Forgotten Friday #91 - 病音ゼン / Zen Yamaine

I had been going on with Wiki Wednesday so far out, that I had not realized I skipped a week. To skip a week would throw off the alignment with Forgotten Friday articles. So, I said, "oh no." I then fixed the dates. Unfortunately, articles that say things like "First issue of 2021!" will be incorrect. I could fix that, but I must put ducks in a line before I criticize the line. And yes, I am so deeply tired at this moment. 

Forgotten Friday #91 - 病音ゼン / Zen Yamaine

Good news! This UTAU has several banks! (yay!) Bad news. Only one can be found. (no...) As opposed to linking to the banks in the videos, the creator of the banks, JoouChiyanmon, explicitly only posted links to the UTAU Fandom page. And the UTAU Fandom page only has the Act 1. This is sad, as I can tell the Act 2 was very loved, with updates to it as in 2+. I wish I could find it, but that's life I guess. There are many UTAU fish in the UTAU lake.

It's unwise to look everywhere for things that were not meant to be shared... Though I did.

Who is Yamaine Zen?

official icon from bank

Zen is related to Jen Genne. I've written about Jen already!

I get extremely lazy when I'm collecting UTAUs to write about, so I didn't realized that Zen was a guy until I scrolled down to the character information where it is asked we take care to make Zen sound like a sixteen year old, fully mature male demon. I mean, okay. No flags, but I'll try to make the voice less high.

He likes thermometers and band-aids. He likes some things that I assume are Malaysian things I do not know of. He is very gentle and does not have feathers that become ruffled easily.

And... Okay so like, the backstory is a ride, and just the thing to wake me up. This was five-ever ago, and it's not nice to make fun of the fantastical ideas of youth. But the one thing that made me emit joyous noises was the information that Zen started his life as a ball of sickness in Hell, left to become a normal human who always keeps a mercury thermometer in his mouth, to being forced into indentured servitude because he lost at a basketball game in an arcade. JoouChiyanmon is a character in the universe Zen inhabits, and she forced him to become an UTAU. What does that even mean? I'm completely fine with the rest of the bio. I think it's creative. But I still don't understand how you can turn a human (or a demon pretending to be a human) into an UTAU. People like Reni would write that UTAUs were robots or cyborgs (but really androids because there's a lack of human parts), but Zen was never given any kind of robotic parts. He was just... Hiding from the sun and now he's an UTAU.

But yeah. Zen is always sick, and he will never stop being sick.

How is Zen Yamaine's bank?

As stated earlier, there is only one. It is a one pitch, hiragana encoded CV bank. OTOs aren't horrible at all, but I still touched them up to give him the best chance. "ro" sadly says "ra" instead of "ro". Thankfully, there is a ruo sample to use! "yo" was recorded correctly, but sadly there was a click that makes it sound more like "do". I fixed that by aliasing "gyo" as "yo" and cutting out the "g". This was only possible because the palatalized consonants were not recorded correctly. (yay for it in this case!)

Those fixes aside, I really like this bank and wish the second act had been released. Maybe even VCV! But nope - no more Zen for us. I do think the voice provider succeeded in making Zen sound male, but likely younger than they intended.

Where can I download Yamaine Zen?

You can download him from his UTAU Fandom page. I'm sad the other banks were never uploaded and shared, but that's just utalife for ya.