In Response to the UTAU Fandom
***Please note that this is not a call to action to harass this person...I want to make sure that my fans can understand the situation as it involves accusations against myself along with two creator friends of mine who can no longer speak for themselves and I don’t want to see their reputations damaged because of rumors of the past. Although I am retired from the synth fandom and have been for many years, after I was shown posts from twitter by a concerned friend, I decided to speak up and clear these harmful rumors.
.***
The accusations come from a twitter thread. I will not be sharing their handle to protect the identity of the individual as they are still a minor.
Many of you know that I started this deviantart account when I was in elementary school, back when I first started making paper crafts. I was 12 years old when I first started to get into Vocaloid and its other related fandoms...which was also around the time when I made an UTAU OC based off of an internet meme called “Yami”. Yami’s name, age, dislikes and likes were all direct translations from the original “bad OC” meme.
That was also when I met an artist called TFOTR who was my age. We became really close friends...so close in fact that we had a running joke that they were my “hubby” and I was their “waifu.” At the time, TFOTR had their own avatar named Saru. Naturally, our OCs were drawn together with many early fanarts from our elementary school years of them portrayed as a couple.
We were both minors back then and our OCs were our age. One of these false claims is that I set and decided Yami’s canon age to forever make him a kid.
Yami was just my personal version of a “bad OC” meme a decade ago.
However, this seems to be enough for one individual to take it upon themselves to interpret his age (in any form) as 13 yrs old, just so they have an excuse to see my works in a negative light.
This individual thinks that I was born in 1997 and used it as a point of attack on me that I should have known better because that's what my art Twitter account stated but I just changed it back to my true age and it locked me out. In reality, I created all of my accounts as a minor and set a false birthday in order to get around the age ban.
Yami went through a couple changes over the years.
As I got older, I updated Yami’s age to make him look older to better match my age. He was also changed into a tomgirl character. The wikia 2.0 setting page I copied over was set to the default permission settings and I have not updated that wiki in many years...however the current 19 yr old version of him now looks like this:
He is a young adult here, but are the fashion choices of short shorts and an exposed belly button really enough to warrant the verbal harassment? I've never drawn Yami in any NSFW related content nor do I promote NSFW works of my characters...yet the twitter thread claims me doing so without any evidence and uses harmful labels to belittle me. I have my own traumas...which is why the only ships I work with (all SFW) are adult ships. I only work with adult age characters to avoid my personal triggers.
About the MV of the bitchy idol, this MV was made by my friend and in the beginning of the MV, we announced that Yami is now 19 years old and a grown adult to reflect my age at the time plus the lyrics. The MV itself is modeled after the original bitchy idol song, I have taken this down.
Additionally, another piece of the drama seems to be related to a group that I was invited to as a 13 year old.
I am not excusing my ignorance back then, but when I was first invited to join a group by the UTAU artist Overlord-N, I was a minor at the time and TFOTR and Overlord-N were around the same age. I did not know the gravity of the meaning of the word sh//ta because I saw it used everywhere particularly in Kagamine Len songs by big vocaloid producers such as Giga-P. I have heard it in the Rampage of Kagamine Len and many other Len songs themed similarly and I understood it means to mean a ‘young male character’. I am sorry to my fans for causing drama from the actions of my younger past self for using this label to describe myself and my art, but I have grown now to know the difference between what is right and wrong and I will never make this mistake again. I do not condone the actions and ignorance of my younger self and I will never use this word again. I have pulled the webarchive of exactly what was on there to see what was posted to the group because I stopped using deviantart and moved to tumblr when I turned 14 and have lost track of what was on my old deviantart account after that. I still used it for archive purposes but I no longer actively manage it.
Here’s what it looked like when I was shown the actual group. The artwork that was posted to was SFW art and it is nothing nefarious like the name suggests. Unfortunately, the name of the group and the resulting folder names was created by Overlord-N, a UTAU creator who has since then deactivated their original account but I believe that their usage of the word sh//ta, was a product of the times. Outside of the cutesy art done by TFOTR. I do not condone the word sh//ta now that I know what it means and I have learned from past mistakes and will not cover Kagamine Len songs by Giga-P and condone its usage as a label for your male characters.
