Christmas yuri vocaloid
Look, I'm not big on Christmas. It's evidence of a wide Christian cultural hegemony, it's become extremely consumerist in modern times, and it's often heavily tied with spending time with your birth family and some uncomfortable social pressure aroud gifts.
But consider: christmas yuri vocaloid1.
I've been having this on loop for the past few days, along with the other christmas yuri vocaloid song from the same artist from last year, on which I stumbled like a week ago2. There's something to the animation3 and sappy romantic yearning here that just puts a big smile on my face.
So here you go.
I hope your end of year gets to have sweet moments with loved ones if you celebrate anything. On my end, if everything goes well I'll be finishing belatedly my Februaryuri challenge, and then I'll try to rest and focus on other non-blog stuff in January, in order to hopefully come back next February with a bit more stamina. We'll see how this pans out.
Take care!
Teto is not technically speaking a Vocaloid but her status is quite special: she was originally an April Fools' parody of Vocaloid characters, then was turned into an UTAUloid (with UTAU being the main shareware competitor of Vocaloid); then recognized as a derivative by Crypton, the company behind Vocaloid, and integrated to a significant amount of official Vocaloid stuff; and she's often affectionately considered a honorary Vocaloid when you're not splitting hairs. Also the post just sounded better that way.↩
I feel the need to mention that softwares like Synthesizer V or Vocaloid 6 technically use the exact same machine learning technologies as what we commonly call "generative AI" - but without the atrocious practices usually implied by that term - in the process of creating the virtual singers' precise pronunciation and intonation/delivery details based on user tuning commands. This makes the singing feel smoother than the sole concatenation of sung notes, as used by previous softwares; but of course the whole lyric writing, melody and composition remain purposefully human-made throughout. I'm still tying myself into knots over this a little bit - and I'm not the only one - considering my general deep anti-AI stance, as it's a term more and more associated with such a horrifying techno-capitalist marketing bubble that is wildly unethical and damaging on all accounts. Yet the Vocaloid/vocal synth scene genuinely feels like the most interesting case on the use of such deep learning technologies and what should actually matter in discussions around this moral quandary, when you consider its negligible ecological impact and its ethical framework: the whole pronunciation smoothing happens locally (no remote data center to power and cool down), and every singer providing their voice is consenting and paid. It's also tied to a 20-year-old community whose art philosophy has always been "making art around making programs sing with consent from the voice providers". I have a lot to say on that topic, notably pitted with my recent disappointment on Touhou 20 using AI-generated pictures, but this is a footnote already dangerously nearing the status of post. Maybe this'll be a post in 2026.↩
The fact that the music video's animation is explicitly influenced by the Adventure Time animation style and notably Rebecca Sugar's storyboarding style is like a sapphic cherry on top of this.↩