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#kagepro: timelines
kattitude130 · 1 year
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kagepro is good because the main event that has to happen for most of the timelines including the good end to take place is the main character touching grass
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yuukei-yikes · 1 year
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just rewatched ep 12 of mekakucity actors to feel something and got pissed off all over again
#mary activating combining but no one dies when she takes the snakes?? GIRL THOSE WORK AS SURROGATE LIVES THEYD DIE IF SHE TOOK THEM FOR EVEN#A SECOND.#mary just stopping the loop bc ayano and shintaro use their powers. girl why dont they do that IN OTHER TIMELINES THEN#like the one big difference is saeru immobilizing them instead of killing them#the lack of haruka. its summertime record. BITCH#the way they dont explain how or why he is back but he is#even saeru asks WHY HAVENT U FUCKING DISAPPEAREDDDDDDDDD#like why didnt he lol. the power of friendship ig#LIKE IM GLAD ITS A GOOD END BUT ITS SO STUPID FR#ive always interpreted it as#now that saeru is in harukas body it has to grant the new host's wishes#and this time its 2 people bc awakening became its own person as well#so it has to give hiyori back (konohas wish) and just grant harukas wish in the first place since his was never granted lol#which is to have a strong body. while. yknow. BEING INSIDE HIS BODY#thats what i like to think anyway and i think it makes sense#and also how tf do shintaro and ayano even get out of the daze. girlllllllll#wait its cuz mary probably opened it ok nvm#mary opening the daze and shintaro ayano and haruka sneaking out of there like the rats in ratatouille#hiyori take ur chance come out now too#like haruka is so funny his whole existence proves that souls are real in the kagepro universe#bc the daze swallows u with body and all. hiyori shintaro and ayano could just walk outta there like nothing#while harukas like. a ghost or something#cuz his body is out and about#when the snake rejects u for being too niceys but u also dont die bc ur too niceys#the daze: but i like him. lets keep him pleaaaaaase#are u reading these tags#if so#hey#kagevinnie#kagenalysis
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straybaddog06 · 1 month
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Izuleo is shinaya coded to me, anyways isn’t it ironic to make the character who has the worlds worst memory be the snake that remembers all the timelines
I keep kageproifying my interests
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fuckyeahkagepro · 2 years
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mE: Everyone shut up "My Funny Weekend" is playing
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every-shintaro · 2 years
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Shintaro 446 from volume 4 chapter 18, Heat Haze Days I
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kyaruun · 10 months
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playing imagination forest on repeat like i'm back at my vocaloid phase again ueeeee
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dittydipity · 10 months
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what is kagepro? - a quick guide
you may be seeing the word "kagepro" around a whole bunch, especially during august, but what the hell is it?
you may have heard or seen something from kagepro without realizing it! you know that vocaloid song, kagerou daze, about the kids who get hit by a truck and are stuck in a timeloop of saving each other? that's actually one of the songs from kagepro.
kagepro, short for the kagerou project, is a series created by vocaloid composer jin (also known as shizen no teki-p). it's a mixed media series that has music, manga, an anime, movie, a radio talk show, books, etc but i’ll try to keep it simple!
basic premise: people who die on 8/15 are taken to another world called the kagerou daze and if they return to the real world, they will have gained a “snake ability” that will turn their eyes red when used. a group of teens that have these abilities form a little gang but are thrown into an endless timeloop.
THE MEDIA
if you want to get into it, there’s a bunch of different ways you can do it, but do keep in mind: each form of media is NOT just a different adaptation of the story.
kagepro is a timeloop story, and each form of media is actually a different timeline (or “route”). the music videos, the anime, the manga, the books - each one is only a piece of the whole story. that’s why many people may have seen the anime, mekakucity actors, and gotten super confused because the anime is actually one of the last routes haha.
but the order of media that has been generally agreed upon to be the most coherent is music videos -> manga -> light novels -> anime
a lot of kagepro media, esp the light novels and manga, are hard to find since they’re almost entirely out of print, but there’s translations or e-book versions of them available, or if you skip them there’s summaries that people have made. you can also ask me if you want :]
music videos
i’ve actually made a couple playlists for the songs! one is in release order and the other is in story chronological order (mostly).
release order: - i tried to get all the original ia/miku versions of the songs with the original pv if there was one - a couple might be a little out of order since some songs came out together in the same album
this is the order that fans got the music, so if you want to try to figure things out and put things together the way we did you can go with this order!
chronological order: - tried to grab some english covers where i could, but if you don’t like eng covers there are plenty of noneng covers or you can use the videos from the other playlist. there's plenty of really great covers out there! - exceptions to the “chronological”: children record acts as the cover/opening song for the series and summertime record is the ending song for the series - some songs aren’t in here bc they’re not part of the music route (they’re mostly from the newer albums and are kinda like ‘epilogue’ songs after the ending of the anime/good ending or are songs made for the anime)
THE STORY
if you don't want to go through all the media yourself, here’s a video explaining the whole story by breadbox/david toth! he also has other really great kagepro videos
youtube
[a bit of an extra] a very common misconception about the story/mechanics: people do not have to die in pairs or with somebody else on 8/15 to enter the daze. i didn’t realize this myself until super recently
all in all, the kagerou project is a story about finding strength and support from the people around you, moving on to look towards the future, and overcoming trauma.
there’s definitely other people who have also made guides or summaries or videos that are much better and cover much more than i did, but i hope this was a decent introduction!
feel free to reach out and/or ask me anything! i'm sure there are also plenty of people who would be willing to help newcomers understand kagepro as well :]
happy kagerou day!
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nanjokei · 9 months
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same anon here, incredibly interested in the history from someone who lived through it
ok!
here's my own rundown on why the vocaloid bubble burst in the mid 2010s!
almost irreversibly! (don't worry— this story has a happy ending)
if anyone is wondering, yes, you can reblog this! i only say this because this took a lot of work to write so if anyone feels compelled, yes, stroke my ego a bit, i allow such a thing. now, i might get snippy here and there, but i'm not serious at all. my sense of humor is pretty tsukkomi-ish and it shows up in how i describe things. <-disclaimer for if this post breaks containment because i know fandom types don't like my sense of humor if they're not given the context that i LOVE what i'm talking about and rib on it out of utmost adoration
as a disclaimer, i do lightly look things up to check on stuff timeline wise and its validity, but this is from my own point of view and memory and a personal retelling, so if you have a different take on it then i'm sure our viewpoints can co-exist. also, i speak about utaite from the point of view of someone who respects their existence but does not participate. so if a few facts are off... i am speaking only from the aspect of what relates to what i'm talking about. also if there are any typos i stopped being thorough with my checking and editing like 4k words in since i am not being paid to write this, it is just for fun. anyways~
so where we wanna start here is before the big bubble era. i think most people would agree that it was in full swing around mid 2012, but i'll set the date at september 23, 2011. the posting of the song kagerou daze (by the way, as a testament to how much of a boomer i am, despite being an kagepro fan from the start i find myself still using the "kagerou days" romanization by accident every time). by the way, senbonzakura, one of the biggest vocaloid songs ever for the longest time, was posted only a few days earlier. just to paint a picture. but that's not the only thing... i think what we want to look at especially is the end of the vocaloid2 era and what was going on during and before. the final vocaloid2 product, vy2, was released on april 25th, 2011. in this timeline, there are a few angles i wanna focus on. the state of the culture, its spread, utaite and producers. by the way, if i had to date when i met vocaloid, it was around 2008. right before gakupo came out, maybe.
around this time, the culture of vocaloid-ke (vocaloid family) type secondary works were falling out of fashion. 2010 and before, i feel that vocaloid had a strong image of nico nico douga especially— not that it didn't during the bubble era. but i mean the people participating. when miku came out, people viewed her as a novelty while still thinking to themselves they had stumbled across something special. there was no subculture like that before, and the closest counterpart to this was idolmaster. now, many know this is the origin of the -P suffix came from. it's a tossed around factoid now but people should know that it was certainly a phenomena back then. and a LOT of early miku adopters (like 80% were either already in the doujin music scene, the DTM (desktop music) scene, trained musicians or even some industry pros. and a lot of these people were nerdy and geeky and loved anime and games and manga so of course their first point of reference for building vocaloid's identity was idolmaster. touhou, idolmaster's next door neighbor, also had a lot of influence given many of the music people in its scene dabbled in vocaloid early on. so naturally the fans that were attracted to vocaloid were also nerds. at first there were only cryptonloids, but gakupo quickly followed (and continuing in the trend of heavy nnd association— kentaro miura (RIP), a big fan of nnd and especially idolmaster— designed and drew his art 100% pro bono out of love for the site and its culture). luka came out... i think gumi was the first shift. gumi just felt, different. i personally owe it to her being modeled after ranka lee, the iconic role of her voice provider, megumi nakajima— ranka lee was the underdog character in her source macross frontier's love triangle. so i feel like that image somewhat imprinted itself on gumi. gumi was not popular at first at all. her release came and went with not much fanfare. ironically the aspect of rivalry would come back under stuff like the miku vs gumi debate. this is probably the first real demonstration of "it doesn't matter how good the voice is, it matters who uses it and how that propagates the voice".
and so i arrive at the producers of the time, maybe late 2008 early to mid 2009, the newcomers. the ones that weren't necessarily otaku through and through, but more on the "teenagers who like vocaloid and/or don't have a singer to sing for them, and want to make music". i will be specific and say it is people like wowaka (RIP), deco*27 and hachi/kenshi yonezu specifically. wowaka for example had a very fresh take— his pvs deemphasized the vocaloid, but it also inspired many fan pvs because of it. i will not go into how it became ironic that he quit due to the attribution to the voice. but his moody lyrics captured a lot of hearts and his style carried a youth to it. hachi did a lot of his own artsy pvs. deco*27 was very unpolished and amateur but his music was VERY of the times. the synths, the guitar, very youthful. aside from wowaka, whose comeup immediately led to him getting signed quickly (and the guy himself just walked and i don't blame him) i think what made these guys (deco and hachi) stand out from the rest in the end is one thing: they picked up gumi. and this set them apart from the old and dusted otaku who didn't pick gumi up, or those who picked her up thinking of her only as ranka lee. mozaik role (still deco's most viewed song on nnd btw, with no sign of stopping. and he is clearly PISSED about it). matryoshka. all that kibs of noise. by the way, matryoshka's stint in the vocaloid rankings went unchallenged until it was finally killed by senbonzakura. that's a good two years of dominance!! a lot of the breakout stars or people who got more popular during 2010 used gumi, i'm talking your 40mPs, your sasakure.UKs, your buzzGs. incidentally, a lot of these people got signed... most for their vocaloid stuff. 40mP, sasakure, deco, kous and others were signed under label split-offs like U/M/A/A. wowaka and hachi... were signed for themselves. specifically, wowaka and his band hitorie, and hachi as himself kenshi yonezu.
but producers were not the only ones being signed. utaite, who had been a thing before even vocaloid was a thing, found themselves growing rapidly due to them increasingly participating in the culture as both fans and beneficiaries. personally, i split off utaites eras as "before piko and akiakane" and "after piko and akiakane". the before era included people who either started very early on when vocaloid became a thing on nnd, or started before it (participating in chorus medleys or posting utattemita videos of anison for example, like gero). it was all amateur and everyone was doing it for fun... but the record companies doth lurk around the vocaloid scene at this rate. akiakane and piko i pick specifically because they were the first utaite who were very publically signed. piko was signed under sony's ki/oon records! akiakane had two or three big albums under the subsidary of VAP, toy's factory (if you wanna have fun take a look at the list of talent they rep). piko is especially important— as he had a vocaloid made of him. this marked first big interest of corporations and large record companies to actually enter the vocaloid space— in the most direct way possible. btw, the reason piko the vocaloid is dead is because piko the person is no longer signed under sony. it's not outright confirmed, but piko the guy stopped tweeting about utatane piko the second he transferred labels. he is stuck in a weird catch 22 he probably will never be free of, though yamaha is doing some insane moves lately, i wonder if they'd ever try to buy the character out and revive him as a stunt. (they are doing many funny stunts lately. but a subject for another time.)
finally, my last point in this preamble is the interest in telling stories through vocaloid had only continued to grow. i think the two biggest early examples were the prisoner series by shujinP and the ever so infamous evillious chronicles by mothy. their explosive popularity is wholeheartedly owed to rin and len— ok this is a tangent but this is the genius of the rin and len package, that to this day was never replicated, they come together as you know and since they are male and female with no set setting, they are an easy buy and you can make a story because you can do two points of view across several songs... like literally. its paperplane vs prisoner. daughter of evil vs servant of evil. and their fans were and continue to be super passionate. it's great, we would be missing a huge chunk of what makes vocaloid subculture what it is without them. of course, shujinP's series (plural because they had several) is less known these days but it was probably the first series to get plays and novels and all that. quickly followed by EC. later came series like sasakure's doomsday series, stuck in a limbo between old and new era (most of the songs released in the old era but the novelization and such came out during the new), and a few "outsider" series like numtack05/putinP's series (the reasons this never got popular is because it was absurdist and shitpost-y and involved too much political imagery, not only that but also because putinP used a lot of copyright samples (most famously ronald mcdonald and sazae-san clips)— the freely distributed album vers omit these samples entirely and i can confirm the songs are worse for it)
so to give a summary of the above section
the tastes of fans were maturing
there was a shift in how vocaloid was perceived
the growing influence of utaite
the growing interest of big corpos in the scene
the growing interest in storytelling using vocaloid as a medium
anyway, here comes the real deal. and... it's gonna be a mess. just like the era itself was. i hope you're ready, at least.
even the very first echo of vocaloid3 felt kinda corpo-y. it wasn't, but.. looking back. it kind of felt like it. the first time we ever found out about v3 was through a leak of seeU's demo— but it was a work in progress leak, so it had the voice of her provider dahee kim singing along. people had no idea so they assumed this was the capability of the software. it was exciting! kpop was just starting to get popular, and we were getting a new vocaloid software, with korean capability!!!
anyway. we're not talking about the can of worms that was seeU.
not just because of dahee kim. but because it's not related beyond this. also the fact that korean fans were heavily and horribly mistreated by the majority japanese fandom for obvious reasons. i do not have the depths to speak on that stuff, but it says a lot that the software's first big swing ended up like that.
but i wanted to illustrate the mood of the fans going into this era. it was full of hopes and dreams. now, i don't want any wannabe know-it-alls wagging their fingers at me and checking the wikia going "b-but cullen, mew also came out!! at the same time!!" the seeU leak came out first. i remember there were fights over whether or not that demo was real. it was a cultural shift like no other. who the fuck cares about mew? literally her only legacy is one really amazing ezfg song. i will not debate anyone on this btw. i try to be objective but i'm allowed to inject a bit of my own opinion here too. you know who were also full of hopes and dreams? the companies. not your internetcos and your ahsofts, no, i'm talking publicly traded shits and record companies. look... i'm coming off harsh. i actually don't hold that much animosity, but you're gonna see why this was the first huge misstep of the era.
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nice picture, right? this was the kind of optimism we started off this era on. but, i'll break down the picture for you in a way that helps illustrate a point somewhat:
your girlies from V2 like gumi (who was this era's it girl), lily, galaco (even if her shitty V2 version is contest only)
your earnest newcomers mew (look, even yamaha girlies count), cul, aoki lapis, seeU (one could argue.), IA (one could argue...)
tone rion of dear stage (who represented dempagumi inc., the group her voice provider came from, though this was a myth for years until it was proven... also it was clear they wanted to make the rest of dempagumi into vocaloids but rion flopped at the time. there was even a picture of her friends floating around. astoundingly embarrassing confidence. one billion dead vocaloids.)
akikoloid-chan of lawsons (yes, the convenience store! she is a vocaloidification of their mascot and i would argue the poster child of the modern brand private vocaloid. she was retired in uh.. 2019 i wanna say? though she was dormant for a long time anyway)
ring suzune, the aborted failure of minna no vocalo keikaku (everyone's vocalo-project)... this one involves a lot of otona no jijou AKA adult circumstances (japanese corpo's favorite excuse. you will now notice this phrase every time you hear it oooo). just unfortunate all around
yuzuki yukari of vocalomakets, i put her in a separate category because she really is a girlie of her own. a vocal born from producers being dissatisfied that their wants weren't being answered and no company was taking them up, they just went "fuck it" and produced yukari on their own. a huge outlier in this era of vanity projects and companies using the scene for their own crap.
not pictured, but i have to mention her due to her complicated position in this era, but mayu of exit tunes. exit tunes is a record label that heavily supported vocaloid and utaite during this era, signing both producers and utaite, and making compilation cds of popular vocaloid hits. and probably saw to it that due to their dominance in the area of compilation cds (and they still dominate, even if their releases are sparse these days their cds still top oricon without effort), them sneaking mayu into the tracklists would work... my thoughts on this? my position has softened a lot over the years. and i've always thought "they gave up right before she organically caught on, they should have kept pushing. so what a shame".
now you may notice i bolded a few of these and made special mention of the companies behind them. you probably already figured it out, but this era had heavy investment from parties who had only to gain from a rapidly growing niche subculture. see, unlike the other two of nnd's big three idolmaster and touhou, who are IPs where you need some kind of cooperation to officially get in on, vocaloid... is incredibly free, so laissez faire in comparison. you buy a 9,000 dollar dev kit and get to work making your mascot. it was... so easy. so free. so sweet. but real life is not so easy, or free, or sweet. you actually had to be accepted by the fans, and like i said before... the voice does not matter. what matters is who uses it, and how that propagate the voice. this is true time and time again. it is the ultimate "how many times do i have to teach you this lesson, old man?!" of the scene from a commercial standpoint. no matter how many years pass. ergo, one billion dead vocaloids. corpo vocaloids were releasing and they flopped immediately. earnest products from newcomers were dropping and struggling, though def doing better than the corpo ones (like lapis, lapis did ok). existing "in crowd" companies were vomiting out new vocals and not even promoting them. it was a disgusting era of excess and death and bile and plague and war and and and. it's astounding that it is hard carried by the art that came out of it. because if you only look at the commercial side of things, it is fucking disgusting.
now, onto the fan aspect. remember when i said this era truly kicked off when kagerou daze came out? yup. here it comes. so, anyone lived through this era remembers the cambrian explosion of original projects that did not make use of vocaloid mascots— arguably the final death knell of vocaloid-ke secondary works being the mainstream.
now, i'm planting my flag in the ground here very firmly— i do not ride the bandwagon of the people who erroneously attribute the near death of the scene to kagepro. it's just not true. personally i have a very complicated (bordering on near sort of but not quite negative, depending on how nostalgic i feel that day) relationship with the series, but to blame it is incredibly narrowminded and ignorant of the actual reasons the bubble burst, and not to mention unfair. if you find it annoying, fine. but just say you don't like the series and move on. and really, for better or for worse, mekakucity days and mekakucity records are unironically god tier vocaloid albums that will be remembered for years to come. i just have to say this because i see a lot of people blame jin for very flimsy reasons... SHUT UP!!! anyway.
i think one of the issues with the whole project culture that flourished during this era was simply the fact that since they were multimedia projects (whether by accident like kagepro or intentionally from the get), fans were coming from all angles, and even those who got into it through vocaloid eventually became super mega invested in them as separate IPs. which is... unfortunately an issue. so when these properties eventually spun off into manga, light novels, covers with real seiyuu, merch and ultimately some even netting anime projects... once those projects either abruptly ended (lol, lmao, this will come back later) or reached their natural conclusion, inevitably a lot of those fans either leave with it or found themselves burned out on vocaloid itself, or perhaps even think they've outgrown it.
next, utaite. now i mentioned a bit earlier about how the first batch of utaite were amateurs who didn't expect anything out of it and did it just cause, and how exit tunes signed a lot of them in this era. now, comes the time i speak about utaite "after piko and akiakane". i believe due to a generational gap and subconsciously perhaps due to the signing of a few utaite from the old guard at this point, the nu utaite of the 2010s had a sort of individuality to them... this isn't an insult, and a large part of their popularity actually came from them always collaborating and a lot of them ending up befriending each other. again, i'm an outsider, but i understand this much. but this era for utaite was the beginning of the idea that an utaite can become a superstar. in the end, very few of them did become superstars.
a lot of them naturally returned to a normal level of popularity after the bubble. there aren't a lot of your AtRs or your amatsukis and such. the smart ones became vtubers before being a vtuber was cool. to give an example: un:c and hashiyan who are arguably oldheads more than nu era became anjo and kosaka of monsterz mate. this isn't a doxx btw, this is publically available information, and un:c often credits himself as a mixer under projects he does as anjo. also, a certain duo of female utaite whose names i will not mention went on to form the super popular vtuber duo himehima. there are other early adopters like kano and god knows who else that i don't feel like mentioning. anyway, if your utaite did it after 2018 and under their own identity it is a desperate plea for attention. sorry but it's just the objective truth. tangent over... did you think i wasn't gonna shoehorn vtubers into this somehow?! anyway.
even sutopuri who got mega popular, only really formed after the vocaloid bubble burst, perhaps even as a result of it. utaite had a positive effect on the vocaloid scene and still do. but at the time, i think it was at its strongest. utaite NEEDED vocaloid, and vocaloid benefitted greatly from their continued patronage and love for it. i for one will not be caught slandering utaite and their relationship with vocaloid even if i will always prefer the vocaloid versions. the issue here comes from the fact that way too many were signed without much star factor (i'm not disparaging them, i'm just saying they did not hold their audience across the mediums), and even at that their fans splintered off into many tribes and many weren't really into vocaloid in the first place and were more into the livestreams and twitter banter. that's just how things shook out. you even have your reols and such, as reol was the face but in a sense her, gigaP and okiku were a set and gigaP left the scene to focus on commercial work with those two. too many of them got signed and splintered off into their own little fandoms before THOSE fandoms kind of died out. so this is another part where fans disappear and lose interest. you're starting to see the pattern here, right?
there's so much stuff i thought i would touch on, like how gumi was the undisputed it girl of the scene at this time, and how kagepro rose IA to prominence (all because jin wanted to buy gumi but didn't find her in the store) and how IA's people 1st place locked certain producers in their basement (like jin, yasuhiro, ishifuro etc) and... now this is a conspiracy on my part but prevented them from working on anything else, so that drew more talent away from the scene... but i realized it's tangential and belongs to other parts in this conversation. i want to reiterate here though before we go on to the biggest elephant in the room of all which would be the point of no return... there is more to the vocaloid bubble era of 2012-2015 than projects, than corpo and record company bullshit, than utaite fans. and there is more to the era before that than the top brass producers i mentioned earlier. i really... really lament how so much of early vocaloid reuploads are gone from youtube. there's a whole world just gone. so, anyway, are you ready?
the final block in this weird jenga of a story.
the producer, suzumu, and his unfortunate associates.
i will cut to the chase because it's easier to explain who was involved once i say what happened. to put it shortly... suzumu "stole" his songs. this is weird and vague and i always hated the way people used polite euphemisms to explain it because it made the situation way more confusing than it had to be— he used his producer friends as ghostwriters to compose songs for him, basically. and was very not nice about it according to one of the people involved. now i will probably adopt a somewhat sympathetic angle that people who have previously heard of this case may have not encountered before. not because i feel bad for that fuck, but because it seems like at least one of the people impacted has forgiven him, and others have moved on in less obvious ways. he's also professionally making music in the industry now. as much as i want to keep up the act of disliking him, i don't care anymore. i still dislike what he did immensely because it impacts producers i love to this day. but the man came forth about it himself and those involved forgave him. it's been almost a decade now... man!
suzumu, before getting into posting songs (who knows how many were actually his and which were ghostwritten), was a prolific lyric writer who worked with some of the trendiest vocaloid producers around. i'll cross gigaP out, since he was not involved in the incident, but almost every single person involved in this had worked with him in a lyric or story writing capacity (for 150P and komine specifically). here are the involved parties as i recall, bolded are people who he "stole" from
mafumafu, the person who spoke the most about it post suzumu's confession and the most vocal, and likely the person who was used as a ghostwriter the most (i don't recall if he actually alludes to this or not but people commonly think this). mafumafu had a series of vocaloid songs that told a story, but stopped using vocaloid after the incident for a while and songs that were going to get pvs from his first vocaloid album were not posted. he contributed a song called machigai sagashi for the vocaloid flavored moba #compass in 2015, but it seems like that song was probably in the works since before the incident for reasons i will highlight in a moment. suzumu wrote the lyrics for only one of the songs. iirc, mafumafu's song berserk is about suzumu. don't remember if this is confirmed or not. btw, the album of those songs, meikyou shisui, is really underrated and you should check it out. im not a mafu guy but that album is great
kemu, the person who is arguably closest to suzumu and the one who most publicly supported suzumu (albeit wordlessly) in later years by working with him professionally. when i mention someone forgiving suzumu, i mean him. suzumu wrote the lyrics for most of his kemu voxx songs, a famous multimedia project kemu was on the helm of along with hatsuko as the main illustrator. since kemu no longer had a lyricist, the project stalled for years until he posted a song suddenly in 2017 (with self written lyrics). it seems like the series is continuing still, but with a different direction
150P, who worked with suzumu heavily for his shuuen no shiori (bookmark of demise) project, a project that was conceived from the start to be a story. this part makes me really mad, guys!! i'll try to keep calm about it. 150P wrote over 50 songs (idk if this is an actual number but he wrote a lot. at least 40.) for the series, with suzumu writing the story and lyrics. the character designs were done by saine (who dodged a bullet all things considered.) and the art was done by komine. 150P was already doing crazy things before shuuenpro, his most popular song is still his insane 12-len classical metal chorus song lost destination. now shuuenpro caught on slower than its peers and was an underdog. i LOVE shuuenpro to this day. you know what? right when it was finally getting its first W, when the album that had seiyuu covers at come out on oricon in third place, suzumu dropped his confession. what a slap to the fucking face!! the manga of the series hastily wrapped up after that. 150P and komine disappeared and no longer did stuff ever. 150P recently appeared for a mafumafu anniversary thing so i'm glad he's still alive. but, komine...
komine, the only non-producer, an artist with the worst luck. she was slowly rising to prominence doing pv art for a lot of popular producers, and was the main artist of shuuenpro most prominently. during the initial release of the first few shuuenpro songs, she was accused of tracing, and the art of the pv of sarumane isutori game had to be done by someone else. komine stopped using social media at that point, but continued to make art for the project quietly and quite prolifically. so she was already on some kind of fraught standing even though the tracing allegations were disproven. fast forward to the suzumu blowup, komine packed up her bags and disappeared forever. if she had become disillusioned, i do not blame her. her final public contribution was the design of jeanne d'arc from #compass, the character who was paired with the mafumafu song. all subsequent artworks of jeanne were done by different artists. i suspect the reason the vocaloid version of machigai sagashi did not have a proper pv was due to komine quitting. i can only imagine what that pv looked like! if you're wondering why i mention a pv, it's cuz compass fans got mad at mafu for having a fancy pv for his self cover but not for the original. but otona no jijou, you know? and where is that energy for eve who still hasn't released a pv for mistletoe publicly and only put it on his kuso app and with 0 compass association? who let that wishy washy fuck do an anniversary song? ...im not gonna go on a compass tangent. anyway.
so... why does this matter?
it matters because people became disillusioned due to this drama. it matters because suzumu took out some very popular and prolific people from the scene during what one could argue was a transitional phase. the fans of all those people, including suzumu's... gone. if you weren't there, you may not understand the cult of personality suzumu had. he had his name on everything and was friends with all the right people. when i heard about this incident... i just closed my eyes and sighed lol. it hurt and it hit when the scene was at its weakest. and was the final blow, almost. and it impacted the way people saw and talked about vocaloid for years. miku became "owakon" for a time. people thought kizuna ai was gonna replace her as a cultural touchstone (lol, lmao, it is proven time and time again that the big three cannot die). kenshi yonezu, in all his detached glory, came down from his jeweled encrusted throne to compose a song for miku's 10th birthday that he smugly thought was the death knell of nico nico douga.... which even at the time of its release was contested by even people who were on the same miku anniversary project and, whether you wanna acknowledge it or not, is still mocked to this day by several producers. magical mirai's theme this year even does it. there is no respect for sand planet or anything kenshi yonezu stood for in that song. what an asshole move no matter how you see it. argue with the wall if you don't agree, i don't want to hear it. the scene survived because there were producers and artists and fans who still loved it. not because of some sardonic fuckoff song by a guy so detached he'd write a funeral march for a birthday.
these days, i feel like the community is incredibly conscious of what happened. there are wanton community led events that encourage not only the creation of songs, covers, art and secondary creations but also the discovery of new producers— the biggest of which being vocaloid collection, which happens three times a year and has many categories, but most importantly the top ranking (producers active for 3+ years) and the rookie ranking. i once read a japanese article that said proseka brought new fans hungry for something beyond the music presented in the game, and vocacolle and other community led events and song posting festivals supplied the works. the average age of the new vocaloid producer is— and this is my own estimate based on how many heart attacks i've been given the past 3 or 4 years— 17~19 years old. they say things like "i know of kagepro but i wasn't there"!! should i get my cane out!! who's driving me to the retirement home?!
even companies involved in the product end are more savvy these days.... (holding my tongue about a certain company of a popular synth software and its ceo because i have nothing nice to say). i think they realized that you can't clap with one hand and that appealing to the end user and fans is a necessity. honestly, i can only be excited for what comes next. we're never going back to that dark age, i can say this with utmost confidence. do i miss the past of the times before the bubble, back when vocaloid was a smidge more geeky? sure. but we can only really move forward, so why not enjoy it
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blackicek1lls · 10 months
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(pasted from my youtube lol)
KagePro Day! This series actually inspired me to make videos actually. You can't see them now (they're privated lol) so here's some sketches! It was a human AU too so it might be cringe to some. I look back on my old art way too much so it doesn't really affect me.
I was REALLY into Inanimate Insanity when I was younger and I would just combine it with other media I like. Out came the KagePro II AU! It was probably a precursor to my habit of excessive world building. TLDR Paintbrush got to be Shintaro, MePhone got Kuroha'd, Cobs was actually a good guy, and Knife, Mepad, and Toilet were all simultaneously Mary (it's more complicated than that but still). And that was just in the WORST timeline. The best timeline was a such a hot mess that the worst one had to handle their eternal punishments in the Haze. This AU held me for YEARS and it took NSR to kill it.
I could honestly ramble for ages about this AU and how KagePro jumpstarted me into making covers and videos haha. The music was so good and I dream of making videos half as good as the ones with it. Maybe I'll go over my old videos at some point because the way I did them was super backwards and unorthodox haha.
Honestly, blame JubyPhonic for introducing me to Outer Science (heck of a first song to listen to) and letting it spiral from there.
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gamer-comix · 3 months
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tbh since the kagepro manga and novels are so similar i was kind of planning on trying to awkwardly merge them together into one recap
but i guess they're separate timelines and the stories end up totally different or something? which means i probably shouldn't do that. THANKS, DID SNAKE. THANKS A LOT
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kattitude130 · 1 year
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i’m imagining a kagepro timeline/au/ending where they do successfully get konoha to beat the shit out of clearing but it turns out that clearing is not in kenjiro anymore (where? idk) but they don’t know it and normal konoha just fucking beats normal kenjiro to death
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yuukei-yikes · 8 months
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i extended on something i wrote months ago in the subject of shinene codependency (and shinaya breakup) but its hidden in a Much longer post under a read more so i wanted to make it into its own post for my kagenalysis tag❤️:
to rant a bit abt the "personal narrative" of shintaro. i think it's interesting that shintaro is essentially a very self centered character and kagepro is very meta in the way it treats him as a main character. because inside of kagepro, he really gets as much focus as any other character, they're all "main" character to us. its rather inside the story he plays a very important role therefore he is the protagonist and as the protagonist he puts an end to the story itself too. i think this is all interesting together and fun to dissect shintaro's character as inherently self centered because that's what the story is. the initial premise is that he's a depressed guy living in regret he used to be "such a bad person" to someone he cared deeply about.
his self centeredness shows not only in the way he acts even without retaining activated, but he is really in the center of it. shintaro IS the protagonist and deep down even if he hasn't remembered yet, he knows that. so does everyone else. they all know they depend on him, sooner or later.
and i like to think of all this in a post str context thinking that the way he handles all that in everyday life once this story is over and theyre free from a narrative in the first place, is self destructive because its not compatible to being a normal person. he's a protagonist but there's nothing to be a protagonist OF anymore
so it IS taking him a bit to really LOOK at his friends and stop looking only for himself. technically he's lived a hundred doomed lives and now he's here trying out this one and again it is scary and new and... ene, who's been the most dedicated to centering her life around shintaro, is a clear safe place while navigating this.
he takes takane totally for granted because of this. in the narrative she has always been his sidekick. she has been the second main character to him. she has always lived and served him in all timelines, in all the time theyve known each other that she can't remember and he can, takane has been more ene than she's been takane to him, and ene has always been his annoying lap dog he hates as much as he needs in order for the story to move forward. takane of course reciprocrates the dynamic because it's also all she's known for a year. but... it's a year, vs. shintaro's God Knows How Many resets.
so eventually... as she is free from the narrative and very much her own person outside of him, capable of finding love and priorities somewhere else away from him and OUT LOUD tackling issues like hey we have a codependent dynamic going on we should work on, bc she does normal people stuff like going to therapy, takane moves on. which is mind blowing for shintaro AND HE DOESNT LIKE IT
he shuns it completely whenever takane brings it up, which she does a lot as time goes on. because time keeps going on. it keeps passing by. and everyone around him seems to be growing up and that's so infuriating and so terrifying and then stuff like ayano dating him and dumping him is as much of a reality check as ayano being alive in the first place, and he doesn't know what to do with it other than cry and thrive off the attention takane gives him again upon seeing him broken again.
he's in PAIN but it's familiar. it's comfortable. it's classic. it works. because the story he was a protagonist of was a tragedy, so he doesn't know how to behave when there is hope in the future. ❤️
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shintaroskeyboard · 7 months
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I feel like one of the biggest disconnects I have with the kagepro fandom as a mostly music-only fan is that I have such different perceptions of all the characters. like, take Ene/Takane for example. she has 4 songs: Jinzou Enemy, in which she longs for companionship before being deleted; Headphone Actor, in which she has a weird metaphorical vision of the world ending; Ene's Cyber Journey, in which her soul is sucked out of her body and into cyberspace, and she is traumatized by all the hate she sees on the internet; and Yuukei Yesterday, in which she longs to confess her feelings to her crush before dying.
Never in any of this is there any indication that she's silly. That she'd do something like call someone Master or do the alarm thing from the novels/MCA. Music Timeline Ene is a profoundly edgy character. And like, I've read the books and all, so I know what she's like in that version, but when I'm listening to Mekakucitydays in my car on the way home from work the Ene I'm imagining singing those lyrics is edgy.
This kinda goes for all of them. Shintaro in particular has it too. Toumei Answer: Shintaro laments the death of his best friend and regrets not doing more to stop it. Lost Time Memory: Shintaro regains his repressed memories, filled with loneliness and sorrow, confronts his past and awakens to his power. Remind Blue: Shintaro is haunted by his memories as he grows up and becomes an adult. NOWHERE in any of these lyrics does the word "gamer" appear. He states in LTM that he "lived a life of indulgence" but the socially inept loser we know from novel/manga/MCA is lyrically nonexistent. Music Shintaro is also very edgy.
Anyway sometimes I remember that other kgpr fans don't mostly know the characters through just listening to the albums over and over again and it kinda throws me off. Kgpr will always be music to me first and foremost
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fictionkinfessions · 3 months
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I feel bad for coming back again but I want to say that I love each and every member of the Mekakushi Dan. We all went through time loops and since in canon different events played out with each timeline maybe in one non-canon/OCs are canon/existent.
But in general what I want to say is if anyone's just wanting to talk about KagePro or the Mekakushi Dan I'll always be up for it. Even if my memories tell me that 'hey there was more members in the Dan.' (I was Dan number 10 and there was up to I think maybe 20?)
-A KagePro OC kin #🍵☕🍶
Anonymous asked:
Hey mod party cat I was half asleep when I sent my last ask and just wanted to correct myself as being Dan number 12.
-A KagePro OC kin #🍵☕🍶
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masonsystem · 6 months
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too sick to draw or do anything else which means its the perfect time to watch mca and be a little autistic nitpicky bitch about it. planning to do a post like this per episode, this one's for episode One. well episode one part one bc nothing in my life is easy and i keep forgetting theres a fucking image limit for posts 🙄
- I HATE THIS FUCKING ANIME ok i needed to get that off my chest...... groaned so loudly at the first four seconds fucking... Church Bells and POLES?!?!? POLES?!?!!! i hate shaft's enviromental choices ok moving on
- how the fuck did i not realize that ayano's VA is rena ryuugu lmfao its all i can hear nowadays
- right theyre on a fucking clock... for some reason.... also honestly i dont like ayano's voice that much. like the voice is fine but i dont think it fits ayano's character
- also this clock sucks i wish it was like more More you know more gears more machinery like ep12 insanity ok wait. are shinaya 3d models here lmfao.. maybe?
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- i like this line. saur mysterious
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- hahaha.... the Kaien Panzermast
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now that i think abt it i have no idea why its called kaien panzermast. like i what its referring to (the song siren thing thats telling kids to go tf home) but what the hell is a Kaien Panzermast?
- this scenery is near meaningless to kagepro literally just a whole bunch of nothing when i say i hate shaft's choices for this anime..... like what is any of this shit. also orange??!? orange of all colors..... god damn man
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like yes ok its the evening BUT THIS IS KAGEROU PROJECT. GIVE ME MY RED AND BLUE!
-- this part is cool tho. a bit too heavy handed in the symbolism but i appreciate the gesture
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- lol at this:
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BECAUSE SHE DIDNT! not until 2017 lmfao. this makes me suspect that the revelations from mr2 were initially supposed to be in the anime. but in the end for whatever reason it couldnt fit itself there, so the only revelation we got was The First Tragedy Exists. and no elaboration.... now that i think of it, iirc me and many fans were pretty thrown off from this opening back when it first aired cuz this was like, the first time we've seen ayano act like this. wait. let me check my timeline
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ok nvm lol. second time. first time shes ever like this is in the manga:
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but anyways back in 2013/2014 before the LTM episode, there was like no context whatsoever for Why Is Ayano Like That. so that was a doozy
- damn can u imagine working on some songs writing a novel and getting these amazing voice actors to voice ur characters... ohhh i wouldnt know how to act
-HJEKHJSKDFHASJKDFH THIS LOOKS CHEAP AS HELL HELP ME
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i mean thats um. one way to show a timeline getting thrown away... I Guess. ignoring the fact that Mary Has Long Hair (which she shouldnt), its a cool visual idea but the execution is um... hfjkssjk
- hehe
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headphone actor mv on the left and mca countdown thingy on the right. holy shit they are near identical damn, i just thought they were similar but no, its practically identical. thats so cool T_T if only the rest of this anime was this cool.... whatever onwards i go
- shintaro's stupid futuristic high-rise apartment... i loathe thee
- the fuck is this
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- first instance of shaft's trademark of putting random shit on the screen and im already annoyed its gonna be bad for me for the rest of this rewatch if i can even last that long. i know i will at least til ep 10 (11???) cuz i need to see baby mekatrio
- no aku benci lmfao shaft hates to animate so much they threw this story into the future so they could just conveniently project things onto shintaro's cyberwall hahaha..... i fucking hate this anime
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- looks like shintaro was drawn by 4 different artists in these various shots that only span like 5 seconds
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- damn in the anime its not even ene's fault that shintaro spilled the soda lmfao. thats all on him this time
- also shinene's voices are srsly perfect
- XX you say...... 🤨
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- storyboarding sucks shit they went from flashback to not a flashback to flashback again my fucking god dude. the only reason i can make sense of any of it is cuz im rewinding every little thing
- literally no reason to add 'roomie' to this translation but it made me laugh so I GUESS
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maybe i should hunt for the official crunchyroll subs. but im too lazy
- lmfao
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text from Mekakucity Talkers 24, translated by x0401x. only difference from tht and the screenshot is that shintaro still has hair lol
- hm. i wish it made a bigger deal of shintaro leaving the house. yeah he threw a fit but i wish the actual stepping outside aspect was more dramatic yknow. like how Children Record emphasized it
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- WHY IS THIS CITY SO EMPTY
- also curiously this episode is missing this sentence from shintaro abt someone rebuilding the city bit by bit which is in the novels and the manga, which is meant to foreshadow saeru's influence. but then again the first 17 manga chapters are taken nearly word-by-word from the novels so maybe thats all it is 🤷
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- also it took like 6 minutes for shintaro to leave the house... theres other things being done ofc, establishing shinene's dynamics, quick exposition of how ene ended up with shintaro to begin with, and spilling soda onto the computer and leaving the house. but i feel like it wouldve been better if the anime stuck to what the novels + mr1 does, where ene blares a loud fucking alarm. that quickly establishes shinene's dynamic and easily leads to a So You Must Be Wondering How I Got Here type of thing, and then knock over the soda leave the house bam easy. instead the anime really took its time with like..... idk making shinaro look ikemen. yeahhh not the best choice, especially considered how rushed the last few episodes are gonna be. ok back to watching the anime
- also aku benci x2 like its only futuristic when its convenient which is soo fucking Lazy. theres literally no reason for this story to be set in the future. like all this city scenery is based off actual modern day Kashiwa its just... ugh. barely any care put into this anime at all
- this anime is cool sometimes
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- reused this pencil texture from the start of the episode... wonder how many times ill be seeing that
- the fucking comedic timing of these terrorists lmfao. and right theyre clowns... for some reason....
- also dude ill still never understand why only their thumbs are the only parts ziplocked like what. also isnt that harder to animate... THIS STUPID ANIME
- this is a completely fair reaction to having kano shuuya speak to you for the first time
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- no the fuck he isnt he hasnt thought of shit my god.
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that comic person on here was not lying shaft really fucked up the order of events here bigtime. kano only speaks to shintaro after shintaro's done brooding.... also seto doing fuckall lol. ik he'll say smth in like 2 seconds but i do find it funny that we've seen him for like the past minute and he hasnt said shit
- ok but its cool that kano's hand just doesnt obey the ziplock.... very clever of the artists to just make him put his hands behind his head and other gestures to indicate that theres something up with him
- why are his eyes red.
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summerendroll · 4 months
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i know i was just saying like yesterday how obviously konoha and saeru r foils and this is why konoha effectively dies; one snake gives his life to save someone, stopping the other snake in the process after that other snake spent centuries and innumerable timelines of shedding blood to ensure his own immortality.
BUT i also said the kingdom hearts fan in me revolts at the idea that konoha has to give up his existence after only getting about two years on earth, years in which he formed his own identity, made friends, etc. so as much as i love haruka i have been thinking about kagepro good ending which konoha keeps the body instead. you could take most of his power from him perhaps to justify his extended existence - no more superhuman strength, because there’s nothing special he needs to protect his friends from anymore. make him human, make him disabled even because that’s what happens when haruka takes the body back anyways. it’d be perhaps more bittersweet. haruka has more close friends than konoha did, takane in particular gets her heart broken a little every new timeline where she has to meet konoha for the first time and see haruka’s face with no recognition behind its eyes.
but haruka was never going to make it out of high school alive anyways, if you wanna think about it that way. his death remains a tragedy but isnt also sad to take the possibility of a life away from konoha. have i simply watched too much kingdom hearts. am i too much of a xion roxas and namine fan. maybe so. but wouldn’t it be very fun to watch konoha carve his own weird little niche in the world and live on and watch harukas old dear friends reconcile with the fact that haruka may still be gone but here is a life he actively created; his literal actual oc he drew and designed made flesh, born from a wish haruka made. just don’t ask me how haruka stays dead and konoha sticks around because i’m trying to envision how that decision would be made and it’s difficult. haruka’s fear of death may override his sweetness, tbh. but he’s been dead two years. maybe that would change things. u know ?
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