Litecoin isn't even a direct fork of Bitcoin. But their devs and marketing and foundation have done a good job making them either number 2, or look like they are number 2.
it's based on bitcoin . The price , marketcap and daily volume in the million is why it's number 2 not because of some entity , I think your confusing it with dogecoin. No, I'm not confusing it with dogecoin. I read it somewhere, I can't find it anymore, but apparently litecoin as it is, was forked of some other coin back then. Then Charles Lee and the other devs decided to unify and consolidate what they had into one coin and litecoin was born. Or something like that.
The official story is that litecoin was forked from bitcoin.
I'm not going to dig any further now, if I was mistaken then I indeed confused its history with something else.