Forgotten Friday #155 - 久度ヤフカ / Kudo Yafuka

 It is so frustrating that while she has a VCV bank, I can't get it to work. It was hosted on Microsoft Drive, and now it doesn't work at all. There's a chance that it's an issue with the link shortener, and the bank is still just hanging out in the Microsoft Drive account. That would be so frustrating!!

Forgotten Friday #155 - 久度ヤフカ / Kudo Yafuka

I swear I interacted with this voice provider in 2013. I probably did, but maybe I probably didn't. I don't even know!

Who is Yafuka Kudo?

Official art from site

Yafuka is adorable. She's a teenager based off of bicycling. Her dress is a pretty pale yellow with a light green and white petticoat. Her helmet is yellow with a green accent and has the antenna on it. I believe that the helmet is actually meant to be a monster?

She wears biker shorts under her skirt and has brown knee high boots that match her curly pigtails.

She loves meat and dogs, but she hates alcohol and perfumes. 

Her character item is manga meat. I had to switch the page back to Japanese to try and figure out what the heck that was, because it had to be a wrong translation… right?!

Nope! Manga meat is the meat in manga, specifically a cylinder of cooked meat on a bone. It's a Japanese shorthand for meat. It is a popular depiction of meat in Japanese media, to the point that there's an emoji for it 🍖 !

It is literally impossible to get that from an actual living animal, because that's not how meat works. However, people really wanted to eat manga meat the way that I want to eat a Krabby Patty or Homer's pink frosted doughnuts. (Editor's note: my grandma would make salmon patties and call them Krabby Patties. Once I was hanging out with my ex and his mom brought home 'salmon burgers'. Imagine my disappointment when it was a grilled fillet and not canned salmon mashed with bread crumbs and fried!)

It took some clicking, but I did find real life attempts at manga meat and it looked really, really gross. Like, made me nearly gag gross. But that literally is unfair to the dishes because I am vegan and meat just looks gross.

The easiest way to make manga meat looks to be to put a bunch of hamburger meat on a fake bone. You can even use burdock! Looks just like the real thing! But hamburger meat is really gross. The most difficult way is to wrap a roast around a real bone. No real bone looks like the bone in manga meat. The one that grossed me out the most looked like it used rib bones. Not cute, because they curved. 

Neither of those will give you the experience of eating manga meat, though. I swear, eating in anime and manga is weird. When a character eats manga meat, they bite it and pull away. The meat stretches before snapping like melted cheese. Meat doesn't work that way! I mean, I wish it worked that way. That looks really tasty… oh boy, until you think about how it would work. Like, what could make meat so stretchy? Collagen??

Yafuka loves running and exploring her neighborhood. She is very active and she seems to act younger than her age.

Seriously, though, I literally don't understand how meat went from being one of my favorite things to something I can barely look at so quickly. I remember liking it and it tasting good. I remember loving cheese and thinking it was the best thing ever. Now the smell of cheese makes me gag.

But I do get the fact that eating meat literally hurts my body, and it will tell me as such. But other foods hurt me a lot also, but I hadn't turned on them so quickly.

I think there's a chance that I ruined my gut Flora with Soylent. It would take a lot of effort to get the little bugs to work correctly again… until I remember that I've had this problem with meat since high school. I wouldn't eat meat for a week, then I'd eat something with meat and my body revolted.

How is Kudo Yafuka's bank?

As said earlier, she just has one remaining bank, and it is a CV bank. Now, here's the thing from a historical perspective: old CV banks are much better to have. There are so many people in the fandom, plenty could be bribed into making a VCV bank for you with any voice type you want. Even if you need the UTAU to be Japanese in nationality, Twitter makes it so that it's easy to track down people and try to bribe them. (Send me a DM if you want me to compose a letter to a Japanese user asking for them to record VCV @annamaeblythe.)

But, old CV banks better exemplify the quirks of "old" UTAUs. They're older, and besides lite being a thing, there's not really much difference between a 2011 VCV and a 2018 VCV beyond maybe microphone quality. So, I'm grateful that I got my hands on the CV. 

Her voice is absolutely adorable and matches her design. It is young and just spunky! It is a little grating, but it is made up for things like the consonants sometimes being timid. That probably makes no sense, but I didn't get much sleep last night because it was freezing. For all you non-Americans, it was negative ten point 5 repeating degrees. Or... -10 C, which is 13 F. Which to many people isn't bone chilling or anything, but dang it. I have Raynaud's disease. My feet were blocks of ice! The only reason I'm working on this now is because this is literally the only spot in my house that is warm and cozy. Oh wait, I forgot what I was supposed to be doing.

Where can I download Yafuka Kudo?

You can download her from her distribution page. A monument to the sadness wrought upon us by file sharing services, as Yafuka isn't the only one with broken links.