Forgotten Friday #149 - 八重華＆辰巳 / Yaeka and Tatsumi

 I did end up taking Christmas off. I watched some TV and was in general very cold. I miss having central heat and air.

Forgotten Friday #149 - 八重華＆辰巳 / Yaeka and Tatsumi

This is the second time in this Google Docs word document that people completely missed the point of Yokune Ruko. 

Ruko has male and female banks. Both are still fundamentally Ruko. But Tatsumi and Yaeka share the same bank, only Tatsumi is g+20. Ruko is one character who can be drawn differently depending on which bank is used. This UTAU and Shallwill (I stan Will) miss the point and just make entire characters for the genderbend. Genderbends are supposed to be like, bends of the original character, not someone else entirely!

You can pull this and get it right, though. It’s harder for bodies that have been feminized with estrogen, but anyone can attempt to mimic the voice of the opposite gender. If you do poorly, there are formant filters in ReaPitch that will make it sound more like the gender you want it to be. Make two banks - they can still be packaged together as a unit! Heck, you can just run a formant shifter on the original samples band save it as a new bank. Twice the storage space, but it’s still a different library! (It’s as simple as setting the track default in reaper to that formant shifter, dragging in all the samples, and then exporting as stems.)

But two entirely separate characters for a flag setting? Naw, man. I do my best to be really positive and to say “you do you!” but like, please don’t make a virtually unrelated character the result of adding flags. (Traditional genderbends like Kasane Ted and Hatsune Mikuo are totally fine being nothing more than a flag. I have no issue with that at all!)

Who are Yaeka and Tatsumi?

Official Art from Bank

Okay so here’s my understanding. Yaeka’s age is unknown, but she looks younger than Tatsumi. However, I know that this website is bad at getting ages right. So, I believe that Yaeka is significantly older than the twenty-eight year old Tatsumi, and she teaches him magical ninja stuff.

They are both heavy drinkers and can summon and transform a large snake? No, they can make a large snake appear, and they themselves can shapeshift. That does make more sense.

Tatsumi’s design is really simple. He’s a guy with black hair in a grey suit with a blue tie holding a sword of some sorts. Okay.

Yaeka, though. Her brown hair has pink sparkly ends. She wears an undone pink tie with sakura designs. I have no idea what’s up with the sweater she’s wearing. Is it a dress? A sweater-dress? Is it a jumper and if she stood up straight it would look like shorts? I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense. 

One of the possible definitions of 召喚, which is in their biography on their site, is subpoena. So like, imagine a giant snake that serves subpoenas. That’s all he does. And like, he has fake arms, but he still holds the subpoenas in his mouth. The arms would be caused to move by similar mechanisms as the wacky waving arm inflatable things in front of a car dealership.

He’d just be snaking through the New York subway with his nylon pseudo-arms flailing, holding onto the envelope like he was an anime girl taking her toast on the road.

He’d always come back to the office, upset that he had a harder time serving people than his fellow workers. Because, you see, to be absurd to the point of humor, he must be the only sapient animal that he knows of. So it’s just a bunch of humans hanging out with this giant snake. And what makes it even funnier?! The snake has no speech impediment. He doesn’t go “hiss” or draw out his “s” sounds. He just talks like a normal person who is really sad all of the time. 

He should have realized that New York was too cold for him, but that ship passed. Could have gotten a nice little house in the desert if he hadn’t wasted all those thousands of dollars in rent. 

Sally Snake was a sweet girl he knew in high school. Ironically, she was a bird. The only sapient animal he ever met besides himself. He had been gifted to the family that raised him. They had no idea what he’d become. Sally was just dropped off as an egg the way that parents explain storks bring babies. Somehow, he envied that. Her family was grateful for a mysterious gift. His family just was annoyed they had another kid to feed and take care of.

She moved out to the midwest and survived off of remote tech work. Her passion was always art, and she was following it. He never had passions. He just wanted to amount to something. 

How is Yaeka's bank?

Note I said Yaeka only. I don't do flags, because I believe in putting UTAUs on a level playing field as opposed to using specific resamplers and flags and people being like, wait?! Why doesn't it sound the way it sounds there?! (I only suspend that courtesy for CVVC banks when I switch to a different wavtool because I love CVVC and want the best outcomes possible.)

There is just a one pitch VCV bank. The OTOs aren't uniform, but that's not as big of a problem as the recordings just being way too smol. They're really short, which isn't the best for VCV. 

The voice type is just strange. It's like they got a forty year old woman and told her to pretend to be a six year old. It does sound a bit better with the g flag, but dang. It's just strange and I can't put my finger on how to describe it other than as a sixty year old with pigtails. Like, it's unsettling in most cases. I'm pretty sure that the voice provider is nowhere near forty, but that's the only thing I could think of. It's very overacted, but doing that with short samples just gets you a mess.

Where can I download Yaeka and Tatsumi?

You can download them from their distribution page. This is an acquired taste kind of UTAU. (also YAY! Finished on Christmas day!)