i know this is just a way smaller symptom of the much larger problem with erasure & i know barely anyone even talks about these characters but it literally pisses me off SO much when people depict the original two 2004 vocaloids Leon & Lola as a little blonde blue eyed literally #FFFFFF white boy and barely tan, ashy skin straight haired girl. their voices were sampled originally from black singers and they were marketed as soul voices. i've certainly seen some AWESOME designs by other folks that correct this, but it just sucks so fucking much that those are the most widely recognized interpretation of them to the point that people have been confused or upset on occasion when people have used other designs for them. guys you have miriam too. certainly shes enough whiteness for you right. you dont need to make the other people white right.
it also sucks that since then, vocaloid had pretty much zero black vocalists until Chris & Amy in the base V5 pack (with the exception of CYBERSONGMAN (the whitewashing i've seen with him while not as bad as L&L is absurd too)) and even then they're very underutilized. I suppose from a musical standpoint I would get not using the base voices in general because in my opinion they're not very well done in comparison to vocalists created by other studios, but they can still produce a great product if you work with them correctly, and they're definitely still used less than the other base voices.
I think thats one of the many reasons why in recent years the community has made a slow but major shift over to SynthV and other programs instead. The available vocals are far more diverse and the available language selection is better than what vocaloid had made available within 20 years of existing. I'm not much of a fan of the upcoming SV2 because of the further integration of AI features(Personally- the "AI" part of the current SVStudio is fine to me. It's less "AI" and more an algorithm that uses and EXTREMELY extensive number of samples from the voice provider compared to the basic voices to find what sounds the most natural, it's off-network and all created consensually)(but whatever im not paying for it anyway. yar har har 🏴☠️) related to tuning and the lack of manual pitch control. For a lot of vsynth producers tuning is part of the art and considered a signature part of their style but this is a tangent and kinda losing relevance to what I was talking about.
My point is that I'm glad to see the tools available to vsynth artists diversifying, but as with any community i think there's still a problem with erasure left over and though they are fictional characters and not real people, and even if it doesn't matter to you, their representation and respect is important both to the real people they represent and to community as a whole
