malymin

Sometimes I think about how audience responses can say as much about ableist attitudes as works themselves do.

The music video for the song "Monitoring" by Deco*27 initially reads as "Miku is a scary stalker", but the narrative woven by the whole seems to be more "the pov character is having paranoid delusions and hallucinations, Miku is a concerned friend trying to check up on them, pov character eventually works up the courage to open the door and speak to their friend". Much more nuanced that how I've usually seen popular Vocaloid songs handle mental illness. There's a lot of bad edgy "look at this crazy sicko murderer, who kills people because they're insane" in Vocaloid music. The song is kind of leaning into those ideas, but ultimately I think subverts the expectations of them.

When I was reading the first few comments on it, I saw a Japanese comment that (auto-translated) was like "at first it seemed Miku was a dangerous person, but then actually it was the classmate who was a dangerous person!" And. Like. There are no signs the pov character is going to harm anyone. Dangerous... why? Just because they're having a break with reality that makes them scared to leave their apartment? I'd also seen English language bad takes, but that specific comment kind of stuck with me.

More recently, the producer published a miku pov version, it's genuinely sweet:

(Miku switching to the "hallucinatory" version at the end of the song seems to mainly be to mirror the original version. I've seen a few youtube comments argue that it means Miku really was a yandere all along, which I don't think... is narratively compatible with the rest of this song, or with the original song. When people aren't treating the POV character as "crazy dangerous" in comments and posts, they're sometimes instead putting that on Miku's shoulders, even when talking about the Best Friend remix.)

Unfortunately, when I looked on Tumblr for analysis of the best friend remix, I saw someone basically imply the pov character's delusions (of their friend being a "yandere" stalker-with-a-crush) would lead them to... sexually assault... their friend:

At the end of the song when Listener finally opens the door to let Miku in, Miku is unaware she's confronting someone who has convinced themselves that Miku "wants" the same kind of contact Listener is about to carry out.

Which feels deeply unwarranted to me from what the original song implies about the POV character's mental state, and falling into that same "people with delusions are dangerous monsters" thing that the Japanese commenter was doing.

I also find it irritating that sympathetic reading of POV character I've found always just call them "depressed" and treat the distortions of dialog and visuals as purely metaphors for the negative worldview that accompanies depression, and like... That's possible. That's a valid reading of the music video. But why is it apparently so hard to imagine that the distortions are literally being experienced by the POV character because they're having a psychotic episode. and that they're sympathetic in how their mental illness harms and isolates them, at the same time?

This is the most sympathetic I've seen a Vocaloid song(s) be to someone having symptoms of really demonized mental illnesses, and people can't even... I guess you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink.

It's absolutely only a matter of time before the streams fully cross.

People really liked Mesmerizer by 32ki. So far, they also really like Static by Flavor Foley. These music videos tap into aesthetics and themes that are currently popular with young online horror fans.

Back in the day, there were a fair number of Vocaloid "song series" - a narrative told from different angle via the medium of a set of interconnected Vocaloid songs (and their respective music videos). Many of these (Evilicious Chronicles, Bad End Night, Dark Woods Circus) used the Vocaloid characters as "actors" as well as instruments; others, like Kagerou Project, used completely original characters. While not all song series had dark, horrific, or tragic themes, they were pretty popular and common! I don't know how to accurately sum up what "dark" themes and aesthetics were popular in general with Vocaloid producers and fans at the time, but they were very... of the era? In the same way that Mesmerizer and Static are so clearly of this era, and not something that would have been made during the intial late-aughts-to-early-teens Peak Vocaloid era.

I got the feeling that people, especially young fans, really wanted Mesmerizer to have a sequel, to follow up on the implied narrative and - but that's not what 32ki wanted to make. I feel like Static is slightly more likely to have a follow-up, but not by much - Flavor Foley's first album did not have a shared narrative between songs, and the group has stated on Twitter that their projects will follow a "flavors of [theme]" pattern:

We make songs that explore different sides of a common theme. Our debut album, "CARDIAC CONTREPOINT", examined the varying flavors of "love".

Analog Horror series and similar ARG-inspired unfiction are a popular medium for indie serialized storytelling at the moment, typically published on Youtube; a lot of them interact with artifacts of nostalgia such as analog media, old videogames, the "old web", or general kid-media aesthetics. Vocaloid song series are a historically popular medium for indie serialized storytelling, historically published primarily on NicoNico but frequently reposted onto Youtube; the "golden age of vocaloid" is, itself, now an object of nostalgia for a specific cohort of otaku and weeaboos. Two standalone vocaloid songs with analog horror or mascot/kidcore horror elements have already been extremely popular. It's only a matter of time before someone who has interest in the overlap makes a Vocaloid song series, an actual serialized piece of storytelling, with these elements. It will probably take a little while longer still for one that actually goes viral, and/or is good, to get made. But it is a matter of time.

"punk uso no utahime" by あれく/bitto

on susumu hirasawa’s birth certificate, it says he was born on april 2nd. in his heart, he says he was born on april 1st, head first onto the earth’s surface. in my heart, it is because he wanted his birthday to be even closer to jun togawa’s, his longtime friend, on march 31st. nisu aniki, the touhou cookie delegate who first recirculated p-model’s “LAB=01” for MAD fodder, now covering the song with teto for her birthday, exists at some impossibly satisfying intersection of these things.

A blog post about Kasane Teto ruminating on Kasane Teto's modern identity as an "anti-idol" relative to Hatsune Miku and the many other voicebank idol-characters in Miku's shadow. The blogger compares her place in the voicebank-character scene to a real musician who satirized idol culture in the 80's and 90's. The blogger also ruminates on how her 2chan-assigned character settings that were originally meant as cheap shock gags, such as her ambigious gender/sex of "chimera" and age of "31", have given her a humanized, relatable quality with her current audience.

( lyric translation )

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Download here from Itch.io.

Not for the story, really - there isn't much of one, and what story is there is pretty tongue-in-cheek. It doesn't really take itself too seriously, being more a love letter to the fan culture than anything else, and I don't mind that! I'm just letting you know that this isn't like... a serious psychological horror experience like you might expect from classic indie RPGmaker games, lol. That is a direction a Mesmerizer fangame could have gone, it's just that it's not what this project went with.

No, I'm recommending it because I think... it's pretty fun to play? It's very short, but it's a nice little freeware experience that makes me curious if Atena (the developer) will make more games (fangame or otherwise) in the future. "Undertale-like with deckbuilder mechanics" is, technically, not composed of any new ideas, but the combination feels pretty novel. Like, being an Undertale-like solves one common "weakness" of turn-based RPG combat, which is that defense turns are very passive, and turns it into an actual turn of gameplay in its own right. So the attacking turns, here...

Okay, so there's no basic generic attack like in Undertale/Deltarune. (Or like other, more normal turn-based RPGs, for that matter.) There's only "spells". You start with some spells already in your "deck", and you can buy and find more to equip over time. Each combat turn, you get a random "hand" of four spells from your deck, like cards. Some spells are buffs or debuffs, some are heals, and some are attacks. You build up 2 MP every turn, which you can spend to cast spells or save up for subsequent turns as you see fit.

You start with just Kasane Teto; after fighting Hatsune Miku, she "joins your party", but this isn't really treated like a standard JRPG party system. They don't have separate equipment slots, stats, or HP/MP. Instead, Miku's spells and Teto's spells pool together into the deck, and have an equal chance of being drawn for your "hand" every turn. Every battle, you start as Teto, and can only use Teto's magic - any Miku spells you've drawn can't be used. Once per turn, at any point during the attacking phase, you can spend 1 MP on "Baton Pass", to switch from Teto to Miku or vice-versa, swapping what selection of spells in your hand you're allowed to spend points on; this also heals a substantial amount of the shared HP bar, making it less risky to swap that it otherwise could be in a pinch. Needless to say, this setup makes attacking turns a bit more strategic than just "spam the same attack every turn."

(Also, you need to press a selection of arrow keys to execute each spell attack, so there's some analogy to executing attacks with spacebar presses in UT/DR there. Each spell has its own consistent arrow key pattern, some easier to execute than others; Miku's vampiric "Drain" spell, for example, is down-down-up-up, if I recall correctly. Very cute.)

Teto's spells tend to be cheap, so you can easily attack with her once or twice every turn; Miku's spells tend to be powerful, but more expensive, requiring the player to accumulate more MP. There's also a handful of spells both characters can use, but none of those shared spells are attacks. You can also spend gold on upgrading your stats in the menu, but I haven't experimented with that as much; the game lets you "refund" your upgrades if you get buyer's remorse, which is nice.

It's... surprising mechanical depth, to say the least! Knowing that Toby Fox himself got his start making romhacks and the like, I can't hold being "derivative" against this work. For what appears to be the developer's first finished game project (their Itch.io also has a Shikanoko fangame, but it's unfinished, and Atena's description says they initially didn't want to upload it at all due to its buggy state), made by an 18-year-old in the span of 3 months, it's a strong first showing. Also, the developer commentary on the final boss theme is pretty fun. ^_^

So, in the last post, I went over how Kasane Teto's roots play into her fandom identity:

We have a narrative, being synthesized here. Even within a world where vocaloids are people and not just collections of sound, Teto is a "fake," a "lie." Perhaps, by extention, a liar herself. She is an underdog, abandoned by the bulk of her cruel creators, who found her voice and now dreams of becoming a real Vocaloid, a big-time idol, just like the girl she was originally made as a mockery of. She's the little guy, she's a trickster. she's a big fucking shitpost and living meme. She is... the internet's home-born idol.

Even though Teto is now a commercial voice bank, with a corresponding character design that sheds the vestiges of her Faux-caloid nature, these elements continue to, I think, play a role in what kind of songs get written for her, and how she's portrayed in music videos for these songs.

made with nex3's grid generator

Each of the above images links to a version of its respective song, with official subtitles where possible, or fansubbed reprints if no official subs exist. I think these songs function as decent examples of trends in post-SynthV music composed for Kasane Teto.

( Overlapping sounds )

A friend, when I showed her it, told me that:

yeah, a lot of the non-meme vocaloid fanwork I've been seeing has been about this one music video

And I think I understand why? 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.

Now imagine an old man, puffing a pipe, grumbling that "kids these days don't want hatsune miku dark fantasy Alice-in-Wonderland hanakaki yandere cannibalism guro anymore. All they want is to play bright, colorful videos at .01% speed and collaboratively decode ciphers messages about how the cast of Whimsy's Playhouse is suffering."

The difference between me and that old man is that I'm delighted to be able to witness this stuff. :)

(Also the more classic edge still exists - check out Fallstay's "-ism" series - it's just not what's hip with the kids.)