Forgotten Friday #143 - v.m.g.のシキアイ / Shikiai

 Okay, this is the last v.m.g. UTAU in a good while!! Hurray! I know I broke one of my most fundamental rules here, but like I said, time crunch. If I don't meet my arbitrary and pointless harsh deadlines, what am I even good for?! But, I believe after this that's just fifteen articles left to process. I can do five articles in a day! Then I need three days, and it is December 24th, and my goal is to get the blog to 2022 before 2021 starts, so mathematically I can do it!

Forgotten Friday #143 - v.m.g.のシキアイ / Shikiai

My mom asked me what I did today. I explained that my brain is broken and I can really only do one thing: work on my blog.

She asked what I do on it, and I gave the slightly snarky “write!” with my arms hung in the air as punctuation to my really dumb joke so that she would know it was a joke. But then I explained that I wrote about the free voice characters, and how every article had a minimum of six-hundred words. That blew her mind! Six hundred sounds like a lot!

Though, I spent more time on the research portion today. The reason that post-2013 UTAUs are easier to write about is because, well, I’m only finding them because someone took the effort to make a Wiki page for them. Some older UTAUs didn’t have that honor. So, I went through the start of my original spreadsheet. I found the best and most complete source of information for each one and verified the download links still worked. I even made four Wiki pages for it!

I’m always worried that my work on the Wiki will get taken down due to fandom politics. I’m just over here trying to make writing articles from bed easier!

So, of course, I’m padding the article so that I have less I have to say about the UTAU themselves. And it’s for a silly reason. I do not like zombies. 

Who is Shikiai?

Official Art from Bank

I try to avoid politics here. But like, not all white people, but some white people just legit have made me despise Halloween and zombies. (Note: I’m allowed to say it because I’m white, and if you’re not white I give you permission to say that white people are weird about Halloween and zombies.)

Shikiai isn’t the typical zombie. He isn’t that gross nonsense that I cannot stand. He doesn’t eat brains, and he wears nice and tidy clothes. He is much closer to a Stephanie Meyer “vampire” than a zombie. And, as a note, Lestat sparkles under fluorescent lights. I think we all like Meyer more than Rice at this point, so saying that Meyer didn’t do it first doesn’t hold much weight. 

Skikiai is stuck at eighteen years old. He’s calm and shy, and loves to learn new things. However, he hates studying. He’s especially good at doing math in his head.

I actually don’t know if he suffered from albinism before he passed. Both Rice and Meyer stated that the appearance at death was what you were stuck with. Vampires who died with beards would have to shave them every morning for the rest of eternity according to one of them. (Yes, I mix up Twilight with Interview with a Vampire sometimes.)

And yeah, he’s not a vampire because he doesn’t drink blood. But he doesn’t eat people, either!

He covers most of his face with his white hair. He wears an UTAU purple shirt, covered by a deep navy coat. He wears a scarf around his neck to hide sutured wounds that refuse to heal. 

Somatosensory is a word that Google Translate threw into his biography. It means anything related to sensations that just happen anywhere in the body. They include things like feeling hot and cold or keeping track of where our limbs are. His sense of that is dull and he can barely feel temperature. 

Because of the wounds on his neck, he no longer speaks. This is not that great, because he is really smart and likely has really nice things to say.

I get so confused when an UTAU has a backstory saying that they don’t like using their voice, though.

How is Shikiai's bank?

Well, I listened to the samples and said these will be bad. They're really laboriously voice acted to sound like someone who cannot speak due to vocal chord injuries. But somehow... It's okay in UTAU. Not great, and some samples will have one of those "whoops all static" attribute, but that's okay.

If you like horror themed UTAUs, then I think the voice and face will make you happy. I just now realized the bank is three pitches. Rendered the sample again shifted up so that all pitches would play. And, well, if you like this kind of voice and can look over glitches, then you'll love this bank.

Where can I download Shikiai?

You can download him from his distribution page. If you like banks that kind of come off as a joke at first glance, then you gotta download this guy.