Talk:Flower/@comment-53539-20190101135810/@comment-27395179-20190123191922

That's exactly the issue I was expecting with Ghost's fandom tbh, so I can't say that I'm entirely surprised. Their fandom has always been....weird like this; I wasn't expecting anything less from them, unfortunately.

Reprensentation in vocaloid has always been a strange thing, and you already touched on Leon/Lola so i'm not really going to bring that up. I'm simply going to say that I'm happy that many are finally starting to accept that Lola/Leon's VP's are black, despite the fact that both of their newer fanon designs tend to be the older fanon ones with darker skin and hair. I've seen quite a few well-done Lola/Leon designs, but they tend to be from twitter artists whose art only spreads around with veteran fans anyways. Like I said earlier with VY1, it definitely has to do with them lacking humanoid avatars, which takes all the imporatnce of representation out for most people. Combine that with a fandom that generally lacks creativity, it creates a huge mess that no one ever truly recovers from.

In terms of LGBT rep though, I can safely say that I am not expecting any sort of rep coming from the Japanese side of things, because as a society they unfortunately still have a long way to go in that regard. That, combined with a vocaloid voicebank financially having a lot to lose, if there is going to be a rep it'll be from one of the Engloids (we've already seen this manifest itself in ausgris being agender according to vocatone's tumblr, although since there's been no update on them since 2017 who knows if they'll ever be released). If anything, I feel like a canon LGBT engloid would instantly boost their popularity and potentially their sales, although the sales issue is yet again a double-sided coin since not everyone is okay with accepting LGBT yet...along with Engloids generally being a mixed bag at whether or not they'll sell well. If it's a voice-type I like, I'll buy them, but if not I wont, even if they are LGBT.

Simply put, that isn't a selling point for me, even though I am a member of the LGBT community. Since I'm a vocaloid user who works with the software, what the vocaloid sounds like is what's most important to me over anything else. There's a major disconnect in the fandom now, and most people care about what the vocaloid looks like than what they sound like; I saw this discussed on VO all the time back when it was still running.

Iroha is a strange topic too, and to this day I don't even know what's true or about her VP other than that he is male. Once upon a time around Iroha's V4 release, I had heard that her vp was trans, and it made me extremely happy. One of my all-time favorite vocaloids being voiced by someone like me? That made me practically jump with joy. But nowadays I see many conflicting pieces of information about her vp, ranging from "it's a mistranslation" to "her VP isn't actually trans," and honestly I'm not sure what to think about the whole thing anymore other than her VP is male. Which is fine with me, being completely honest. No matter what iroha's VP identifies as, Iroha still has one of my favorite vocaloid voices and will always be one of my favorite vocaloids to use, even though I can't mix her with music to save my life lol

Also, I do want to say that I am 100% fully aware that the older DoE songs are flawed, and I didn't want it to come across that I didn't. Their repetivity bothered me all the way back in 2013, when Servant of Evil was the first Vocaloid song I ever heard. The tuning, or more, lack thereof, really got on my nerves. I found Len's voice extremely annoying. However, I simply liked the song regardless because it had an interesting story, and I think many people are like this as well. I did explain this in my other post with saying that in terms of music production they aren't great; I simply wanted to offer my belief as to why people like them despite of all this. I do not think that's mothy's current works are stellar either; compared to other producers his work is really lackluster.

When I say that "I like mothy," I'm really not talking about his vocaloid works, but rather, his novel series. That's what mothy is to me, but that is only because I'm a veteran fan who realized there was more to him than low-quality songs and therefor read his novels. I know that this is just because i'm part of an extremely small niche group called the Evillious Chronicles fandom that actually reads the novels, but I digress.

Most people are not this way, but chances are that whenever says that they like mothy, half of them are vocaloid noobs while the other half are people who actually read translations of his novel series. If given the choice to listen to a mothy song such as A Hero's Armor is Always Crimson versus a non-mothy song like Hated by Life Itself. on repeat, I would hands down pick the latter. Even though I don't really like the tuning on the latter, the music production is still better than the former, and it has interesting lyrics to suit my tastes.

I am not fluent in Japanese myself (currently enrolled in a Level 2 Japanese college class), but to add to your point about speaking japanese and song lyrics... With my limited vocabulary I am almost certain that in terms of lyric structure, one of the major issues with mothy's earlier songs is that they are extremely literal. Stanzas are short and to the point, with very little creativity in terms of song flow. Take PinocchioP for example, whose songs tend to have elegant nonsenical lyrics that are brilliant when read between the lines. This is apparent enough if you look at the official Diva X translation of Slowmotion vs. descentsubs'. They are complicated enough to have multiple translations that vary in complexity, while mothy's earlier songs are so simple that all their translations are strikingly similar. (I still have issues with Pinocchio's current song productions, but that isn't relevant for here)

Japanese lyrics in general tend to be more literal than that of English, but is still possible get something resembling the flowing lyrics. With mothy though, I think this is because, like I said, these were his first works. Oversimplification is something that new songwriters tend to have an issue with, no matter the language. While his new songs have gotten better at that, they still aren't perfect by any means.

I never really thought about the "mother instinct" you brought up, but honestly it makes a lot of sense when explained. Many vocaloid fans are like that when it comes to Len, and it is certainly because of the female audience, like you said. It still confuses me when people say they love Len more than rin, because in terms of the Kagamines, Rin is better in every way, at least imo. I might like using Len's V4 Japanese bank over Rin's, but in terms of quality and whatnot I believe Rin is much better. It really puts a lot of perspective with the "mother" thing.

It's ironic, because I tend to distance myself from a lot of those noob vocaloid fans, because I get too anxious about correcting them. I think I could do a lot of good to the community if I tried to educate people, but a lot of them get so defensive that, coupled with my anxiety disorder, I just decided to separate from them. I will correct people irl, but online is an entirely different matter. And I feel like this is an issue as well; without veteran fans like me trying to educate and set an example, nothing will really change.

I sincerely hope that going forward the DoE series soon becomes not much of a big deal going forward as well. The series is over, and it should really try to get absorbed into the main evillious chronicles series. But unfortunately, I do not think this is going to happen as long as mothy keeps promoting it, which he still does. The actual western Evillious Chronicles fandom is sick of DoE, which I think says a lot about the DoE series as a whole (don't know about the jpn fandom though, since EC's main fan groups are actually Chinese- and Spanish-speaking). When the master of the heavenly yard novel came out, people in the English fandom were angry that the other sinners got shafted in favor of Allen/Rilinae fixing everything. When the Tailor of Enbizaka novel came out, people were angry that Kayo got negated to essentially a side role in order for a reincarnation of Allen to take center stage...because Kayo should've been the MC since it's her novel and song. People in the EC fandom don't like DoE, and this will always be a very interesting fact that amuses me to no end. It really appears to me that the only people who really like DoE nowadays are voca noobs, or people like me who like it for the other two novels in its series, which like I said, have nothing to do with the songs at all.

Lastly, I'd also like to agree with your view that a lot of mothy's songs were intended to be one offs but then got added into something more. It's a well-known inside joke in the EC fandom that mothy just "makes up the story as he goes along," and even though he swears he doesn't... it's still pretty obvious that he certainly does make stuff up given that he more or less retcons something with every new novel release. However, this is actually not a fault of mothy, but rather the type of author he is. In creative writing classes, including my own, one of the first things learned is that there are two types of authors: a "planner" and a "pantser". The former are people that spend an immense amount of time before they write their novel worldbuilding down to the tiniest details; even details that won't be present in the novel. The latter are people that "write by the seat of their pants," aka really have no set in stone plan going in and create plots according to wherever their current plot takes them. Mothy, although he does have a massive world that clearly some minimal worldbuilding went into, is clearly a pantser lol.