What Happens when Japanese Voice Synthesizer Program Meets the Powers of the Internet

Ok, to start, I play a music program called Osu!, which is basically like Elite Beat Agents for the computer, and I noticed that a lot of anime songs I could find seemed to feature a certain character I'd never seen before in any of the animes I've seen. I've even found the character singing non-anime songs like Silent Night and the This is Sparta Remix. By random coincidence, a video on youtube happened to name the character shown to be the one singing as Hatsune Miku. So being the curious person I am, I did a google search on the name and found that the character is from a voice synthesizer program called Vocaloid 2 Character Vocal Series and voiced by Saki Fujita.

Now my first question was how could a voice program become so popular with anime songs? Well, seems she became popular from a Japanese video hosting site(kinda like youtube for us US and European folks) doing, of all things, the Leek Spin song(Ievon Polkka, aka those vids of Bleach with her twirling a leek). Thus people soon began showing their own versions of popular songs using the same character and voice, and pretty much became an internet meme in Japan.

Ofc with her popularity, the creators decided it would be a good idea to have her appear in other mediums like animes and mangas(usually as a cameo), and song concerts. I'm not tempted to watch the Lucky Star OVA since she appears in Kagami's dream. She also has her own manga now, and there's a petition to have an aluminum plate based on her as a balancing weight for the Japanese Venus explorer Akatsuki. She also has here own PSP game created by SEGA.

Now I assume most of you don't really care, but I felt like sharing my discoveries. I'm still surprised that a character from a voice synthesizing program could become such a phenomenon in Japan(well, I guess not really, since I've seen crazier things from there).

Image added: showing the classic anime oddities like strange clothing fashion and unnatural-natural hair color





EDIT: LEEK SPIN!!! AHHH!!!

 

eh, its Japan, thats about all i can say and i thought the program was called volcaid or soemthing like that.

 

Still, it's quite an achievement for a voice synthesizer character to get a video game based off of it for a hand held system and created by a well known game company.

 

how about Black Rock Shooter?

it's getting its own anime based on nothing but a single video clip of a song made from vocaloid that became a meme.