Forgotten Friday #52 - 鳩音キユ / Hatone Kiyu

Is this problematic? Usually, if you have to ask, it is. The name of the bank makes me think this will be an issue, but at the same time, they listed her age as 2010 years old. At release, that would mean she was either two millennia old or two months old. After searching through her bank, yeah, this is problematic. It's not the problematic you expected, but it's still there.

Forgotten Friday #52 - 鳩音キユ / Hatone Kiyu

So, well, this is a joke UTAU. I tried watching the release video to figure out what was going on, but as you may have read in my "hiatus over" post, I kind of lost the ability to can Japanese. What I have found is that the voice provider is someone named Himeno. It's completely impossible to google such a common collection of kana, so I have no idea who that is. She was credited as "姫乃" in the readme, and I went down a rabbit hole. Himeno is also the voice provider for 白滝イト as far as I can tell. Well, Ito was a special UTAU to be used by a small group of producers. I've tweeted about her twice, so we'll see if anyone knows anything.

I wasted a few hours tracking down leads all because of this UTAU, so you know she's getting an article even if she's just a joke. If the leads end up leading to a nice place, you'll be getting an article on a better, not joke version of this UTAU. 

Who is Kiyu Hatone?

Art from release video

So, the artwork was drawn with copic markers! That's really cool. I've always thought that if I had copic markers, I could be a real artist. That literally isn't how art works, but it's fun to imagine. "If I could pay twenty dollars for one marker, I would truly be art." (That exaggerated, of course. They're like five dollars.) 

Anyway, because this character's description lacks kanji in places where it probably should have it, it is either extremely, horribly problematic or silly. I'm leaning towards horrifically problematic. This is bleh if I'm able to get the legit UTAU from Himeno, because she'll be liked to this problematic mess. I doubted if I should even write an article on this UTAU, but too much time has been sunk into this to back out now.

What can you even use Hatone Kiyu for?

Well, uh. Okay so, the whole joke is that she can only say two things. I'm not saying what the two things she says are, because they're problematic. Kind of how the demo for one of the early English VOCALOIDs could only say "I love you baby" in their demo. 

Japanese has five vowels and one nasal-kind-of-vowel thing. You'd think that she'd at least have all five vowels, but nope. She has literally no sample that says "え". So, when you have a bank that only has vowels, you are able to at least make them sound kind of like they're singing the song. But this bank can't even do that.

And it stinks so much! The voice is so cute and adorable!

I mean, I have to pretend you're asking how to get her

This UTAU is basically useless and extremely problematic. If the 2020 fandom is as immature as the 2010 fandom, then someone is going to have a field day with this UTAU. But, if everyone is woke enough to find problematic things problematic, then this UTAU will just be forgotten, and maybe referenced when we're talking about how broke 2010 was. 

Anyway, here's her UTAU Visual Archive page.