The only "fandom" I was ever really heavily involved in was Vocaloid. I got interested around the time Luka was released, early enough to have made the mistake of searching "vocaloid episode 1 part 1". I quickly came to realize that just about everything related to Vocaloid was just the work of passionate individuals, not large studios. The overall creativity of the community really inspired me. Everyone was free to make whatever they wanted. The ability to make music was cool and all, but if you weren't a musician, you could sing a cover instead. If you couldn't sing very well, you could make your own UTAU to do it for you. And if singing wasn't your thing, you could choreograph a dance. And of course, there were the animators and artists too who made PVs for the songs and really brought them to life. It was a lot of fun!
Favorites
Underrated favorites, anyway, from when I was particularly interested in Vocaloid music. I haven't sought out anything new in a long while but I think these still hold up. All titles link to the oldest original video I can find, so that you can experience the same way I did!
MikuMikuDance
I was mostly involved in the animation/MikuMikuDance scene. It was a little disappointing the English-speaking MMD scene pretty much only involved pumping out endless OCs by Frankenstein-ing together the work of people with actual talent (I participated lol), which of course lead to equally endless drama. But me and my small circle of online friends made some pretty cool stuff amongst ourselves. I also made and distrubted a few motion data, most of which were pretty bad. I mean, I guess it was okay work for a 12-year-old, and I certainly had fun. I was able to make a lot of progress in the three or so years I actively animated. I wonder where I'd be if I'd stuck with it?
I ended up working a little with a group that brought small-scale Vocaloid concerts to local conventions before official concerts came to the US. Most of my other work is long gone, but I think videos of these concerts probably still exist somewhere. Because I never gave out my age, I doubt they knew I was only 13 or 14 at the time, and hopefully would not have contacted me otherwise. Perhaps they just thought I was incredibly stupid. Still, this was my first experience talking to adults easily twice my age or older and I tried to keep it professional. The problem was I didn't know how to have a job, and one of the guys always had criticisms about my animations that were perhaps my earliest encounter of bullshit client feedback. I recieved the animator's equivalent of "make the logo bigger, make it pop". If I had known better I would have reminded him that it was unpaid child labor and he needed to curb his expectations.
Anyway, as such, these animations are not ones I'm particularly fond of. I just was not a choreographer or a dancer, and it's difficult to make decent dance animations without rotoscoping or a video to reference. And I had deadlines. So I typically just animated lipsync, and made a few sets of simple moves I could loop easily, and threw the sequence together. I rushed through them and I don't even think I ever even finished most of the ones they asked for before deciding to just disappear from the internet for a while.
I don't know exactly why I stopped animating. Maybe I was just overwhelmed, but maybe it was because overall the community just became very annoying. The collaboration part was most fun to me, so it was a huge bummer when I struggled to find anyone willing to work on projects with me. I just wasn't skilled enough to do most things on my own. I do really regret never being able to muster up the courage to ask creators I truly admired if they wanted to collaborate. But MMD is a rather unsophisticated program, and perhaps its real strength is its simplicity and limitations. Well, despite only having a fraction of my original files, I've still kept MMD around just in case I have the urge to make something again. But I think if I could only go back in time once to experience something again for the first time, opening up MikuMikuDance just might be what I would choose.
UTAU
I was not really interested in making my own music, every bone in my body is completely tone deaf, but everyone else had a Vocaloid OC that was typically functional as an UTAU as well, so I needed to make one too. I had other Vocaloid "OCs" that again I just treated as dressup bases and edited together models. One of the only remaining one of these appears to have been themed around angler fish. But my UTAU was the first and only one of these that I intended to actually use in animations, perhaps including self-insert purposes. The voicebank was a standard CV recorded on a headset microphone not unlike what scam callcenters use. It probably could have passed as the first voicebank recorded in the middle of a blizzard. I had no intention of widely distributing it, I don't think I even really used it myself. But it worked fine for silly projects with friends. Sound and character design were clearly not almongst my talents, so I mostly stuck to animating.
