Tracing the tradition of single flowers posed in vases to maximalist flower stands for 2D characters is probably easier when your culture already elevates the flower as a heritage. It’s so easy, apparently, that no one seeped in either has really bothered to document how the minimalism of ikebana (生け花) evolved into flower stands now being gifted for new businesses, concerts, retirements, product launches, and promotions, before we even reach the otaku. The oldest known flower shop in Japan dates back a little over 240 years ago. For what is supposed to be an ancient art form, that would be fairly young for a thorough trace.

Ikebana has always been, chiefly, an exercise of simple elegance. As a serious practice, it is a collection of unfathomably specific rules about structure and balance, all in service of a sparse and deliberate construction. While minimalism rarely survives modern cultures now, it’s also rarely the preference of rulers that want to flaunt wealth, which Japanese flower arrangement was never going to be immune from. Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s overseeing the construction of Osaka Castle, a fortress with a gold trim designed entirely to surpass Nobunaga, is only a narrow slice of that ambition. His planting of cherry blossom trees at the Daigo-ji temple in Kyoto is a similar extravagance in presentation. The reserved dignity of ikebana would not survive Hideyoshi either, where size mattered most as he commissioned four-story tall flower arrangements with a lavish excess. Flower arrangement, for most of Japan’s history, was not imbued with a high-minded meaning or structure that would qualify it as much of a developed art form, before it was allowed to be the subject of a comedy drama. Hideyoshi’s practice, one of the generals most principally associated with the tradition now, instead elevated it as art with a most useful function: signaling the ostentatious.

Most English overviews one can locate about ikebana, winding the competing schools of it that traveled through different shogunates, prefer to emphasize the dignity and high art. The one that I have found most compelling in trying to discover any connective issue to the modern practice of flower stands instead prefers to characterize it as a light accomplishment, just as playing the harpsichord was for the English. Particularly as the otaku undergoes a change in perception where signaling status becomes in many ways more valuable than amassing trivia, this qualification felt like accidentally tripping over ground truth while wandering lost in a dense forest of history. When the Teshigahara school took the ikebana out of the tokonama, a discipline taken up by housewives during the Edo period, it would still be a stretch to qualify it by this point as a hobby interest. It certainly succeeds, however, in orienting it as bombastic in ways that I recognize from now looking at the array of otaku flower shops that have launched in the last decade and a half, including novel species, brilliant forms, and new materials like inorganics. Ikebana, mostly here, began to appear in public spaces like exhibition halls in department stores and lobbies of hotels. As grand openings became more elaborate, flower displays scaled to match as they became even more ornate.

There is still tremendously little documented specifically about the introduction or progression of flower stands as an otaku activity, which is curious for the otherwise documented minutiae that dominates breathless fandoms. Particularly as they have been so present across Japanese culture, it may seem unnecessary to frame them as any sort of uniquely otaku convention. Knowing better, the excess of the bubble economy is how I have usually understood to center Japan’s modern entertainment industry, and this golden age for idols is generally cited as the beginning of flower stands being gifted by fans for concerts. Assumed truths like this do make me uneasy, but strong evidence does support the bubble era establishing a lot of modern tradition in this space. Moth orchids became the preferred flower for business gifts during this period, considered to symbolize good fortune, and it’s recognizably common to see more modest displays using them gifted by corporate partners mingling among the more ostentatious fan stands.

Few rules and conventions from the flower stand’s growth out of ikebana, if any, seem to survive in the modern practice of businesses playing flower-gifting tag, which is inconvenient if you are trying to elevate their art as anything other than a holdover from wasteful bubble excess. For as much lip service has been paid to integrating the consumerism of acrylic stands and locally grown produce into regional revitalization, it would be useful if one company, any company, had some grandiose mission statement on the magic of flower stand gift tradition that could be retold by otaku to back the custom, or parsed by foreigners trying to understand what a flower stand even really is. Instead, it is mostly surprising how bereft overseas fan accounts are of any mention that a company like Flosta, contracted by Cygames and Sega to provide flower stands for concerts that intersected one weekend, fumbled so spectacularly with damaged stands, super-duper bankruptcy, and failed refunds that it has brought tremendous viral attention on flower stands in Japan. As much as I would qualify flower stands as an east Asia fascination, I also wouldn’t say a disposable vanity and presentation is any more baroque to westerners than kabuki, especially when it can be anchored to virtual idols and horse girls. Outrage remains the reserve currency of all otaku the world over, even when it is well outside our spheres of influence, so the silence from overseas is more bizarre to me than it is deafening.

When did flower stands, then, grow as an otaku concern that makes them now able to support a company as over-promising and under-delivering as Flosta? The process for gifting flower stands in the bubble era for concerts was largely informal, often beginning by asking management directly for approval, and the growing popularity of character idol concerts is likely to be where it was solidified as otaku ritual. The closest primary source I found linked to its current expression is a signup spreadsheet for IDOLM@STER’s 5th Anniversary concert in 2010, showing HarukaP putting up a fixed contribution of 1000 JPY each to fund a flower stand. Crowdsourcing funds in this way remains the popular convention today with the expectation that contributors will be credited on a placard, although some fans do prefer to develop stands alone.

Some flower shops that have had a long online presence do preserve some evidence of otaku participation at smaller IDOLM@STER events in the years prior to this concert, confirmed by at least one veteran fan I know that was around for the era. IDOLM@STER did not formalize accepting flower stands until NEW YEAR P@RTY the following year, where after reports of that concert were the first time flower stands appear to have earned serious focus. The start of IDOLM@STER’s Second Vision here is a fairly convenient delineation, seen with even more clarity as Azumi Asakura, replacing the voice for Yukiho during this transition, celebrated the novelty of receiving a flower stand at this concert. Speaking to how green the ritual was, applications were accepted for them not as フラワースタンド (flower stands), or フラスタ (the otaku’s now preferred shortening), or even スタンド花 (stand flowers, the normie’s preference), but more specifically ロビー花 (lobby flowers), a carve out that has definitely fallen out of fashion.

If we were to chart an inflection for flower stands, IDOLM@STER’s 7th Anniversary might be a good one for increased participation in general. Some of the earliest Twipla event IDs, where fans mostly begin with organizing flower stands even today, apply to flower stands starting with NEW YEAR P@RTY stretching into this event. On the heels of a post-anime boom period, IDOLM@STER was also undergoing a sea change in participant regulations. Penlights using AA or AAA batteries were no longer allowed at these concerts due to an incident that caused equipment damage, leading to the popularity of LR44 battery powered penlights and the development of character penlights as merch. Coupled with this bombshell announcement, and certainly less mentioned despite a similar surviving longevity, flower stands (no longer lobby flowers) were now pinned to a 40cm base and 140cm of height. Some fan wisdom I recall suggests this became explicit policy due to bounds being overstepped when overeager fans began to furnish extremes, like huge wreaths. As regulations became studied documents for concertgoers looking for any in to flout the rules, a now formal warning specifying that the number of stands might potentially exceed what could reasonably be accepted does suggest that flower stands were going through a new swell in interest.

M@STERS OF IDOL WORLD (MOIW) would be where we really begin to see that interest show in its modern concentration. With each of IDOLM@STER’s branches converging for the first time at one concert, the grandeur of this event’s format continues to propel it forward as a significant opportunity to push your tantou (or oshi if you’re now hip with it). Across the two days of the event in 2015, approximately 300 stands were counted exhibited outside of the Seibu Dome. One fan, hyping IDOLM@STER as the start of otaku giving gifts at events, wants to claim 10% of flowers in the country were consumed over these two days. Somewhat more impressively to me, Omo, as he recounts his personal exposure to flower stands at MOIW, says that 2ch by this point was still an operating organizational glue for them, although I had trouble digging up specific references. Flower shops were very much keeping up with demand by this point, leading fans and retrospectives from florists to jokingly refer to this exhibit as the 花屋天下一武道会 (Flower Shop World’s Martial Arts Tournament), riffing on Dragon Ball’s tour of force.

The label would be pushed most visibly by an otaku-focused flower shop, a relatively new invention, that had launched in 2013. Although more recent MOIW events have chosen to discover a new format of lottery participation with nobori flags, more logistically agreeable and equally well received by fans selecting into ad hoc groups, flower stands became embedded as part of the core Producer identity by displays simply of impressive scale than even individual stands being uniquely expressive. Theater Days later in 2017 would also make gifting flower stands the core interaction among players added as friends, with Starlight Stage grafting a similar interaction on a cooperative mode that was made permanent in 2018.

Realistically, the process of otaku organizing flower stands has only recently matured as they have become more individualized expressions, instead of being furnished as a general support. Organizing and delivering a stand is still uncertain and tepid enough that it is not unusual to discover organizers writing postmortems for Note blogs, or to find curious fans inquiring about how to proceed on Yahoo Answers. Rather than simple displays of bouquets, otaku have invented the flower stand as a crowdfunded accomplishment by contracting independent flower shops to realize designs that embellish a character or performer. When money does intersect doujin in this way, there is usually a conduit, like print shops and digital shopfronts, that allow the interest to scale. The advantage flower shops may have most over doujinshi, however, is that their testimonials are more publicly palatable, which allows featuring completions as case studies or in galleries on websites.

While in the past it may have taken an inventive otaku with ambition to boldly ask for Arisu’s strawberry pasta, accelerated exposure through social media and legitimization like this from independent businesses have grown the otaku flower stand into an industry, realized most by these specialized shops. One of the largest shops, citing fanaticism around Cinderella Girls, prominently seized on otaku during a post-quake downturn in business to trademark 痛花 (itahana) and make this business their focus. The characterization certainly seems applicable to the ways we have seen itasha now being stretched by custom car culture. One stand in 2017 attempted to skirt the rules by using a tablet in its display, leading to a revision of the boilerplate rules for flower stands starting with PRODUCER MEETING 2018. Later follow-ups, like an AR solution using a QR code, feel as if they are ribbing someone to make a further amend of the rules.

Most of subculture, it should be said, remains a loose collection of conventions rather than strict rules preventing these teases of the boundary. Flower stands began as such, and all related doujin concerns, if they are to continue existing with any sort of purity, will always lack a full qualification or understanding for what is completely acceptable. The abbreviation and awareness of flower stands, even among the otaku, likely has as much to do with Ensemble Stars fans upsetting what was still a reasonably loose etiquette in 2018.

Overseas otaku, as they do become more attuned to Japanese expressions, will desire to achieve the flower stand as a measure of fan legitimacy. Fans that have already sampled from this world, where a light creative achievement is still a signal stronger than accumulating merchandise, are also the reason why more overseas conventions are continuing to attempt replicating Comiket and WonFes as an export of the doujin fair model. Anime Central more recently has been able to support flower stands in its exhibit hall, mostly on prodding from fans that have strong familiarity with the process already, and Otakon secured a corner for them as well this year. Houkago P Time, one of the older assemblies of overseas Producers, effectively banded to legitimize the overseas interest in the franchise and was able to achieve a number of overseas-sponsored flower stands to Japanese concerts in its heyday.

Attempts at achieving flower stands overseas have otherwise been minimal, if not sober to the realities limiting them. Not only do volunteers at anime conventions and contracted staff for concert venues lack familiarity with flower stands, but the infrastructure, labor, and business to support them effectively do not exist in an analogue overseas, nor does anyone want to dedicate floor space to something that is, realistically, an insurance liability and fire hazard. When fan activities can be atomized and exercised organically by overseas fans without significant hurdles like this, as they can be for call guides, sponsored cheer billboards, or itasha, the purity of the expression does not feel compromised and can ramp organically. Flower stands, probably, will always have trouble achieving a similar penetration that they enjoy in Japan unless fans accept compromise on their inherent maximalism, at least initially. Japan, for what it is worth, did learn to make concessions when scaling their participation with flower stands: many of the examples you will see today now use entirely artificial flowers.

Bushiroad, despite aiming to achieve 50 percent of net sales in overseas markets, has hedged on the potential for concerts overseas. Animenomics, in their analysis, expressed this as showing the limits of holding anime concerts abroad. For overseas fans that can recall Anisong World Matsuri in Los Angeles, or Lantis Festival in Las Vegas, or Bushiroad’s own CharaExpo USA in Anaheim, it doesn’t take the head of Bushiroad Music saying it to know live events are a tough nut to crack. The cloud of fan behaviors surrounding the performances themselves are, also, more of an intangible that do as much to complete what makes the experience of a live (ライブ) more special than any concert is when realized with the same performers abroad. While it isn’t to be suggested that the intangibles like flower stands override the core experience, one does wonder if the camraderie that collects to realize a live are what western fans may be missing to unlock a deeper appreciation for them, or an experience that makes them worth traveling cross-country for. When Bushiroad and Lantis already prohibit peacock penlight holders and shouting during intermissions¹, tempering the wild spirit of the otaku, flower stands and similar completions being absent from the experience does already risk, in my mind, chipping at that core.

For otaku that have relished in the maximalism, the boundaries being drawn so tightly around their behaviors can feel constricting when they are enforced most viciously by fans policing other fans with online haranguing. Even traditions that are inherent to the spirit of Japanese concerts have teetered on a similar uncertainty in their enforcement, with COVID at one point pushing them to the edge when it ushered in a dark age of prohibiting calls and chants altogether. The convergence of the otaku on the flower stand in this period, to me, does not feel accidental. Flower stands, a venue where gilding the lily to impress other otaku remains encouraged besides simply acceptable, may be where the otaku still consider themselves able to shout freely at their loudest, without inducing the ire of fellow fans. Struggles may still lie ahead anyway, if even flower stands have now been locked out of certain events due to disputes among fans.

Seichi junrei and itasha have been similarly initiated by fans, but are catalyzed by mature business rather than being wholly dependent on it to exist at all. Whether American brutes can learn to care about flower stands in a similar context is likely, still, an open question. If they are to, they will probably first need to sprout an understanding that you can’t mirror a model of engagement by throwing more money at it to make it bloom faster.

以前オタクと飲んだときに声優現場は奇声を上げたり全身をサイリウムで発光させたりすることができなくなった結果オタクの自己表現方法がフラスタに収斂したという話を聞いてその時はそれはどうなんよと思ったけど全般的には平和な方向への歴史の歩みだなと後では思った

— えるあ (eruatashi) Jan 14, 2024

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.

The poetry of news, providing context for events, is that it informs a critical public. Technology, instead, has been thrust upon me in an information age that is past ripe. It should be clear by now that ingesting a modern daily news, where images of community raids and poetic destruction are beamed directly as seizure, is more of a ritual that allows one to hallucinate a Fourth Estate than an actual enrichment. The amateur blend of news now found in true crime, Joe Rogan hang-ons, investigative reporting learned from Google Docs callouts, and live stream clips beamed from suburban bedrooms by influencers with ring lights, dizzies before one is allowed a thought that might ever focus them.

The supposed professionals are not doing much better to distinguish themselves. The New York Times now sells their news on the side as a game publisher with a bonus of endless, pulsing, full color video. Democracy dies not in darkness, but with bankers boxes from editorial staff clearing the room so that the invisible hand can direct more salutes of business. Talking heads, evolved from grey hair dulls into slicked-back DUI hires, now have their clearest path to upwards mobility by sitting in the rotating chair on podcasts or skipping all standards to be confirmed as Chief of War Crimes. These acknowledgements are not comforts themselves, in a traditional way as you or I will understand a warm blanket or a tricot dakimakura cover, but a fun house comfort that allows one to believe they are able to parse the ruins of our media landscape with complete clarity. For every ProPublica that does remain, there are ten thousand independents and generative summaries jockeying for their pennies and attention.

The iteration of media’s current forms did not arrive all at once, or without truths borrowed from the style guides and behaviors of mass broadcast. Dan Rather may be one of the most recognized of our grey hair dulls, as one of America’s “Big Three” evening news anchors for CBS, but he is no less an encapsulation of the thrust from technology. Most of the urgency of modern hurricane reporting is owed to Dan’s time at KHOU in Houston, where Hurricane Carla would be the first time satellite images of a storm were projected on a scale map, urging the largest evacuation performed during peacetime to this point. Telestar I, the first telecommunications satellite launched in 1962, was the first time live images were broadcast globally by satellite on CBS. The year after, in 1963, he was one of the first to screen and narrate the amateur Zapruder film out of Dallas. Any understanding of media or television is incomplete without also an understanding of Vietnam, where Dan was on the front lines for the living room war enabled by satellite and video. By his own account, he was ill-prepared for the gravity of the role.

The highlight of this five year window is not necessarily to regale technological accomplishment, or to tour Dan’s presiding over major events in his tenure as an evening news anchor, but to bookend with where you will ultimately find Dan now: writing a Substack, swimming in the trash heap with the rest of us. The conveyors of technology (Dan’s characterization) have pushed him into the blogosphere, though only after experiencing a stint as a podcaster. His Substack equal has now been absorbed as the boss of news on the network where he first developed any authority at all.

Neil Postman, an already renowned media theorist during Reagan’s political star, would most pointedly express that serious television is not just worse than useless, but embarrassing. Dan would attempt to override this modality at his outset by inventing his own take on Walter Cronkite’s signoff, but lacked the courage to continue after one week. It is instead mostly the squabble between Dan and George HW Bush dissected by expert political analysts for form, not content, that became an emphasis on Postman’s core thesis that television encouraged tennis matches of picking winners, completing television news primarily as entertainment.

The submission of news to technology is where Postman’s critique postures some of its strongest today, not the least when Dan also attempted to pass off proportionally-spaced Microsoft Word documents as originating from a typewriter. The specifics of this episode are best revisited in broad strokes today, recognizing attempts at sourcing, verification, and correction were gestured at more than ever really attempted. The cranks on the Free Republic forums, obsessed with exposing the liberal media bias, shattered the illusion minutes after they were first presented by Dan. A concise analysis posted there the day after should have been good enough to expedite a retraction. CBS instead moved at the speed of television, choosing to take twelve days to correct the record.

Similar embarrassments today have been worse than enduring. The outcomes and their expressions, however, are still not foregone either. Of the lawn chair media critics that do remain, most prefer to pose what past luminaries like Postman or Nam June Paik would make of our now accepted mediums in podcasts and short-burst social media. The atomization of news, disjointed into segments that arrest thought as they are chained back together, would be as clearly seen by Postman as the remote control was to Federico Fellini in interrupting an emotion.

For Postman, it would perhaps by difficult to accept that the linear nature of television as he knew it would make it a relatively slow medium today. It is instead a horrible invention of a wandering mind, one exploded by looping shorts assembled reactively and that allows itself to write a post aggrandizing the media ecology of Dan Rather and Gochisua, that imagines if Postman would react as a small Victorian child would when allowed a sip from an overstimulating marriage of their forms. What, possibly, would Postman make of Gochiusa News (ごちうさニュース), if not the ultimate perversion of our news as entertainment that it deserves?

“Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the "Now... this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.”
_{— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death}

Teleivison may be yesterday’s medium, but Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka? (Gochiusa), when it was first broadcast during the spring of 2014, began when simulcasts were not a complete substitute. Depending on how much you can remember the anticipation of fansubs, it may be difficult to accept that in Japan it did not release on streaming services without a few days of broacast delay from its airing on Tokyo MX. Gochiusa was likely to have been a success without streaming, though a great deal of the fandom is still attributed to its attention on Niconico, where the participatory nature of layered comments remains attractive even today over better streaming options under the Kadokawa umbrella. A specific diehard audience, at scale, is imperative to it being an appealing option at all. Gochiusa, not necessarily uniquely but as one of the more prominent examples, had each new episode free to view for its first week on Nico. Operative to this recount, the first episode remained free to view through Gochiusa’s entire broadcast run and after it concluded for some years. Gochiusa’s first episode, it feels now, was predestined to become an informal meeting space for fans, creating conditions for the raucousness of a Rocky Horror Picture screening seasoned with otaku inventiveness.

The common Gochiusa fanatic here has more overlap with the average K-pop fan than they likely care to admit, as the initial goal of their attention was to push this episode to one million views and to run it further up the site’s ranking charts. On Nico, where view counts have always been protected for rankings rather than inflated exponentially, every view captures an active engagement that can’t be equated to YouTube or other global platforms. One million views continues to be an accomplishment of magnitude on the site, and especially so in the era before it stopped requiring user registration.

While numbers-chasing is potentially enough of a carrot to snowball an audience, the fervor around Gochiusa has larger otaku recognition. With Comiket 86 (C86) as Gochiusa’s first debut, corporate booths from Houbunsha and RONDO ROBE were ready to lay out the proverbial otaku carpet with dakimakura, tapestries, and bed sheets. The result, as you can still find expressed on dives back into dusty blogs and profiles, was mayhem: each item’s stock sold out on the first day, though not without also forcing many to wait in lines until closing time that they had queued for in the early morning.

By the second and third days of C86, either from rationing what was left or having learned from the crowds in their first day of bumbling around, stocks at these booths were depleted within minutes. We know this today not because of my fastidiousness in combing old tweets declaring breaking news, but because Gochiusa fans on Nico were monitoring intel and have compiled a C86 merch table for posterity plastered with 完売 (sold out) labels, as if we are still gawking at the same merch advertisement boards affixed with stickers on each item. Communicating merch stock has long been considered an advanced tactic of Comiket information warfare, stretching back to Nanoha in 2006, and social media is the preferred theater for making things up as you go along. Nanoha’s sold out and war is cruel. Gochiusa fans are hopping in and out of line. Someone at the Garupan booth just collapsed to the floor pissing and shitting themselves.

Gochiusa fans would feed on this potential prestige of earning title as the next Nanoha, when such title meant something. The invention of Gochiusa as news was therefore not modeled by any serious event, or even one rooted in any true reality with anecdotes meant to lightly smear respective fandoms, but an opportunity to stamp ごちうさ完売 (Gochiusa’s sold out) over Chino’s face on Nico as template as they declared themselves refugees from one of Comiket’s worst trials.

Gochiusa’s first episode becoming an informal wire service for otaku would only need a few danmaku repavings to overwrite an initial context of breathless Comiket reports, beginning with headlines front loaded in the first few seconds of playback. What did eventually develop this aggregation of headlines with the moniker “Gochiusa News”, as if to suggest it had secured a broadcasting license, was the 2014 snap election colliding with this episode also being on the precipice of two million views.

Japan’s politics have been a prominent fixture of Nico’s democratic engagement since it adopted live streaming, but what intrigues here is not that the otaku have thoughts on politicians or their politics, but that the 2014 election would be, and remains, a low point in voter turnout. Syaro and Chino fans are not yet a political class, but still the headlines about Abenomics and the weakness of the Democratic opposition are littered through the comment log during this time. It is frighteningly conceivable that someone could have extracted all of their news for the day from these headlines alone, but the posing of serious news over latte art could convey no more clearly that dooming headlines were undeserving of the grandeur that they tote. Gochiusa News became settled primarily, here, as performance. Most contemporary invokes of it would more sharply narrow it as breaking news (ごちうさ速報), except if you live in Oita prefecture, and there is perhaps no performance more enduring than news that never stops breaking. Even with comments posted at their largest font and their most urgent, they are immediately shoved under layers of more novel noise, pushed to the back as quickly as they were never seen or inspired thought about to begin with.

Even as a crowd, there is an editorial voice that applies to Gochiusa News in that of the daringly absurd. The nakedness of a deadly car crash being invoked next to Bitcoin price reports presents not so much a slice of life, taken in as nibbles coming from multiple sources, but as a dense pound cake of the ludicrous being shoved directly into your stupid face. The awe of this spectacle itself, where every headline can barely be discerned as visual content, is holistically the news. Tabloids exploded by a hydraulic press would retain more recognizable context. Tweets in a timeline collapsed into a single post container would still impress some average of attribution. Gochiusa News may elect to find more shared in a graffiti wall dedicated as community bulletin board, with a similar adherence to informal rules not established by committee but inferred from other participants. Unlike the rules that would be common to graffiti, where tagging over another another’s work where ample room was still available would be considered bad practice, the overwhelm toes vandalism as each comment can only be valuable to the performance in a whole.

Gochiusa News does focus where formality must be sacredly respected: news should only flood the screen until Cocoa’s first line, starting at 35 seconds, so as not to cross-talk. The first user to specifically mention this phenomenon would invoke it as the 31 second rule (31秒ルール), a direction accounting for comments taking at most four seconds to clear the screen at their posted timestamp. As Postman would describe for the nibbles of televised interviews and news segments, there is never enough time for anything but the openers and the irreverence of time-keeping.

An assembled danmaku shares more with a supposedly serious news than we should be comfortable with. Comments scrolling from right to left, punchily condensed so as to catch the eye swimming among others, are evocative of the news tickers that dart around skyscrapers or sit with importance as chyrons below the faces of nightmare round tables. Tickers are undoubtedly the best characteristic of visual news, so much that they are globally recognized when performed for parody in blockbuster movies or by amateurs opening Windows Movie Maker. Everything one could hope to know about the world is promised within a ticker, not with enough patience to read it in full, but with a darting gaze back and forth over it searching for some end to an infinite. Does anyone truly expect to find enlightening news outlined here, enriching beyond school delays and closings, when the events described are churned through and atomized as a flurry of unconnected points? It seems difficult to emphatically answer “no” to this question when, for a large cohort of adults, a scroll at the bottom of news as entertainment may be their only brush with news at all. The danmaku, at least, has sense to not keep one waiting when it blasts as a confetti of infotainment.

A lone individual repeating the dignity of a news anchor projecting steadiness will always be difficult to achieve in a 500-channel universe. Gochiusa News, instead, tunes its expression as a mass hysteria. For some years during its most prolific era, searching for “1” alone on Google or Yahoo! Japan would present Gochiusa’s first episode and related pages on Nico as top results¹, a vote of endorsement in the ratings rat race against other first episodes. While cable news may have been antecedent as only a finite and closed universe, the web has certainly graduated ourselves to uncountable multiverses. Gochiusa News indeed is only one constituent element of a broader templating that applied to Gochiusa’s first episode with an exacting detail. Each second has been outlined in a timeline guide on the video’s Nicopedia article, returning some context and categorization to what would otherwise require an academic grant to compile.

Reference guides are, of course, tremendously useful citations for anyone returning to parse these riddles today, but in their time would offer otaku mentorship matching the call guides distributed by fans at concerts for call and response. The revisions made regularly to this page during its peak run are a revealing supplement in that many of the citations are not just highly referential, but are meta to the act of templating itself, branching from comments vectoring as inquisitive reply to a prior template or from similar posts made to the guide’s bulletin board. The memetic value of otaku in-jokes is exposed as not exclusive to one video, or one website, but most entertaining when they are allowed to confuse new hosts. In distant galaxies of anonymous boards dedicated to posting Chino images as avatars, when someone will always undoubtedly query why Sxarp must be invoked that way, it remains appropriate to always volley your own question back: are you a virgin here, or do you kiss Hepburn with that romanization?

Many of the touchstones applicable to Gochiusa News were crowded to Nico’s silver age. If it were to have an emergent property, it is not as an authority for aggregated headlines, but as the rabbit hutch returned to as shelter. Whereas we can focus anonymous participation as a creative destination for movements like Muneo House, Gochiusa’s first episode qualifies itself more an event destination. Although people certainly do return to this video as regular ritual for news, enough that a Twitter bot began to capture the first thirty seconds each day, the ritualism most obvious in its pattern of activity is as meta participation tailing Gochiusa itself.

As main example to this phenomenon, Gakkou Gurashi will always be most viscerally remembered for its bait and switch. Notwithstanding that Minase Inori voiced main characters in both shows, Gochiusa provided retreat for shell-shocked otaku in 2015, grounding itself to a reality where Chino will always make you a fresh blend and Rize will always be your mom. The serious news is, as result, incidental bedding. Everyone arriving to Gochiusa News already implicitly expects the stock market to crash today, or that 40 million people will lose access to food assistance next month. What they would really prefer to jockey is when Kemono Friends’ first episode rocketing to the top of Nico’s rankings, a phenomenon forever intertwined to Nico and Kadokawa’s meddling, would achieve parity with Gochiusa at an eye-popping 9.3 million views. The dressing of the fluffy and lighthearted with wildly divergent global chaos, a crisis that never seems to cease, authorizes a fiction that this is a five-alarm meltdown worth freaking the fuck out about. The news, it does then appear, is always at its most entertaining when it is allowed to create the news.

It should not be discounted that many did derive some utility from Gochiusa News. At the peak of its recognition, when more eyes were on it as its danmaku were reposted outside of Nico, the most common refrain would be that it was faster than official sources, or even the early warning system of platforms used to brace earthquakes; it is, for example, only one way you could have learned about Brexit. Nothing posted to Gochiusa News had to go through the gullet of being spotted and reposted, because no comment existed in any hierarchy or with any specific authority. Naturally, there is no fact-checking ombudsman accountable for anonymous comments, or sourcing concerns gumming them up from flying at anything faster than the speed limit of their own medium. The informal meeting as news is a more general quality that wreaths it, as students gathered to vent about shitty questions on the Center entrance exams, or fans popped champagne celebrating the Hiroshima Tokyo Carp advancing to a Japan Series championship for the first time in 25 years.

Gochiusa News, in many ways more constructive than much the rest of Nico’s comment culture, mostly avoided devolving into fake news or vandal trolling. It is often improbable to consider that anonymity can deliver positive or even neutral outcomes online, when there are plenty of reasons to hark otherwise, but the localization of digital community often is a concern of probabilities as much as it is bending them into shape with moderation. Nothing is necessarily foregone about the character a medium does express: Kemono Friends did not break the Gochiusa News monopoly, and recent ascendants like Hiroshi Nohara returning viewers to Nico² have yet to show a convergent evolution as they also template danmaku over confusing food porn.

Gochiusa News does not hop in many hearts today, except when it is allowed to arrest them for reminisce. Checking the first episode today is enough to expose that most of the fluff is gone, now transplanted to mediums that push even closer to the speed of light, while a few diehards make vain attempts to replicate the magic. While I am tempted to close the book on its retreat as constituent to Nico’s broader decay, there is a hypnosis in its visual nature that I find myself gnawing on as artists and ghouls take to discovering representations of how our world will look with ceaseless horror and push notifications broadcast hovering in my retina. It is usually not that we are willing participants in our mediums, but that I find we are often first only bemused by them before being involuntarily attracted to their fine-tuned expressions, now tabs and swipes away, or pushed to us without consent as we must settle for them. Is there any wonder, as I stare into the eternity of scrolling feeds with voices barking at me teetering on the nonsensical, that I feel my eyeballs pulse with the caffeinated memories of Rabbit House?

Postman has had his mettle stretched in the four decades since he concluded we are amusing ourselves to death with television. The speed at which amusement does become terminal, rather than a chronic ache teetering on migraine, has yet to hit escape velocity. Postman’s books and lectures are now numbing parts painfully quaint and prescient of a technology that has, to align with his critiques, fogged our thoughts. He was too early to experience the web as we now know it, or to offer thoughts extending beyond the interrupt of electronic mail, telephones, and fax machines. The wrestle of old world technologies with a technological determinism seems as plucked from coverage today about generative AI, but the cultural references themselves are dated enough to require decent preface. A context of Reagan, Dan Rather, and the connective tissue of AM talk radio remain a useful grounding when dissecting why our modern media landscape looks like a Stormfront gathering in Breezewood, PA, but there is no singular Neil Postman of a similar critical renown that seems to offer as much modern clarity (Douglas Rushkoff could get there given enough time to hoist his influence on Lain and the psychedelic substrate), likely because so much of our energy is spent contesting platforms, as Cory Doctorow now wrestles with, rather than mediums themselves.

So much of what was at once theoretical about the web no longer needs to be said in aggrandizing detail when it can be lived. So much of our digital information pummels the senses without distinguishing venue to its expressions, a pornographic convergence that oscillates between rage, entertainment, and lust. So much of this convergence is engineered and designed to strip away all nuance and importance until it is sufficiently naked for decorating spectacle. Registering these mediums may be like explaining to a fish that they are swimming in water, as McLuhan posits, but the shifting of currents still cannot go unnoticed to even the most naïve of participants. Otaku ー maximalists, consumerists, and technophiles in their most modern derivation ー we may learn with more time provided early warning with Gochiusa News of our current barrage in mediums created primarily by their participants. They had no time to concern themselves with the shame or embarrassment then, nor does it seem we appear much concerned with the embarrassments of our new mediums since.

Rot is the primary tenant of the web. Radio Garden, the small building after which this site was themed that butts against the elevated tracks of the Chuo Line, embodies a similar outlook. First opened in November 1950, it still exists today, although absent any of the electronics and junk retailers that used to shape it with identity. Hagiwara Electrical, the last electronics shop in the space, moved out in 2023. The decidedly retro lettering, which I have failed to design a good replication for still, has more recently been plied off so that it can now show a scrolling LED ticker.

Even now as it is a vending machine enclave, Radio Garden has a personality that I find doesn’t exist in much of Akihabara anymore. It seems impractical, much the way running personal websites does today, that it continues to exist surrounded by commercial developments and office towers. It does not have a lofty future, and yet it is still tended to in some cottage way. When I reflect on why I still want to write and publish despite the hurdles and obstructions that would be far easier to refuse than to attempt navigating, or the reality that there is little prestige or audience to be squeezed from small websites, I remember Radio Garden. While I’m not entirely eyeing the exit from every large platform, it is also a motivator for me to collapse more completely on my terms. Even during a content apocalypse, I would rather choose to trim the overgrowth than to set myself on fire.

When I talk about the fatigue of socials, it is usually contingent on the moderation sucking out loud. Bluesky is so far doing a great job of replicating some of Cohost’s mistakes at about ten times the size with a hundred times the budget. Frankly, I have never been all that great at socials either, so it is easier to step back from them without losing very much. Even while there is a good core buried on Bluesky that is thoughtful and funny, Bluesky has definitely missed a useful critical mass that makes the maladies of socials harder to bargain with. The headache, as I experience Bluesky, is that it is desperately in need of some sort of Community Notes solution. Only second to this is that it needs more ero artists.

With this already top of mind, I soft launched denpa.denden.garden a few months ago. Considering the announcement for it I’ve been massaging has sat in my drafts for about that long, let’s just call it fully launched today. The theming is heavily inspired by Ayashii World, usually cited as a prototype that ended up cloned in many iterations. While I may eventually furnish some philosophizing on why that is and why a second website themed to it is a desirable thing to have, this is categorically a personal site in the Neocities vein that aims to build up reference materials and loose collections. This blog is a casual presentation that I don’t intend to discontinue; the subdomain, instead, should be considered more like mumbling to myself.

My favorite pages at this stage are Screencap stew and Status messages, which let me imagine I’m funnier than I actually am, but poke around and decide for yourself! If you like what you see, feeds are, as always, available.

Second: this blog now comes with a likes counter at the end of every post that allows you to donate Happy Points. Drifting from socials has made me reconsider the value of comments, knowing email is maybe an even more powerful black hole and that solutions like Disqus are a non-starter, so this feels a reasonable trial to take with rolling an API myself. For the moment, it’s unfortunately a small chunk of this site that strictly requires JavaScript. Recalling Cohost again, I’m planning to make the endpoints respond with images so there is some reasonable noscript alternative. The API layer is flexible enough for this and should hopefully prove extensible enough to add likes to the subdomain as well, if nothing explodes!

Third: I’ve very graciously been approached to contribute on two projects, one as preface for a book and the other a more informal academic anthology (think fans writing critically for Comitia). I’m tremendously nervous about adapting a digital voice into an authoritative style worth printing on bound pages. At the same time, it’s affirming to have earned recognition in what I regard as a fairly short overall journey for the blog so far, and I’m excited to stretch the longform a little more. The anthology piece will likely only end up published in Japanese around November, but I have been cleared to post the original English here whenever that makes sense.

Although it may feel short to me, enough time has passed that many of the hotlinks here have already begun to rot. There’s a smaller effort I’m undertaking to resolve these all to archives today and to ensure that new entries remain stable going forward. Until I do finish trimming the overgrowth, though, please enjoy a Pocari Sweat or a Boss Coffee as a reprieve at one of these spun-out vending machine enclaves that I call websites.

“Well-known” has no keepers, nor is it a particularly interesting frame for me when performing an inquiry of digital cultures. Common cultural touchpoints haven’t been shred entirely at this point, but they have in recent history become more atomized to expressions like memes. It could be useful to probe the dwindling monoculture as a byproduct of influencers and now generative content, and this is likely to be a reality you’re already familiar with if you’ve ever tried to intersect your YouTube subscriptions with someone else, but the longing for a monoculture now being imagined by video summary YouTubers is flimsy with even slightly critical generational and regional examinations. Unfortunately, I do not make money off of longing for the monoculture, so I have no need for the security blanket. When you take a permissive approach to culture, you also gain the convenient power to meditate on decades-old copypasta and subcultures, probably so that this wisdom can be ingested as truth into the elitist superstructure of tomorrow measured in flattened gains today.

The point at which personal fixation graduates into subculture is, exactly, one person. This is probably an unacceptable criteria if you’ve been tasked with organizing tags for metadata, where it’s common to mull whether a meme is legitimate or notable enough for category, but it’s the only acceptable leniency that I want to have applied to my anthropological studies. Humans are not neat categories. Our subcultures, maybe at their purest concentration, constitute a fractal dimension of expression and are often only observable when measured with an instrument sensitive enough to observe them at their weakest signal. Judging whether the Angry Video Game Nerd, or the Nostalgia Critic, or King of the Hill satisfy a legitimate Japanese subculture, whatever we decide constitutes such, is not a useful questioning not because there are no registrable ways to measure fandom for them, but because subculture has always been hyperlocalized and never always searchable, even in digital contexts. Bulletin boards and tweets expire, archives waste away, and the utility of search engines wither as they butt against walled gardens and spam. Yes, it’s probably bullshit that King of the Hill has ever engendered subs versus dubs debates, even if it had most of its first two seasons dubbed and was the only other animated series besides the Simpsons to air on Fox Japan. Mike Judge has otherwise enjoyed modest success in Japan, with a Mintia tie-up and a Japan exclusive PSX port dubbed by a manzai duo. Even without having fan art of Beavis ogling Rias Gremory to point to while chuckling myself, an absence of evidence does not nullify that passive consumption is a default and that any remaining observable expression, however small or without a trend throughline, remains extraordinary. The expectation of constant engagement through free promotion by fans, one forged by digital marketers combing analytics to explain why promotional budgets must be branched to influencers with sponsorship deals, remains as much of a foolish superlative today as it was before fan fiction was popularized by Trekkies.

Categorizing subcultures, at least when allowed a loose definition as I have prescribed them, tends to trend towards chaos. They do not always follow a strict hierarchy, or a chronology, or flow into neat bins. This, however, does not suggest an atmospheric noise to their cultures that escapes observation. The bridges a subculture connects with other subcultures are what provide a useful anchoring context that allows us to establish them with a relational definition, while also preserving the flexibility to recognize categories that do not flow with strict ancestors. When you trust the experts, even Dewey’s own eponymous decimal system has undergone numerous revisions to better communicate this type of faceted classification. Subcultures when studied under this pretense, by attempting to put a lid on galaxies of expression, will appear to interact with their environments in as many unique ways as water can flow, crash, and destroy.

Nico’s open tagging, a loosely organic attempt limited to 10 attachments per video, is a shrewd way of signaling what users find important as classification. Whether full episodes of King of the Hill broadcast rips posted to Nico constitute a subculture or more of an opportune skirt of copyright should be questioned, but a layering of Nico comments already provides a more convincing case that overrides a passive consumption. The fansubs for numerous AVGN episodes, sprouting great colloquialisms like the Angry Video Game Nyard, is an organic import that could only be teed up by Game Center CX and numerous kusoge playthroughs. The intersection of these preceding facets, serialized online video at the interstate artery of American personalities and gratuitous barbecue, along with faceless food preparation performed now most prominently by commandeered vocal synths, places the BBQ Pit Boys as a landmark. Hank Hill may be disturbed to know they only appreciate the rich, smoky flavor of charcoal.

Fansubs for niche content are an interesting metacontext, as while they can be stewarded by dedicated individuals, a clamor for them suggests a previously unmet need. One million views on a BBQ Pit Boys video, still an achievement on NicoDou, would earn it admission into the Hall of Legends. With preparations of spare ribs and huge honking steaks, gratuitousness is clearly the driving novelty to Japanese audiences drawn more to the methodology of the pitmaster manning the grill, affectionately ダディ (Daddy) to fans, than the total bombast of an Epic Meal Time. Most of the analog in this respect are the comments responding raucously to bacon being used as seasoning. Even more express culture shock at the portion sizes and the complete disregard for cutting board hygiene. The だっかーん (dakkan) danmaku that swarm the screen during the pitmaster’s recitation of the URL in each intro, a correct soramimi, is an emergent jargon. Many of the quotables and interjections are likely too lofty and tone dependent to christen as proper slang, though we would be remiss not to mention how much “pitmaster’s privilege” appears to align philosophically with food terrorism (飯テロ), perhaps an American exceptionalism of our god-given right to euphemistically stir up international conflict. With fan art that leans more directly into secondary contents¹, these are all the bona fides of a healthy subculture. Hank Hill and his propane fixation may meanwhile earn passing mention with CM collectors and a loose fandom interested in the revival, but he does not notably present with most common expressions of online Japanese subculture like fan art, at least among those that are now observable.

Although I stress again that any subculture should not require registration to earn this title, it may instead be appropriate to frame that subcultures can be graded on their health by some assembled measure of these expressions, such that we can process and communicate them as categories. Bright minds that have mused long on tagging before seem to contemporarily flirt most prominently with GPT. While I may return one day to draft the perfect subculture category system, the observant truth more enshrined than ever by numbers-chasing on socials is that metadata is the マッサージ. The north star for Nico, its user-managed tags, signals an escape of jargon into slang by sliding us “Daddy Cool” (ダディクール) across the picnic table. What about it, Daddy Cool?

Daddy Cool, like the branching personalities of the BBQ Pit Boys, is a mona derivative from a much larger cavalcade roster of AA² characters. The overwhelming canon of these characters originates from 2ch board subcultures and Daddy Cool is certainly without exception, as his name was christened in reply to a thread on /newsplus/ about a barbecue murder brawl in Mississippi. His image, independent of this event, was already a remix of a mona crossed with fish eyes, which may explain why he was so early to wearing cat ears as fashion. The connecting of these two things or why they were crossed is likely to be digital dust. Although I entertain some readers may be familiar with him already, I wager it is far more likely you may know him namelessly from a famous Tenkomori Miku PV, No Thank You, popular at the height of YouTube reprints. Daddy Cool unfortunately lacks much of the smooth charm he is known for in this representation, when in reality he is most prominently a fat, happy, family-loving, red meat-eating American. He never cleans his grill, values portion size over tenderness, and will save the trimmings of fat to feed his seethingly polite Japanese guests. He is most enigmatic when playing mahjong, where he will declare pon despite being in tenpai for kokushi musou. As a man of, for, and about business, he also wears a suit as leisure and slams back Diet Cokes, before he could be usurped by another American icon of note. He is lucky, then, that he is most often only invoked at the presentation of plentiful, subpar smoked meats that would require a second mortgage and a well-stocked Food Lion.

Daddy Cool is not unusual in that he has a developed Japanese fandom, as do many other AA derivatives of mona, though it is still unusual to count not one, but two bulletin boards dedicated to him. He powers his own daddy search engine if you’re feeling daddy, rather than dandy. The matome sites with curated directories of what’s cool present a sprawl of extremely focused personal sites, a friction overcome to exhibit a mountain of salvation. The catalog of these expressions is mostly a tour of artifacts that were rarely if ever invoked in their time and, in most cases, were likely forgotten the moment after they were first posted. Low brow and often pointlessly crass as they are, they are the constituents of VIP quality. No one can ascribe a rubric to VIP quality, except for perhaps Daddy Cool. Daddy Cool would know if you were VIP quality.

Most of these elements have been discarded from the surviving Daddy Cool, at least to the locales where he does survive. The most effective way to verify the authenticity of this claim, rather than wrap ourselves in the comfort of old matome sites or pretend Nico is representative of anything more primary than decay, is to venture into the collapsing Twitter mines. By any standard, Daddy Cool is slang with some modern endurance. There is nothing I would attribute considerably to this, except that saying “Daddy Cool” is a very specific activation. Daddy Cool’s mahjong tirades are more usually directly translated visually to new characters for parody, but Daddy Cool as an atomic value of language is almost exclusively invoked referencing his experience with gratuitous meat. Closed incantations like thisーhighly referential, only lightly remixedーmake “Daddy Cool” operate both temporally and functionally like saying “wassup” to your millennial friend, or laying up NEDM to their horror.

Copypasta being an authority for characters like Daddy Cool is largely a Japanese phenomenon, mostly credited to an enduring text culture that is much stronger than whatever is hanging on in other online locales. His origin story, to my knowledge, never earned a translation on contemporary harbors like Everything Shii Knows and Tanasinn, with it only more recently being outlined by Nameless Rumia. As the Atkins fad was well on the way out for Americans by the aughts, Daddy Cool had to abandon his carnivore when he did remigrate back to Texas. English VIPPERs, performing a soft reenactment of /news4vip/ and related hubs for the Secret Area of VIP Quality (SAoVQ), wisely hired him primarily as their CEO, allowing him to hawk access to VIP quality text discussion and Cool Free Ringtones. While such recontextualizations are not unusual in the import of Japanese AA iconography, Daddy Cool’s popularity on English textboards is an absurdist stretch that leans more towards a reconstitution where he becomes appropriated as a full-blown mascot. Daddy Cool here is pronounced to be not only the guard of the board itself, but also ends up puppeted by individual users that stretch his archetype. While there is certainly a voice ascribed to Daddy Cool, often of hopeless capitalist wanting and a mocking camel case that somehow hedges on CAPS lock being cruise control for cool, these representations are mostly the result of a convergence of traits driven by a niche textboard, hyperlocalized itself that they have probably had very minimal Japanese contact. There is no central authority on the Daddy, only a meaty, wet mass of participants. Every participant, born from a Daddy, is also born with access to the tools of man to deliver and assess VIP quality.

Value judgements of subculture communities are mired by bad faith reads that I often prefer to steer away from, but it has mostly held that a high-churn original content (OC) culture that allows for this type of winding absurdity delivers at least, if nothing else, entertaining outcomes. Many of the emergent properties to this approach were felt in the loose Weird Twitter collective, itself seeded from FYAD users that would rather piss on the label, that gave personalities like Dril a sardonic and detached edge that have been able to pollute their language into the web at large. SAoVQ, now bunkered in a refuge board on world2ch after its most recent domain stopped resolving, straddles its own insular roleplay of personalities. The trajectories of English textboards, Something Awful (SA), and Weird Twitter, where Dril quotes were already considered lazily stale by 2017, all aligning with decay is a good proof that it is a reliable signal for identifying whatever we consider to be an online subculture. Retrospect will continue to be the best advantage available when making this call.

Daddy Cool’s brightest star, at least as a cogent personality, very directly found habitat as a tweeter in the soup of Weird Twitter before it had earned the title³. English VIPPERs were otherwise early adopters of what could be considered Weird Twitter, with the tweets4vip aggregator and the very tasteful cum bot. From the surviving archives of this Daddy, there is a kernel of creative genius visible, the stupidly absurd, that gives it good harbor to the label. While many common elements of Daddy Cool have been transposed, there is a stretching in having him steered with one voice that makes him feel less disposable and transactional to the joke being told. Sagas and callbacks, like the commandeering of an oil rig to install disco lights, are able to invent and control the character’s own destiny more than they are allowed to be on open bulletin boards. That realization may be why reading these tweets back now has the free trial spirit of a Longmont Potion Castle, now that I am caught up on Tasmanian Syrup and The Clown Motel. They are, of course, absent the improv and pedal effects, but the sprinkled mentions of exotic places and slightly off-kilter word jumbles is a match. The self-certainty I find they share, always spiraling into the discovery of strangely memetic phrasings, is a badge of pride for any great genius idiot.

i aM wRItInG a sOnG abOuT sOUTh AmEIRcAN pArrOt'S iN rUSsiA iN tHE 16Th cENtURy i Am nOT suRE, WHErE tO bEIng. PaRROt rHyMEs w/: caRrOt

— DaDddy cOol ★ V I p (@DADDYc_OOL) Dec 8, 2012

sup. im damian. well i was. certified cisco network associate. u got a question? fyi i died in 2008 & didnt keep up w/ router tech

— DaDddy cOol ★ V I p (@DADDYc_OOL) Oct 14, 2012

[4]

aNy nEwsPaPeR wAnTs tO bUY, mY bAD nEWS?

— DaDddy cOol ★ V I p (@DADDYc_OOL) Sep 6, 2012

hOrSe rEfUTed dOStOYevSkI & rENOUncEd suIciDE & sToPPed sMOkINg & stArTEd plAYiNG KoOl & tHE gANG vIA mOuTh & bLUEtOOth & sCroBbLEd IT

— DaDddy cOol ★ V I p (@DADDYc_OOL) Jul 20, 2012

hORsE iS noW sEedEd w/ issUEs oF lE mOnDe DIplomATiquE, B. RuSseL's hIStORY oF wEsTErn PHiLOsoPHy, EPiSodEs oF mY lIttLE pOny, dISco ALbuMS

— DaDddy cOol ★ V I p (@DADDYc_OOL) Jul 20, 2012

iT wIll pROvE, pOPulAR iN deMOgRApHICs tHAT eNJoy mEAT & wHAT iS pOPUlAR w/ oThER pEOplE

— DaDddy cOol ★ V I p (@DADDYc_OOL) Sep 4, 2012

If we were to put a pin on this Daddy Cool, however, it may mostly be one of a simple convenience. Like a geriatric thinking about those beans, or a conservative wearing sunglasses, he has a stock character appeal that doesn’t especially depend on remaining married to his initial context. It is not to be suggested that this profile was ever an authoritative representation, or even one that has surviving reverence, other than that it is one of his more complete representations. The synthesis of an AA character is a fairly mild completion, though one that I treat as incompatible with modern socials. So-called main characters of the day that dominate these platforms, now almost universally actual villains and not shoestring wimps or simple editorial failures⁵, are a fatigue that has stripped socials of an overarching whimsy washed by the strange from independent sites like SAoVQ and SA. Somewhere in the years since the runoff from Gamergate, it feels forgotten that Twitter was only ever good for useless murmurs and confusing support agents. Now that it’s possible to scrape pennies off the floor by posting as badly as possible, the theatre of the absurd is always broadcasting beyond any convincing parody, and the jokesters don’t have much oxygen left to heckle the worst actors out of the room.

The diffusion of Daddy Cool into different online spaces would suggest more of a memetic influence than being a subculture to itself. The degree to which we ascribe differences to memes and subculture as community, though, seems a useless pedantry as they often fold on each other. Memes in the way Dawkins identifies them are very much a transmission unit that must have a surviving longevity and fidelity to succeed, yet humans are the means by which memes are able to propogate at all. Memes do feel to be the overriding concern as they use humans and culture as their hosts, while subcultures with secondary contents, particularly those that exist primarily online, become entirely dependent on their templating. Daddy Cool at times expresses as a sardonic component device, much like a template reached for in MLG montages, though he has also become a personality unto himself with dedicated fan sites, boards, and profiles with a quite literal following. Grading on the value of expressions again proves troublesome in identifying subcultures: absolutely recognized subcultures like Talkloid videos may not gather in physical space, preferring digital festivals, but a jokey Facebook event meme will swarm to Area 51. One of these expressions would certainly be considered to have a more regular cadence and longevity than the other, but to attribute particular notability to either is a wasted effort when you can, instead, admire the tablecloth tapestry of two cakes⁶.

Text has seen a diminished relevance in an increasingly visual culture. While text has been a great high order bit for 2ch’s creative output, it is also dense and immovable. AA character representations like Daddy Cool exist in an awkward medium between text and pictogram, sharing qualities from image macros like an easy transposition that allow for context collapse, but are also exact about their form due to specific font and presentation requirements. When operating at his strongest, he should be inseparable from his dialog, and yet his strongest representations flow not from a clear waterfall, but a diffusion of his form being regaled by cycling audiences. Everything I have imposed on the Daddy for this post is a falsehood only a fool would take as fact. His Twitter ghostwriter generations removed from his original representation, offering a rare peek behind the curtain by breaking character for one final sign-off, is likely to agree as much.

“Many of you won't know much about the origins of this character as a piece of text art on anonymous Japanese discussion boards. Neither do I. I appropriated him from a site that appropriated him and made up details as I went along.”
_{— dADDd YcOol' S ghOStwrITer}

1. If you haven’t been roped off by the Nico Seiga geofence, then I recommend Yuyuko and Mystia as Barbecue Pit Girls, which doesn't involve arms behind the head ↩

2. More typically referred to as ASCII art (AA) despite almost never being to that limitation, which makes it only another wasei-eigo loanword. Tell your friends: it’s Shift JIS! ↩

3. The core “Weird Twitter” experience to me was Dogboner, a name I have probably not thought about for close to a decade, and seemingly someone that got out before the stink of socials became unwashable. Daddy Cool as Twitterati may have occupied this same Twittersphere-shape-thing more than conceptually, but I don’t really remember that being the case when I followed him ↩

4. How it must feel to interact with a Cisco Network Associate that has a training cutoff ↩

5. Adrian Chiles has never missed once: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/24/if-dishwasher-loading-was-a-sport-my-dad-would-be-world-champion ↩

6. With a flood of generative content online, I do wonder what validity this meme may continue to communicate. It has always expressed content gluttony in a very literal sense, but with 20 million cakes being put in the window every day on YouTube alone, window shopping seems more and more like relying on the all-mighty tangle of algorithms to put out the cakes it thinks you might like best. ↩

Idolmaster celebrated a 20th birthday recently, making it old enough to drink. At this age, it’s also an uncomfortable amount of history for a contents franchise to sit on top of. Most franchises don’t enjoy a longevity that allows them to realize any influence or forces them to make difficult choices about attracting new audiences. Few can be considered as much of a blueprint for a successful media mix. What is now a sprawling giant of multiple branches initially started as an arcade game that sent you mobile mail. The 360’s brief star in Japan (and the best reason to JTAG one stateside) leaned on the success of an arcade game’s home port. It proved pivotal to Japanese online video, thanks especially to a Miki communication event and a blue screen cheat code. It presided over a social games service boom that saw an entire class of gacha game outlawed, and while it has often ebbed from spectacular mismanagement and failure to read the temperature, the modern era for it has never really ran without a leader on the app store charts. Much of that success and influence is captured by how it has been molded by fans, especially in its formative years, though equally so today from any calendar or catalog of doujin events, anikura setlists, or meme exploitables. Today, I’m recovering one slice from its formative era by reviving the imas only uploader, a file uploader that acted as a hub during its initial boom.

The imas only uploader (マスロダ, colloquially) is a particular antique of the franchise’s early history and growth. While Nico’s role in developing the fandom is well known at this point, Nico being a descendent of 2channel is a more thorough trace. The home port’s release in early 2007 came just as Nico was graduating from its provisional era, still relying on YouTube for hosting. With aggressive endorsement by Hiroyuki and a similar enshrining of anonymity, it found itself seeded as a colony for 2ch users. Even as Nico was still months away from establishing an independent account system and video hosting with the γ closed beta, the relationship was lodged enough that Dwango was attempting to recruit developers off of 2ch’s programming boards, well before YouTube forced their hand and blocked access. 2ch’s popularity at this time would align with a model of the web where links were still currency, and although it had become its own destination for content, a text focus means it was primarily fashioned for commentary. External uploaders, hosts, and file lockers became necessary social glue and indeed were considered so integral that links out to them were deliberately obfuscated to prevent hotlinking, forcing direct access without a referer to keep administrators blind to where traffic was originating from. The sprouting of numerous home grown 2ch uploaders, too varied to list in total, though consolidated enough to have recognizble heavyweights like viploader, was born out of a need for stability. The imas uploader is only one example of these communities coalescing on a common uploader, just as its 2ch general thread for the home release was taking root, and still before its regulars would begin building up Nico as an attractive destination.

cgi-bin, the container for guest books and asyncronous games, is an old incantation of a web powered by forms and now mostly in ruins. Most web servers today don’t support CGI scripts without workarounds or touchups. The majority of these scripts, older cousins to PHP, are stuck on old hardware that has never been patched, and are likely dwindling towards extinction as more of them break without being noticed. Their security is tremendously naive, when such indifference was allowed when exposing a service to the open web. With new horrors that have made it possible to run full applications in the browser, they have also lost most of their allure except as a diminishing nostalgia, more obscure of a character than under construction GIFs or marquees, less celebrated than creative frontiers like Flash, and less scorned as an obsolete web technology than SOAP or ActiveX. They’re too simple to have ever earned that ire, and even covered in cobwebs, they have a good chance of responding if you manage to stumble into one and poke it from slumber. Japan exists on a lagging timeline, so some solutions like the Sangoyomi calendar are still being developed today. The wishful nostalgia has even seen some of the rubble collected and polished for display. Further remnants, like the SN uploader once powering this uploader and many others, are full of so many complications, bad SJIS encodings, and broken line terminators that deploying them into a production environment would be like asking for an even more comically large hammer to hit you over the head than offering open uploads already is.

Social media platforms have been deemed town squares of the web. Most actual websites without fake valuations have always been sane enough to not have such lofty ambitions. While CGI uploaders like this one were born out of a specific 2ch utility, they represent to me how a focused area online really expresses as more of a collaborative playground. Removed from their context, these uploads are a collage of eras during Idolmaster’s boom, but they’re also tremendously entertaining to return to today, particularly if you can point to macros that have long outlived their original host. As a premiere destination relied on by matome sites, there’s a great fount of promotional materials, game screenshots, and seichi junrei that does not huddle in any other collection. Many uploads end up in conversation with each other. Character merch, mostly for birthday shrines, dominates. Raw assets, fan art, and data sheets all manage to coexist here without a usual sorting by karma or shun of algorithmic destiny.

The underappreciated aspect of these uploaders, and perhaps the part I reflect on most fondly, is that by catering to a specify category through a public gallery, they’re allowed to emerge with their own canon of jokes and habits. Following along with new uploads became a ritual for me in its heyday, and especially in an unorganized period for the fandom overseas provided a useful window to the target audience. Monotonic IDs are considered a liability when hosting a website, but they also make for great quotation with an imas prefix, which allowed them to worm their way into Nico video descriptions for file distribution. Undoubtedly the most famous example ended up being an early entrant with imas9393, featuring a grumpy Chihaya. So versatile was the Chihaya zoomer stare that linking out to it became shortened to “9393” as slang among fans, with the -9393 suffix later becoming a coveted GET on the uploader. While Idolmaster has never exited conversation with fans, Dire1 played the field better than anyone else, dropping a quote in a Dengeki PlayStation interview that elevated it beyond mere uploader canon: “Sometimes she has a 9393 face, but that’s part of her charm.” With this, it is only one more piece of semi-expired net slang that deserves an explainer video, with dwindling uses to be found if you know the right double quote search terms. As much as I would also like to continue linking out to the vanity site featuring her, complete with a bonus URL shortener, it unfortunately vanished only just last year.

For as brittle as the implementation is, this uploader and the management behind it was astoundingly resilient. The original imas.ath.cx domain lapsed in registration on the first year around, allowing it to be snatched up by someone impersonating themselves as the admin and sending traffic towards Amazon affiliate links. The interim had people advertising and accessing it directly via IP, until a new dynamic DNS service was settled on with imasupd.ddo.jp. The years after saw it weather multiple direct attacks and endure collateral damage from 2ch attacks, yet even the irregular downtime, often across multiple weeks at times, would always see the site come back from the brink of death. The uptime graph embedded on the landing page, it is fair to presume, likely never achieved three nines.

The imas uploader did eventually fall to a fate similar to most others at the end of April 2014, sunset by a disinterested admin. Retrospectively, this would be an inflection for Idolmaster and a huge moment of upheaval for 2ch, likely to be classed as comorbidities in this case. Cinderella Girls was even more of an ascending star by now, earning an anime announcement, while Million Live and a much troubled SideM were launching. Some of the hurt feelings from Idolmaster 2’s lead-up and launch on the 360 had been soothed by this point, and One For All had corrected many of the wrongs enough for it to now be considered one of the better main console entries, but the franchise no longer wore one face. The gal game elements that had wreathed it were starting to recede. A ten year anniversary and a concert to celebrate that triumph was a natural exit for many that had rode the wave this far out.

As for 2ch, Jim Watkins had mostly completed his seizure of the site in February, the month after enacting a blunt ban on matome reprinting that began a mass exodus. Users that had remained loyal to 2ch at this point opted out to smaller forums, or more chiefly, treated Twitter as an equal substitute and abandoned the BBS format entirely. Dedicated CGI uploaders had little incentive to stick around and either keeled over quickly from abuse or limped until a registration expired or a hosting bill lapsed. There is not much reason to badge one’s pride in a similar manner today, now that we largely live in walled gardens that offer free and unlimited embedded image and video uploads. The chigyu were otherwise content to settle up with Imgur as a substitute.

Rather than patching the existing uploader, this is a minimal reimplementation that borrows the look and feel while ditching some cruft and bringing a few styles into the present, mostly to be responsive and accessible. Uploads are also behind a CAPTCHA and a few other protections, though you should be able to scrape without hitting anything. On a web crawling with spiders, bots, and agents, this is also an invitation to have my window smashed in by a proverbial brick of egress fees. The thumbnail view will be reimplemented eventually, although you’re not experiencing a CGI uploader organically unless you’re relying on the element of surprise that comes from blindly clicking links. Some of these holes will hopefully end up filled with enough procrastination.

To set expectations, this is as much of a living museum as similar efforts. While it’s mainly a trial for me to experience what headaches may be hurled at me by 2025 that were nascent in 2014, it’s also a trial to see if it attracts any uptake. There are undoubtedly people with personal collections more storied than mine that may help fill in the voids, in which case they should probably get in touch with me. If I find myself entirely fed up, the worst you should expect is the site being frozen and pushed as a collection to the Internet Archive, but I’m already entering with an expectation that it may require a heavy moderation hand.

After a decade delayed start to Third Vision, Idolmaster has found new footing with audiences entirely foreign to its first vision roots. The roots that got it to this stage, now frayed or rotting into broken links, haven’t disappeared entirely at this point, though the weight of age on them is starting to show. Many of the fans that have walked alongside Idolmaster for this long breathe with its beating heart, practicing many of the same rituals as they always have by drawing art, making MADs, and attending concerts. Other exercises too, the antenna sites and mock travelogs, exist primarily as legacy curios. With this step, I’d like to think I’m rehydrating some of that legacy, as many of the fans I consider even wiser and more dedicated than me did when stewarding a new fan that found themselves kneeling before a specific L4U catalog. Click around and see what you can dig up. If these files could talk, they’d have a lot of useless otaku trivia to tell.

ktkr!待ってたお！
あれが帰ってくるお！
でもたったの12日間しか復活しないおorz
kwskは明日2/21(金）、みんな待っててくれるかお？

ぬるぽ

Loki Technology, Inc.

— マクドナルド (@McDonaldsJapan) Feb 20, 2025

Did you see this tweet? It’s better if you don’t go out of your way to these days, and instead allow them to waft in like intrusive smells, but we have to acknowledge that they continue to be launch pads for some of the best banter. There is a focused lens to short form broadcast, with no room for nuance or hesitation, that makes them especially potent mind viruses. This is sort of like the crisp, refreshing hit you get from taking that first sip of McDonald’s Sprite. That one dollar any size drink deal you scored off the app is a rush. At the bottom of the cup, the last swills watered down in melted ice, there is only regret, and a realizing acceptance that we need to eliminate corn subsidies and regulate the doomscroll.

Television is the original mass media mind virus, when such critique was limited to Neil Postman, and commercials were their short form analog before we ever had to worry about world leaders tweeting their bluster. The accomplishment of these forms feels at its clearest to me today not in the soundbites of political ads wed to the dementia cloud of American exceptionalism on Truth Social, but in the unrelenting cadence of collaborations coming out of McDonald’s Japan. The wit and syntax of the commercial, McDonald’s has long known, has always been best cracked with celebrity, and it is an effective shorthand that has only amplified in entertainment throughout the last century. Michael Jordan and Larry Bird duking it out is a pretense to sell Big Macs not especially because they are champion big eaters, but because they speak for the brand overall by implicating their own authenticity. Unit-02 and Char Aznable are indeed celebrities, so these may already align with your and my basic understandings of celebrity endorsement, but portraits next to products is an especially narrow view of how endorsement is performed today for digital niches. Instead, as I see the simulacrum of subculture from Touhou and vocal synths elevated for promotion, I look more to David Lynch promoting the PS2 or Michel Gondry hawking jeans in uncompromised cinematic styles, though always punctuated with a logo so you are sure to be arrested with the proper meaning, even if you can’t parse what the rest is yammering about. The already golden denpa lyrics from ika and ARM tagged in for commercial spots, touched up ever so slightly to now be about beef patties and fried potatoes, feels no less dissociating to me than having the local diner from my sleepy town show up on the national news.

The producers across the full breadth of Vocaloid’s boom era and the doujin stalwarts from Flash’s heyday now participating in McDonald’s advertising campaigns is, in my characterization, Japan discovering an activation matching the celebrity meal deal. Celebrity meals, like the ones you may know from Travis Scott and BTS, roared back into the McDonald’s advertising language beginning in 2020 by repackaging existing menu items with the blessing of musicians, often with a unique instructional flair or condiment. Japan, and many other locales, have been opted out of these campaigns, and while these tie-ins are mostly focusing in on names with global recognition, there does feel to be a recognition in them that the monoculture has waned, and these promotions are not targeted especially towards a mass public, but a wave of cascading social media engagement beginning with fans. The blueprint in the McJordan special, some 28 years prior to the second attempt in the Travis Scott meal, was in fact a regional exclusive to the Chicagoland area, and was reportedly allowed only to Jordan’s exacting standards after years of experimenting with combinations. Perhaps, we can imagine this campaign having performed nationally, or even globally – Miku certainly is pulling on that sort of soft power now – but a targeted influence on the fandom surrounding Jordan is where it was, already initially, deemed most effective.

What strikes me is not necessarily that these campaigns mirror in similar attempts to court authenticity, by letting Hiiragi Magnetite shine as-is subbing in teriyaki burgers or by having Travis Scott remix the Quarter Pounder to his own specs, but that we are seeing subculture elevated to a promotional stage where it is being presented not only in uncompromised expression, but in amazing process. These are imaginations of remixes that would not betray a period appropriate upload by an amateur creating them with some irreverence, and still they are now expressions celebrated and recognized enough today to rake in huge repost counts that even campaigns with promises of free food do not meet. Subculture, at this point, we must recognize graduates to simply being culture when it is promoted by a multinational brand, the same way vaporwave has evolved into a cloud of ideas rather than a specific aesthetic presentation. Vocaloid similarly may continue to be recognized as having sprouted certain musical idioms in Japanese pop, from unbroken melodic runs with no breaths to frenetic key changes, but ceases to have specific subcultural identity the more it is folded to become pop music unto itself. To audiences below a certain age bracket, it has already diffused across a cultural membrane that makes this undoubtedly the case today. As these campaigns add on to more general campaigns trafficking an anime style and a singing double cheese burger mascot, McDonald’s has clearly placed a stock not so much in massaging subculture by rewriting it for jingles, which they have already leaned on, but in placing it on a pedestal as a readymade icon, now with a wide enough recognition, that can sell the brand on the side.

There is an anxiety with this elevated stage, notwithstanding other recent cultural clashes we have seen play out even in vocal synth spaces recently, that is present at all ends. The digestion, bad faith reads, and misappropriation of Japanese expressions by global audiences is an ongoing saga. Doujin cultures, once predominantly skittish of commercialization, have realigned their criticisms to audiences leaking outside of Japan, and tie-ins more often than not are now causes for celebration at all commercial levels of subculture, rather than something to be reflexively rebuffed. McDonald’s is neither stranger to subculture nor remix culture through countless anime parodies and the streaming video boom, and yet it has also chosen to restrict non-Japanese audiences from so much as peeking in on these recent vocal synth promotions by putting them behind region blocks. Regional promotions no longer have clear cultural context when yet another McDonald’s campaign distributing a transparent PNG, allowing anyone to be a McAmbassador, traveled through Japanese VTubers without incident, yet caused Rosemi to retract from criticisms adjacent to the BDS movement. Geofences may slow this scrutiny, but they are rarely all that useful, and the anxieties of a constant watching is an equal dynamic to western celebrities that no longer feel free to lend their image to Mitsuya Cider or Sankyo Pachinko, knowing they may be immortalized online rather than confined to broadcast or tape trades. Instead, it often ends up preferable to neutralize an expression instead of testing whether it explodes when tossed into a social media swamp. McDonald’s, in many cases, is likely beholden to licensing restrictions to begin with that keep their promotions from leaking, but it does not take much of a leap, as an example, to imagine something like a benign Popotan trace in the current environment unintentionally blowing up sky high. Lord knows the suits in production committees, searching Twitter and sweating over a handful of critical takes, have balked at far less.

Subculture being raised into a commercial spotlight, admittedly, triggers a similar sort of fight or flight response in me that makes the overture difficult to swallow. Nature Valley, we know with hindsight, committed the original sin in the west by quoting a screencap shop of Akechi Kokoro now over a decade ago, and became the inflection that gave red carpet to great regal cultural moments like Smug Wendy’s and a bad KFC dating sim. These approaches are now almost goads manufactured to inspire a groaning reaction, without specific or really any reverence for their quotations, and while “selling out” still feels part of my vocabulary more than many only a touch younger than I am, the reappropriating of a shared net culture probably orients most why I take pause with even a loyal remix done by McDonald’s, despite Lamaze, Daniwell, and Miko being brought into the loop. They are just as catchy as they were when they weren’t promoting french fries, and we probably need not demand some strict non-profit celibacy if it’s good enough for the interests that retain some actual ownership. Nevertheless, straddling the walk of lauding creators and stripping a loose commons for commercial interests is, I must admit, an approach I will always bite my tongue on with some unease and disdain. If I acquiesced so easily on these feelings, I wouldn’t have a shred of otaku cred that allows me to care about such things to begin with.

To reject the approach on its face would also be denying the opportunity to experience when it fumbles spectacularly. McDonald’s, in attempting to invoke 2ch slang like a hip netizen, is almost quaint in how easily mocked it is. Unlike Marisa stealing the precious thing, or a Teto spinning on one leg, these are expressions that haven’t really been iterated on since their inception a quarter decade ago. Nurupo is table stakes. Perhaps the only ones left to parse the rest of it are handily clearing middle age by now, scoffing at the coupons on offer as they can recall an era of 59 yen hamburgers after school. 2channelers, more than most other subcultures at their height, are so infamously reticent of being marketed towards that the attempt feels doe-eyed and innocent the way only someone born this side of the millennium could ever attempt to be. There’s a sense that everything is slightly askew when the twisted usage of kwsk feels like an invention only a ChatGPT feigning curiosity could arrive at. The “Loki Technology” sign-off, a copyright notice that was only introduced with the site’s seizure as 5ch, only confuses eras further. The cultural context seen in the replies is fortunately shared in a way I do resonate with, and that we can agree has still successfully siphoned my own engagement in writing this post: silence, brand. Shut up and lurk for six months as a ROM before you post again. When you’ve done your time, though, let me know if you have any of those Red Comet or Blue Comet burgers waiting under the heat lamp. It’s okay – I’ll still keep eating that garbage.

Preramble

as promised, it’s taken me two months to get back to VOCALOG, and my yap fever hasn’t broken. returning to the format with fresher eyes, I am reflecting again on whether this really was always fashioned to be a newsletter. right now these posts are being sent into the common global feed for this site, and even if filtering is pretty trivial, they’re likely to begin smothering everything else. newsletters aren’t exactly flexible with presentation, and wrangling subscription lists is hardly something that I want to bother with. ghost could be a happy medium, but I’m not keen to jump back to another central platform or balloon the complexity myself by self-hosting. maybe it would be preferable to detach VOCALOG strictly to its dedicated page and provide a feed there. do I dare bifurcate my loyal audience, of which I have no metrics to prove exists at all?

my initial hierarchy for VOCALOG was always imagined in three parts: spotlight (editorial focus), pickups (presenting new releases and producers), and clippings (curiosities and tidbits sourced elsewhere). spotlight and pickups I think survive this round of review, but I’ve decided to give clippings the ax for now. decent beat reporting is arguably one of the biggest holes in vocal synth coverage these days, now that referral links don’t seem to pay out the way they used to for cottage fan sites, but VOCALOG doesn’t necessarily seem like a great place for it unless I accelerate the cadence. per my soft mission statement, these posts really should be taken as a supplement to other explorations rather than as a total of the vocal synth scene, and that is probably something that I will constantly need recentering and reminding on to keep scope in check. clippings, if it does return, feels like it should be reserved for the sort of oddities that would earn rightful placement on a fridge, like kenshi yonezu running a phone scam on poor grannies in kagoshima. real notables, like satsuki’s detour into boy bands, could just as easily slip mention into the pickups section if I decide to be less rigid there. there is a balance to be found in highlighting producers instead of specific works, commentary instead of gratuitous link dumping, that I’m not sure I’ve settled on yet.

one truth that is already emerging is that this is likely always going to remain a very PV-forward deal. while I would love to applaud freshly recorded vegetables, no doubt extending my veggie mix, we live in a food desert when the only meaningful way most of us interact with doujin events is through a flood of crossfades for albums we can’t listen to. being able to anchor to what’s available on streaming is not only naturally convenient, but it also provides a point of interaction for readers that doesn’t dead end in disappointment. crossfade roundups, too, are the sort of monotony that I actively want to avoid.

if monotony is where I land, then I hope it is with adachi rei’s love and support. right now, I’m energized enough to keep the plates spinning.

Spotlight

while they have never exactly shied away from doing so, crypton made a rare nudge this past week to remind everyone that the piapro character license (PCL) covers derivative uses and restrictions that apply to their characters. more accurately, they’ve made this plea specifically to japanese fans, as it wasn’t translated or posted about in any other languages. with it so cagey on specifics, this is really the only useful signal that we can parse to determine what group it may have actually been directed towards. for all the curious bystanders, and all the roaches scattering to the next flame war, it has become another creative springboard to levy accusations and point fingers. the digital diva has never really been divorced from scandal, no matter what my city paper’s culture reporter has said.

it doesn’t take much to construct explanations for why we’re seeing this notice now, and not three or six months ago. this year has been turbulent for crypton, between brazilian miku’s explosive popularity, channel being hunted by a new wave of puritanism, overseas fans misunderstanding display technologies, and a flood of generative AI that no longer means facominn is the only game in town depicting miku with huge breasts. isolated these have each mostly faded into a background hum, but together they are a relentless series of events to spar with in a PR capacity. most explanations at this stage seem keen to point the finger at akihiko kondo, the more press affable miku wifeguy, for most directly violating the license by recently carting her to the wedding of numazu city council member ryu ozawa and promoting her as a representative fictosexual. the timing certainly aligns here, but akihiko has been on the press circuit for going on five years and has schmoozed with politicians like taro yamada before, so it does seem a tad unjust for him to now carry the full weight of a public scold. the notice certainly suggests a wider spray, and a more accurate assessment would probably conclude that he was unluckily the final straw that frustrated things enough this time to inspire a press release. the ambiguity in the statement itself, echoes of payment processors, is already enough to inspire a chilling effect.

although the PCL is generally lenient, and effectively codifies understandings and assumptions that are inherent to derivative works under any other japanese franchise, it has always had a broad carve-out restricting commercial use. the text has always been clearly written under that doujin governance, and the scenarios presented in its summary speak more pointedly about consignment sales that truly only apply to events that happen in japan. miku has otherwise been dual-licensed globally under a creative commons equivalent (CC BY-NC) since 2012, just on the periphery of miku’s first english release, and crypton has given wide leverage for creators to pick and choose whichever license allows for more permissive use in their personal case. with this consideration, the PCL should be viewed as the guiding legal document, as it is both more permissive than the CC equivalent and is the only document written with crypton’s express intent. even as they do not generally diverge, more principally, both are lockstep in not waiving moral rights, and while the US and many other regions have only a milquetoast patchwork of equivalents, japan has retained them with an overriding supremacy available for creators to exercise against all derivatives. all doujin activities will always hang in this fragile balance, and even trusting that crypton is too sober to ever go fully nuclear with restrictions, any of their proud boasts of free culture exist only under the thumb of their current attitudes about enforcement.

there is plenty of historical precedence for these chides when one shops around for them. concurrent to the JASRAC registration upheaval, crypton requested the cancellation of dakimakura covers that were planned for distribution at C73, leading to revisions in the PCL better covering consignment sales. ZUN, who has spent ample time discussing how he would prefer that touhou continue to be retold by others in new ways, still prefers to exercise control through team shangai alice and has had very public scuffles over unauthorized royalties. white canvas, the shop center to that dispute, did eventually make amends with ZUN, but wasted little time moving on to bootleg love live merch, inspiring similar restrictions there on doujin goods. commercial sales are really the only scenario where we do see the mettle of restrictions being tested; when the requests are more general and have no specific parties in mind, as they are when cygames pleads to keep seiun sky out of ero, fans seem to relax restrictions on their own over time until they are essentially void. even when the nudges have pretty obvious subjects in mind¹, the requests to follow usage guidelines can feel more like toothless formalities as they go ignored without consequence.

these examples are both too residual as memories and too academic about policy for them to earn much mention in a discussion with a convenient individual villain like akihiko. if we are to learn anything from crypton’s statement, though, it should be that these flare-ups have already happened with regularity and are going to occur more frequently as increased participation ignores guidelines that have always existed on an uncertain foundation. controlling political expressions and commercial activity has so far been a narrowly tailored approach to keep most of the heat off, and it is normally desirable to prevent miku from becoming a nazi mouthpiece, but it bears stressing that a growing cohort of fans now advocate for more stringent brand control in even mild expressions. the way long-term IPs react to these pressures, either with stricter enforcement or accepting leniency, is how I expect we may see their fortunes reflected in overall cultural longevity. what players like crypton may not recognize, however, is that the era where advisory guidelines can survive with enough prodding reminders has likely already expired.

Pickups

♫ fibonacci

志無 feat. 足立レイ

♫ がんさくびぃつ

背面８回宙返り feat. 重音テトSV

there’s not much positive to say about nico as a platform these days, except that it continues to be a large platform that understands the power of metadata to change outcomes. despite that vocacolle did not run this summer, with the site opting instead to run a more informal dumping ground for uploads in vocaeri, producers have largely picked up right where they left off with informal user submission festivals before the site’s hiatus. these have continued to be the remaining lifeblood of the site, exhibiting users in conversation through communal tags. with a tag on nico, it’s feasible enough to view every upload linearly for a release event, or even applying your own filtering, without having to rely on algorithmic discovery that chooses winners. you only need to compare this to youtube, which launched linkable hashtags only a few years ago with an idleness where they should have probably not bothered, to see how easily a themed cocktail can turn into more of a content slurry. the major threat for nico, then, isn’t that their competition is necessarily more capable than them, but that these events have almost all moved into off-site organization through twipla and discord where those benefits are easily substituted for or less relevant. making the video player suck less wouldn’t hurt either.

despite the label, the irregular time signature song festival doesn’t skip any beats. almost 200 submissions were made to the tag over the two days of the event period, and it is an amazing fount of mixed meter and polyrhythms that feels uniquely expressive the way maybe only a bemani or BOF roster typically does. even accounting that sasakure and soflan-chan have been beating this drum for years, there is a bespoke craft to the presentation here that you won’t see explored by those avenues, and more novel visualizations of time signature that I could only expect to see equaled in a game jam of the same concentration. it’s also possible I don’t go to enough math rock festivals to say this with any authority.

the time signature festival is especially an opportunity to flex, and it is difficult to come up with a representative sample that does it full justice. haimen feels like they’ve taken the chaos learnings of furokuro and umicha to a new logical step, arriving at every twist of visualization that doesn’t involve committing itself to standard sheet music. yohaku seems to have worked harder to disorient more than anything else, sprinkling single measures of 11/8 and 17/6 into a standard 4/4, as if they are continually feathering the brakes on a roller coaster and daring you to not hit your face on the crossbar. shimu’s lean on the fibonacci sequence, though, is potentially most fascinating for how pure it is. the expectation is established and immediately understood by the title, and yet it doesn’t feel like it has compromised at all on easy listening by adhering so strictly that rule. it is the best love letter to spirals this year, and if nagahama was able to release his own uncompromising standards sooner, he could have tapped something like this as an uzumaki ED featurette to also correct wrongs central to the core work. now that he is free to work on anything else, perhaps we will finally see him return to easy wins by leaning back into love letters to lat miku. around the loop goes, circling back in on itself.

♫ とめて。

OSTER project feat. ずんだもん, 春日部つむぎ

one of the comforts of oster is not only that she has remained astoundingly active, but that she has not rested on her moe laurels. while zundamon is not out of place as a featured vocalist, she has been mostly steered as a jokester with producers like namigroove and nununu, and mostly relegated to talkloid status for youtube shorts one degree removed from AI slop and explainers about bir tawil. tsumugi is still the real deal: she’s the gyaru vtuber embarrassed about how she’s never had proper vocal training. she has now been under steward of the VX-β engine for over a year, with hopes of potentially getting the V6 release treatment sooner rather than later, and oster has been pretty much the only name orienting her sound by contorting her with humming. she is one of the few names you can expect to navigate those restrictions and wispy intonations with enough poise to land on a chill duet. the flipside to this is that the zuntsumu pure love yuri festival, unmatched in lure only to someone spinning a sign for FREE FOOD HERE, seems to have gone by with this being only one of two songs submitted. love hasn’t fully bloomed yet, but I am lying in wait with binoculars.

♫ テトリス

柊マグネタイト feat. 重音テトSV

tetris and teto are too convenient a coupling of accumulated regrets for someone not to have taken a pun this far. against a backdrop of a paul brother and a weapons manufacturer becoming intertwined with the brand through another cash grab, this is likely to be the best thing that’ll happen to tetris this year, even if you believe TGM4 might potentially escape vaporware. you just can’t take mihara at his word, unless you also believe you’ll need a superheater and migs and megs of memories to play it. unsavory personalities and potential trump czars aside, korobeiniki being this catchy shouldn’t hugely surprise anyone, and is probably the core wisdom pushing the youtube monkeys to let it put down seven million views in under a month. not saying I’d make a great pop music consultant, or one cosplaying as a tastemaker, but you could have seen this one coming a decade ago if you had access to my IME autocompletes.

💿 Constant Companions

Jamie Paige feat. ANRI, SOLARIA, GUMI SV, GUMI V6, 重音テトSV

we’re already a year past a shrimpku frying some rice, and as that has simmered into the preferred fan citation for good english tuning, jamie paige feels like she’s still walking a path to western stardom matched only by names like crusher and circus before. perhaps it comes with the territory, but the ambition for these producers is clearly being driven by a love for vocal synths themselves, and a respect for GUMI that traces back to V3. to describe it one way, the variety being featured on this album, without snark, feels most like a sample platter of lyrical weaves that arose from testing out new voice banks. to put a pin it, though? teto says fuck. it’s as shrimple as that.

Subbed

♫ Future Nova

DADA GAUGUIN feat. 重音テトSV

I don’t have the social graces or the athleticism to prove that I played youth baseball, but it continues to resonates deeply for me as a piece of celebrated americana. the lucky break for a modern hermit like me is that japan now loves baseball more than the states, notwithstanding ohtani and all the great sports manga, and I don’t have any trouble finding myself getting swept up in the same frenzy. little league will probably always lack the same emotional punch that comes from losing teams scooping up dirt at koshien, and while I have grown warmer to the NPB owning a ham fighers jersey and following atsuki yapping incessantly about the yomiuri giants, professional athletes and corporate sponsors hardly clear in the same way. only in a school setting can I recall my pops tallying up the slugging percentages for everyone on my AAA team, only to reveal that I wasn’t clearing .300. things could have been different if my girlfriend was cheergirl teto and I was able to have this as my walk-up song.

the indie spirit is alive in adachi rei. I’ll spare another launch into the wonder of aspect ratios, but the soft CRT effects, text supers, and mixed media here from taiyo offer enough veracity to convince me this very well could have been processed through a video toaster before it was digitized off of a dusty tape, a remainder from departed days of public access. the airhorns will jolt you out of that dream, if you do fall too deep into the trance.

♫ ひまつぶシステム

子牛 feat. 音街ウナSV

the vtuber bubble may finally be starting to pop, based on a string of shuttered agencies and high-profile departures, but the flood of voice bank releases that also rode a larger surge of otaku media alongside it doesn’t seem to be slowing at all. do the economies of scale still make sense when moca seems to have already hit her peak after people like haraguchi sasuke were assigned part of the budget? not my problem. right now I’m doting on the ever-cute una, until the next little lamb makes me feel like wanting to adopt another daughter. cowshi is doing their damndest to keep her afloat with this demo track, which does deserve recognition for how well it accommodates the whole multiple selves trope in a cuter light. all of the fans that told me una was their second favorite eight years ago now just need to show up.

♫ close to snowfall

TONE feat. SF-A2 開発コード miki

nascent online video, the social web, or whatever other arbitrary era split you prefer to delineate the mid aughts with, now is with enough distance to have reemerged as fuzzy nostalgic memories. unlike frutiger aero and other inventions that are completely self-absorbed with themselves, TONE’s work is authentically retro to an unbelievable degree, especially as it dawns that they were was not old enough to be contemporary to lucky star episodes in three parts and PVs mirrored from nico. combing this channel reveals a producer almost cozily trapped in digital amber from my memories at 18, and sitting awash in all the digital synths, static art, and folky lyrics feels more like participating in my own anthropological dig. SF-A2 miki may actually be the closest thing we have to a time machine, youtube be damned.

the only appropriate way to describe ikomai is other-dimensional, the cousin once removed from sun ra. with a jazzy dissonance that feels like it’s constantly slipping between your hands as you try to cling to it, the winding groove and instrumentation switches to vibraphones and stylophones are hypnotizing. as if this weren’t totally apparent, liking the video on nico reveals that the harmonies were deliberately pitched out of tune². it’s to be expected with vocals from kazehiki, stuck in the limbo of an eternal cold with a sore throat.

the animation and demoscene-like loops come courtesy of osawa, who looks like they may be primarily working in game dev, though their socials are just as personally inscrutable. their personal site is obtuse in ways only matched by ARGs, and what we do see seems characteristic of someone that digitally scribbles: virtual travelogues, trace jobs from scouting google street view, and studies in touchdesigner and pixel composer. if we ever meaningfully detect vocal synth music in a transmission from deep space, it’s probably going to look and sound something like this, coded with aberrant signals. evidence suggests their people may also be carbon-based.

♫ む

大漠波新 feat. 足立レイ, 重音テト

clocks. twins. gothic architecture and the art nouveau. girls kissing other girls. show this to ikuni and you just might get him to slip back into his cosplay wardrobe.

even knowing rei and teto are my personal chocolate and peanut butter, the taste being sampled here is bitter, and the growing evolutionary distance between rei and teto as scrappy utaus, one a lie and the other a fake, is now at its most ripe for dramatics. rei standing upright for the first time is certainly a triumph of character and creator, and that would still be worth exploring in its own youtube essay timeline of events, but nothing else is going to offer this degree of flashy, theatrical meta commentary with showa trimmings. the other personal triumph in yasai31 being tapped to perform tuning for an original song, as the foremost superfan for both teto synthV and utau covers, is a more seducing siren.

even as the classification of something as “webgen” is perhaps more nebulous than it even originally was, now that it is the path of least resistance for animation, it remains rewarding to trace those influences through to emerging creatives. clicking on to exsy’s channel immediately hits you with a wall of stick figure brawls animated with flipnote dating back almost a decade, and while the flash and pivot animations from newgrounds continue to trudge along in some fashion, flipnote holds on to a more precarious niche with custom servers and fan-run portals. exsy is just one person steering this ship, and they’re currently soliciting submissions for a stickman battle event that shows where they’re really concentrated. in between the page flips, they’ve somehow found the energy to pursue vocal synths, and even though the coupling will probably remain a jourzin trademark, PVs like this are a reminder of how free, open platforms like flipnote are a vital element to fostering young talents where they don’t have to compete with incumbents that enjoy access to expensive tooling. hatena may be continuing to keep some sliver of this dream alive running splatnet, but as long as a wide moderation surface area remains a liability, it is disheartening to realize that these sorts of unique social services are rarely being pursued at scale anymore.

Subbed

♫ Darling Darling

めろくる feat. 夏色花梨

it’s stuck in my head, and I’m not going to deny you the chance to fall in love too. while he hasn’t disappeared himself, mellowcle has tapped into the classic twang of emon danceability that has made some of those tracks so enduringly great. the slow simmer of utaite and vtuber covers, which I am already bracing for, are likely to make this one unavoidable past a certain point.

Noteworthy

💿 ひとりごと

inuha feat. 初音ミク

Subbed

♫ 電脳G

すずめのめ feat. 重音テト

♫ 契約ショ

おし怪 feat. 足立レイ

♫ おすしまわるプログラム

いのうつはSA feat. 初音ミク

♫ なんとかシミュレーション

いのうつはSA feat. 初音ミク

♫ Sine

Aa feat. 足立レイ

♫ 灰桜色

にほしか feat. 可不

♫ 蜃気楼

らげBOY feat. 重音テトSV

♫ 都市と空想

ヨハク feat. 足立レイ

♫ 観測するソンザイ

阿修 feat. VY1

♫ ランダマイザ

⊿yamhok feat. 可不, 重音テトSV

♫ 櫂

荷戸眠しーた feat. 花隈千冬

♫ Till the Moment

regulus feat. Hayden, 花隈千冬

♫ 夜伽草子を泳ぐ星

自炊 feat. 音街ウナ

♫ 植物になっていく

ukaihi feat. 初音ミク

♫ 極々彩々

ぬゆり feat. flower

♫ hakutyūmu

Aa feat. 足立レイ

♫ 純情パステルタイム

Twinfield feat. 夏色花梨

♫ im sleepy and i want to sleep

Guppy feat. 初音ミク

♫ 幽霊彗星

イナナキ feat. ナースロボ＿タイプＴ

♫ ずんだ家の晩餐

こわどり feat. ずんだもん

Halloween night in Tokyo was not always a romp. Thanks to Disney, along with intersecting cosplay culture, Halloween had already been successfully imported as a recognizable holiday for the Japanese through the early aughts. By 2009, though, it would still be a few years away from discovering the Shibuya scramble antics that are more likely to color perceptions of the holiday now. The savage gaijin party animals were not at the scramble then, but instead hogging the festivities to themselves by riding the Yamanote party train, roaming between cars in costume to surprise commuters. It would end up being an abrupt send-off this year, as after fed-up protestors scolded them for disrespecting cherished Japanese tradition, these brave trendsetters would abandon the concept and retreat to the local HUB in years after. The Japanese men disciplined enough to shave regularly were more likely to have been dragged by their girlfriends to see the fireworks at Tokyo Disneyland. The rowdiest boys were instead left behind to party deep underground, celebrating the standing Japanese tradition of 2D love. Here, in the basement of neighboring Shinjuku Loft/Plus One, sporting their best Uniqlo shirts and conbini socks with fashionable neutral tones, two hundred men were gathering in solidarity and collecting their boyfriend power to express their devout commitment to Rinko, Manaka, and Nene.

4gamer was the sponsor of LovePlus One, a fan event that occurred on the rise of LovePlus mania just beyond its base release on the DS. It’s an impressive cavalcade of hosts both contemporary to the event and in retrospect, most notably producer Uchida Akari (Tokimemo Girls Side, Rumble Roses) and character designer Minotaro, but also industry connects and heavyweights like Ishii Jiro (999) from Chunsoft and Ishihara “Dire1” Akihiro of Idolmaster and, more recently, horsegirls. While it would be wrong to call it an unserious event, it did capture the tongue-in-cheek of the cultural moment. Uchida proclaimed Christmas would be canceled that year. Mega teriyaki udon burgers, the aspirational stupid food you invent when taking Manaka to winning burger, were served alongside cocktails of “Beautiful Blue Sky” mixed with Rinko milk. If there was a chance to interject with a joke about Christmas, home security guards, or the meditation of 2D love, it was probably taken. You’ll just have to trust me that this was gut-busting comedy for otaku of the era that relished the spotlight mainstream press was putting on men abandoning social chivalry and marrying their DSes. Out west, where “seasonal waifu” was punted as mild insult and SAL9000 was still mocked by the weeaboo that tagged Haruhism as their religion on Facebook, we have always lacked a commitment to the same sort of performance art¹.

This would not be the only LovePlus event put on by 4gamer, and Sugita would show up the next time to throw his arms around Rinko that Christmas, but this inaugural event has a strange legacy that teases philosophical about the otaku. Although the otaku today is buried under a waterfall of new content that makes it often difficult to appraise value or legacy, otaku at the tail of the moe boom still recognized and savored the novelty. The broader cultural consciousness did as well, and as part of Beat Takeshi’s white paper on Japanese education, an annual special for six years on Fuji TV that explored the minutiae of Japanese society, LovePlus One found itself focal to an exploration of modern love. The college student interviewed about his affection for Rinko, a humble if pitiful loner, was approached with a quizzical respect. Our talking heads, instead, reserved their horror for the sweaty, faceless mass of a crowd, led to chant “As long as I have LovePlus and conbini, I can survive!”

The LovePlus timeline is much richer than the understanding of one event, but this moment has been retained as a sort of representative capture of the nijikon. Konami, mired by Uchida and Minotaro’s departures after gazing into the dating sim crystal ball, let the franchise fall into a deep sleep. Like James Bond, the perennial heartthrob, they did promise it would surely return. The otaku in this parting chant are more nebulously projected upon, often invoked by matome blogs as macro images to provoke the next owacon, or to puzzle over an aging society: where could they possibly be now? Are they still stuck to LovePlus, making their conbini runs? Would they still even consider themselves otaku at all?

LovePlus by now will either register to you as a nostalgic artifact, or a curiosity either too old or too foreign for you to have ever experienced. LovePlus is, of course, noticeably absent from any modern system, sent to timeout with the rest of the Konami catalog. Most franchises, especially in the otaku sphere of influence, go through a sort of natural retrograde as they age out of popularity, though not always strictly from this kind of mismanagement. It is conceivable, even now, that Kemono Friends could have avoided becoming the black sheep if it didn’t experience a very abrupt breakdown when Tatsuki was ousted by Kadokawa. LovePlus was certainly no exception to this fate, when it delayed a mobile game reboot for two years, fell into a month of emergency maintenance, and eventually recovered only to reveal that it had grafted stamina timers and instant dates on to girlfriends that you used to set your watch to with real time mode. Even after a failed launch, expectations were discovered to be hilariously sky-high, and datamining found a graphic was already prepared at launch to celebrate 3 million registered players. The lukewarm reaction and collective groan from fans, most probably a majority old enough to already respect the aura of Rinko and to have had their relationships blessed by Pastor Sugita before, instead meant LovePlus Every exited service after less than a year. The window had closed on LovePlus, and as it attempted to hurriedly catch up to mechanics that had emerged in its wake while wasting away its influence, it instead self-destructed in spectacular fashion.

While this trajectory is not unique, there are far more franchises in the modern era that have retreated to a background hum than that have experienced this sort of disgraced fall from content heaven. While Love Live and KanColle are still giants ー 15,000 admirals to a fan event in Kure last week and a sold out Yokohama K-Arena for Nijigasaki 7th this weekend ー they have certainly not demonstrated a lasting hegemony that would displace any of the big three genres with Touhou, Idolmaster, and Vocaloid, a status that has arguably persisted over the last 17 years. This is a fundamental reality of network effects being exhibited through fandom: while each of these pillars has at times appeared frayed or reclined, they have persisted not only with careful stewarding that has adapted them generationally for young fans, but specifically because they emerged on the cultural ground floor before an explosion of otaku subculture into the mainstream. There are still chances to upset some of that hegemony, if we decide to treat circle numbers as a leading indicator for territory claims, but the categorical truth is inertia is difficult to counteract, and there is a flood of franchises now, more than ever, competing in the otaku media swamp to displace even a small sliver of that attention. Those allegiances, however, remain more elastic than is usually perceived, and the success of examples like Blue Archive and Genshin Impact serve as reminders that there remains a latent willingness and ability for new entrants to overcome the resistance of comforts.

“Subculture” itself has been consumed by platforms. Today it appears less like a rich tapestry, as it did when communities were organically independent and mostly isolated, and more like a monolith crushed into a small cube, now that fandoms have been corralled into the fiefdom of services like Twitter and Reddit. As a trainspotter, or a chika idol diehard, or a Blue Archive fan (sneer quotes absent), you’re probably engaging with Twitter because it has emerged as a de facto public utility for those and almost every interest. Twitter diffuses the bad jokes, delivers fresh ero when you’re on the bus, and starts the next struggle discourse to rage over, all in one convenient place, and principally because it enjoys an incumbency privilege that crowded out other social attempts at microblogging like Plurk and FriendFeed. Twitter got in on the cultural ground floor for microblogging as phones became a default, letting third parties build up the experience where portal sites lagged behind, and it has been able to coast on this network value by polishing its stability, even as it has struggled to profit and has at times confused its identity. Gone are the days of Mixi, or FC2, or LiveJournal, or Xanga blogs, and shrinking too are the off-topic threads and 5ch generals of quarantined kuso posts. Personal sites? Those, I must confess, are really for nerds. An instant, public access to everyone has become a personal and professional expectation globally, and although the results are predictable when posts escape their intended audiences, it has given Twitter an unmatched lifeblood and interconnectivity that was never possible with a thousand InvisionFree forums or static websites. It is only somewhat recently, with an improbable series of missteps, that its incumbency has come anywhere close to being threatened at all.

Stability is a desirable quality for a platform to have, if you eke out a living by using self-promotion to slingshot your posts; those interests are equally aligned with large corporations that benefit all the same from access to hooked audiences and robust analytics. Especially now, though, I would argue that it is an overvalued aspect of incumbent platforms, as it is what has enabled the concept of a “large platform” to exist at all. Large platforms are, by their nature, corrosive. They are the obvious vectors for miscommunication and disinformation that are part of a general cloud of malaise hanging online, yet they have effectively outmoded the web itself for most of the audiences that return to them with a daily cadence. They are, also, more of a liability than has been fully appreciated during their growth. Stability should never be an expectation of closed, for-profit platforms, and their default state should always be considered failure, unless they can significantly scale back to a barebones feature set and a smaller moderation surface area.

Twitter, now that it is more obviously unaligned with creatives than ever, will only be the latest casualty. Inertia says it is unlikely to fully croak for a while, but I don’t think it is much exaggeration to qualify it this way when independent artists specifically have run for the hills. Retreating to the small web is an obvious, more effective antidote, but the motivations aren’t tremendously compelling when open standards on it have lagged and audiences have been placated by far more addictive patterns that place content directly in front of them. The dynamics of promotion online have changed since Twitter’s launch and reformulation, and promoting yourself as a freelancer with a dot-com and a blog is woefully insufficient when exposure is now shaped by recommendation feedback loops. Creatives are already bending to these expectations now, so it is notable, then, that they appear to be the leaders of an exodus that is almost unheard of for a platform as large and entrenched as this since the participatory web era expired into crypto junk. Undoubtedly, it takes considerable mental stamina for them to decide a migration must even be worth the trouble when they risk uprooting their influence to less fertile social soil. Elon Musk, it seems, is comfortable enough to let this saga unwind, perhaps if only to prove the trust thermocline overrides Newton’s first law of large platforms: saying you’re a haven for porn doesn’t mean people will actually want to use it.

The actual stability of the net, and not just the facade of it, has always existed in the plumbing powering it at the protocol level. TCP/IP is still the bedrock, HTTP is still HTTP, and even with bolted on revisions it is largely a dumb pipe. FTP, BitTorrent, and IRC all continue to exist ー they’re how I download manga, CPU-melting fansubs, and prefer to be alone with others², respectively ー but they are underdeveloped and generally obsolete for most modern uses. AT Protocol (AT Protocol), the plumbing backing Bluesky, is definitely more modern in every sense of that word, right down to its over-engineered complexity; the bespoke engineering this time feels more sober, at least, when it’s righting some of the wrongs that continue to ache ActivityPub by drafting a public protocol that can, hopefully, outlive whatever funding is left to develop it. For now, as long as it operates with only one relay, Bluesky does teeter on the same uncertain edge as the monolithic platforms before it. The silver lining is that if it isn’t making money now, then it is difficult to lump it together with the ongoing scams and snake oil schemes³ that make their own proud claims, and we can be reasonably charitable when the Bluesky team say that their goal is to develop it as a meaningful place for community. If the clouded nostalgia of Cory Doctorow says RSS is feasible again and Anil Dash feels confident enough to say things feel like 2004, when the money had already dried up for the first time and ambitions like this that remained still presented some critical appetite for social good, then it may actually be worth taking seriously. Fred Wilson, the bubble veteran VC now enamored with blockchains, demonstrates how closely this will always teeter on mania, as long as nothing important ever gets built without irrational exuberance.

The wrinkle is we are not entering this chapter with fresh eyes. Bluesky has done everything to button down its attitude as an old Twitter, equally as much of a throwback as SpaceHey, and it is still entrenching feeds as the preferred delivery mechanism under a big tent with AT Protocol. ActivityPub is a backwards-looking protocol in comparison, localizing communities around more of an email model of federation, so it does not surprise that it has also carved out a niche for social media detox that Bluesky has never entertained. There is nothing necessarily flawed about this approach, when your mental model of community exists under Dunbar’s number, but it is a curious half-step that still enshrines the feed while being just obtuse enough with discovery that it will always struggle with any mass-scale adoption. Some of its proponents may, even, qualify this as a feature. Bluesky stands to benefit as the only serious alternative, as addictions do not break when there are equal substitutes available, and potential users are only more likely to migrate where people already are.

Feeds, it should be clear by now, are still a pattern that users believe can be tamed to be affable. Algorithmic presentation is a primary vector for abuse, yet there is a prevailing belief that bad behavior can be coached by moving laterally between websites, which always conveniently scales right up until the moment it doesn’t. Audiences are not particularly great at internalizing this, and it is difficult to accept a diagnosis that drinking from a firehose is still likely to give you water poisoning. Bluesky, I expect, will be unlikely to solve this with cottage algorithms, even as it discovers interesting collections like back alley views and explosive love. These are novel categorizations of noise, but they are not human-scale, and they do not sift or curate it in any way that develops community rather than unrelenting feed delivery. AT Protocol is designed with an extensibility that could feasibly enable quieter formats that respect attention, and some of those solutions are starting to sprout already that provide some hope that the micropost does not need to remain a default format. Twitter itself could have gone down this path before it hit third-party clients at the knees and monopolized the platform, effectively excising the exploratory variety of those functions into a lost future. The question for AT Protocol, then, will remain if it can keep the plane flying long enough while it is being built to develop a stable atmosphere to give those efforts long-term security. If it does make a splash landing, it will at least be aligned with those interests, since you will be able to watch the fuselage rain down from an RSS reader, or from another bespoke client of your choice.

Subculture, today, is accessible to everyone, a concession that has allowed it to exist in a superposition of death and overwhelming diversity. The evolution we should expect it to undergo is not likely to yield any clear platform winners, the same way Idolmaster does not reign supremacy over the otaku today, and this should be viewed as, if nothing else, a recovery phase for it. The big tent is blowing away, and the monoliths that have stripped it for content and smothered it into a crush are now crumbling. Subculture, and the people celebrating it, still have time to escape the underground and find sunlight, before the foundation caves in.

Preramble

against a backdrop of economic uncertainties and imploding labor markets, the web has remained surprisingly resilient for small creators. large platforms clearly understand the lifecycle of this dynamic, yet increasingly are engaging in an obvious doublespeak to peddle the new snake oil. at this long tail, where creators are less established and enjoy less security from coasting on name recognition or career contacts, is where you will find the voices sounding alarms the loudest about the cracks starting to show in the web, accelerated by LLMs now laundering creative output and creators being pushed even further to the margins. there’s usually no need to read the comments to conclude what you’ve already figured out on your own: the web is dying. the global copyright regime that was engaged to fight against it in its P2P heyday is now repurposing fair use to flip the script, and it is probably fair to say it is unlikely to be reactive to concerns about ownership and remix being raised anew again when it starts crashing into the wall of large-scale AI, let alone inform its context in cooking us all alive. there’s negative profit to be had, endless growth to never be realized, and dividend orgies to be deferred indefinitely.

vocal synth music will certainly be no exception in this shifting dynamic. now that audio transformers like suno have started to appear, they’ve begun contributing their own noise into the screaming chorus. yet, somehow, more authentic vocal synth music will be published over this year than the last, largely by new, independent producers using it as a creative springboard for the first time. vocal synth music is experiencing its largest boom yet, and the resiliancy of the doujin spirit that has guided it, if somewhat bruised from a global pandemic, has protected that growth.

it’s my strong belief that manual curation is needed more than ever to sift through this noise, especially as fabricated content online goes exponential. recommendation algorithms, engineered primarily to extract attention, do not discriminate on content or control its failings, and many of the largest players are already racing to a future where creation is content maximized for infinite churn. there may eventually come a future of the web, or another protocol, that figures out a way to validate creators and separate out the bot chaff in a meaningful way, but the incentives are diminishing rapidly for platforms to ever develop or find such solutions. regular, periodic, grassroots curation will be our best tool to defend this value in the medium term, and it is the primary motivation for why I’m starting VOCALOG to explore new releases and the producers behind them in vocal synth music at a monthly cadence (though realistically, more irregularly). while it is unreasonable to think I may be able to chart even a small slice of a still expanding subculture, it’s subject matter that I have a sticky enthusiasm for and want to celebrate. the antipode is the enthusiasm and money slushing around for AI today that shrugs at culture converning on a marketable, average sludge, and there is more opportunity and responsibility than ever for you and me to show up with critical perspectives that might help us wade through it together.

unlike the data rummaging I’ve done and plan to continue with when the right inspiration strikes, these explorations are purposefully turning away from that approach. for one, the weekly vocaran is still active at this point and is being collected purely on numbers, which makes it one of the best windows into what trends locally within the vocal synth music scene undisturbed by more global fads or memes. one can argue about whether its relevance has already slipped, and also whether newer outfits like the billboard japan chart and vocaloid rankings are more usefully recording larger casual audiences being exposed to vocal synth music, but the point remains that there are ample models of the data-focused approach available, performed at different scales for a variety of purposes, that understand the quirks and caveats of streaming platforms and public metrics. weekly vocaran especially provides a wealth of historical data that has already been forced to respond to the way metrics have been recalculated and reformulated on nico over the years, and any other attempt to catch up to that benchmark would be redundant. the focus with VOCALOG is to dig deep, down into the CD jumble of a plastic bin at the hard off, to see what curiosities may turn up.

secondly, and perhaps more crucially, I want to avoid enforcing arbitrary limits and thresholds on what might be covered in this space. the initial vision for these explorations is to bring focus to lesser-known creators, and while I anticipate that will always inform what is showcased to some extent, view counts are a distraction to that goal. an upper views threshold on eligibility for mention would not only be arbitrarily snotty, but also uncompromising to the realities of how this scene has expanded. “VOCALOG” is meant to communicate this discretion: while a ship’s deck log may record as granularly as changes in the weather, there is also an expectation that it will be incomprehensive and likely omit events. maybe the presiding officer never noticed something. maybe the presiding officer was too lazy or inattentive to bother in the first place. the discussions here should not be taken as a total of vocal synth music, but as a supplement to other explorations, often done by other individuals who want to highlight their own personal discoveries. these have always been limited in english, which is some of the motivation for this effort to begin with ー I’d probably be in better company on this crossposting to a note blog ー so I’d encourage anyone that follows along to also check on resources like vocaDB to understand how far the horizon stretches and where I’m probably either overlooking or hazily scribbling the territory.

since my motivation flies more than a little high here, let me put things a little more plainly: what should you expect to read about on VOCALOG? vocal synth PV and album pickups, mostly. we’ll likely also detour pretty frequently into editorial and snip interviews or other commentary that I think make for good highlights. click through the hotlinks and fall down your own rabbit hole. expect the format to evolve as I find my tongue past this initial long-winded preamble, unless my yap fever never does end up breaking, in which case we’re in serious trouble. the weather here has been unreasonably warm for what should be the fall, and I need adachi rei to blow her cool air over me to save me from the delirium. save me, adachi rei! before I launch a real newsletter!

Spotlight

when I wrote about teto on her birthday last year, there was far more uncertainty in my tone then about how people would react to her receiving a commercial voicebank. teto does continue to reside over an underdog charm that I gushed about then, a forever distant second to miss 01, but reappraising now a year wiser, it’s stunning to admire how much glam and glitter she has put on since. the likes of haraguchi sasuke and masarada, producers who were in that moment mostly one-hit wonders with an unknown horizon in front of them, have completely upended that characterization by making major or exclusive use of her voicebanks, respectively, in a new boom era.

rarely would I credit one or even two personalities with defining an ad-hoc movement like this, outside of a crafted ideology, which makes it doubly astounding that these successes establish an almost perfect snapshot of the maturities that are supervising teto’s rise. masarada, a producer that splashed onto the scene from nothing, has cracked charts and sent teenagers rushing to karaoke booths. sasuke, initially signed to warner japan as a 15 year old boy-wonder toying with demoscene-style witchery, has mostly hung up that hat to celebrate the online youth he spent enjoying MADs by polishing his sharp sound with a reliance on UTAU. the superstar rookie, spurned by teto’s synthV release, has weaved an entirely new story for her. the seasoned production veteran, an amalgam of old haunt and fresh face, choosing to reach for her synthV voice primarily for commercial releases, prefers to exalt her old canon as a raucous VIPPER unconcerned with polite aesthetics. together, they encompass teto’s elevation from joke to standout, and larger diffusion among audiences as a character thrust into sudden success.

although the character PV has never lost full influence in vocal synth music, and someone like yukopi is affirmation that it has remained strong, the era where black rock shooter or kagepro could be propeled into media mix powerhouses has felt more like a distant memory. teto’s resurgence, the doctor wannabe forced into a lab coat, has likely brought us closer than ever to someone threading the right twist of her character into a commercial manga or light novel. a flood of amateur creatives and teto’s rise out of a lie have equipped her with especially useful subject matter, and teto, more than other voicebanks that engage character profiles as mere suggestions, has become an ambassador of youthful uncertainty. she’s been thrust into adulthood and is adrift. she’s socially anxious. her friendships are growing distant, her career is a mess, and she has a swelling panic that the best days are behind her as she begins to twilight at 20. to the teenagers crossing over some abstract threshold into adulthood, she is literally them. while it is not to say teto is uniquely tapping into emotions that vocal synth music hasn’t already trafficked in, she has emerged as a uniquely apt personification of that unease for audiences to latch on to. masarada and sasuke, having soared the highest here, provide some of the brightest beacons for producers to orient themselves towards, and it is with fully-realized narrative PVs from fresh faces like hitoka hitomoku and square37 that we see that influence with the most clarity. the nebulous elements of tondemo pop and the lyrical density of poemloids are unlikely to travel as far, or resonate as deeply, as the 31 year old chimera lamenting her dead-end desk job.

♫ かえせ本命

■37 feat. 重音テトSV, 初音ミク, IA

Pickups

no particular cut-off for inclusion this time, so I’ve picked out a few releases from the last two months or so. if I’m going to keep myself to a monthly cadence, then I’ll need to be stricter about this. equally to the point, I’m hoping to be more wide-ranging on what’s included in the future, now that I’ve shaken off the introduction, and events like comiket or vocacolle could make that an overwhelming ask. I think you might already be seeing me rationalize the need to make these posts less regular.

if kasane teto represents a merge of personalities, then adachi rei is the double agent living two lives. unlike teto, who has had her memetic status reconciled with her core music identity, rei has more closely followed miku’s path in seeing her character drift from any semblance of fixed traits. on twitter, where she exists as a markov chain bot mashing together tweets from followers, she is at moments wistful, in need of correction, garlic toasted¹, blistering with rage, celebratingly horny, or conseratively horny (jordan peterson). that chaos is now most communally lauded, but producers do respect her more emotionally flat android side, still her dominant trait as informed by creators like avogado6. tracks like this one from mizenkei, a reflective quiet, are a nice retreat to that.

hatenagi nagisa has the sort of creative drive I want. not only is that reflected in his PV output – five new PVs in the last month, each of uncompromising standard – but also his seemingly smothering need to include footnotes for each of his songs explaining his process and motivations. most producers are usually content to let a work speak for itself, but the parade of releases and these addendums for what are already typically frantic anthems suggests more of a breathless urge to shout than a simple desire. if anything else, that’s the sort of enthusiasm we need to tap for the wacca and maimai crossover revival. anyone flirting with time signatures like this deserves the recognition.

yomitan akane has twisted familiar iconography in unusual ways before, or deliberately expunged it, so it’s really exceptional to see him attack it with such full throat in this exploration of the subconscious. what starts with a benign dream-like logic – teto flying with a golf club, holding a miniature organ, and buried in trash bags – quickly teeters into the nightmarish as things take a hard turn to the disassociative. there is as much to parse as there is to puzzle over: the lyrics in the description, distributed materials, and video itself don’t match each other, and fixed comments throughout the video provide terse explainers like they were jotted down in a dream journal. satoshi kon’s famously dense storyboards cross my mind here, and I can’t help thinking this a particularly great abbreviation of the same sort of subconscious odyssey. kon made whole films this way.

Subbed

♫ シンカンセンスゴイカタイアイス

シャノン feat. 歌愛ユキ, 初音ミク, GUMI

are you the kind of person that pays attention to aspect ratios? some of this is probably owed to the normalization of vertical video, and also retro tech nostalgia still booming with younger generations, but it is surprising to note how many vocal synth PVs are returning back to the promised land and away from widescreen. shannon here is more obviously leaning into the latter, as are most other examples I can cite, to blend the sepia tones of the showa era with the cool, trendy blues of mizuiro. personally, I think if anyone deserves to use this motif as a crutch, it’s probably the person that can convicingly establish a new-age retro worldview using a bed of chiptune arpeggios and a minutiae of shinkansen trivia (seriously, unless you’re a diehard railfan, you need to trust me that there’s a lot to gain reading the comments). wrap me in a blanket of television snow and let me nurse the too-hard shinkansen ice cream.

♫ ていたいむず

綿ナラシ feat. 琴葉茜・葵

getting around to completing this round-up, which I announced would surely be coming almost a month ago, was especially taunted by this release from wata narashi. apparently, this is how he recalls the pressures from writing his graduation thesis, and while I’m not nearly as cute as an aoi puppet, looming quarter deadlines and the dread of reporting no progress in another standup has also led me to feel like I’m part of the same circus. even worse, I don’t have an adachi rei on a tripod scurrying past me in telepresence mode as she provides color commentary. along with the aspect ratio potpourri, we’ve also started to see more producers using live action footage like this as texture, or even similar thematic use to narashi, that I’m ready to shout that puppet comedy is back in. from vtubers to school idols, I think everyone would be more likely to swoon over my tehepero whimsy if we all had to talk past each other with flapping muppet mouths.

Noteworthy

♫ かなしばりに遭ったら

あばらや feat. 歌愛ユキ, ナースロボ＿タイプＴ

♫ ヘイヴン

ヨハク feat. 初音ミク

♫ 以上、n番観測地からお届けしました。

佐藤乃子 feat. ナースロボ＿タイプＴ

[2]

Subbed

♫ 巨人の肩から見下ろして

海茶 feat. 琴葉茜・葵

♫ 好きじゃないかも

Pohmi feat. 夏色花梨

♫ ワカンナイト☆フィーバー！？

キノシタ feat. 音街ウナ, 鏡音リン

💿 水槽

Aa feat. 足立レイ, 鏡音リン, ゲキヤクV,浮遊レイ, ナースロボ＿タイプT, カゼヒキV

Clippings

• blessed by what is no doubt a full book of corporate contacts, haraguchi sasuke’s rampage has seen him now worm his way into popular music. new sasuke releases find you, rather than being hunted for, which tripped me into ame-chan, kotone, and now his new idol single that I like to imagine came with a clause contingent on letting teto sing it too. for someone this high profile, it’s an amazingly steady output, and seeing how sasuke goes from an empty track timeline to twelve layers dancing around each other in thirty minutes is a great look into that process. when we talk about flowing like water in a creative context, this has to be what that looks like on a DAW.

• kitkat. mcdonalds. sure, everyone is ending up on the nissin CM promotional circuit at some point these days (daijoubu da, mondainai), but namigroove is grabbing the bag with both hands and running far with it. it’s something of both a generational and cultural gap, but in the before times of forums, indie assholes would blow a gasket upon learning of montreal signed on to be outback’s new jingle. watching fans congratulate namigroove under a commercial for new frappé flavors (not zundamochi flavor, mind you) has caused me to disassociate, and for a brief moment, I’ve peered through the cosmic keyhole to a world where these superfans are instead flaming each other over a commercial on vbulletin boards. let’s go maccas tonight.³

• kikuo’s north america tour wrapped up last month, and I scrambled to see him in chicago after being blocked out on the other showings. rarely do I feel all that old, since I already channel my ojisan chi daily, but it’s likely no exaggeration that I was one of the oldest and least trendy attendees outside of parents chaperoning their sons and daughters. while miku expo over a decade has already plainly demonstrated the audience growing, it was probably the clearest I’ve seen how tiktok has rocketed kikuo into stardom. all said, seeing hoshi-kun play hype man was worth the price of admission, but the sound mix left a lot to be desired. when you have teens screaming along to aishite in your ear, any extra attention to it probably wouldn’t have impressed anyway. just remind me to wear platform boots and to not forget my striped arm warmers next time.

• kenshi yonezu wants to sell you godiva chocolate, which explains why donut hole finally received a fully animated PV over a decade after it propelled him into normie. the credits backing it are impressive, and it looks just as much, with legends like masashi andou and takahiro chiba as standouts. as yonezu tells it, though, it doesn’t sound like he even needed the godiva money to get hooked up with production IG on it. after drinking georgia coffee for a few years, it’s nice to know you can always return to a sweet comfort; even sweeter, I’m sure, when you’re welcomed back with a millions of views over a couple days. no big thing to you, I know, yonezu-san.

1. preserved for your convenience, as this tweet no longer translates the objectively correct way ↩

2. if you've been bit by the same umicha bug as me, my gushing over this one already ended up on bluesky ↩

3. it should be interesting to see at what point, if any, teto starts to show up in collaborations like this. to my knowledge, supercell ran the first CM of any kind to feature miku, and it wasn't really until project diva was in full swing after a year or two that collaborations began to spin up rapidly. throw me a curveball and let's see her work at a ministop instead of famima. ↩