Wiki Wednesday #85 - 吸血霊 / Kyuuketsu Rei
I have no idea why, but today the headers are wonky. I'll set something to be a header, and then when I set the next paragraph to be normal, the words are large as if they were part of the header. But... They aren't. It's strange.
For the first time in a bit, I'm actually covering an overseas UTAU! The whole home page situation was strange, so I actually wasn't fully sure of what was what until I found the contact page, which led to the voice provider's Twitter. They're not American, I don't think. But, it's not a Japanese UTAU made by someone who will never, ever see this. If you just tuned in, get ready for tonal whip lash. If you've ignored the last few articles where I'm focusing on Japanese UTAUs, then you'll never notice any difference.
Who is Rei Kyuuketsu?
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| Official Art Packaged with Bank |
TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS
yay.
So, the first notion I had that this bank is linked with trans issues was the symbol used when it stated that Rei was female. It was ⚧, which means gender blind. It is often used as simply a way to say trans, so there's two possibilities. The first is that Rei isn't trans, but gender means nothing to her, as she is gender blind. The other option is that she is MTF, meaning she was always a woman on the inside, but people couldn't see it because of what was on the outside.
If you really asked me to choose, I'd say she's a woman who ignores gender and takes part in male gender roles when she wants to. However, logically knowing that the emoji assigned to that unicode is called the transgender emoji, she's probably trans. It's never clearly stated, which I think would be a way to stave off the transphobes who would be too lazy to google the symbol. (She's 6'2'', which could be a sign she is MTF, and her chest is drawn as flat in the official art, but cis women can be super tall and flat chested also.)
Her being a vampire is a wonderful way to allude to the issues as, you know, transitioning from human to vampire. Am I reading too far into this? When have I not read too far into an UTAU's biography?
Her physical age is 21, but she was turned in the late 1800s. She's lazy and apathetic until she needs to feed. Then she's a whole different person. She goes a complete 180 from sleeping all day to being extremely hyperactive. Her voice provider never gives permission to use her for roleplays, but she would be a fun character to write for!
post script: all of this discussion on her gender identity is invalidated by the fact that her readme lists her gender with the Venus, or female, sign. So, I think she's cis?
How is Kyuuketsu Rei's voice bank?
I'm really, really happy with how her voice provider handled her voicebank. As opposed to having ten different banks that start to blend together, she only has one. It is a four pitch bank with pitches spanning from A2 to C4. So, you know this girl has a deep voice.
So, first things first, I did have to edit the prefix map to get all of the samples in the same tester UST without doing that thing I used to do where I'd just randomly completely botch the melody by raising parts by an octave. The voice provider was not kidding when they said that the transitions were smooth as heck. Even with the edits, the pitches were perfectly picked and they were recorded flawlessly to give us a product that doesn't sound jarring at any point.
Where can I download Rei Kyuuketsu?
You can download Rei from her download page. My biggest complaint about this bank is just that it uses a UAR to distribute it as opposed to a RAR, but really, that's just me really liking WinRAR. (There was an update that was forced on WinRAR because of really awful vulnerabilities. I was upset that the icons looked really different and ugly. I actually just downloaded a skin for it, and the icons went almost back to normal! Not exactly, but close enough.)
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