Welcome to CBC Spotlight, our monthly blog series where we interview members of the Youtaite community! Sign up for your chance to be interviewed. Today, I’m interviewing Lunarveil.
Tell us about yourself!
Hi there! I'm Lunarveil, but feel free to just call me Lunar. I'm a youtaite-in-the-making from the United States. I've been singing online since 2017, and in the youtaite community since late 2018/the start of 2019. While I'm new-ish to the whole thing, being a youtaite has become an absolute passion project -- through working with amazing people, making incredible friends, and honing my cover singing skills (as well as learning motion graphics, something I would have never thought I'd do in my lifetime)! If I had the time and energy to work with every single youtaite ever, I probably would. We're all just so amazing :>~!
But when I'm not a youtaite, I'm a college student just trying to get through life, such as through applying to graduate schools, playing ace attorney at any break I can get, and apparently raiding macaron stores at 5AM now, too. I'm always down to DM about whatever, maybe dream up an amazing chorus collab, or fangirl over amazing cb teams and entries. I hope to chat with you soon!
How'd you first become involved with the Youtaite community?
One way to interpret it is “When did I start singing Japanese songs online, using an original character (OC) as a representation of myself?” Seeing as this is a pretty sound definition of a youtaite , this is one great way to interpret this question. In this case, my journey starts at the ripe old age of 16, where friends of mine on Anime Amino told me that their Love Live cover group, Project Lunaris (PL), was looking for new members and that I should audition, seeing as they liked my singing voice. Thankfully, I was picked to join, despite the fact that I’d never sung online, let alone in Japanese, and my “mic” was the built-in microphone of my Surface Pro 3! It is on the Project Lunaris youtube page that you can find the oldest cover featuring yours truly — a Snow Halation cover published December 24th, 2017 (Note that I had been apart of PL since much earlier that year). While my first solo is no longer on their channel, this would also be the first time I sang a full song solo for the purpose of making a cover for it to upload to the good ol interwebs. So you could say that my journey started here, on Anime Amino, at 16. We never called ourselves youtaite (I’m fairly certain most, if not all of us, were completely unfamiliar with the term or concept), but we definitely did youtaite stuff.
As an aside — thank goodness I was accepted into Project Lunaris. If I hadn’t, I likely would have never started online singing, because I wouldn’t have had any additional exposure to the online cover community without them. Not to be dramatic, but I’m fairly confident I’d be a lot more lonely and depressed without the youtaite community. Fate truly is magical! Anyway, continuing on with this question…
Another definition could be when I started working with people who I’m fairly confident (well for one case, 100% confident) *identified themselves* as youtaite (bearing in mind that I still did not have any knowledge of the term, as far as I remember). I can tell you pretty exact dates for this, because I happen to have records (lmao sounds so professional) of two instances of this (two instances that, I argue, are two of the most significant moments in how I came to be a youtaite): The first instance was around early February 2018, where I was chosen to be apart of an Awaken the Power chorus, which uploaded on Christmas Day, 2018 (what is it with Christmas and youtaite milestones????). The second instance was November 10th, 2018, where I was accepted into a mass-chorus of Sunny Day Song. While the project itself was nice and dandy, it was through this that I learned that there are a lot of people who do this online singing thing — many of whom I’ve now had the incredible pleasure of working with in other projects, and some of whom have become dear friends of mine.
Fun fact, earlier this year, that Sunny Day Song chorus was completed and uploaded to YouTube! To say that was an incredible moment would be an understatement. I also learned that I definitely grew in the then-2-and-a-half-year gap between recording that and the upload date. While I didn’t call myself a youtaite when I was first added to these two projects, I was definitely working alongside those who were youtaite, and I was enjoying it quite a lot, and I was doing the exact same thing as those people. So you could say my journey started there!
Finally, you could say that my involvement in the youtaite community began when I *myself* began calling myself a youtaite (or, idoltaite which, fun fact, I used to call myself due to a long period of only covering love live stuff. I still call myself this from time to time, although almost exclusively when reminiscing about the good ol days(tm). Shoutout to Mori, who also uses/used this term to describe herself!). I don’t remember when I learned the term exactly, but I probably learned about it during my first CB, where I was exposed to the term for the first time, most likely. This was while recruiting for my first CB, which I’ll elaborate on below :) Just know for now that this was in late 2018, until early 2019, which is much later than when I first started online singing. While there’s a pretty small gap of time between that SDS chorus in early November 2018 and recruiting for that first cb within the same month, they’re definitely different events, so I like to make that distinction :) This is also most commonly what I say when I’m asked when I started being a youtaite (cause just about every youtaite knows about CBs). That, or the 9M Chika audition CCC. If you know, you know. And if you used CCC for auditioning for every love live chorus ever like I used to, congrats, we’re getting old!!!!
TL;DR: Girl Starts Online Weeb Singing in 201[X] and Hasn’t Stopped Online Weeb Singing Since
What made you wanna participate in chorus battles?
Okay, now THIS I can answer much more concisely (I’m sorry I just love to talk-). Remember PL? Well, one of the members had participated in BtSCC’18, and I thought their entries looked REALLY cool (and that the whole thing looked cool-), so I looked into what the heck this cb thing was, and that’s how I discovered that the first cb I was in was, at the time, just starting the recruiting phase! Little did I know that I’d eventually be signing my soul over to the devil I mean Chorus Battle devils I mean cb organizers.
Also, I became absolutely enamored(!!!) with this cb entry and I found myself wanting to create an entry as lovely as this cover. I think this was probably the second (first was mentioned in the previous paragraph) CB entry I ever watched. Finally, It's amazing that, today, I'm actually friends with some of the folks who were apart of this team!
During MTP, I found myself aspiring to be as Cool and Amazing as all the teams and people who participated -- I still get butterflies when I get to work with those who made those amazing MTP entries back in 2019, because they were my first "real-time" exposure to the cb scene and youtaite community as a whole.
I think once I've helped make an entry that makes some random viewer out there feel like how bm&w's R2 entry -- and many of MTP's entries -- made me feel, I'll have considered my work here done. I cannot do anything more powerful as a youtaite than move someone to try and recreate an incredible sensation my work may have given them (and what if, maybe, my work even makes them want to become a youtaite themself- imagine that!).
What was your first CB?
This is a pretty unknown piece of Lunar Lore (I only just recently added the entry to my collaborations playlist — “I must embrace my Cringy past, not run away from it” I decided!), but my first chorus battle was Muse Trio Party (MTP)! The 3-year anniversary of my first tweet recruiting for that CB — and indeed, my first tweet on the then-newly-created @lunarveil twitter account — is about 3 weeks from today. Terrifying!
How'd you become interested in being a Vocalist?
Well, I’d actually been singing since I was a little kid (2nd grade, to be exact), and in 2017 I simply transferred my choir girl skills (although I’d still end up doing choir things through most of 2018) into a wholly new format (and language, and style, and genre…just about NOTHING is the same between choir and online singing, I learned). I described this journey in a fair amount of detail in the first question, so I won’t repeat all that again for this — but I started from zero experience in jpop-style singing to now, where I actually PREFER singing in Japanese to English. It’s weird how things work out like that :)
The *really* interesting creative role origin story, in my opinion, is with animating. With that, I didn’t join this community initially with the purpose of learning to animate or to get better at animating, therefore it’s beyond the scope of this question — and, for the sake of the sanity of the lovely team behind editing and publishing this interview, I’d rather not add even MORE words onto their metaphorical plate.
Any funny or amusing CB stories?
Interestingly, much of my CB history (if you will) has consisted mostly of serious groups (as opposed to “meme groups,” or those with an air of humor in their content, concept name, and so-on).
With that, I think the funniest and meme-filled CB experience I had was with my SDB team, where, after a decent amount of conversation, Jenn (@jennacraa follow and Stan!!) was like “speaking of x and y (a name idea involved [blank] and the [blanks], which was phrased as x and the ys), what if our name was a math equation. What if our name was the whole quadratic formula?” Little did she know, I liked it so much that I actually registered that as our team name. And thus, x = −b ± √(b^2 − 4ac) / 2a (Or “Quadratic Formula”, or simply “Quadform” for short) was born! I even put a khan academy video about the quadratic formula/quadratic equations in our round 1 entry — something I would have never dared do in any of my other CB groups. The memes just felt right, you know?
Anyway, stan quadform and all the lovelies in it :) ily Jenn, Nina, Amuri, and Tsu! ❤️
Any advice for people interested in CBs?
If you’re like me and sometimes staff only (also being a vocalist/staff double applies here, which I most commonly find myself working as) DON’T DO MULTIPLE CBs AT ONCE!!! PLEASE! Cause you will low-key die (probably) — I’m speaking from experience here (looks at FWDB in the distance). It’s important to get that CB-experience in, yes, but it’s just as (if not more!!) important to pace yourself. Of course, this is also true for all y’all who are vocalists-only — it’s just a lot easier to overload yourself with work if you’re (also) handling lineart, or tuning, or animating (like me) for multiple CBs within the same timeframe.
With that!!! If you’re wanting to take part in CBs, I encourage you to fill out the forms/DM team leaders for as many teams as possible! I’ve gotten into teams with people I didn’t think I’d ever get to work with because of this — and that’s the power of taking shots that you *think* you’ll miss (and in turn may decide not to take them to begin with). You really NEVER know! CBs are, in my opinion, the best way to start working with really skilled people — they’re amazing for making connections in the community. So try out for that team of superstars — you may be just what they need to complete their roster :)! Some of my closest and best friendships in the community started by working with them in a cb team -- that could definitely be the case for you, one day!
OH and, of course, make sure to put IRL stuff over CB stuff — and to have lots of fun!
That’s all for today! If anyone wants to support Lunarveil, you can follow them via Twitter and/or subscribe to their public YouTube channel.
Credit goes to Shikimusen for the picture of them in the featured image of this blog post.