The Existence of the "Mesmerizer" Fangame Is Wild To Me

[malymin]

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So, I've already made a post about how the wild popularity of "Mesmerizer" by Satsuki (with animation by 'channel') is simultaneously a throwback to the days of Vocaloid fan culture latching onto certain songs as their own self-contained canons, and a complete new evolution informed by changes in online youth culture since then.

It has some of the kind of qualities that often drew people to make little mini-fandoms for specific Vocaloid song+mvs: catchy song, distinctive designs (that are variants of the vocaloids singing the song), and a vague/implied narrative (bonus for dark qualities) ripe for speculation and iteration on.

The main difference is that I hazily remember a lot of classic Vocaloid mini-fandoms were for things that wore their edgy, dark, or angsty qualities on their sleeve, like Daughter of Evil or Dark Woods Circus; this particular juxtaposition of a cheery exterior with a dark underbelly feels influenced by '10s and onwards web-horror, particularly unfiction (you know, ARGs and stuff) and stylistically adjacent media where the evil hides under a kiddy, utopian, or otherwise friendly/safe aesthetic. Detail like Teto blinking the morse code for SOS, making the American sign language sign for "help," etc. feel very modern compared to the way 00's web-media would convey the "cute thing is actually sinister" premise before the Big Reveal at the end.

What's interesting is the further evolutions I've encountered since then. I'm going to need to give you some context.

First of all - Akita Neru. Akita Neru is a "derivative", specifically a "fanloid" - a character who does not have their own voice bank (unlike UTAU characters, which could also be considered a rough equivalent to "original characters" in the vocal synth fan culture), but is directly derived from an existing Vocaloid's voice bank and/or design. Like dear sweet Teto-chan, the concept of her was born in the early days of the fan culture, on 2chan. When odd coincidences seemingly censored Hatsune Miku's search results and Wikipedia page following negative news coverage of Hatsune Miku's growing otaku fanbase in 2007, 2channers began joking about a secret anti-Miku plot within the Japanese music industry; eventually, the name "Akita Neru" became attached to supposed agents of this conspiracy. She didn't really become a character, though, until a user named Smith Hioka drew and posted a design for her. This effectively became her "official" design.

Neru was pretty popular for a while! Like Kasane Teto, she's had the honor of appearing in official Vocaloid tie-in material, having official merchandise, etc... despite being a fan creation. But while Teto has managed to keep some relevance even in her more obscure eras by being the single most popular UTAU voicebank, Neru is... just a meme character, and I get the feeling that over time a lot of classic fandom memes like Neru started to be seen as cringe, as did fanloids as a concept in general.

Akita Neru is not in Mesmerizer.

For several years, fanloid Akita Neru had been associated with the Comic Trio of her, Miku and Teto thanks to the Lamaze-P song "Triple Baka", even long after Neru's popularity as a character had mostly waned. When the song "Mesmerizer" by 32ki had gone memetic around the Vocaloid community with copious amounts of fanart of the song's iterations of Miku and Teto, a comment was made on one piece of art over Twitter/X asking about the "yellow one that wasn't in Mesmerizer", clearing referring to Neru. The hilariously-vague phrasing of the comment quickly became an in-joke around the fanbase, with even more Mesmerizer fanarts cropping up inserting Neru into the song or regular Neru fanarts calling her "the yellow one who wasn't in Mesmerizer". The meme became prevalent enough to start a minor resurgence of Neru's character, even making her original creator Smith Hioka return to educate new fans on Neru's history over Twitter.

One particular character design for the hypothetical Mesmerizer!Neru went especially viral. This design was made by MICCHI, an artist from Australia, and posted on June 19th of 2024. Via Twitter, it broke containment massively, to the point that it was commented on by Satsuki, the producer of Mesmerizer, as an example of the theory phenomenon occurring in the overseas fan culture. I can only assume Satsuki's retweet spread MICCHI's video, and its design, to even more eyes, because eventually...

japanese fandom is using micchi's animation to teach people who akita neru is oh my god we've officially breached the contaiment pic.twitter.com/jDYAJJiWPX

— Yuzu 🌿 ユズ (@yuzuleaftea) June 24, 2024

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In its early peak, the flow of memes and fanon in Vocaloid fandom had often been one-way: the Japanese fanbases' memes absorbed by Anglo fans scouring Pixiv and NicoNico for content to bring to their own spaces... often without any consideration of, or credit to, the fellow fans who created that material. This was a common trend, at the time, for Anglo fandoms of Japanese media. Witnessing containment breaches from the other side still feels pretty novel! We've also more recently, in August 2024, seen Pearto, an Anglo-side shitpost derivative of Teto, make the breach over to the Japanese fandom, where she's known as 梨テト (Nashi Teto). There's a pretty long history of weird, uncanny, memey derivatives in Vocaloid fandom, but the best-remembered ones (Shiteyan'yo, Larval Rin, and Takoluka) all came from the Japanese side of the fan culture during the same initial-peak-era that gave us Teto and Neru.

...and now we come to Atena's Mesmerizer fangame, available in a whopping five languages (Japanese, English, Korean, Chinese, and Spanish) on Itch.io. It's very short, but also pretty damn good for an amateur effort made in three months by an 18 year old. This game takes the premise that the Anglo side of the fandom laid out ("what if Neru was the mastermind behind Mesmerizer"), with MICCHI's character design, and transforms it from scattered posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, etc into being a narrative, rather than merely the vague idea of one - something that reminds me of the nature of Teto and Neru's own birth from the churning mass of 2chan into concreted characters.

This also seems to be a pretty new medium for Vocaloid fan-media to be working in? Fangames, I mean. I don't recall any noteworthy Daughter of Evil RPGMaker adaptations, is what I'm saying. Previous song-fandoms like Daughter of Evil or Dark Woods Circus were series with multiple entries, so they accumulated a self contained "canon" via their lyrics and music videos, at times with a semi-official manga or light novel tie filling in the blanks; that's less common in the Vocaloid scene now, so there's no guarantee of a follow-up song. it becomes entirely the work of the microfandom that sprung up around it to formulate a narrative, which they'd already begun to by introducing the idea of Neru as the mesmerist. But... it's kind of weird to go making a sequel to someone else's song, especially if its a recent song and they're still active, right? I wonder if this is part of why Atena chose to make a game, rather than a song + music video, despite showing interest in becoming a Vocaloid producer themselves.

Also it's an Undertale-like. Atena openly says its battle system is modeled after Undertale. I think that speaks to the fact we're in a different era of internet from Vocaloid Classic just as much as Mesmerizer itself does. XD

Comments

[malymin]

It's so good. There's something deeply nostalgic about all this (not least because of the presence of Teto and Neru), but it's not just a rote rehash of the past - it's genuinely fresh enthusiasm.

There is something very endearing about the Neru boom originating from someone calling her "the yellow one that didn't appear in Mesmerizer" in the comments of some Triple Baka fanart and then everyone who does know Neru running 5,000 yards with it. Love this little bit of animation (Tumblr/Twitter) that Micchi did in reaction to the popularity boom, too! Every time I see a fake "lost media" video on Youtube using it, or fanart (Anglo, Japanese, and more) on Twitter using it, I think about how I CANNOT imagine how wild it must feel to have made the design that became the default for Mesmerizer!Neru. Apparently Smith Hioka, the original artist for Neru, has seen the design too! Really wild...

Agreed about SynthV Teto! It's really nice how having a modern, professional voicebank has put her back in the spotlight; people have been making an incredible number of absolute bangers with her (it was really hard to narrow down songs to mention for this post, even when I kept myself largely limited to Japanese songs with English subtitles available!), and I've even seen a few new songs made with her UTAU bank as an indirect result of the SynthV release.

Wait, hold the phone, let me boot up nitter.poast.org and check out those tweets...

Twindrill: Amazing, the foreigners are saying YURI...

Satsuki: According to the foreigners, Mezmerizer is “TOXIC YURI”!

Twindrill: Cultures are merging...

Oh my god. Once again, ideas passing back and forth across the language/culture barrier feels like the biggest new element of Mesmerizer's fanwork boom compared to the past and it's a big part of what delights me about all this! We have a Japanese fangame based on an Anglosphere meme/theory for a Japanese song...

[bedes]

Rahhh I'm so excited seeing all the new Teto songs, too!!! They've always had one of my favorite voices, and I've always been fond of them as a character, too. One of my favorite recent vocal synth song releases, period, recently, had been using them, which is so cool to be able to say~

(And oh my GOD thank you for casually dropping that Nitter link... I've been looking for a privacy-focused frontend to Twitter for AGES, but it felt like all the main ones just stopped working after Elongated Muskrat's takeover.)

[malymin]

It's really good to see. Also, from what I understand SynthV is very good software (while being far more affordable than Vocaloid currently is), so it's great to have a version of the Teto voicebank that can take advantage of advances in technology like that.

What's the song release? 👀

I depend on Nitter for my LIFE. So much official media for Japanese franchises seems to be exclusively on Twitter, but Twitter's enshittification means it only gets harder and harder to hunt things down...

[bedes]

The song is “Language of the Lost” by RIProducer! It’s essentially about how trauma can give people a fractured sense of self — it resonates with me a lot. I also love how Teto is drawn in the cover art hehe

Also I didn’t realize it was technically released 7 months ago? But that’s recent To Me apparently haha

[malymin]

I just gave it a listen - thanks for the rec!

IMO anything less than 12 months old absolutely counts as recent :P