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Debunking the Rumors Regarding Yanhe’s Development.
Written 05/07/25, regarding rumors from 2014-2015.
A large portion of this article was written by @喵喵碎冰沙/@碎冰冰ICEYYYY on Weibo, with an English machine translation and heavy editing by Lone. I can make the original article available upon request to maximize understanding.
One thing that some people in the English VOCALOID fandom might know about VSINGER despite not even listening to their music are rumors circulated regarding Yanhe’s development. These claim that her voice was originally meant for Moke, and that Moke’s funds were spent frivolously by the CEO at the time, Ren Li.
However, a dedicated look at the rumors with evidence, years after the rumors were initially spread and the heat has died down, has never been done before in the English side of the fandom. This will be a VERY long post, because there’s a lot to discuss.
Jump To: ☆ Overall timeline of Yanhe's voicebank development ☆ A list of allegations & rumors about Yanhe’s development → Yanhe’s voicebank was originally meant to be Ling’s. → Yanhe’s voicebank was originally meant to be Moke’s. → Yanhe's voicebank is half-developed and was released incomplete. → Moke’s funds/VC funds were spent and embezzled at a brothel, and Yanhe was created as a result of this. ☆ Closing Thoughts & TL;DR
DISCLAIMER: This article is purely meant to be informative. I do not support character bashing of any kind, do not use this as a vessel to spread hate.
Overall timeline of Yanhe's voicebank development (and important background events):
✦Highlighted Text means "less certain/speculation", the specific uncertainties highlighted are described in the notes at the end of this section.
In 2011, VOCALOID CHINA (here onward referred to as VC) was established by the company Shanghai Henian (SHN). The early stages of the project's planning involved using VOCALOID CHINA PROJECT (VCP) "as a world to set up sub-projects”. These sub-projects were to be “a vocalist with a VOCALOID voicebank and a varying number of members of a silent band. The bands fight against each other or cooperate with each other, telling the story about the fusion of the three worlds of the initial VCP worldbuilding”.
One of the projects was named "博歌乐PROJECT"①, and a public design contest was conducted— fans could submit their designs and one would become China’s first VOCALOID, while the rest would be promotional companions.
In 2012, Yayin Gongyu was selected as the winner, with runnerups Ling Cayin, MOKO, Yayin, and Chou. The five character designs were adapted and designed according to the VCP worldview to become "Luo Tianyi" (a 瓦纳海姆星人 / Vanaheimian Alien in the VCP worldbuilding, a VOCALOID), "Yuezheng Ling", "Zhiyu Moke", "Yuezheng Longya", and "Mo Qingxian". (地球人 / Humans, with no voices).
After Tianyi’s release in 2012, SHN decided that the next phase of VCP would have all character designs created within the company, rather than holding another design contest. This is possibly because of controversies that stemmed from the first VCP design contest ②. A post in the future will be made regarding the first VCP design contest in full detail.
Around this time, Moke’s character bio had this bit in it:
因为外形的问题,偶尔会被人误认为女孩子,虽然本人自称非常讨厌被认错, 但是却有传闻说有一位跟他长得很像的人气伪娘COSER出没于各种漫展,真实 情况至今未明………………… English MTL:“Because of his appearance, he is occasionally mistaken for a girl. Although he claims that he hates being mistaken for a girl, there are rumors that there is a popular crossdressing cosplayer who looks very similar to him appearing at various comic exhibitions. The true situation is still unknown…”
The VOCALOID voicebank that would be created during this time also had a gender neutral sound, and could be passed off as either a boy or girl. SHN also did not inform the voice provider of this voicebank, Seira Ryu, of anything regarding the character’s setting at the time of recording. All of these matters combined led to the voicebank being given the development code "VC02MOKO" during the development process. This led to employees who did not participate in the character setting identifying this voicebank as Moke.③ However, this was not Moke.
Around 2013, due to poor management by Ren Li, SHN was removed by YAMAHA from the operation of VCP, and the five characters of 博歌乐PROJECT and the entire VCP setting could not continue to be promoted.
At this time, the voicebank for the second phase of VCP had already been completed, so in order to ensure that the project would continue to operate, SHN chose to do a second design contest for the voicebank they still had. In the end, the submission named "Yanhe" won the fan voting. SHN still did not have the character rights to promote Yanhe as part of VCP's second phase, so a separate project was created for it, called "YanhePROJECT".
Following the return of the character rights, the overall worldbuilding concept of VCP was discarded, and all the characters joined together under the label VSINGER.
➣ VCP's early sub-project planning is mentioned in a 2022 livestream of SHN's early design employees ideolo and jaryestel. You can find this livestream here.
➣ The original reason for the existence of the silent band members is that they correspond to VOCALOID fan creators of various identities and professions. The identity of "humans" assigned to the silent band members also coorberates this point. The corresponding relationship under this worldbuilding can be simplified as:☆ "瓦纳海姆星人 / Vanaheimian Aliens" - VOCALOID☆ "地球人 / Humans" - Creators (producers, fanartists)☆ "音之精灵 / Sound Spirits (each character’s mascot, such as Tianyi’s Tian Dian)" - Abstract music concepts, each mascot represents an instrument.This is also why Tian Dian transforms into a microphone, because Tianyi is the sole singer. The three parties would act symbiotically to replicate the VOCALOID content creation ecosystem.
The original worldbuilding is mentioned in this 2023 Q&A. For further elaboration, see the Luo Tianyi Official Setting Book, pages 04 and 05.
➣ A screenshot from the above mentioned 2023 Q&A that seems to have been scrubbed from the page states:
Jarryestel: 关于当初录制声库的步骤,其实到我离职(12年11月也 就是声库2录制作业完成为止)都还是按照最初版本的企划来进行的。关于摩柯嘛 其实在人设文字里早有伏笔(估计现在也没有改动,可以去看看~~),不过要 说的是,当初录制的并不是单纯的”摩柯的声库”(我靠我都承认了)。 English MTL: "Regarding the steps of recording the second voice library, actually until I left (November 2012, when the recording of Voice Library 2 was completed), it was still carried out according to the original plan at the time [meaning as part of VCP phase 2]. As for Moke, there was foreshadowing in his character bio (I guess it hasn't been changed, so you can go and have a look~~)... But what I want to say is that what was recorded at the time wasn't *purely* "Moke's voicebank" (I admit it)." Screenshot Source
Some people speculate based on "there was a foreshadowing in his character bio" and "02MOKO" being the development code that this cosplayer who looks like Moke might have been planned to be a VOCALOID (that is, not Moke himself, but the cosplayer alluded to in Moke’s bio would be revealed not to be him, but instead a girl that looks similar to him).
➣ Seira Ryu's posts regarding the voicebank's gender have been deleted, though some crumbs remain through other peoples's quoteretweets.
@kkryu_k [Seira Ryu's Weibo]: Eh...?! Girl...?
➣ Below are two conflicting claims regarding the rumors:
VCP Phase 2 Character No. 1 (rebellious VOCALOID junior) "X-chan" (At the time, we considered adopting a different process from the first phase, where we collected character designs and then officially decided on the name. Instead, we changed to the official release of the design drawings and then picked the name. Therefore, the name of this character had not been set). Explanation from Mr. Wang, the person in charge of character setting at the time, from the 2023 Q&A.
Yanhe's development code name was VC02MOKO. *Was Yanhe planned to created from the start of VCP? No, her voice was originally for the kid in the original VSINGER 5 (what was his name, Moke?). Later we decided to make it a new character. An anonymous post by someone who claims to have worked with SHN.The information provided by two former employees of the voicebank development department shows that there is an obvious cognitive conflict here.
➣ More reading is available here (in Chinese).
Ending remarks for this section, regarding highlighted speculation text:
A list of allegations & rumors about Yanhe’s development:
1. “Yanhe’s voicebank was originally meant to be Ling’s. Because SHN lost the copyright for the VCP characters, they made Yanhe instead from scratch. But the second Chinese voicebank should have been Yuezheng Ling, and only wasn’t due to the loss of character rights.”
The reasoning behind this rumor: Aside from Tianyi, in 2013, Ling had the most relevance in both official content (such as VOCALOID CHINA PROJECT’s animations) and fan content (such as people creating songs for Ling using Tianyi’s voice). Ling had the most fans of any supporting character in the group by a large margin. Because five characters were created, it was naturally assumed by fans that SHN would create voicebanks for all of them, based off of other VOCALOID groups (such as Miku & company). When this was not the case and the voicebank that would become Yanhe was announced to be in development, fans were quite upset.
Comment 1: I suggest @-ideolo- to only draw one character for bplat each time in the future, so as not to waste our emotions. Comment 2: After reading the analysis of the forum users, I calmed down a lot and thought about it seriously. In fact, SHN has already implicitly stated that the other four people have no sound source library. Maybe the official accounts played the word game too well, and many people, including me, did not see it [meaning, saying SHN used tricky wording to never say the other VSINGER members would become VOCALOID]. Anyway, the new sound source is out, I won't criticize it, I just hope I won't be disappointed. Comment 3: I don’t want a new sound source... I just want Yuezheng Ling... Comment 4: I just hope the pronunciation of the new voicebank is clearer. I don’t want to complain about the image [lack of design] anymore. Anyway, there are already a lot of people complaining below ↓ Source
Rebuttal of the "Yanhe's voicebank was originally meant to be Ling's" rumor: Until the completion of the second voicebank (which would become Yanhe), VCP was in the early stages of planning and constructing the world and worldbuilding. The remaining four characters are characterized as "Humans" in the setting, versus Tianyi who is classified as a “VOCALOID”. It seems very clear that at this time early on in 2011-2013, SHN did not have voicebanks for the other characters planned. During VCP’s initial design contest, this was even highlighted as such— the winner becomes a VOCALOID, the runner ups become promotional companions. Nowhere did it say that they would all become VOCALOID!
An extra bit of evidence points toward the redesign process by ideolo. If they were all to receive voicebanks, they would all be much bigger commercial products, which would require a lot more thinking and planning. Compare this to Tianyi, who had her design reworked over 50 times, while the other characters were “much simpler”. This is said at about 01:05:00-01:08:00 here.
The Luo Tianyi Official Setting Book released by SHN does feature concept art for the other VSINGER characters, but only one or two additional sketches. It seems clear, based on how quickly the other characters’ designs were done, that the early VCP plan was to skip all the characters in the "Human" setting and only develop the "Vanaheimian alien" characters into VOCALOIDs.
2. “Yanhe’s voicebank was originally meant to be Moke’s. Because SHN lost the copyright for the VCP characters, they could no longer call the in-development Moke voicebank ‘Moke’. As a result, they ran a new design contest to obtain a new image to replace Moke and reworked the recordings they had already.”
The reasoning behind this rumor: When the second VC design contest began in March 2013, it did not indicate it was for a brand new character, and due to its gender neutral voice, many fans thought “this could only be Moke”. On top of this, it was common at the time for the first two voicebanks in a said language for VOCALOID to be a girl and a boy (LEON/LOLA, KAITO/MEIKO, Bruno/Clara).
In 2014, a former employee, 発光P posted a large number of true and false messages expressing his dissatisfaction with SHN as a company, one of which is shown below:
“Let me tell you guys some interesting news. The Chinese head of VC, Ren Li, cheated Yamaha of Japan out of nearly one million, then ran away with the half-made Moke and then came the call for a new character design contest → Yanhe. So now you can finally get why Yanhe's voice sounds like this, right? Because VC and YAMAHA had a fight and VC itself did not have the ability to develop a voicebank with the characters, the Five Colors Team wasn’t bought back and that's why they've disappeared. [2014 at the time of posting, when only Tianyi and Yanhe were active]"
For other reasons why people believe this rumor, refer to the first section of the page, regarding Seira Ryu's posting and development codename for the voicebank.
Impact and further spread: The artist who submitted the art for MOKO in the VCP design contest, saku, did not take this rumor well. They had a public meltdown and expressed their dislike for Yanhe and Yanhe fans for quite some time after the incident in 2014 on Weibo. As of now, links and screenshots are no longer available. (Since more than ten years have passed, we won't provide the relevant links and screenshots this time as its possible their opinion has changed, and saku themself has not logged in to Weibo for a long time anyways. You can see some posts by searching for their name directly in Weibo and searching for keywords such as "Yanhe" and "Zhiyu Moke" in their account).
This incident with saku is important to mention because it helped spawn a number of angry fans, who began to hate on Yanhe. A large number of misleading recountings of Moke and Yanhe’s history regarding their voicebanks also took hold in the public consciousness of Chinese VOCALOID fans. This Moke-Yanhe rumor would be kept alive in commentary videos and posts over the years. See below ↓
This is a post with of fan timeline with a lot of views and shares.
Title: [Chinese VOCALOID History]: VC Chronology, Second Revision version.
Text shown:(From the second half of 2012 to the beginning of 2013)
YAMAHA found that Ren Li, the general manager of SHN, had misappropriated investments and direct distribution resources (money) to support himself and lived a chaotic lifestyle, and had no intention of operating VCP seriously. Disappointed, YAMAHA took back the copyright of VCP and sold the half-finished "Zhiyu Moke" voice library to Ren Li at a very low price.
Ren Li then found Japan's MERCURY INC. and sold the copyright and operation rights of this voice library at a high price. MERCURY SHANGHAI provided investment and prepared to produce the semi-finished Zhiyu Moke voice library, "making the best use of it”.
2013.3.23: SHN announced the new voicebank was in production and began to collect new designs (via the second VCP design contest).
As discussed, this information is not true. The OP made a clarification in the comments earlier this year, in reply to someone pointing out this information was not true.
Hello, friend. This chronology was made in the summer of 2020. The information at that time was mainly based on the online remains of what 発光P had said in 2014, so if there are problems with the wording or if it does not match your current understanding, that’s why. According to the current information, it is true that the VCP operation team headed by Ren Li only planned to release a Tianyi voicebank to make money, and the other four characters were only there for the worldbuilding. However, it is also credible that YAMAHA, which wanted to expand the Chinese market at that time, had the intention to continue to make other voicebanks, and did make a semi-finished product. Of course, now we know that it’s not from Moke or anyone else, after all, it was just a prototype voicebank with no character attached. After YAMAHA withdrew its investment and took back the copyright of VCP, Ren Li found another investor to start a new project, which may be related to the existence of this semi-finished product, but as I wrote that year, Yanhe's voicebank was undoubtedly re-made later, and it was not a continuation or inheritance relationship with the semi-finished product (meaning, Yanhe didn’t inherit a half done voicebank meant for someone else, it was developed for her). I have already faded from the VSINGER fandom, and I am glad to see that there are still fans like you who are still passionate about Yanhe. Thank you for reading this imperfect chronology. Your reply will be be kept here as a correction for it. Source
A video by Moke fans discussing the rumors also surfaced:
Title: The Birth Of The Most Miserable Young Boy In Chinese VOCALOID, Zhiyu Moke Description: Many of these were discussions and revelations at the time (posting from 2023). There is no official evidence regarding any of this, so I can't be 100% right. Welcome to add anything to the comments section.This video regarding the rumors was removed, after a rebuttal video was made, entitled "The Biggest Rumor and Its Refutation (Newbies MUST READ!)". The description is as follows:
Rumors were spread on both Weibo and Bilibili at the same time, so I urgently refuted them here. If there are any mistakes that I haven't mentioned yet, please add them in the comments section. Time is tight, so if there are any mistakes, please correct them with evidence in the comments section.This rebuttal video basically sums up everything we’ve typed here, but it’s in Chinese only. The comments are great, though— one of the top comments is “We are a Chinese family! Why should we make things difficult for our own family members?”.
Summarizing from before:
①It was clear SHN had no intention during that early time period (2011-2014) to make the other characters into VOCALOID.
②If Moke was planned to be a VOCALOID at any point, then concept art from this time period would have shown this off more.
Bonus Argument & Speculation: At the time of Yanhe’s development, Ling was more popular than Moke, so if anyone would receive a voicebank, it would be her, which is why the first rumor exists. However, if we go off of the assumption that the next Chinese voicebank had to be male… Longya was more popular than Moke, and still is. This extends into a new bit of speculation: Why would they produce Moke first and not Longya? Forgetting fan wish fullfilment, they’re a business trying to make a profit. And we know that Longya was prioritized over Moke, because in real life, Longya received his VOCALOID voicebank before Moke!The only reason why this rumor had any basis is because the voice that would become Yanhe sounded gender neutral, and could possibly be passed off as a boy. But why would Moke be made before Longya…? It’s one of those things where your brain fills in the reasoning (“this voice could be used for a boy, so it must have been for Moke at one point”) without hard evidence.
3. “Yanhe's voicebank is half-developed and was released incomplete.”
The reasoning behind this rumor: This rumor has been around for a long time, and most posts about it are no longer available. This section is based on personal recollection to list some of the facts as a reference.
①Yanhe’s voicebank has no breath sounds, but Tianyi’s voicebank does.
[Post from 2013] @YanhePROJECT Sorry to bother you, but where are Yanhe's breaths? It seems that I can't find Yanhe's breaths files on the CD.
② The "Yanhe voicebank is a half-developed product" viewpoint was put out there by 発光P in their posts, the same source as the Moke rumor.
Rebuttal: It is true that voicebank producers changed during Yanhe’s development! However, the producer who took up the mantle to complete Yanhe's voice, ghostfinal, chose to reprocess the material recorded by Seira Ryu and start from scratch due to a difference in production habits. Ultimately, they produced the sound bank (codename VC02MOKO) in its entirety, so there is no such thing as releasing a half-finished sound bank.
A long time ago, the increasingly bizarre rumor that "the voicebank is half-finished and half done" confused me for a long time. Now I think about it, I firmly believe that this statement was originally a rumor deliberately spread by some people for private, malicious purposes. Because I personally know R and GF, two producers who worked on the Yanhe voicebank, I asked them privately and got the following answers: 1. R resigned after making half of the Yanhe voicebank. 2. GF took over the production afterwards. Because everyone has different habits in processing materials, GF did not use the parts produced by R, but instead completely remade it themself. ※The two have left SHN a long time ago and are active in new jobs. Please don't disturb them anymore. Relevant evidence has also been collected, but it is not convenient to make it public at this stage. Rumors stop here, thank you. Source
BONUS: “Moke’s funds/VC funds were spent and embezzled at a brothel, and Yanhe was created as a result of this.”
The reasoning behind this rumor: This is entirely in the English fandom and does not exist in the Chinese fandom at all! Wahoooooo!
Let’s reestablish the truth here, as said throughout this post: Yanhe’s voice was not Moke’s at any point.
This is not to insult whoever originally translated the events on Vocaloidotaku, but rather just to clarify two things— that 1) A long blog post by 発光P in 2015 was translated by someone and taken as fact all the way through, when a lot of it was some true and some false. Then, these rumors were posted to the english VOCALOID fandom wiki and were also treated as fact. If you go onto Yanhe and Moke’s pages, you’ll see a lot of the claims that Yanhe’s voice was meant for Moke. 2) There seems to be some misunderstandings that came through the language barrier.
While making this post and consulting ICEYYYY, I asked the following:
I think your article should have everything I need. Actually I just have one question… Ren Li’s irresponsible spending, in English, it’s summarized like this:“YAMAHA became suspicious when money lent for the project disappeared and it was found that the president of Shanghai HENIAN Information Technology Co. Ltd. (SHN), Ren Li, had spent the funds at a brothel.”^ Is this actually substantiated…? That is to say, did he actually spend money at a brothel LOL.
They replied as such:
关于任力：或许关于他是否嫖娼的误解是一个通用词语产生的，它可能来源于下图↓ (image) 这张图片里有一个固定词语“吃喝嫖赌”，它指的是一个人生活作风混乱，将大量金钱花在了享乐事务中、不开创自己的事业或做正式工作，而非代表着一个人真的去做了“吃饭”“喝酒”“嫖娼”“赌博”这四件事。也许是早期的机器翻译导致了这个误解，事实上我们没有任何证据证明任力进行过嫖娼或赌博，毕竟这两件事在中国都是严重的违法行为，我们甚至有一个名为“扫黄打非”的专项行动来关注这个问题。 English MTL:About Ren Li: Perhaps the misunderstanding about whether he solicited prostitution is caused by a common term, which may come from the picture below↓ (image: the screenshot of the "VC Chronology, Second Revision version." post) There is a fixed term "eating, drinking, whoring and gambling" in this picture, which refers to a person's chaotic lifestyle, spending a lot of money on pleasure affairs, not starting his own business or doing formal work, rather than representing a person who really does "eating", "drinking", "whoring" and "gambling". Perhaps early machine translation led to this misunderstanding. In fact, we have no evidence to prove that Ren Li solicited prostitution or gambled. After all, these two things are serious violations in China. We even have a special campaign called "sweeping pornography and illegal publications" to focus on this issue.
I spoke with about ~10 other followers of mine on Weibo and QQ regarding this to make sure I was getting my information right, and they all had various levels of knowledge regarding the big rumor with Yanhe and Moke. However, basically all of them said this part of the rumor was especially untrue. (And one later clarified with me that it was untrue after telling me it was true, because of an error in my machine translator.)
So, even though it’s really funny because of how insane it is… Nooooo, it’s not actually true that Moke’s funds (or VC’s for that matter) were taken and spent at brothels!
Though I had thought that the English fandom didn’t treat this rumor as seriously as the Chinese fandom (that is, using it to hate on Yanhe), there are some English posts that prove otherwise. So let's not hate, only love between Yanhe and Moke!
Closing Thoughts & TL;DR
In summary:
Hopefully this post has been illuminating for you, I don’t think anyone will take the time to fix the English VOCALOID fandom wiki pages for Yanhe and Moke regarding this, especially because no one likes using the fandom wiki anymore, but this is the truth, as informed by evidence throughout the post.
A nice note to leave off on: SHN knows of these rumors, but does not speak of them. There’s some fan speculation that to try and mend public perception of the two characters (or to show there are no hard feelings between the two, that they’re friends and you shouldn’t hate either), Yanhe and Moke’s back to back section in the second verse of the group song Attack! was created and highlighted (as well as other interactions between them, like high fiving).
So Moke and Yanhe don’t hate each other, why should you?
