Talk:Akita Neru/@comment-2A02:C7F:9202:5C00:81A2:604C:6417:A7C0-20181018211725/@comment-53539-20181129190114

They aren't real Vocaloids so as the trend favouring them dies, so do they.

Derivatives were popular in 2007-9 when there was a handful of Vocaloids, as it was hard to stand out in a sea of producers. Nico Nico Douga, Nico Video now, was a young website and Vocaloid videos took up almost 1/3 of its content at one stage. The fanloids were memes and personnel personifications of Vocaloids. Miku and co didn't have personalities so producers created fanloid representing them also, leading to a variety of different styles of Vocaloids and numerous variations on the designs. At their basic they were like Akaito - a simple recolour of Kaito in red. It was rather lazy and Neru is basically the same as this too. Others were a bit more creative, technically Haku is based on Miku's design but is different enough from Miku's own design.

What killed the fanloids was a number of things. Arguments for starters, there were some producers who were over protective of their particular setting of Vocaloid and would defend anyone using the same setting. Other Fanloids like Zatsune Miku were owned by a creator who quit. Others faded because criticism was aimed at a lack of creativity. But the thing that killed the fanloid scene the most was the introduction of other Vocaloids beyond the Big 8 such as the Ah Software vocals. Producers also discovered an entire genre of Vocaloids, they dubbed the Engloids because they were English voicebanks, independent of the Japanese ones who existed before theirs did. So the diversification of Vocaloids lead to less pressure to create fanloids as fans then were looking up Vocaloids new on the scene and not fanloids.

Its not a biggy as I've gone from fandom to fandom and every time there is a new fandom arising the early days or first few years often consist of a lot of fan OCs that are not particular creative. Mortal Kombat, My Little Pony; Friendship is Magic, Beyblade, Sonic (the laziest of the lazy designs come from this fandom), etc, etc. Eventually you just get used to it, its the same for everything including fanfiction. The easiest route is the rehash of old ideas and not the creation of new ones, particularly from younger audiences. But you can copy an idea without knowing anyway, as even Miku herself is guilty of borrowing ideas from previous influences in popular culture. You can't escape it, you just get used to not viewing everything as a special snowflake and that so long as you look at the characters and tell who is who its alright.

For some reason, the Vocaloid fandoms fans struggled at points to understand that almost every design is formulaic and for a reason that there simply is only "x" amount of variations you can do to any single thing in existence. And formulas form to make life easy, because these are things that work and have proven to work. Once you understand that, you just get on with things, it doesn't take the spark away from the designs uniqueness but you can then see its history of that design spewing out back across an entire culture, as well as the consequences of it existing. There are designs that are clearly based on Miku even within Vocaloid and when people complain about it they can end up accidently saying "This Vocaloid is bad because it looks like a Vocaloid" depending on how their reaction is.

We used to see this a lot at the now extinct forum Vocaloid Otaku forums, and people have knee jerk reactions to you telling them their favourite Vocaloid is just a rehash of an old design. Yet they'll accept that fanloids can be rather lazy redesigns.

Anyway, this is all you really need to know about the situation with fanloids. I've never been bothered about them myself. If I was still 16-18 I'd be in the crowd mocking them. 14 years later and I just know their part of the process of the fandom.