Looking Back At Zaako

2025.7.9

I should get you up to date with the background around Zaako before going any further. Zaako is a song written by music producer Hiiragi Magnetite. (You can listen to the song first - judging simply by the music, it's an okay song with nothing too offensive to the ears.) There had been two versions: the current one, which was sang by the well fabled Hatsune Miku (the link says 亞北ネル [Akita Neru], but this character itself is not a voice bank but simply a character); and the original one, which was sang by 歌愛ユキ [Kaai Yuki]. The latter version, alongside with the music producer, received a huge amount of hate for the fact that Kaai Yuki's voice provider is (at the time of creation) a 10-year-old child and a combination of the following reasons:

• The lyrics of the text was deemed sexual because:
  • In the lyrics there's the word 変態 [Hentai], which I think is really unfortunate - "hentai" being used to refer Japanese anime style porn (and sometimes JAV) is exclusively a western thing; in Japanese, it's simply used in the same sense as "creep", "pervert" and/or "weirdo".
  • The song played into the メスガキ [Mesugaki] trope, which in the West is somehow deemed a porn-only thing despite the word literally and practically only means bratty girl.
• The music video was deemed sexual because the fishes shown in the music video was somehow interpreted as a metaphor for penises, despite the song's title literally translates to (mixed) small fishes and the whole fish thing could very well be just a wordplay.

These two reasons turns the whole thing into a perfect candidate of a pedophile witch hunt, something the western Internet was only too happy to do; the music producer ended up taking down the original version due to the backlash, and that's how we get the current version, which the same group of people were still not satisfied with; because by their logic Hatsune Miku, whose canonical age is 16 and is thus a minor, shouldn't be used in this sexual pedophilic song, completely ignoring the fact that the story could very well be a school girl's feelings towards her crush at school which renders the whole thing into an innocent song about puppy love and may very well be what Hiiragi was aiming for in the first place.

But is sex the main culprit here? It seems like that would be the case, but then you'd never hear about anyone (anyone in the west currently, anyway) being angry at DeadballP who has produced bangers like 脱げばいいってモンじゃない！ (It's not as simple as just taking it off!) and とある娼婦の恋 (A certain prostitute's love), and you'd never hear about people hating Giga for writing +♂ and Gigantic O.T.N, which are written from the viewpoint of a middle school boy and are actually sexual (in a very-Japanese subtle way) with an actual penis reference in the title; and if with that you're going to say that's the case only because they were old songs and they're not relevant and not well-known among the new fans of today, I want you to think about that for a minute: if what you've said can somehow be the explanation, does that not mean that they're going after Zaako and its creators only because they've become famous and relevant and all the sex talk is just merely an excuse they can grab onto?

I suppose I should tell you a bit more about the person who made the music video. Before Zaako, they've made many music video animations, and some of them had the unfortunate fate of going viral in the west, one of which were for the song Rabbit Hole by the music producer DECO*27, which unfortunately did contain sexual references and the "canonically minor (of age)" Hatsune Miku, which of course later rolled into pedophilia accusations and cancellation attempts... some of their bad names may have been carried over in this case. But it all feels like that nothing is more important for the Vocaloid characters to be the characters themselves from the viewpoint of this current western fan base and the concept of using the characters merely for its storytelling qualities, which has been the attitude of the far east for as long as I can remember, seems to be completely non-existent in the west - not only non-existent, some of them even actively oppose it.

Can all of this somehow be traced to a covert form of racism? Had Hiiragi been black, I suspect none of this mess would've ever happened; I have a deep feeling that anime and its related media have never been truly accepted not as some weird thing the East Asian people do but as a true and genuine part of modern visual culture like how it is in the far east despite people like the Trash Taste trio has been talking about it for more than a whole decade. The most damning evidence is that I've heard hood weebs openly talked about how they made watching anime cool - really? Do you think you deserve a trophy for replacing your opinion with prejudice into one with slightly less prejudice as well? - actually, don't answer that, because I've had an answer in mind and it's not the one I want to hear.

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