#Miku across the world

[nocurnalday]

Brooklyn Italian Miku

[modeus-the-misanthrope]

In all sincerity, I love seeing people draw Hatsune Miku and Goku with their personal culture draped across them. Brazilian Miku, Halal Goku. Both of these characters being welcomed across the globe is nice. It makes me smile.

(Partially from nostalgia, I will admit. Growing up in the 90's DBZ was everywhere and the early 2000's internet belongs to the world's number one princess, Miku. So it's nice to see them still around and popular.)

[rosenbergi]

I can’t take the “The World Is Mine” plot point seriously because this is all I can think about-

[red-dyed-sarumane]

aru sekai shoushitsu is an 11 minute song i listened to on accident because i was too tired to look at the length & was just solely like man thats such a cool title for a vocaloid song i hope it lives up to it and it 100% did. i didnt have any idea there was a story behind it it just thought it was such a cool sounding song & i remember clearly playing animal crossing past 4am with it on loop. completely forgot the producers name & didnt recognize them when they posted kyuuyaku hankagai so it took me like 3 days to actually listen to it & the SECOND i heard the nami no ne no motif i lost my mind. that was it for me ive been so deep into it since then i dont think theres a way to pull me out. at the start everything had such weird phrasing it was so hard to sort out what was stylistic and what was direct story telling & even now its sometimes difficult, but the fact with every new song we get a new version of the story and new info & everything ties together to consistently for a project made by one person over the course of several years with this level of detail.

going from knowing its a story about trying and failing to prevent the world's destruction to finding out not only are they doomed to repeat it, the only way out is to completely give up on their own self and accept total death. putting together the timeline from little hints some of which u have to sort through which is fact and which is a character's own narration distorted by either their emotions or intentionally. the fact the story telling is not entirely direct, the lyrics are only one facet of it, it goes as far as using the genre of the song to express things, theres just so much. ive been into my fair share of vocaloid song projects but this is the most precise and delicately handled one i've encountered. there is so much care and attention put into every single one of those songs it would just be insulting to not take it seriously. there was a moment i was worried it was going to turn into the same song but different when we got maximizer and then kanon and i'm so so glad that isn't the case because the way theyre handling it now really shows how important it is to them. this is a person who posts some of the most ridiculous memes ive seen & has some now popular meme songs and even with that attention they've said they're continuing to take the series seriously and that alone says so so much about the weight of this project to them.

i'll be honest with you i dont think there's a good end to this story. with the info we have now, with how aru sekai shoushitsu, the story outline song, goes i cannot see a happy ending for any of these characters. i wouldn't be surprised if it turned out we're only being shown one instance of that certain world & it ends in a way that implies despite all their efforts it's just going to happen all the same all over again, just with certain people lost forever and others willing to try more underhanded tactics to try their ideas that ultimately wont work anyway. i don't think there will be a real resolution to any of the problems. but even then there are so many currently unrevealed secrets & the overall commentary the work is making in the first place that sticking around for whatever ending we're given will be well worth the wait

[staff]

Tumblr Tuesday: Many Mikus

"Draw Hatsune Miku from your culture," they said. "Ok," you said, proceeding to create Hatsune Miku from every culture under the sun. From Catalonian to Korean, from Nigerian to Navajo: Please enjoy this staggering abundance of Hatsune Miku fanart inspired by cultures across the world. 39!

@molenaide:

@meriahlatyar:

@marsipain:

@beastwhimsy:

@catmask:

@annbragin:

@fox-from-malta:

@sparkly-s0da:

@multiiocular-mushroom:

@spiiiiiral:

@ella-the-eevee:

@leafsei:

@auntphibian:

@biibontic:

@dr11ft:

@cowinf:

@kapustainu:

@missmisnomer:

@prixcel:

@geothermalescapist:

@noxious-fennec:

@pereczke:

@lemonpoet:

@windwenn:

@berryesque:

[herbertwest]

The origin of the shrine revealed!!!!

There's a Miku shrine in the woods near my house

[communist-hatsunemiku]

I don't think the broad explanation of Hatsune Miku gets across what exactly Miku means to Her devoted fans and the producers/artists who work with Her.

Like my general quick explainer these days is something along the lines of "So She is software that let's music producers add a synthesized singing voice to their music. Think of Her like a digital instrument, you write the music and tune Miku like you would a guitar"

And even that often requires a bunch more nuanced explanation. And so how do I transition into "yeah She's basically seen as an angelic digital entity, a sonically-driven egregore whose filling the world with music, but she needs our help to do it. The world is hers, by the way. She's immortal, she lives in the computer, in your smartphone, in that flashdrive or that psp. She's more real than jesus- hey where are you going im NOT DONE!!"

[jibunbosh]

Mesmerizer is a satire of TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and the rest of the modern short-form vertical video format

A brief thematic analysis.

I'm sure there are countless people already interpreting the imagery and details in this wonderful song & MV, like here and here, so I won't spend too much time retreading that ground. Miku and Teto are dancing. Miku gets hypnotized. Teto signals for help, but gets hypnotized at the end as well.

That part is obvious enough, but that's still pretty surface-level. What is this seemingly hyperspatial horror scenario supposed to mean to us?

While checking to see if anyone before me's already come to the same conclusions as I did and if I should bother not writing this text post at all (lol), I came across udin's great analysis video. She comes to the conclusion that the song tackles themes of disillusionment with reality and the ways we indulge in escapism to relieve ourselves of the pains of the world.

I agree with that reading! From practically the very beginning, we have Miku call to us - the viewer - to push away our true feelings. Teto comes in to peddle a solution, inviting us to surrender and empty our minds - in her words, "pretending to know nothing."

You, the viewer, are a critical character in this masquerade. For nearly the entire video, Miku and Teto's eyes are unfailingly trained on you. Or, well... perhaps they can't actually see you, but they can see a camera, or whatever other aperture the point of view is supposed to be from. And they know they're being watched. (Who else would Teto be sending distress signals to?)

Let's put a pin on that for later.

udin notes very early on that Miku and Teto are, conspicuously, kept in vertical frames - very similar to the video formats of TikTok (and Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, and whatever other clones of the format exist.) You know, just like the animator Caststation's Rabbit Hole fan MV that went viral some months ago.

Hey wouldn't it be crazy if the song's producer, 32ki, released Mesmerizer shorts too haha. Wouldn't that be crazy.

Wow, wild.

These short-term vertical videos are captivating & alluring. If you're reading this, it's more likely than not that you've also found yourself caught up in them at least once, scrolling through the infinite algorithmic slurry and forgetting about the real-life issues you have at hand. Would you say, then, that you felt hypnotized? Mesmerized, even?

And so these two invite us to join their world and focus on the... uh... rectangle.

Their dances are repetitive, following the same loop. Their outfits are distinct, but their choreography isn't. They're copying the same formula, repeating it ad nauseam to the best of their ability.

They're doing a fucking TikTok dance.

Back to the pin I told you about earlier, with Miku and Teto looking at a camera.

Miku sways with the camera, eyes looking directly at it like a swinging pocket watch. She's been looking at it the entire time, after all. We've been seeing her via our screen this entire time, but, again, she doesn't necessarily see us. She's beholden to the camera, which she dances for day after day, caught up in its spell. She's hypnotized by it. Eventually, she breaks.

Teto, on the other hand, resists. For a while, anyway.

Despite her being the one jumping to us with the "solution" at the beginning of the MV, there's very quickly good reason to question how much agency she has in this. She dances for the camera as well, but she doesn't want to. She's signalling for help. She wants out.

Many content creators (as much as I personally loathe the non-specificity and soullessness of the term) have struggled with the adaptation to the short-form video format, and the preference the algorithm has had for these captivating, bite-sized videos. They're catchy, and easily drive up metrics. Practically anyone who's publishing their work via video format online needs to learn to adapt or fall behind, even if that means whittling their content down to fit the frame, the time, and people's shortening attention spans. Sometimes, that means compromising on specificity and completeness... or, in other words, the true representation of a full work.

The song's writer, 32ki, has been releasing songs on YouTube for several years. Their first YouTube Short, however, was posted only a year ago: a short, whittled-down segment of their previous song, CIRCUS PANIC!!!, hoping for it to win the ProsekaNEXT song contest. It was their first song to achieve widespread popularity and hit a million views.

The shorts, however, aren't the "true" versions of the song. The full song just won't fit.

We're being mesmerized as consumers of this endless stream of content, rather than appreciators of music and art. However, that relationship isn't completely symmetrical across the plane that is the 4th wall. Miku and Teto are trapped not by their attention spans, but by a compulsion to project their "truthful acting" and peddle that window into a colorful, problem-free world.

We, as the collective audience, need not dwell on any one thing for too long - we need only swipe, and move on to the next video. However, Miku and Teto are trapped behind the screen for eternity, day after day.

They're the only characters we get to see, of course. There's no evil 3rd voice synth character that's plotting to keep them trapped in there. We can't put a face to whatever force is hypnotizing them and trapping them behind the screen. It's faceless - like the inscrutable algorithms of YouTube recommendations or the TikTok For You page, or the impersonal corporations that develop & maintain those aforementioned apps. Miku and Teto's likenesses, on the other hand, are being exploited and extracted from for their entertainment value, being strung along by that metaphorical hypnotizing force like puppets on a string.

Many people, represented by Miku, enjoy their success on such platforms. It's freeing and liberating to throw oneself wholeheartedly into such an endeavor, of course! Others, represented by Teto, harbor their doubts of the emotional veracity of such a medium, but know they have little choice lest they face destruction... perhaps not literally as a person, but as an idea.

Wouldn't it be easier just to let oneself be swept away by it and give in?

[jamiepaige]

Constant Companions Closeup #5: CADMIUM COLORS

(also on bandcamp and spotify!)

Once again, welcome back to the Constant Companions Closeups - a series of in-depth dives into the songs off of my latest album, Constant Companions! Last time, I wrote a whole diatribe about my OCs while talking about I Wish That I Could Fall, and today, we're eating paint! Cadmium Colors featuring Soneji of Project Mikan!

Consider this a content warning: this post will discuss the pandemic, struggles with mental health, and suicidal ideation/attempts. I'm hoping it'll ultimately be uplifting, but the discussions at hand are incredibly heavy, and it wouldn't do this song right to be vague. Please be warned.

---

Let's talk about COVID.

At the beginning of 2020, I was in the midst of a long-term break from making music. It wasn't completely cold turkey, and I might not have even called it a break if you'd asked me at the time, but things were dire. I was still dealing with the burnout I'd sustained from the making of Autumn Every Day; I'd had my ego bruised by a live performance at a house party that went so hilariously bad it'd hurt even the most stoic performers (imagine watching an entire packed room of people clear out in 5 minutes flat from the already hyper-exposed vantage point of being on stage in front of them and knowing you single-handedly caused that lol); I had just moved across the country, and was preoccupied with trying to make ends meet as a 22 year old dealing with pure adulthood for the first time.

I was working a shitty minimum wage job at a discount clothing store I will not be naming, slogging through late-night shifts that wouldn't get me home until 3 am some nights. I had friends and roommates, but they were all just as overworked and exhausted and dealing with their own shit as me. I was mentally ill and unmedicated. Suicidal ideation was rearing its ugly head at my lowest moments.

Then, as I turned 23, a global pandemic shut the world down, my grandpa died with me being unable to attend his funeral, and I had a catastrophic mental breakdown that suddenly turned the voices in my head into a deafening cacophony of self-inflicted malice.

In hindsight, I think being 23 kinda just does that to you

---

Fast forward to 2021. I was back at my retail job with the pandemic raging in full force, my sense of self was held together with duct tape, positive self-talk essentially didn't exist for me, and I was the loneliest and lowest I had ever been. I was working the fewest hours I could get away with, and still, almost all spare time I had was taken up either by work or by my recovery from it.

This was around the time I got an email from Crypton, of all places - the people that make Hatsune Miku, for anyone uninformed. They wanted a remix of the song Happy Synthesizer for a Digital Stars compilation. I could not for the life of me tell you how I lucked into this or why they reached out to me of all people, but they did, and I was deathly determined to prove myself worthy of it.

This was August of 2021. I was staring down the barrel, languishing in what felt like only half of a life, fantasizing about death and trying to twist my thoughts into something that could at least keep me blearily shuffling forward another couple days. It was untenable.

(I'd also recently been diagnosed with OSDD 1b - this is a whole can of worms I can't really open until we talk about Breeze Blows, but it's important to at least mention that coping with this was a significant part of this turnaround.)

It's melodramatic, but I had only two options - make things again, or die.

I finished that remix within 24 hours of getting the stems, and I will gladly toot my own horn about it - it's really fucking good, in my opinion. Bittersweet ended up coming together in a mad dash over the next couple months as well. I was making music again.

Even though I was exponentially busier, things paradoxically got easier. I made the creative process a priority in my life, and not only did it give me an outlet for everything that had otherwise been eating away at my soul, but it struck a chord with other people who had been struggling as well. Things just... started getting brighter.

So I kept making music and living and yadda yadda blah blah here I am. This is all a lot of words and very personal stories of mental health struggles to say this:

One: The line between being an artist and being one of countless people forced to work jobs that go nowhere, that put their life at risk, that force them to strip parts of themselves away - it is a faint and transparent line built on circumstances of class and privilege and luck. Making Art and being an Artist aren't magical elevated states of existence, but something anyone is capable of if given the space to nurture their creativity. I believe the world should be a place where any person can do this.

Two: It's easy to convince yourself that art is meaningless in the face of the world at large. And yes, revolutions aren't fought by poetry and paintings, and people aren't fed through songs. But art is a source and a medium for connection; Art is how we find beauty in a disorganized and entropic world; Art is what we come home to and what words we write and pictures we paint and songs we sing to remind us that people matter to us and love is real and life is worth fucking living. Maybe that's corny and stupid, but it's true.

Three: So help me God, I will never work retail again in my entire life.

---

This is another song that is heavily inspired by artists like Prefab Sprout, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, and other artists of that ilk - very 80s, very flowery and sentimental lyricism, focused on telling a story. I greatly admire songs that aren't afraid to paint otherwise banal or ordinary scenes in abstract reverence!! I wanted the verses to contrast heavily with each other in that way, with verse one's relentless poeticisms (prosaic practice of depravity) and idioms turned on their head (suspending innocents above their disbelief) against verse two's incredibly straightforward depiction of a factory worker's circumstances.

The flowery language might have worked against me somewhat, though! I've seen a lot of folks that thought the ending was darker or much more defeatist than I intended, and while some of that is just inevitable with a work of art, I want to be clear.

Translator's note: this means "don't kill yourself, you idiot"!!

As you may have picked up from the previous post in this series, this song does heavily feature a leitmotif or two predominantly performed under pudgy pretenses. I'm not going to go on that whole novella-length spiel again, but rest assured knowing that this song, too, is one that makes me think about my OCs. Since it's something many people missed, however, I will take a moment to point out that this song quotes none other than Autumn Every Day off of my album of the same name!

Painting and visual art have been something of a reoccurring obsession of mine in my own art. I grew up around visual artists, have always been friends with many visual artists, and generally have a really intense love of it as a medium and a mode of expression. However, there's also always been a sense of... well, I don't want to call it jealousy, but it's jealousy. I've tried many times to start making visual art of my own, and I have made some things, but it's been a struggle, and I worry sometimes that my eye has permanently outstripped my ability.

However, in my quest to toss out grand expectations and simply have fun making art, I did recently pick up a cheap little drawing tablet! I'm excited to be a beginner at something artistic again...

Finally, I want to thank a couple people: Soneji of Project Mikan for the gorgeous, soaring saxophone solo; friend_xp for the mindboggling MV editing; and especially my good friend Que for the GORGEOUS painterly art that goes along with this song! Que's style was just perfect for this, and really tied the whole thing together immaculately!! There's no joke or deeper lore or anything I just fucking love Que's art go follow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And with that, I think this post is complete!! If you have anything else you wanna know about, ask away in the replies! Tomorrow will be Breeze Blows with Marcy Nabors and Marlow Jacobs!!!

MAKE ART AND BE GAY

[nostalgic-nobody]

YESSSSSS

spidey miku!

[vocabulary-altering-posts]

Pinned

gimmick blog for cataloging posts (videos, images, texts, whatever) that have altered your vocabulary in some way. adding a word or phrase, obliterating the tumblr linguistic biosphere, etc. you can nominate posts by tagging or asking if you want to. (if u dont send a link in an ask, i'm probably not going to go looking for the post, but i might keep an eye out.)

whether or not i reblog a tagged post is up to my discretion. if it's one i haven't seen before but that i can easily picture Changing Something, it gets added. specific fandom references probably won't make the cut unless they're truly groundbreaking (such as miku binder thomas jefferson).

#outside nomination - someone else sent this in

#personal nomination - this one came across my dash, or i sought it out, or it was on my hit list and someone sent it to me

more info below the cut

other tags include #phrases, #words, and #characters. phrases and words are probably self-explanatory but for characters it's for when a person or other entity is made up and tumblr latches onto them/it for fun, such as cousin throckmorton or goncharov.

#bonus hit is for posts that permanently changed the way people talk on this side or stuff that is still being referenced years later. #combo hit is for if the entire post (multiple words/phrases/whatever) is insane enough to be referenced or thought about for years. if the entire post is one sentence or sentences that are unrelated to each other it doesn't get the combo hit tag because that is, by definition, not a combo.

main blog is nickel-alloy so youll occasionally see me reblogging posts from there if the source of the linguistic injection cannot be reblogged from for one reason or another. if i reblog from you it's likely that yours was the most recent clean reblog i could find without doing too much scrubbing.

yes i have autism. pronouns are he/they or something

HIT LISTS OF POSTS THAT ARE GOING ON THIS BLOG (as soon as i find them again):

stabby the roomba (long-standing character)

cinnamon roll too good for this world, too pure (biosphere alteration)

the friendful visitor (arguable biosphere alteration)

death is coming. Death is coming. pass me a hot dog (i personally think about it from time to time)

los feratu (funny)

hear it hurgling (funny)

the grink (funny and true)

vanilla extract (arguable biosphere alteration)

eeby deeby (arguable biosphere alteration)

horse plinko (arguable biosphere alteration)

bidoof's law (biosphere alteration)

okay <3 yay <3 (arguable biosphere alteration)

[lagomoz]

List of true Project Sekai facts for non-fans

(technically spoilers but out of context and funny. please add on)

-a character can see ghosts. this is never elaborated on

-all main characters can teleport to a separate dimension based on their psyches and also hatsune miku is in there

-a girl imagines her female friend kissing her and gets so flustered those around her are concerned

-a song very explicitly about having sex with men, originally sung by all women, is covered by all men

-actually correct me if I'm wrong I can't think of a single love song that is covered by an m/f pairing

-a character causes explosions at school near daily

-a character is sad her friends don't go to the same school as her so her solution is to sprint across the entire city and break into their school to hang out. she does this frequently

-a group gets stranded on a deserted island

-hatsune miku stops a suicide attempt

-a highschooler makes a borderline if not outright sapient robotic replica of his childhood friend. nobody considers this a particularly world shattering achievement of ai

-the robot was created to help with social anxiety/stage fright

-the robot has rocket launchers

-the robot has a job as a theme park performer and gets a salary

-a characters family member is dead and it takes her three years to find out

-a character has a body guard dressed in a full mascot costume at all times follow her around

-a character got into fights with professional wrestlers on tv as a middle schooler/high schooler (not sure the exact age)

-there's official sonic collaboration costumes

-fuck is said three times and it's all by members of the theme park troupe that performs for children

-catgirl hatsune miku almost impales a man without realizing it

-sometimes miku is a catgirl

[mikufunfacts]

Miku can you run president so we can lower the prices on leek!

miku fun fact #249

miku is cannot run for president, because she is 16, but rest assured she is taking full advantage of her connections across all the world's governments to keep the price of leek as low as ethically possible.

[ageless-soul-au]

Introducing: Hatsune Miku, ASAU version!!

Odyssey is her biggest fan and he's being so normal talking to her!! Aren't you proud??? He's never been more excited to be the hero, because he gets to show up to a gala and Miku is just THERE. Free concert! (He should probably stop showing off though...)

Characters are from ASAU, please don't tag any other AUs!

Miku has been making music since she was a kid and wants to share it with the world! She's pretty famous, but being asked to play at an official event for another country is still an honor! (Not that she doesn't travel and perform across the continent anyway)

But what is she actually doing here? Well....

She's a sword spirit! She was the one and only replica prototype with a soul. The Sheikah researchers that made her never attempted it again. Did their funding get cut? Did they just call it quits because they realized playing god might not be worth it? Who knows! Regardless, the program ended and Miku escaped with someone's help.

This reference sheet is only current Miku, not how she looked when she was first created. We might draw that eventually, though!

After escaping and hiding her blade inside herself (I wonder where she learned that?), Miku changed her form to a child's to reflect her mentality and wandered into a Sheikah settlement, hoping someone would take her in. It worked! She grew up like a human and blended into society, no one the wiser.

How will the chain meet her and find out her secret? Wait and see!

[mikufigureoftheday]

Hi, Mod!

Just ran across this picture in an eBay listing full of Miku bootlegs- she's a figure I've never seen before, and I'd love to find a real, non-bootleg listing for her! Do you recognize this release?

I tried a reverse image search, but the only result was the same bootleg listing on AliExpress.

Thanks for blessing us with many jpegs of our queen, Miku!

I'm here and always glad to share images of anime girl with the masses :>

This specific Jpeg is of Taitos Latidos 2022 ver

on Ebay she seems to be going for ~$30-40USD atm from more legit looking sellers

[project-sekai-facts]

What do you think the World Link of the Virtual Singers will be like? Will it be like those 2 events, i forgot their name (Cherry blossom Sekai thing and Resonate your song in this Sekai?) or will it be a completely different thing?

something i find interesting is how they've been spoonfeeding us the whole concept of WLEs since 2nd anniversary and it went under all our noses. Like. Sakura Across SEKAI is the virtual singers trying to find a tree that will bloom in the sekais, and eventually they get sent to the tree sekai. Like no shit the anniversary was called Journey to Bloom. And then the new buds growing in the sekai like they were not lying about pre-3rd anniversary being the jorney to bloom.

Resonate Throughout SEKAI introduced the concept of an expansion to the tree sekai, no shit the anniversary was called brand new world and now there's new parts of all the sekai too. Oh and also Resonate introduced some lore concepts that are used in the bloomfes card stories. Right back to journey to bloom. Bloom is a very important arc word don't forget it.

Yeah anyway I think this is gonna be the tree sekai's yearly appearance. Technically it already has its sekai expansion last year but i mean it's kinda left vague as to if it's the same place so there's room to work. and it's still a fragment sekai too, maybe this event it'll become a proper sekai? Oh and yeah the saplings + blocked off areas in each sekai 100% are linked to tree sekai. All the sekai are gonna connect at some point (probably not this event?) but we knew this it was foreshadowed in miku's first fes story (also they're literally called World Link events, or World Bloom if you go by their name in the game data. They're telling it to our faces again)

Idk if it'll be the default vsingers or the starters, but considering the order the event is running in i think it'll be starters. I think at the very least the starters might get to meet properly, since they didn't get to do that in sakura across sekai. The individual chapters I reckon could follow a similar concept to Resonate, with the sekailoids meeting the default cryptonloids, except the interactions will get to be longer and more fleshed out here due to the event pacing.