malymin

made with nex3's grid generator

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

( cut for long image )

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

I previously mentioned being fascinated by the Tumblr user Palaceperspective's creative decision to write a postcanon fanfiction as the penultimate part within a series of analytical essays (or in old LJ/DW parlance, "meta") about incest and gender roles in Revolutionary Girl Utena, using in-universe continuation as a means of conveying analysis alongside the out-of-universe analysis.

In a somewhat similar way, I am fascinated by Tumblr user Beluvbug's "Princess of Gender Dysphoria" fanart series for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. In this series of posts, Applejack is interpreted as a deeply closeted and repressed transgender man - unable to admit to himself what he truly wants, he instead accepts a metamorphosis into a "more mature" form of mare/womanhood - that is to say, an alicorn princess - as a solution.

(The artist's blog is currently only viewable to people logged into Tumblr, so I've linked to reblogs made to public accounts.)

The usual format of each entry is an MS Paint drawing or comic of the characters from the cartoon in this personal continuity. Sometimes the image is instead a photos or mock-up drawing a My Little Pony toy, either official or imaginary. Sometimes the two forms of imagery intermingle. This is a thematic decision as much as an aesthetic one.

Part Three in the series depicts "Princess Applejack" in the form of a plastic toy: her alicorn horn and wings blatantly glued on and made of pink plastic instead of her own essence's orange, her hair done in an distinctly un-Applejack-the-character style. The text surrounding her begs the viewer to play with her. The text below her describes a narrator (implied to be the artist) seeing his own reflection in the plastic of Applejack's body as he asks if the "element of Honesty" has truly, always been honest with herself: he ignores his reflection to continue playing with his toy. Tags are the whispered footnotes of Tumblr vernacular, and the artist has the following written in the tags on the original post:

#do you guys ever think about how applejack does worst in toy sales

This is an important note. Applejack-the-character, at the end of the day, exists to sell the plastic toy horses labeled as "Applejack" by their boxes in the pink toy isle. She is worse at this divinely-ordained purpose -- at being a marketable commodity -- than any of her friends.

In Part 12, the series takes a complete break from its usual format of MS Paint drawings and collages of real and imagined MLP toys, to present us a text essay about Applejack as a children's toy. Let me place the full text in a cut:

( Blind Bag Applejack )

The commercial reality of the My Little Pony Franchise (you know, that this cartoon exists to sell toys) is not something ignored for laying outside of the Watsonian plane. Rather, it becomes part of the meat of Applejack's characterization within the AU. This Applejack, on some level, knows that he is a children's toy: not on his own plane of reality, per say, but in some vague sense that he occasionally glimpses in dreams. He wants to be loved: for a mass-produced toy within a massive corporate franchise, this means to be marketable, to be consumable, to be passively subsumed to the needs and desires of the lowest common denominator. So he rejects his deepest and most personal self, and ignores his desire to be a stallion, because it does not serve the Brand. He instead becomes a "beautiful mare", a princess, "the natural progression of a mare"; he thinks he will make a better toy and object for others this way, that it will make his body less unlovable. How the paint (the cartoon character, the part of Applejack that is a person, more than just shiny orange plastic or unslaughtered horse's meat) feels doesn't matter. Not in his own eyes.

"The Princess of Dysphoria" is a very personal piece, visceral and intentionally ugly, and the artist openly admits that it's heavily based in projection and not some clean, pure, "objective" read without bias. It is too idiosyncratic of a text to ever osmose into popular widespread fanon.

And... I really like it a lot. It's one of my favorite non-Cohost works of art I've encountered this year.

I do feel a disjoint from a lot of fandom spaces?

My main disjoint from Livejournal culture, as a kid too oblivious to notice most of the drama and controversies happening behind closed doors, was the shipping focus; I didn't have words for it at the time, but currently, I would identify as a sex-repulsed asexual, and if pressed to use the split attraction model I would call myself an aro-ace. Honestly, it's easier for me to wrap my head around esoteric furry kinks like TF or inflation than actual, real human sex. I try reading about the things attraction does to people's heads and I feel like I'm reading about aliens. Typical shipfic sort of depends on you getting something out of depictions of romance and/or sex intrinsically, to the point that the romanticness or sexiness often takes priority over "in-character-ness". I spent a lot of time scrounging around for genfic. At the same time, the text-heavy culture of LJ meant that "meta", or analysis, was pretty abundant. Dreamwidth fandom is a direct descendant of Livejournal fandom, but the focus on shipfic over other fanwork seems to be intensified.

Tumblr at first was a somewhat better place for shipping-agnosticism, but now it is a landmine. Anything uncritically adored one second becomes irredeemable media the next; people seem to be bad at nuance no matter where they are, but something about modern social media's virality-based structures makes this worse. All conversations are polarized. I feel scared to talk about the flaws in something I love, or gush about what I love about my favorite things, because it feels like getting misconstrued and dogpiled and dunked-in-a-water-filter are inevitable.

There's an entire essay I've wanted to write about Mytho from Princess Tutu. How part of why I feel strongly about him is because, regardless of what the creators actually intended, his arc in season 1 to me reads like a disabled person gradually realizing that he isn't treated well by his caretaker and girlfriend, and exploring and acting on his own thoughts and feelings after an implied lifetime of being told what to think and do by these people. But in order to discuss this, I'd have to go into the thorny territory of - describing how Fakir acts verbally and physically abusive as Mytho's caretaker, how Rue/Kraehe literally rips the ability to give and retract consent out of him and then lies next to his comatose naked body. Because I don't want to tone down how bad these characters' actions are, even if the show doesn't seem to fully realize how bad it is to do these things to Mytho. (I think the show believes it's not that bad because Mytho can't properly process it, due to his lack of emotions; it doesn't realize it might be implying something shitty about real people by doing this.)

But I don't want to declare these characters irredeemable monsters who it's bad for the audience to like or sympathize with: Fakir comes across as having caregiver burnout from being the primary caretaker of an ageless, effectively-disabled teenager since he was a first grader; Rue was raised being told her abusive father and Mytho were the only people who could ever possibly love her, and has developed a distorted relationship to the very concept of love as a result. And this is a work of fiction; if these narratives are badly handled by the second season's shift in priorities, it's the staff's fault more than the characters. But I don't want to condemn Itoh, Sato, etc as irredeemable monsters, either.

Where am I supposed to articulate my complex feelings about 00's children's television without being sorted into a binary moral system? ^_^;