punk uso no utahime

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.

one aspect of teto that is less accounted for, at least in discussions of her rise as a totem of career drudgery and back pain, is that she is also gender. in her original birth thread, character traits were determined by the OP anchoring (安価) future post numbers that would then assign their values; for example, an initial post specifying that future post number 5 would determine her hair color. most VIPPERloids born through this process usually would overlook asking about gender at all, with a few notable exceptions like yokune ruko. for teto, gender was such an afterthought that it was only broached after determining almost every other profile detail, including her three sizes. with some finesse, she ended up not as an effeminate man, or a cat, or a woman with a strap on, but as a chimera.

twindrill were never the ones to chart teto’s course, and they have always punted on deriving any specific meaning from isolated posts made approaching two decades ago. as teto has attracted a demographic divorced from her creation, they have only further embraced the ambiguities. no one can actually be entirely sure if disliking “DMC” ever meant devil may cry, detroit metal city, or darryl mcdaniels, and the assimilation of posts into a crowdsourced character creator is more appropriately akin to database fuzzing than any sort of rational logic. while teto being a power drill doraemon is not something that ever had much chance of transposition, “chimera” has been seized upon to project teto as bigender, nonbinary, intersex, agender, genderfluid, and really any other identity that you can apply with reasonable interpretation. much of vocal synths are already a convenience of infinite possibilities, but teto is unique for how presciently she has captured a zeitgest where queerness and identity are being explored with more visibility. kasane ted shortly after her reveal may have captured this idea most specifically among a sea of other genderbent fanloids, though as we have learned from recent discovered trends like on tiktok and indeed the totality of vocal synth fandom, decades-old kindling often insists on another spark to find new and wider appreciation. teto, mostly indifferent to the inquiries, is just teto.

teto’s sensation, pointed since her synthesizer V redebut, echoes twangs of jun togawa. while teto is not placed much in the guro lane, there is a similar intermix of rewritten nostalgia, for a bulletin board original content culture that has largely fallen off of the map, and an evaluation of self-constructed identity. jun occupied idol pop to construct it as farce, cycling archetypes in costume, and although she is haunted most predominantly by the structures and gender roles of a post-war japan, teto, and all other trending voicebanks that emerge beyond miku, must additionally exist in miku’s shadow, haunted by expectations of recreating a cultural ascendence that was centered around her. the collection of voicebanks in this shadow is staggering, and almost all voicebanks, even the free UTAUs, are chasing to touch some of this same fame and audience under a pop guise, as even jun does under the same commercial structure she is parodying. miku, of course, serves as a default instrumentation for vocal synth music; more importantly, she is primarily seen as a character with sustaining idol presence, and has conformed to those conditions. miku is by no means shackled to specific interpretation, but she has increasingly operated under a commercial umbrella that requires presenting primarily as one in the conventional sense, dressed in school uniforms and traditional okinawan garb mobilizing japanese cuteness. teto, thrust almost accidentally back into a spotlight, more often that not is still more likely to be found lounging in a gray sweatshirt and baggy sweatpants, or an unironed button down. the subversion has developed as a core facet of teto’s appeal, and provides some relief. teto could not have been born conscious of popularity, and it is only with an accumulated context that the initially groaned-over peculiarities of her profile like her age and gender have earned a reclassificiation as humanizing traits, providing one of the clearest counters to the manicured designs and profiles of the many emerging voicebanks sourced from utaite and vtubers angling a more twee nostalgia.

teto may be more cybernetic than jun, a lump of meat and an insect women, but she has also molted into a new form. given a second lease on life, she remains as much of a mess as she was on the first go around. bugged before by a expanding lost decade and a looming recession, and now the uncertainty of any career stability, she is a modern bridge to a long-lasting endurance: refuse to conform.