#not gonna bore you w/ shit abt phonetics and also im technically not studying linguistics so 😭😭

[sundial-girl]

yeah it is a thing too! there also used to be so many jokes about this

mainly because R/L sounds get sorta blended in japanese and thus the jpn voicebanks (these memes were most popular prior to the kagamines getting their eventual english vb release) have trouble differentiating these sounds, and "roadroller" is, thus, a difficult word for them to say. plus the prior association w/ roadrollers, so, meme material

WHATS WITH RIN AND LEN BEING INVOLVED WITH STEAMROLLERS

IS THIS AN INSIDE JOKE IN THE COMMUNITY THAT I DONT KNOW ABOUT

ITS A REALLY OLD THING THAT GOES W/ THEM, FROM YEARS BACK LMAO. dont quote me on all of this cause i dont remember exactly its been a while but iirc:

so early vocaloid fandom internet memes led to most of the popular character + item associations that we see today (miku and spring onions/leeks, kaito and ice cream, etc), basically trying to assign some sort of 'signature item' to every new vocaloid release (this was like 2007-2011 for timeframe reference). these sorta became 'item wars' b/c there was the push to get some of these fandom-assigned to be officially recognized (and some of them were, as you can see merch now for example featuring kaito & his ice cream item)

i don't remember why a road roller was specifically tied to rin & len? i think it had to do w/ videos featuring them and. road rollers (possibly on niconicodouga) that went viral around their original release. this was before the orange & banana association both of them have more commonly now i think (that which i do know the reason for: rin's is orange b/c her bow looks like orange leaves and len's banana b/c his hair kinda[?] looks like a bunch of bananas), and there were these lil figures released for them:

however though i'm p sure the road roller as their item became replaced w/ the orange & banana that were more favored (easier to draw lmao?? and fit more w/ the food theme that a lot of the other items had).

anyways the item war trend/meme kinda died out around 2018 and nowadays you don't really see people talking abt it. but yeah tldr; roadrollers & these two used to be a big meme thing but not anymore