NEWS UPDATE

08.04.2026 To Yami's Fans... 

Today, I'm debuting Yami's final voicebank.

Before anything else, thank you to everyone who has supported me over the years. It genuinely means so much to me that people have continued to care about Yami after all this time.

Yami has been my UTAU mascot since I was in elementary school. If you had told 12 year old me that he’d still be around today, I wouldn’t believed you. 

I still look back on 2015-2016 really fondly. Those were the years I was the most active in the UTAU community, and I have a lot of great memories from that time. But I also made a lot of things as a kid that I don't really feel represent me anymore. There are projects I look back on and cringe a little, and for a long time, Yami was one of them. 

The funny thing is that Yami was never supposed to be a serious character.

When I was ten, I found a meme character on an internet thread about "Horrible OCs." I thought it would be funny to make a gijinka version of the bad oc and copy that character sheet almost word for word. The original character profile wasn't really something I created- it was an internet copypasta, and the whole joke was that nobody was supposed to take him seriously.

Though it changed because someone did…

A really talented UTAU creator and artist saw something in Yami and in me, and encouraged me to actually try to work on UTAU. They made me believe this silly little joke character could become something more. Looking back, if I ever reached my peak as a creator during those years, it was because people like them kept believing in what I was making before I believed in it myself.

I was also incredibly lucky to receive support from so many creators I admired. Their encouragement during my formative years is something I'll always be grateful for.

As I got older, I started realizing that a lot of my feelings about Yami weren't actually about the character…they were about me.

It took me a decade to understand that I had written all of that because I was nonbinary, and suddenly so many things clicked into place. I finally understood why I had latched onto Yami growing up. Exploring and bending traditional gender roles through fiction was my way of trying to understand myself and make sense of my on-off feelings of gender dysphoria.

There are other parts of that time that are harder to look back on, too. As a minor, I was approached by an adult who knew me through my work online and tried to form a personal relationship with me. Looking back, I wish I had recognized sooner that those interactions were not okay and set stronger boundaries. Those experiences became a source of trauma that caused me to grow detached from both Yami and the community for a long time. I still carry the pain of those experiences with me today. I now identify as aroace, and the only relationships I feel comfortable forming are queerplatonic ones.

Of course, I stepped away from UTAU for a long time. I explored other creative spaces, met more queer creators around my own age, and grew a lot both as a person and as an artist. When I came back briefly at nineteen, I had updated Yami's age and gender and character profile because I finally wanted him to reflect who I had become then.

I know some people have wondered why I've been hesitant to revisit my older fan works, especially Yami. So much of that work was published under my deadname, I felt the need to leave that chapter behind. For a long time, I wasn't sure what place Yami still had in my life or what I wanted to do with him anymore.

But, sometime last year, I heard an original song someone had made with Yami.

My first thought was, "Wow... I can't believe people still use Yami." And then I felt a bit ashamed of thinking that.

People were still creating with him while I'd quietly left him behind. That was the moment I realized I didn't want Yami's story to end with work I'd made over a decade ago.

I've grown so much since then; as an artist, and as a person. I wanted there to be one final release that actually reflected who I am today. So I put together my portfolio and applied for the opportunity to create one last voicebank for Yami on the engine I liked. When I was given the option to make Yami trilingual, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I really think this is the closest I've ever come to capturing what Yami sounds like in my head.

The design itself is still one of my favorite pieces of my own work. Over the last few years, I've become much more confident in my work, and I wanted this release to feel like a complete expression of that.

For the first time, I feel like Yami fully represents the person I've grown into.

Thank you to everyone who has supported Yami over the years. Whether you've been here since the early UTAU days or discovered him much more recently, I'm incredibly grateful to you.

So, maybe UTAU is where everything started. But this isn't where it ends.

Everything on Yami's homepage will stay available indefinitely. I've refreshed all of the UTAU download links on the new website @prod808, and if any of them ever stop working, just send me an email and I'll get them back online as soon as I can.

Thank you, truly, for believing in Yami all these years.

– TS99

"Reminiscing about what we've been through."