Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26853814-20150804095318/@comment-25521131-20160815071523

It's a tad silly when people bring up a Vocaloid "replacing" another in terms of popularity, or criticizing a Vocaloid as a result of their popularity. I can't tell you how many times people have pulled out the "I HATE MIKU BECAUSE SHE POPURAR AND SHEEEE ES MORE POPURAR THAN OTHER VOCAROIDOS AND MY WAIFU/HUBSBANDO NEED TO BE MORE POPULAR" card, and while I'm not saying anybody's doing such a thing, this is a similar situation, except much more civilized of course, and thank god for that. What people seem to forget is that Vocaloid is a software, not a popularity contest, and the popularity of the Vocaloid voicebank in question does not dictate the quality of said voicebank, in other words popularity=/=good;bad vocaloid. It's become a bit of a controversy however, among those who seem to value the Vocaloid characters, more than they value the actual software, which isn't always the case, but it more times than not is. This mostly revolves around, of course Miku, and she often gets a lot of hate from newcomers for being popular, what a lot of people seem to not understand however, is that, nobody controls how popular she is - now don't get me wrong, she has a shitton of marketing as she is now, which definitely influences it, but someday, it may just be people won't care about her anymore, regardless of her marketing, hell, look at Tone Rion, she had a TON of marketing on lauch, and she still stands today as one of the most, if not the most underused VOCALOID3 vocal of all time, if not just the least used vocal of all time in general. When you consider that, and the fact that how Miku even got popular in the first was basically a freak accident, and nobody expected her to get nearly as much reception as she did, especially when you consider that the original VOCALOID2 Hatsune Miku vocal was rushed to meet it's deadline apparently, how would a Vocaloid voicebank or their company have direct control over their popularity? They have influence, yes, but they don't have any real control over it. If you know the first thing about marketing, it's that it's basically a guessing game usually based on probability, statistics, and collecting mass amounts of analytical data. Now why did I go on about all of that? Here's the thing - how do you suppose SeeU would "replace" Miku, ignoring the fact that the voice provider was arrested, the false claim that she was "trilingual" despite only having two voicebanks ( to clarify, her Korean vocal has extra English phonemes, but due to the nature of Korean pronunciation, specifically it being a lot faster than other languages, rendering SeeU's Korean voicebank very choppy in English, and the fact that some of the extra phonemes didn't even work half the time, people got upset by this claim, which prompted SBS to work on an English vocal they never finished ), and the fact that there was controversy about her being able to speak Japanese and Korean, due to the strained relationship between South Korea and Japan. They're characters, fictional, they can't control their popularity, people on the other hand can garner popularity much easier aside from their marketing made by their record labels, but fictional characters can't - and on that note, they only have the latter, companies can't just decide "Oh hey, let's switch out the popularity between one Vocaloid, and give it to another", it doesn't work like that, but a good amount of people seem to think so, likely because human celebraties have a lot more influence over their fanbase than a mascot for a virtual singing software, and they think that fictional characters can work the same way, but the fact is, they don't.