a moment of doubt about what kind of point i was making and this thread conveniently popped up so here it goes)
I was thinking about the yuko thing while sleep-deprived, so pardon me if im being autistic since my brain is working on fumes rn.
This will sound prudish (it probably is) but i feel like a lot of chuubas are becoming more and more degenerate to try to one-up one another.
I am not going to claim that is an objectively bad thing; vtubing has always benefited from parasocialism and it's mainly aimed at filthy weebs who like that sort of thing. I also see that a lot of it is played off as ironic or teasing or pandering to an audience that prefers that content and that is totally fine in itself.
My concern is that a lot of very fucked in the head people do not understand irony, or they don't understand that it's just an act. I know this is a slippery-slope kind of thing but it nags at the critical part of my brain. It's kinda like 4chud, the discourse there has always been ironically autistic and edgy, but that shit only attracted people who didn't get the joke and actually believe all of the shitposting.
I won't blame the fans though, there's always gonna be autistic fuckwits with weird proclivities who try to infest anything they see, the problem here is our oshis my guys, pandering to these people is the problem, even if ironic it only brings in more degeneracy to this community and chuubas should really start to check their own retarded fans, even if it makes them mad.
Tl;Dr
With regards to parasocialism I think the "blame" for lack of a better word ultimately comes down to how deep the particular streamer leans into it. Obviously if they're consistently doing the GFE schtick it's going to bring in the more deranged fans and if they're taking the benefits of having them around (views and cash) they're also going to have to take the drawbacks.
The problem is that some people are so out-of-touch with reality they literally see GFE-bait where it doesn't exist. I saw a thread on /vt/ a while ago where someone was trying to argue that Lisa playfully saying hello to her fans at the start of streams was exploitative, when she's literally just being friendly and welcoming. If she's saying "hi, I hope you've had a nice day!" and some autist sees that as flirting and develops a crush on her I don't think that's her fault at all.
