Forgotten Friday #206 - 百音★世継 / Yotsugi Hyakune

 The Romanization came from the artwork in the bank... Until I realized that Yotugi wasn't a choice in romanization, but a typo. What I read as Yotugi was Yostugi.

Forgotten Friday #206 - 百音★世継 / Yotsugi Hyakune

I honestly tried to do this article without my keyboard, but the tablet mode keyboard is so bad, it took me far too long to even type what I had typed... I also took to Twitter to say how pretty the art of Yotsugi is. Hyakune Yotsugi is a seventeen-year-old woman who loves strawberries, raspberries, and Japanese sweets. She hates mushrooms, though. This was all taken from the Bing Translate version of the site. (This tablet has like zero space for more than one browser!) It may not be entirely correct, but I have a feeling it's close enough.

The art of this character is so pretty, I made a tweet asking for tutorials on how to do that style.

Who is Hyakune Yotsugi?

official art from bank

Previously on A Spectrum of Apple Skins…

"Hey, Mae."

What?! We're in a nice mansion in what looks like a suburb of New Angels. Everything is nice and a cool toned white with big windows. Oh, those are monitors showing old footage of the Gulf of Mexico.

Franz is just standing around. He's older than the last time we saw him. He's holding his coffee. What are you doing here?! Well I mean, why is the focus suddenly somewhere else?!

"Well, I think we need to talk about this whole idea of yours. An entire year of fan fiction? You don't even know if your readers will like it!"

I mean, I'm on week forty-six! Fifty-two minus forty-six is… let me get the calculator… six!

"Yeah," he laughs. He lowers his chin and asks, "Can you wrap up the story in six installments?"

Well, no…

"Exactly. I know you have really big plans," he gives a shallow nod. He looks over his shoulder before making eye contact with the camera. "But a lot of your plans just aren't suited to this format. Telling everyone about Emily's childhood and why she settled for a desolate wasteland? That's just far too heavy." He shrugged, "Your plans for Freddi were great - but reintroducing Belly would make you blow right past that six more installments idea."

I know! You raised a good kid. I love writing for her!

"And your idea for when Apple Bloom comes back from Florida and demands a fancy dinner and a hot air balloon ride from Edwin?"

I mean, yeah! She doesn't want anything romantic with him, but she wants to experience romantic things! Like, this all ties back to a romance novel! I wouldn't be happy if I was in an adventure story and the most adventurous thing I did was risk food poisoning from uncooked cookie dough.

"I know you really wanted to see this through, Mae."

The concern on Franz's face is genuine.

I really did want to, you know. Like, I had this grand plan. But it's almost May. You know I get anxiety about deadlines. I kept not finishing the fanfiction keep me from processing articles. I really need to just buckle down and start processing banks and stuff, huh?

"Yeah."

Well, thanks Franz!

As he starts to respond, the scene fades to black. 

I'm glad that I've gotten a friend out of this whole ordeal! Right now, it is the 23rd of April, 2021. I'll timestamp when I write this to see how long it takes to get this many banks processed. 

There's no telling how this fanfiction experiment will turn out once all of the parts are published. But, everyone say a thanks to Franz for helping me realize that I was in a place where I just needed to get a move on!

If you want to know what the final six installments were going to be before Franz stopped me… basically, I would have to just randomly cut myself off. Belinda would come back, and she is just so much fun. Her and Emily just talking about life could take up six parts. And then there's just describing the beach. I'd talk about the sand, then the sky, then the water, and then the fish. There would be extremely angsty parts where it's literally just Freddi staring off into the sunset and thinking. No action. Just thinking.

Spoiler alert, but Freddi would definitely stay in Florida with Belinda, even though I would spend an entire part on Freddi being angsty that she is incapable of swimming.

Anyway! Back to our normally scheduled programming!

How are Yotsugi Hyakune's banks?

You know that feel when you see one zip archive and you think "All right! This will be an easy one!" Well, not particularly. She has four banks, but one of them is CV and has the same subtitle as one of the VCV banks. The others are natural, normal, and whisper. For the funzies, I'll look at each of the one pitch VCV banks individually, as that is how her voice provider did the example samples.

The first is Natural. It's fun when things work out - I had no idea what the average pitch was, but I still chose the UST with "f4" in the name! The voice is sweet and clear, but a little forceful. 

Next is Normal. I accidentally opened the main bank instead of Natural last time, but there's no suffixes to use the banks all together - though happily, natural was the first bank alphabetically, so it played when the main bank was opened.

I don't know if it's every 'r' sample, but the 'r' sample I used was an 'l'. This is harder to tell because of the fact that I used flatten and contour. The voice seems brighter, clearer, and more forceful than Natural. It is a very nice voice!

Finally, we have Whisper. Random story - a long time ago, I released a bank called 'whisper'. When I was more stable and did nothing worthy of calling out, people would just pick random things to pick at me. The 'whisper' bank was more of a soft bank, so I got called out for that. Why bring that up? This doesn't even feel like a soft bank! Comparatively, it is very soft and whispery. It is a very nice bank with a calm tone!

Where can I download Hyakune Yotsugi?

You can find Yotsugi on her official site! It would not be difficult at all to add a prefix map to make this a kire bank if you were interested! But even with each bank on its own, this is a very nice UTAU!