A barrier to my attachment with fictional characters had always been the way gender was depicted in art for most of my life. "Boy characters" were allowed to have neutral colors and simple designs. If the characters were animals, for instance, the boy animals would just be drawn as normal animals. But for "girl characters", there had to be some kind of characteristic that "made the character a girl". The girl animal characters would get eyelashes, or a bow, or they'd be a strong color. They were "othered" from boys in that way.
I couldn't understand why this would be. Despite being bestowed the label of girl, I didn't, internally, feel any different from the boys or the girls in my class. I was raised in an environment, or perhaps I just didn't see, a context where those categories mattered. It bothered me for a really long time. It wasn't "feminine characters" that bothered me-- it was just the fact that girls weren't allowed to just exist in media, they had to be put in a box in a really specific way. Hopefully that makes sense. (nowadays that the selection is so wide, I love all of the super feminine characters, super masculine characters, etc. but when I was younger it was an issue for me!)
As I got older, suddenly there were more and more girl characters that were allowed to just "be". v4 flower was one of these characters. I was barely 12 when she came out (yeahhh... that's weird in retrospect) and she immediately became one of my favorite characters ever.
Usually products in this industry are most successful when they play into tropes of female character design, but v4 flower has been an insanely strong contender in the vocaloid world, and is super, super unique. Her voice just speaks for itself and the character design is awesome. That's why v4 will always be the best for me.
I absolutely love v3 flower's more gothic affiliation and sincerely unique design. It is a truly awesome design. I also think flower talk's design is a cute spin-off of v4. I also genuinely like Ci flower's design, I am very weak for astronomical/mechanical design elements. I love the winter designs of both v3 and v4, too.
I think it's awesome that flower's range of designs are all so strong.
