User blog comment:Rilena/I am tired of all the anime/cartoon designs for mascots/@comment-53539-20190129221423

I'm indifferent.

I prefer the way Diva, Songman, Tonio, Miriam and Prima's boxart, but the rest doesn't bother me. The boxarts which have stepped away from the characters have often received mixed reactions, from people calling Lena Horne "ugly" to the feeling of it being impersonal as there is no avatar.

I do understand, that avatars have their negativity. There is anti-Japanese people on line who see the anime characters and mislabel Vocaloid as a "Japanese thing". There are weaboos who like Vocaloid for no other reason then "Len is cute". There are unrepresented groups who do things like force their world views onto Vocaloids like Flower because they have no representation and only stereotyping. There are people who feel their ethnic groups weren't represented because most Vocaloids were at one point White or Japanese. But overall... The characters turned out to be better then not investing in them. Aside from being amateurish looking to professional musicians, the character characters just sell.

Imagine you have the situation in V3 wherein you have a big complaint of newer Vocaloids sounding too like the older ones and you have 4 vocaloids with the same vocal type. You have therefore very little advantages and disadvantages between any of them and the character ends up being the divider. It shouldn't be a selling point, but when the difference of voicebank is not much, you basically might as well draw lots to see who you buy.

I'm more concerned with the "Len is so kawaii, I want his vocal" type of fan because they don't actually know how bad or good the Vocaloid is and think that their fav. vocal is the best. CFM pretty much set the president and most attempts to change that have failed. People can feel vocals like VY1 and VY2 are impersonal or that the artstyle of Vocaloids like Sweet Ann make them look ugly. The list goes on. Even PowerFX pretty much said that its what fans expect. You also had with Avanna the confirmation that Yamaha now is just pushing the anime artwork style onto many Vocaloids now and that they want this style to be the one studios use.

Even with "look alike" Vocaloids, I don't really find an issue, you can put Miku and SeeU next to each other and go "Thats Miku" and "Thats SeeU", so they may copy other Vocaloids... But I still prefer SeeU's design over Miku's so it can be a working theory that pulls off an easy victory. Thats baring in mind I don't feel SeeU was that good and that SeeU overall was a PR nightmare and supporting SBS Artech is not a good idea or SeeU because her provider gets royalties from her... And I don't want to support criminals. Thats why I say supporting Uni is better, but even Uni still has the sort of vibes of a Miku-esque idea in her design. And despite people's overactions towards the idea, I honestly think their just that, overactions.

Chinese Vocaloid is now on par with Japanese Vocaloid with English about 75% the way there but a long way still to go. Spanish is dead. Korean is struggling but at least had a new Vocaloid for V4. The last two Chinese Vocaloids weren't that successful but at least we have a 2nd strong fandom and a 3rd semi-strong one. The avatars thing is something that won't go away but I do understand why its not going to go away. Its most likely other languages will get the same issues occur.

CeVIO took the vocaloid route and it proved successful. Chipspeech also benefitted from it, as did Alter/ego. Fans just want a character to bounce the vocal off of now.