Wiki Wednesday #133 - 灯音フミ / Fumi Tomoshine

 I hope I can be on a roll and get article after article done right now! I apologize for spamming usa-utau at this moment.

Wiki Wednesday #133 - 灯音フミ / Fumi Tomoshine

I first saw the design and thought, wow! I love her! But then I looked closer and I was so confused.

For those who don't know what Usa-utau is, it's a giant mess. A lot of the UTAUs are meant to be references to vocaloids. One is a copy of KAITO that got attacked by a virus. One is a copy of Rin that was given a book. I believe, for the most part, it is an attempt at a collaborative effort. 

This UTAU seems cohesive enough as it was only worked on by two people if the byline on the piapro page is correct. But then again, I see the pentagram and I'm wondering what's going on here.

Who is Tomoshine Fumi?

Official Art from Bank

Fumi is a chimera virtual body with an UTAU color scheme. She has a pentagram on her arm and her character item is a sickle. 

I think the mental image they intended was a scythe. (The piapro description says it is a scythe.) A sickle is a one handed cutting tool with a shorter blade. The scythe directly evolved from the sickle and simply became larger. The handle and the blade both got longer, and using one requires both hands. The main association people have with scythes is death and the occult. The main association they have with the sickle is the USSR.

I love how her skill is just listed as none. Literally anything could have been put there. But it was none. She likes reading and hot beverages, though!

Before I say anything else, they used an actual clothing brand as the name of one of the characters in this backstory. Stella Lavinia is a real person who founded a real clothing company in Berlin. I… I know that the company was founded long after this UTAU's piapro page was put up, but how did they choose that name?!

I even switched back to the original Japanese to make sure that the translator wasn't messing up. Nope, they wrote out the name in Latin letters.

So, Fumi is not a virtual body. She is a chimera who was created fifty years ago in some laboratory in some dark town in the European Union. That sure narrows it down! I think the story might have scanned better if it was in the USSR. 

If you say "fifty years ago" in 2012, she was created in 1962. Only Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands were members at that point. I… none of those places sound like somewhere that illegal human experiments would happen. Head canon that I'm not budging on: she was created in the USSR.

Various plants and animals were mashed together to make Fumi. She has gills on her neck. They used the katakana エラ, so I had to open up a dictionary to confirm that yep! She breathes water. 

The purpose was to create a human that could live forever. She was modeled after Stella from up there. I mean, okay I guess. 

I have no idea what's going on. Fumi isn't a clone of Stella, because she has gills and antenna sticking out of her head. She has plant DNA in her cells that help her live forever. A clone is an exact genetic match. The technology exists to create human clones as we speak. (It's just illegal to do it. There are probably clones running around in China, though.)

But half of the backstory seems to be about someone mistaking Fumi for Stella and Fumi considering herself a clone of Stella or something??

I think if it was written in novel form, Fumi would be an insanely compelling character. I kind of would really love to read a novel where a science experiment steals the heart of an aristocrat, but it all falls apart I'm the end. But I really have a feeling that the artist and the person who wrote the story freaking hate each other. The tonal shift because lol there's an occult symbol on her arm and the romance element are in stark contrast. Maybe I'm wrong and it was a team effort between friends, adding in jokes. The pentagram isn't actually explained from what I've seen? It's a strange situation.

How are Fumi Tomoshine's banks?

Fumi has two CV banks! She has a regular bank and a whisper bank. I'm tempted to mash them into a two pitch bank, but that would be silly.

Let's start with her regular CV. The OTOs are bad. Her "ji" sample sounds like "gi". I don't know if there was a click, but even if there was a random click... She would have been saying an "h" sound! The tone is really inconsistent. 

She has a really nice voice, but if you care about the consonants being correct, because I swapped "ta" for "da" at one point, and it still sounded like it was "da"... You'll be frustrated using her by a large degree.

Now, on to the whisper CV bank. Same stuff as before. Inconsistent samples, consonants that are the wrong phonemes entirely... All with a scratchy voice kind of whisper. I usually prefer whisper banks, but I don't prefer this one. 

Where can I download Tomoshine Fumi?

You can download her from her distribution page. This UTAU is confusing!