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How Alive is the Vocaloid Fanfic Scene?

Kairi

New Fan
Jul 27, 2018
4
I used to write a lot of Vocaloid fanfiction back in the day, and I've been thinking about trying to rewrite some of my old stories since they were fairly popular once, but I never got to finish most of them. But is there any particular place where Vocaloid fanfiction is booming? Or has it really died out since the early 2010's? I don't see it around nearly as much as before, and so I was curious to get other people's opinions on where Vocaloid fanfiction stands today, particularly considering a lot of older fic circled around the fanmade Vocaloids. Any thoughts?
 

First Sound Future

Passionate Fan
Apr 8, 2018
144
I'd say Wattpad, sometimes Vocaloid Amino and maybe Fanfiction Archive are pretty known but I'm not sure if there's a place where Vocaloid fanfics are exactly booming unfortunately. I don't think Vocaloid is as "trendy" as it used to be to some people, most will just write about the next cool thing it seems.

Also, this is the first time I hear that a lot of older fanfics centered around fanmade Vocaloids o: (Then again, I don't think I read much fanfiction when I first joined the fandom)
 

Kairi

New Fan
Jul 27, 2018
4
There were a lot more fics back in the day that utilized fan-made Vocaloids more often, particularly because at the time that I recall, there were very few male Vocaloids especially, but there were still plenty of female fan-made ones too. Almost all of my Vocaloid fanfiction was centered around fan-mades or mixing them with the main Vocaloids. I'd like to bring them back, but the fandom has definitely moved forward with other characters.
 

BigScreenTV

A Creature of Want, Filled with Noodles
Aug 2, 2018
25
(This is from someone who has only browsed Vocaloid fanfic once in 2013, browsed it more around the time I started getting back into it (2017-18) and has only written one very short work recently)

Hm, it's not as active as it would be, considering the hype started at 2010 and has fallen off through the years. However, there are new fanfics being posted and updated daily on both fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own. Most of it focuses on Cryptonloids + Gakupo and Gumi, although there are a fair amount of other, less popular characters that are being featured, and ships are mainly the same, nothing changed on that front.

AO3 is a newer site, and has started to eclipse FFN in popularity. 2050 fanfics in AO3 is not bad compared to 20K fanfics in Fanfiction.net, especially considering some other fandoms. I haven't browsed Wattpad and Amino, but I feel that Archive has the most quality in fanworks, on average (could be biased though, but I don't have faith in FFN as a website, it has some issues, but I still).

Unfortunately (for me at least), the non-Japanese (more narrowly, the non-Crypton) Vocaloids aren't much focused on, which reflects a lot of people who have listened to Vocaloid as a whole, but on FFN, 5/6 Cryptonloids have at least 3000 fics about them while Oliver, the most popular Engloid on the site, has around 300 fics, while SeeU has around 100. Yanhe approximately 50, and Maika 30. Pretty depressing, but considering the Chinese and Spanishloids are more recent, eh...and on the other hand, Teto, Haku, and original characters have more than 100 fics. (EDIT: This is not meant as bashing, there is a lot of overlap between voice synths and I like what they offer) AO3 is much the same - Oliver has around 100 fanworks to his name, while Len, the character with the most works on that site (and on FFN) has about 700.

Oof, only around 1% of this post is about how active this is and the rest of it is a rant, sorry that this got kinda into other topics. But write what you want to write, don't take too much of what I said to heart when writing it, it is your work first and foremost.
 
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Rylitah

kiyoteru enthusiast
Staff member
Moderator
Apr 8, 2018
575
Most of my thoughts have already been said, so I'll tell you how it's like on Amino (since I'm one of the leaders on there now).

It's... really not a good place for writers. Since Amino is mostly a blog-type app, any and all posts get buried under newer posts, including fanfiction. A lot of people tend to just read short posts and go about their day, and fanfiction does terribly there. We really do our best to support fanfic writers by featuring them and encouraging writing-specific events, but everything just really doesn't work. We can't force people to read long stories, and if you have a long, multi-chaptered story especially, your reader count will drop off considerably the more you have to post for it (oneshots tend to do okay).

We've had members take polls specifically to gauge fanfic interest, and... it's not looking good. Most people just aren't interested or fully admitted to not paying attention to any of them -- or they'd rather read them somewhere else that's not Amino (which I understand). I definitely want to work on making it a better place for fanfic writers though, especially since I personally love seeing all sorts of content the community can come up with. There are active writers there still who do post, so it's not completely hopeless.

That being said though, it really is a great place if you care a lot about the characters over the program and technology itself. We have people who care about both and the latter too, of course, and even if you can't gain much traction with fanfiction, there's definitely a lot of people there who are more than happy to talk to you about the characters.

(Also, Amino's been a great place for people to get more into Vocaloid, I've noticed. We get a lot of new fans who only know of the Crypton Vocaloids and after spending some time there, gain a much wider knowledge of just about everyone else. A lot of "unpopular" Vocaloids get a lot of love there, so it's pretty nice and refreshing from larger areas of the community where you'll only see the same ones over and over. I can't promise that most people will care about the fanmades though as I do recall a number of people from a while back who expressed dislike towards them, but the community right now's pretty accepting. We featured fanart of Zatsune Miku not too long ago, so they're still around! Neru and Haku get posted about fairly frequently, too.)
 

Blue Of Mind

The world that I do not know...
Apr 8, 2018
699
I don't go on FanFiction.Net anymore, but back when I used to be really active on there (pre-2013/14; basically any time before I started college), I was always disappointed/annoyed with the types of Vocaloid stories being posted on FFN (mainly just shipping stuff and boring high school stories). And that's ignoring the elephant in the room which is the overall quality of said stories...

Saying that, FFN's Vocaloid section was really busy back in the early 2010s. It might have slowed down in that section now, but it's been ages since I last logged on to the site so I can't say for certain if that's the case. Archive Of Our Own is starting to overtake FFN as the go-to fanfic site (because of how AO3 works, but what AO3 does right compared to FNN isn't hugely relevant to this thread), so if you wanted to post your stories somewhere, you might have the best shot at AO3 nowadays.

Your comment about the fanloids has made me curious to check what the Vocaloid fanfic scene is like now regarding character choices. I guess the Cryptonloids, Gumi and Gakupo are still popular, but I'm now wondering if people have been writing more stories about the likes of IA and Yukari? Though it does sound like nobody still cares about the Engloids. ;_;
 
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Eviltreat16

Probably an Artist, Probably a Praying Mantis
Apr 8, 2018
169
I've done some fanfic writing for Vocaloids (can't say if they're good or not tbh, cuz I think they're mediocre lol) and I think it's gone down. I had pretty high traffic when I was in my stride (2014(?) but when I did some updating last year barely much. I've considered moving to Archive of Our Own tbh but I don't know how big the scene is. Though, most of my stories are Crypton-centric, I do have other Vocaloids...

I will say it's kinda sad 'cause there's a lot fanfic writers can do with Vocaloid fanfiction because of how the versatility of not much canon for Vocaloid mascots as is, even if it's inspired by a song series... (depending on the song series I suppose). I'd be down for a resurgence though, though finding time for writing is weird right now...
 

Zaphod Scotsman

New Fan
Mar 9, 2019
9
Believe me if I could come up with a good Vocaloid story I'd write it down. And right now I’m tiring to figure out a way for the Vocaloids to work with Herbie.
 

Katastrophe

Not An Actual Phoenix
Apr 8, 2018
78
Apologies for necro-ing this thread, but I've been following the Vocaloid fanfic scene for a long time (like, a LONG time, for as long as I've been into Vocaloid even, which is like 8 or 9 years at this point), on both FFN and as of recently Ao3. I can't tell you about Wattpad or Amino, since I'm not in those communities.

I can say that it's definitely not as active as it used to be, especially on FFN. In the old days (circa 2011-2014) I used to see 10 or 11 fanfics updated or published every single day on FFN, but now it's slowed to a crawl. Most of the prominent writers of that time have either left for other fandoms or stopped writing entirely. The Ao3 is more active, but not by much.

However, it doesn't mean it's totally at a standstill. There are still new writers popping up to replace the ones who have left, even if it's just a handful compared to the deluge of writers we had eight years ago. Most of the new people are active on Ao3, but I've seen fresh activity on FFN as well. The use of fanmade Vocaloids as characters has dropped, but that's probably because of the sheer number of Vocaloids available now. I've seen many people use relatively newer Vocaloids such as Fukase, IA, Yukari, and vFlower as of late, but as always the focus is mostly on the Big Eight. Fanmade vocaloids still pop up every now and then, but those are usually the old popular ones like Haku, Neru, Akaito, and the like. On Ao3, I can also see more content being made for the specific canons of Vocaloid song series (such as Mothy's Evillious Chronicles or HoneyWorks' Confession Executive Committee), but that might be because Ao3 lumps them all together in the Vocaloid tag instead of separating them into their own categories as FFN has done.

So in summary, is the scene dead? I don't think so. But it's not doing so hot. It's just barely getting by, as the number of people who are willing to write using Vocaloid characters has shrunk down to this small circle. Compared to Vocaloid fanart or fancomics, Vocaloid fanfiction has kinda fallen by the wayside in recent years. It kinda sucks, as Eviltreat16 has said, because there's so much storytelling potential in Vocaloid and many people don't seem to realize that. It was one of the reasons why I even got into Vocaloid in the first place. But I guess, like some people keep saying, if I want anything to change when it comes to this side of the Vocaloid community, I gotta take matters into my own hands...
 
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peaches2217

Give me Gackpoid AI or give me DEATH
Sep 11, 2019
1,930
26
Arklahoma
I apologize if it's been too long to comment on this thread, but I feel like Vocaloid fanfiction is seeing an increase on Ao3! I write a lot more of it than I read, but lately my fics have been gaining more views than usual (which is especially odd, since I primarily write for a rarepair), and more and more people I don't recognize are coming out of the woodworks. It's still small and mostly slow, but I really do think it's starting to pick back up again, at least a little bit.

I really hope that's the case, anyway. Fanfiction is a very underrated form of fan content.
 
Sep 21, 2019
1,401
I think the Vocaloid fanfic seen is doing pretty well. I haven't done enough looking into it to really vouch for it, but... the Vocaloid tag on FFN seems to have a healthy amount of fanfics being submitted, I think. The fanfic I recently uploaded is doing pretty decent in terms of views; the view count isn't anything super impressive, but better than I expected, esp. considering I'm writing about a rare-pair.
 
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