でんでんガァデン

Kasane Teto, more than a simple lie, is a phenomenon. Reignited by a SynthV release in 2023, Teto is undeniably going through an explosion of reappraisal. Despite being imagined in the swamp of posts on 2channel closing in on almost two decades ago, she has been allowed the time since to earn recognition from audiences entirely foreign to the fog of April Fools jokes and comparisons to Doraemon that birthed her. The discard of this context has thrust her into a new limelight. Beyond the usual fad popularity vocal synth fans are used to observing with characters that cycle through the silver medal podium neighboring Miku, Teto seems staunch to prove, even more steadfast than her predecessors, that she can be an exception to a trend rather than a brief aberration.

Casual vocal synth observers will likely already register Teto’s ascendant popularity without requiring data to prove as much, thanks to watershed events like Satsuki’s Mesmerizer and the emergence of fresh sounds from producers like Masarada, Haraguchi Sasuke, and Jamie Paige. Even so, the statistics in enthusiast spaces provide a sense of scale: Niconico has seen the number of video uploads tagged with “重音テト” accelerate from 38,000 at the start of 2022 to now being on the doorstep of 70,000¹. VocaDB, an overseas site crowdsourcing a catalog of vocal synth releases from PVs and albums, has charted a doubling of song releases tagged only to her UTAU voicebank, with her SynthV voicebank so far comfortably cataloging 500 new songs every month on average and still increasing². By any direct measure, or even soft measure like views on TikTok, Teto’s flame is continuing to burn at its brightest.

For Japanese fans that have followed Teto from humble UTAU beginnings, it should not register much shock that she has always collected some overseas recognition. More surprising perhaps, even for those overseas that have followed her for as long, is that much of her recent overseas growth and creative enthusiasm feels exceptionally assertive. While Miku is used to being appraised as a global sensation and is unlikely to ever lose that stature completely, Miku’s ownership culturally has largely flowed downstream sourced from Japanese expressions, as did Teto’s initial brief overseas popularity. The circumstances now surrounding Teto’s most recent global reappraisal, however, are not necessarily uniquely multifaceted, but arrive at a convenient period of expansive growth for both vocal synth music and global audiences becoming more familiar with traditionally otaku representations. Detached from any initial 2ch context, she is most pointedly another demonstration of how decades-old cultural kindling can take years to reignite.

Character-focused origins

“VOCALOID” has remained a slippery definition. While the exact properties and prevailing characteristics of what we consider “VOCALOID” music can undergo different critiques, its endurance as a term itself suggests much about the trajectory of the genre. The diversification of character synthesizers to include software like CeVIO and SynthV has effectively genericized the term, while Yamaha continues to hold it under trademark and license it effectively in perpetuity. Even as “vocal synth music” has become a favored umbrella term for overseas enthusiasts, usage of “VOCALOID” broadly continues in the same way as it does in Japanese due to a wide recognition. Being able to identify a voicebank in a lineup of vocal synths for one character, from UTAU to SynthV, remains more of a point of pedantry than a trivia digested fully by most listeners.

The overriding language of “VOCALOID” is in some ways more keenly felt in English. Western fans have never struggled to police UTAUs being invoked as Vocaloids. UTAU, initially as a VOCALOID parody with Defoko and Teto’s designs, would highlight some of the initial novelty in characters existing outside of the Crypton umbrella. Despite the point of distinction, overseas fans arrived early to Utauloid and Cryptonloid as character categories, borrowing the same -loid suffix. Teto, as the most recognizable example of UTAU, earned early accolades as the icon for it. Associating UTAU so closely to Crypton characters could have already been considered invalid at this outset, though it highlights a common refrain seen in early overseas fandom exposed to derivative characters like Teto, Neru, and Haku: why do these characters look so much like Hatsune Miku? With these expressions being exported from nebulous VIPPER and Niconico contexts, their histories would not be intimately understood, even by those tuned to recognize the characters through reprints. The loose assemblage of these derivatives as sister characters depended most especially on them being closely associated in Japanese expressions.

Much of the initial overseas enthusiasm for Teto can be found in these reprints. Reprints, operatively, are a contextual collapse. Part of what made Vocaloid so culturally mobile initially is that moe characters, frantic animations, and catchy denpa melodies do not especially require translation to earn appraisal. Further operative to the Japanese doujin context is that expressions must be atomized so they can be easily blended together. Kasane Territory by oxi, though most especially the supplemented PV animation by Riot, was the initial overseas success emblematic of these conditions. While it is most practical to trace doujin expressions as a waterfallーan animation PV parody, itself borrowing a cover song by oxi, itself a parody of a previous vocal cover by circle SilverForest, itself descended from Suwako’s stage boss theme by ZUNーsuch a full accounting was rarely digested for reprints, especially in a nascent overseas Vocaloid culture. Besides that overseas viewers were unlikely to ever parse the 2ch-isms and mentions of Tsutaya, many of these reprints gained attention without fan subtitles or instead with poor machine translations. The meta commentary in Kasane Territory became entirely secondary in its overseas appeal, pushed most eagerly by YouTube as a related video before it had mature personalized recommendations. Ironically, Teto’s questioning of whether she counts as a Vocaloid (重音はボカロに入りますか？), intended as a light gag, would very likely be sincerely affirmed by many overseas fans of the time.

It would be difficult to undersell Lamaze’s influence on being an accelerant not only for Teto’s overseas popularity, but for Vocaloid overseas in totality. Lamaze benefited perhaps more than any other producer from the herding of YouTube’s initial recommendations, thanks again to animation PVs for Popipo by Sunafuki and Triple Baka by Berserker Soul. More than contextual collapse, PV reprints like these not only often came with no attribution or sourcing, but also had obfuscated authorship due to their collaborative components and multiple uploads. The prevailing disinterest in enforcing copyright norms on YouTube, both from audiences and set as explicit policy from up top by management, would mirror what was seen on Niconico, though absent the strong relational tagging that would allow these producer relationships to be revealed even incidentally. Japanese fans, in my experience, have sometimes remarked that Triple Baka is a unique fascination by Western fans, and while I’m not entirely qualified to assess this as completely true, it is undoubtedly verified from Wayback Machine archive captures, surviving reprints, and casual parodies that Triple Baka was widely exposed on YouTube. Teto in this representation was not owned by Lamaze, but thanks to close association with Miku, became a character with equal recognition in what was otherwise an immature overseas Vocaloid canon.

Perhaps more than any other Lamaze contribution, however, Ochame Kinou (most commonly referred to as Fukkireta overseas) was an inflection in Teto’s recognition. The explosive popularity of this meme overseas, and not simply as a video duplicated wholesale, should not be understated. Principally, its growth on the western web vectorized in many of the ways we consider organic to Niconico’s culture, including through home-grown trace MADs, covers, and compilation videos. A large component of Fukkireta’s success would naturally depend on reprints from Niconico, though it is probably fair to assess these as a bedrock that allowed a western ownership over the meme to develop. 4chan, the west’s message board equivalent to Futaba Channel that was far more relevant at this time to a casual fandom than it would be considered todayーweekly “Miku Monday” threads often became an excuse to post Teto alongside other Cryptonloidsーchristened Fukkireta with “daily dose” status, or a video that was memetically posted to boards there ad nauseam³.

YouTube’s annotations functionality, removed in 2019, at one point allowed for collaborative comments to be layered on top of a video not unlike Niconico’s danmaku, which was taken to an absurd extreme for the fansub of Ron’s rendition of Ochame Kinou borrowing the same Lamaze animation with Teto. Many of the oldest comments on this video, clearly unfamiliar with the specifics of Teto but familiar enough to ask questions, muse whether UTAU is capable of sounding this human-like. Fukkireta as a cultural memory overseas would still likely now be most widely invoked when associated with this layer of annotations. Even with this exposure, Teto could be said to have remained set dressing rather than focus, and the constituent elements of this PV itself unattributed the way memes usually are. The character parodies conveniently stripped her away as grounding context, and the earworm quality of the rendition had standalone memetic value. Ochame Kinou has otherwise persisted with recognition over the last decade and a half, and most notably before Teto’s SynthV revival was considered Hololive’s most enduring danketsu song with a parade relay. Nonetheless, it is often invoked together with Triple Baka by many western fans as their initial contact with Teto. As can be observed in any collection of secondary creations, doujin expressions are no stranger to discarded and stripped contexts, so Teto is certainly not unique in this appreciation. It is more appropriate, instead, to consider Fukkireta as a creative precursor that perhaps somewhat incidentally raised Teto’s character profile overseas, though tuned only as background noise in a literal layering of recontextualization over the top of her. The value seen in this introduction would not be fully realized until her SynthV release, as interest in vocal synths broadly lulled in the following years.

From Japanese imitation to Western ownership on a post-regional web

YouTube as an outlet for readymade Japanese expressions was broadly important in the export of Japanese pop culture in the late aughts, but we would be remiss to not highlight the participation of overseas users in shaping characters like Teto at even an early stage of development. Overseas users have in fact been long participants in UTAU, evident not just from remnants on preferred platforms of the era like deviantART, but also embedded in the creative explosion of sites like Niconico with tagged collections like ＵＴＡＵ海外組. Many of the names likely already familiar to long Japanese fans of vocal synth music, including CircusP, cillia, MystSaphyr, and Crusher, did not go unappreciated in this time. This is not necessarily highlighted to overstate the overseas influence on UTAU, but to exhibit that a core producer class, vocal synth otaku in the most pure sense, can be considered of equal value to why an unlikely candidate like Teto developed overseas attention.

Much as they were with Miku’s initial attention by Japanese producers, cover songs remained a routine component of Teto’s core overseas producer class. UTAU as a free software alternative has always conveniently realized this remix dynamic, which was heavily focused on overseas. With English support not arriving comprehensively until Vocaloid V3 in 2013, overseas users even slightly curious about producing vocal synth music still had to entertain wrestling some Japanese, and thus the obtuse nature of UTAU was no more of a hurdle to overcome. It is also the case that many producers of this time overseas explored pirated and unlocked solutions for Vocaloid, with region locks and limited distribution being prohibitive to acquiring voicebanks legally; it remains a sore point, even now, that voicebanks like Rana were only available for purchase through the magazine ボカロＰになりたい⁴. Beyond this, it is a repeated truth that much of vocal synth music overseas is steered by teenagers without the pocket money for fancy DAWs and equipment. Any software free and easily accessible (see also MikuMikuDance) was a huge boon, no matter its rough edges. SynthV’s arrival for Teto, most especially, is anchored to pent-up demand from fans nipping at Crypton for English voicebanks and also fans that were unable to bargain with UTAU’s shortcomings, despite being loyal to the characters themselves.

The global sound that has developed around vocal synth music can be most pointedly recognized to have started as Japanese imitation. As identified in the previous examples with Teto, much of vocal synth music’s initial overseas history was the result of Japanese cultural output being “lobbed” over regional borders online. While no one would dispute that vocal synth music is a global scene now, the global village of a web where all netizens interact together has only ever been mythologized rather than realized. The dynamic with Japanese spoils like Triple Baka was that they were, more accurately, extracted by those brave and technically savvy enough to export them out of regional websites like Niconico, instead of fully bartered for with our own expressions. Language is a limiting factor in why this remains true even now for much otaku media, and also why expressions that are culturally smoothed or maximally bombastic for global audiences earn favor. Even so, the regional disparities present in these expressions will likely never fully evaporate, as long as overseas fans cannot engage with the physicality of doujin events, but Vocaloid music is also some of the closest subculture has gotten to global participation thanks to loose copyright restrictions and industry barriers that do not afflict it like traditional Japanese pop music and anime. It can be simultaneously true that while overseas fans may still target a sense of Japanese authenticity in their expressions of vocal synth music, geographies still exert cultural differences on a global web that will always code them as obviously regionally unique. Our prolonged exposure to Japanese expressions is thus less of a complete import and, over time, dismantled to be an aperture for rebuilding and remixing them to our own cultural specifications. Undoubtedly, the rise of fresh sound from overseas producers like Jamie Paige, omu, and TONE suggests this has been realized not only across Teto’s sound, but also the totality of vocal synths.

Discussing vocal synth music and Teto in an overseas context impresses how much the homogenization of platforms into global spaces has accelerated our exposure to vocal synth music, enabling more of this participation from overseas producers. While the consolidation of social media has created fewer large platforms overall, the herding of locales on platforms like TikTok and YouTube makes cross-regional conversation more an unavoidable reality than a deliberate choice as music and images are exposed indirectly through algorithmic presentations. Some of this homogenization is attributed to English becoming the lingua franca of the web at large. TikTok especially has emerged as a nexus for overseas growth: much in the way Niconico exposes parent-ancestor remix relationships and attribution, TikTok has oriented original music as the ultimate point of truth. Japan is of course no less entrenched in TikTok than the rest of the world, and so their participation and contribution quickens what would have otherwise taken months or years to be communicated over regional borders online in the past. This may contribute to some of the Japanese perception as to why Teto seems principally steered by overseas interest, when in fact it is simply that cultural conversations that previously followed waterfalls are instead exploding to more corners of the web with more haste. The TWINDRILL circle account on Xitter may continue to converse even directly with overseas fans, but even the atomized text of tweets is unlikely to override the mobility of short form video that controls so much of our culture now.

Regardless of how we measure our balances in cultural trade, overseas Teto fans are certainly controlling a larger share of her character canon than before. Meme variants like “Pearto” and “Fat Teto”⁵ are undeniably a huge constituent of this phenomenon. Whereas before expressions were curatively imported, memes like this can be said to encroach on spaces rather than having been directly picked for import by Japanese fans. There is a marked difference in this, for example, than having memes like “Nice boat”⁶ reappropriated from a 4chan post, or comments on Teto reprints translated for matome blogs collecting overseas reactions. While a post-Miku boom for Vocaloid has often emphasized the celebrity of producers over characters, overseas fans are now reasserting Teto’s character, often with crippling back pain. It should not be suggested that overseas fans do not value producer personalities, but rather that the character remains overriding in why vocal synth music attracts popularity here at all. Much of Japanese vocal synth music of course also remains reliant on this principle, and the existence of events like Snow Miku and Magical Mirai would not exist without embracing it, but it is my sense from reviewing examples like Joysound rankings and Billboard Japan charts that vocal synth music has done more to permeate the pop music conversation in Japan instead of continuing to remain related as pure subculture, as it does overseas.

It is also notable that as overseas vocal synth fandom catches up to Japanese expressions, there are still times when we will find ourselves unexpectedly all on the same wavelength. For many overseas fans, producing music or animations remains out of reach, which allows softer or more casual expressions like fancams and memes to become their participation in promoting the subculture. While we will still need more time to digest its influence, Mesmerizer has already been clearly relayed as an inflecting moment for both Teto and vocal synth fandom with these reliances. Principally, Mesmerizer managed to capitalize on unified Japanese and western interests with a light mystery that encouraged speculative yarning about hidden meanings and codes. Aesthetically, it also manages to blend the components of viral growth that have proven successful elsewhere: there is a grounding familiarity in Channel’s designs of Miku and Teto, performing a dance in vertical video engineered for repeat on TikTok, that is also compellingly amplified with a quirky denpa sound far outside of mainstream pop music.

The success of this song, an escape of subculture into the mainstream by any measure, continues to reverberate with the number of Miku and Teto duets that have been released in its wake. This event alone may, realistically, have more to do with Teto’s overseas appeal than any other prior history we’ve discussed, simply due to its sheer scale and wide exposure. Admittedly, there is no surefire theory to deriving a global appeal, and at the time of Mesmerizer’s release, I personally did not evaluate it as the runaway success it has now proven to be. Although it is possible for me to now retroactively assess its qualities, it is also important to accept that any cultural critique will more often find itself blind to the multiple facets and serendipity of social media that judge a song, or an artist, or a character like Teto. On attempting to gauge a song or a character in regional locales, or evaluating the cultural sensitivities of expressions (see Hiiragi Magnetite’s Zaako), we should remind ourselves that it is difficult, if not outright impractical, to estimate how they will be received across all different cultures and descendant subcultures, either with a glowing praise, a swarmed contempt, or a shrugged indifference.

Kasane Teto as a commons

Although Teto has never been a Vocaloid in the technical sense, her commercial representation has only been loosely stewarded by Crypton under the Piapro umbrella since 2010, casting her as a character born from Vocaloid culture. This distinction has proven essential to how we view Teto as a kind of cultural commons: her association with the Cryptonloids, particularly in situating her beside them in the Project Diva franchise, gave her an accessible and polished public form that did not entirely erase her independent origins. Even before Project Diva titles were localized to the west, starting with Project Diva f in 2014, widespread PSP piracy and the circulation of reprinted PVs ensured her overseas visibility as an underground concern. With this loose exposure, Teto rode the wave of Miku’s first global boom, accruing legitimacy as part of the frenzied excitement around Vocaloid without being wholly bound to its strictures, or indeed even being able to benefit from the commercial floating performed by Crypton.

Teto’s rejuvination with SynthV has been marked by more than a technical update. Emerging on a moment of upheaval following COVID, her new voicebank and renewed interest aligned with a generational turnover in Vocaloid subculture and a youth desire for a new cultural jumpstart. This new audience, raised on participatory fandoms fluent in atomized meme cultures that were a novelty in Vocaloid’s first boom, have now collided with a loyal doujin base of vocal synth otaku that had already matured her identity across years of grassroots activity. The modern rhetoric of democratized creation, where anyone can jump in to participate, finds in Teto a fulfillment where she is simultaneously an accessible entry point for new creators and a cult figure sustained from long-term community investment by TWINDRILL fans that could not have ever imagined the level of attention she now commands. Her appeal is situated between these classes, embodying both the underdog authenticity of an UTAU while borrowing some of the polish of a mascot character. From today, she is consistently a second choice for vocal synth creatives behind only Miku, and yet the split narrative of her emergent star makes estimating her longevity in this attention difficult to compare to previous second favorites that have preceded her, like IA and GUMI.

Miku’s history has now been canonized through a near-corporate mythology, matching a mascot appeal borrowed from Hello Kitty crossed with the creative reinterpretation of Disney characters. Miku has also had an enduring presence, even in the west, for close to two decades, and yet much of the Japanese trivia that does orbit Miku (recently revisited examples such as the JAXA signature campaign⁷, for example) remains broadly not a part of her overseas simulacra that instead relies on solidified touch points like her concerts to convey her influence. Teto’s story, instead, remains highly mutable, shared, and still fluid, though similarly dependent on a contextual decay that makes her character very culturally mobile. Whereas before Miku and Teto were dependent on receiving and recreating Japanese expressions through a clear waterfall, overseas participants are now entering this commons on an equal footing that was not possible during Miku’s first boom when her ground truth was being established. The esoterica with Teto’s 2ch hoax may now be of less importance, but it is with the dual contexts of the emergence of a borderless creative space and the digestion of expressions associated from her early era that her appeal is being supercharged overseas. The web’s time lag has, effectively, collapsed in a post-regional web. Teto’s evolution thus reflects not just her own persistence as a character, but a diffusion of ownership and recirculation of culture that has offered overseas fans whetting their subculture appetites with Vocaloid for the first time an unprecedented opportunity to forge their own participation and assemble a unique canon for Teto on her second splash. In overseas locales where participation has not yet come online or where regional firewalls persist, most notably in China, there is likely much opportunity left for Teto again, or any other character revived through a SynthV release, to be reappraised with more global remixes.