Forgotten Friday #131 - 禊萩ウラン / Misohagi Uran

 Back when Dubya was president, someone made a parody of "Barbara Ann" that had words I don't think I can say here. But I'm like singing the parody in my head with Iran replaced with Uran. 'Member back then? Before Obama? 2020 lasted a decade, so looking back at before 2008 is like looking at the 70s now. So different. 

Forgotten Friday #131 - 禊萩ウラン / Misohagi Uran

Finally! I believe this is the last Airuga UTAU for a good, long while. I have really good news. I confused the names of this and another UTAU of theirs and I read the story for that one instead if this one. (Uran himself has no stories about him.) Boy howdy, I was just straight up terrified of the guy in that story.

Whoever writes these stories is gifted. Even with Google Translate and no idea what was going on, it was evocative and deep. I could imagine it all in the beginning, then it became so frantic that it would be detrimental to imagine it all, and then I could see the guy staring into the glass of the phone booth. Not the guy in the story, but someone. Someone who would have done that mess.

But that guy was terrifying and did awful stuff. This is an UTAU with no story and no biography. I guess… yay? I have an excuse to not be on topic?

Who is Uran Misohagi?

Official Art from Bank

Okay so, comparative anatomy. I actually googled "what would a human with the legs of a bird look like". Birds are digitigrades. This means that only their digits make contact with the floor. The reason that Uran looks so wrong is because he's meant to be a bird like creature, I think, but the legs are kind of just human legs that painfully bend backwards.

I think it's fair to simplify it as the fact that a bird's knees are hidden inside of their body. Everything above the knee is inside their body. The "knee" that bends backwards is the ankle. Even if I researched the correct terms, it's easier to just say that everything between the fake knee and the fake ankle are just the bones that connect our ankle to our toes. Their feet are just their toes.

I think the thing about Uran's anatomy that bugs me the most is a tie between fat bird legs and the feet being drawn as paws. Mind you, cats are digitigrades also. But like, cat legs don't bend backwards all creepy like that. 

But they just love playing with anatomy and seriously just trying to unsettle people at airuga.

Humans are plantigrades. I just clicked the Wikipedia article and saw that rats are also plantigrades. Taking a hard left turn from educational to entertainment, Joinen on YouTube made a comment on stream that rats would be great pets if they lived longer than two years. I've said it once (many times) and I'll say it again: rats are amazing pets. But they don't live like… even remotely close to long. 

If you have a healthy cat and you treat them like a princess, they can live to twenty years old. Not even kidding. There are quite a few cats out there that are over twenty! Dogs tend to hit a decade and a half, if my recollections are correct. 

But rats. Just one or two healthy years on average. 

Back to the UTAU! 

If you block out the legs, the design looks like some typical demon design. White skin, black nails, and bat wings that are… I don't know if they are decorations clipped to the jacket or if they are disembodied. 

He has elf ears and black horns. One horn has a purple band on it and ooh now I see why the legs bug me so much. Nothing above the waist reads as bird. 

The visual archive says the outfit is gothic which like… I guess? Gothic generally doesn't entail lime green leggings and vibrant primary colors, but okay. 

How is Uran Misohagi's bank?

Uran has a one pitch VCV bank. The OTOs are bad. They're uniform (yay) but the consonants are too long for this pattern in quite a few places. And in one case, the preutterance was ON the consonant! And I don't mean one of those edge cases "the red line was too close to the plosive", I mean it was dead center in an "n"! Even worse, one of the samples, the preutterance was on the vowel. That sounds right? It was on the first vowel. It was touching the first V in VCV. The consonant was 100% after the preutterance. These aren't little Mae nitpicks that everyone rolls their eyes at. It's like, you need to remake the OTO to use this bank. And I think "i て"... is actually "e か"?? When you hear it in context of the sample, it's obviously meant to be "i te" but... it's iffy in isolation.

It's a nice and sweet voice - super soft and cute. But it would be a lot of effort to get it sounding as good as it could.

Where can I download Misohagi Uran?

You can download him from his distribution page. I think if someone put in the work, he could sound amazing! But it would be a lot of work :(