Wiki Wednesday #71 - 来唄ホタル / Koiuta Hotaru

I love when things are games or contests, even if I never win. I thought about a way to make the blog into a bit of a game. Alright, so, for one month I am competing against dice. Every day, I roll a d6. That is the score of my "opponent". I gain points by finishing an article. So, if I roll a three, and I write three articles, we are tied. If I roll a six and can only do three articles, then they win for the day. However, I can cram as many into a day as I want, whereas my opponent can only roll once a day. I'm getting really excited about the idea to compete, even if it's just with an imaginary dice I rolled online. I may start this mess tomorrow, on Sunday. I'll just try it for a week and see if it's fun or... unbearable. If I did it for a full month and had horrific rolls, I'd have around 180 articles written. Which is over a year of content!

Wiki Wednesday #71 - 来唄ホタル / Koiuta Hotaru

Hello Project UTAO! It has been so long, I have completely forgotten what their entire thing is. I think it's just a loose collection of cool designs and voicebanks, whereas last week's episode covered an entire expanded universe.

But I may be wrong! 

With as many UTAUs that have been straight up abandoned, it's strange to see someone state that a bank isn't updated anymore. People usually just kind of slowly walk away and never definitively state that it won't happen. However, UTAO's manager isn't Hotaru's voice provider and the manager still manages the website. They stated that Hotaru's voice provider can't be contacted and the UTAU will not get an update. So, it's cool to know that it will never happen as opposed to having any hope it would happen.

As another note, when I saw her official art, I assumed that she would be some kind of ghost or magical being due to it being so blurry. Nope! That's just how the artist draws.

Who is Hotaru Koiuta?

Official Art Packaged with Bank

I believe from reading Google Translate that Hotaru that she is a sheltered girl who has never left her little place beside the water. I don't know if she literally believes she is a princess or if she figuratively believes she is a princess. However, due to her being so sheltered, she speaks in archaic Japanese. Her first person pronoun is "Warawa". Have you ever heard of "Warawa"? Its kanji is the kanji for concubine. 

She looks as if she is thirteen or fourteen, I believe. One of the strangest parts of her design to me is just the extremely prominent bloomers. Each artist draws them differently. Some artists treat them as underwear and hide them using skirts. Some draw them as petticoats. And then some draw them as a stand in for pants. When they're drawn as a stand in for pants, they look really weird and out of place.

As a note, she speaks as if she is from the Heian era. This means literally nothing to someone like me, so I Googled it. The Heian era spanned from 794-1185. English may have evolved more rapidly than Japanese since then, but Beowulf was written in the same era. This is an example of what Old English sounded like, though we can't even be fully sure about the accuracy. That's five hundred years before Shakespeare, man. 

Anyway, I can see a lot of awesome potential for this character. Imagine if a totalitarian regime took over, and her family's money was able to secure them a spot in a Western nation. Even the Westerners who studied and were fluent in Japanese would just stare at her like she had two heads. But, she'd refuse to even learn modern Japanese and hide in her room, crying for the old waterfront. 

How is Koiuta Hotaru's bank?

It's a one pitch CV bank, and the OTOs are those kinds where they figure out how fricatives work and apply it to plosives. So, you can't even be mad because if you follow their logic, they did really well. 

No matter how great the voice is, it has literally nothing to do with the character. That voice and that character don't mesh at all. I know that technically, any human can have any voice, even if it doesn't match what they look like. A big, burly man could just exclusively talk like Mickey Mouse. A little kid could just randomly have a James Earl Jones voice. But, you know, when things don't match up with a made up character without signs of subversion, it's like... huh?

Where can I download Hotaru Koiuta?

You can download her from her download page. She has a really nice voice, and she has a really nice design. But, they don't really go together as well as one would hope.