Forgotten Friday #97 - 菊龍 / Kiku Ryu
Kiku's voice provider is still active outside of the vocal synth scene! Her art is really nice!
Who is Kiku Ryu?
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| Official Art from Bank |
First, what you can't see is her lower body. You're not missing much, as she is either shown wearing black pants with black boots with soles that are colored the same as the accents on her shirt. In other instances, she is wearing a skirt. Either way, that doesn't take away from the color scheme, which I love. It's not fine art and I can criticize it from an artistic standpoint, but shut up scholars. It reminds me of happy times before I cared about art being art and art was just fun. As with her pants, her hair style is drawn differently at different times. To begin, her color palette is shifted around many times to be more harmonious. The next point is that it's difficult what exactly the hair style is meant to be due to the style it is drawn in. In some appearances, her bangs specifically are segregated and colored differently than the rest of her hair. In some appearances, the teal covers her entire head and begins to create a gradient with the pink around her ears, ending in pink tips. In some appearances, the pink is just gone.
I actually have no idea what "Devil's Pink" means, and that is the color assigned to her eyes. I believe it was a weird translation in regards to Teto's eye color.
Her race is listed as Osakan, but has the parenthetical of "Made in America". Which I don't fully understand the phrasing of. I believe it's from a weird divide of seeing UTAUs as humans or seeing UTAUs as robots. For example, the entire biography implies that Kiku is a human, but then there's just a random "Made in America" to denote that she is a robot.
Her character item is a blueberry with a tattoo. She hates Miku and the word "desu". So let's unpack that desu thing. So, in Japanese, "desu" is best translated as "is". So, if I want to say "Kiku-chan is cute" I would say 「キクちゃんはかわいいです」. However, in constructs like that, it is fully acceptable to shorten it by removing both the verb and the subject marker, leaving us with 「キクちゃんかわいい」. That's totally fine! So I can see how you can avoid "desu", and there are other forms of "desu" such as "da" or "deshou". (Though, something like deshou changes the exact meaning, but you're allowed cute quirks in Japanese.) It's entirely possible for a Japanese person to just... avoid desu, but it's a really strange thing to even think of.
But, this is just another double-think on the part of the voice provider. Kiku is simultaneously an average American kid in America (what I assume Lynny was at the time) and a robot living in Osaka. So, why would an American kid dislike the word desu? Well, weeaboos. Of course the weeaboos. In Japanese, "desu" is generally spoken as "dess", with the final mora of "su" being devoiced. In 2010 America, weeaboos said "day-su" after everything, even if it made no sense. "I ate cake desu". In Japanese, that would be 「ケーキを食べた」, no desu. It literally made no semantic sense.
Anyway, yeah, Kiku hates weeaboos.
How is Kiku Ryu's voice bank?
I found a download for one Kiku Ryu bank, which was called "upgraded." It is a one pitch CV bank with romaji filenames. There are strange extra samples, like "kawaii". The OTOs aren't very good, of course, so I pulled open the Hakobako tester.
The biggest problem that I've found so far is just a fundamental misunderstanding of what ん does. It was recorded as if it were "na" as opposed to ん. ん is a syllable on its own. Some of the samples clip, and some are extra long, but introduce issues with being held for a bit too long. One is unfixable, and the other just takes cutting out the bad parts in the OTO.
I do enjoy her voice! It sounds very 2010, and everyone knows I miss that era.
Where can I download Kiku Ryu?
You can download her from her Wikia page. I like her. She's nice.
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