Forgotten Friday #164 - 露草滴 / Tsuyukusa Shizuku

 Bing translate is laughably bad at something basic. Transcribing katakana. Shizuku was rendered as... Sisk. In what world is that right?!

Forgotten Friday #164 - 露草滴 / Tsuyukusa Shizuku

The visual archive kind of lied about this girl. They said she was CV, but she was VCV! They said she basically had no personality, but she does! I have no idea if the personality, as translated by Google Translate, is literal or hyperbole. She dies if she runs for longer than ten seconds. She can't hold anything heavier than a pair of pliers. She's a paranoid teenage female scientist who cannot hold a conversation. She wears a lab coat and has glasses. 

Who is Shizuku Tsuyukusa?

official art packaged with bank

This week, we'll take a break from A Spectrum of Apple Skins to address a topic I think about too much.

(Future Mae here from the past! I thought a lot about it and my head canon for human Twilight Sparkle is that she is mixed, and Shining Armor is her half brother. Her father, Night Light has dark blue fur in canon, even!)

As you may have noticed, Apple Bloom is white in the story. Well, the reason is that it feels problematic to make Yee-haw pony anything other than white without launching into a history lesson. And even with context, all of the work on the farm is hard, manual labor and a lot of well meaning people would point to slavery or migrant workers as a point of contention if Yee-haw pony was any other race. 

(History lesson! After slavery was abolished in America, formerly enslaved peoples went out West and staked their claims. And a good lot of America's farmers were African American! And they were good at it and would have proudly continued to be farmers if it weren't for ya know, unspeakable acts carried out on a systemic level. Applejack's parents in canon were a Romeo and Juliet story, so imagine how sweet it would be if one of her parents was black and one was white! But, that's a lot of context and it's easier to just handwave it all by saying Yee-haw pony is white.)

… it took me twelve hours to realize that the Yee-haw accent might be seen as racist and demeaning when applied to a non-white character by quite a few people. Southern rural people just talk Southern to me, but it's another reason to just say Yee-haw pony is white.

So, the race of the ponies is default. If it's dubbed in Latin American Spanish, the ponies are Latina. If the show is dubbed in Korean, the ponies are Korean. (Though Mistmane complicates that, but more on that later.) But in America, like, you know, there isn't just one default. It's fun to project the fabric of American society onto cartoons, dang it!

So, even if it is completely irrelevant, I like to think about how a live action Equestria Girls would work out.

There are two of the Mane Six that I just want to ignore canon entirely on. Pinkie Pie's family is coded as Amish. So, if she's their biological child, she's white. But! Amish families often adopt children of all races. If she's adopted, then she can be black, just like Shelly from Return to Amish's final season. (Future Mae! There were more seasons!! I love that show.) That's just how I imagine her as a human.

If Hasbro never forced them to add Cadance (and by extension Shining Armor as he debuted in toy form with her), then Twilight would have no in canon reason to not be black. She was a strong student but was struggling to get along with the snooty rich white kids, so Princess Celestia sent her to a place with diversity where snooty butts wouldn't be mean to her for being different. But, Cadance is her babysitter, and she marries her brother. That implies that Twilight is just a few steps removed from royalty. Also, her brother is literally white. Like, his fur is white. As a note, though, Cadance's full name is Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, which is Italian. But I still imagine Twilight Sparkle as black when she's human, even if canon makes that unlikely due to details even less abstract than systemic racism. (Seriously, Shining Armor shattered that head canon with a single hoof.)

Rainbow Dash is Latina in my head. I saw a painting of her in human form and she was Latina in the painting, and that's now how I see her in her human form.

Rarity is obviously an upper-middle-class white woman who does a weird accent to show how fancy pants she is (despite having relatively non-fancy pants compared to what she aspires to be). You know it's weird and not part of her culture, because Sweetie Bell doesn't share it at all. 

Now, what's more problematic than portraying Fluttershy as Native American just because she communes with animals?! Racially coding buffalos as being Native American. But regardless of that, she's a white Pagan in my head canon. Not Wiccan specifically, just the more broad Pagan. She communes with animals and has a deep respect for nature. 

Now, back to the buffalos and Mistmane. There are racially coded creatures in Equestria. None of the Mane Six look like Mistmane or Sable Spirit, so they can't be Asian. None of them are buffalos, so they can't be Native American. Okay, that's all well and good until you realize that Zacora… is a zebra. Using the logic of racial coding, none of them can be black because they aren't zebras. 

That's dumb. I'm keeping my head canons and pretending Shining Armor doesn't exist.

How is Tsuyukusa Shizuku's bank?

As said earlier, I was expecting a CV and got a VCV. I should have noticed something was up when the download was over 70 megabytes. There are 70 megabyte CV banks, but they're not nearly as common.

The bank is one pitch and the average pitch is F#4. Some of the OTO settings were not finished, so you may need to edit the OTO to use her. 

I love her and she is perfect. Her voice is soft and sweet. She does sound a bit younger than her stated age of 16 to 18, but older people are allowed to sound  adorable also!

Where can I download Shizuku Tsuyukusa?

The link to her distribution video is on her UTAU Visual Archive page. She is perfect and I love her.