No English voiceroid fandom? FINE I'LL MAKE ONE MYSELF

So, I've always been a huge Vocaloid dweeb. And no, not for any gimmicky reason like 'wow anime girl hologram singing much future very cool' but rather for the creative community around it that bypasses all the traditional barriers and middlemen and record labels music has to go through and just exploded into a whole subculture of creativity birthing countless new artists and composers.

Oh right, but this time I wanna talk about its lesser known cousin (at least in the english speaking weebdom), Voiceroid. While Vocaloid is about virtual characters you can use for singing, Voiceroid is the same, but for talking. The key here is that it's tied to a character (like Yuzuki Yukari)-

Add people drawing free character sprites into the equation, and boom you just handed Niconico a buncha walking talking 2D dolls to play with.

AND I KNOW what you're thinking- that sounds like the perfect recipe for degeneracy and fanfics, and my god are you right. And best part is (at least for me), it's almost entirely YURI thanks to Voiceroid being dominated by female characters. And in that sense it doesn't count as degenerate cause all yuri is pure and heals the very soul ofc fr fr.

But I digress. People took awhile to figure out what to do with Voiceroid at first, and in the beginning it was just used to have a cute anime girl do Lets Plays of the popular games at the time. But gradually each character's lore and personality grew in the fandom, people got creative with using and making free assets and music and background images (in a similar way Visual Novels do), and a genre called "Voiceroid Theatre" made its way onto the scene.

And while many have a plot as simple as "NOW KITH," others can get elaborate as a Shakespearean tragedy, but with more yandere and yuri. It's a genre that has a lot of the charm anime has, but without the usual filters or middlemen to make it acceptable to air on TV. It takes part in the largely unhindered 'wild west' of doujin storytelling, and its a goddamn goldmine of content that I'm-totally-not-addicted-to-I-swear, and I always think it's a shame that it's gone virtually unnoticed outside of the JP side of things.

Anyways I'm gonna fansub some of my favorite series until I draw together an English fandom out of sheer stubbornness. My foolish goal is to get it popular enough that other people start discovering their own favorite works and fansub them too.

I've tried before with pitiful results, and I don't expect to make any big waves anytime soon, but frankly I enjoy working on these enough that it's its own reward, so I intend to keep it up regardless.

Oh and the best part is its all free stuff. Hope you'll enjoy some of the episodes I translate!