"Ego Renegade Boy" concept art and additional doodles (Arusechika)

rice: y’all know “She’s So Gone” from Lemonade Mouth, the Disney channel movie that came out 15 years ago? i liked that song so much that it made me go and watch the movie. but then i found out that it was basically completely inconsequential to the movie!!! i was so mad!!!! the song was so good that i felt like it should've been like, the thesis song of the movie??!!?!!! i proceeded to be mad about this for about 15 years. and then i made Ego Renegade Boy

Vane: i just watched lemonade mouth with my friends and i agree why the hell did they make such a good song and go "okay! anyways." what!!! ill kill you!!!!!

rice: i’ve also always liked classic vocaloid songs where rin and len were the same person! we probably could’ve done this song in either direction, but there’s kind of a running joke amongst the english-speaking vocaloid fandom that len always dies in songs (Servant of Evil, Prisoner, etc), and i thought it’d be more interesting to subvert it than to contribute to it! it's 2026 len is LIVING now!!!!! LIVE that boy 👏👏👏 LIVE that boy!!!!!

Jamie: also my too woke opinion is that i think the general treatment of len in the english-speaking fandom has old old roots in 2010s era misogyny/homophobia and more broadly how society treats and sees "girly boys" as something lesser to be ridiculed but we don't need to get into that

rice: during the conception phase i made a vibe playlist for the others and i just see this every time i go on the flavor foley channel to do freaking anything

since this was a rice-directed song here are my sketch pitches!!! i originally envisioned the concept with more of like… a Guchiry vibe so he’s uhhh. really sweaty in a lot of the early concept art sdfheflakjskj SOMEONE GET THIS GUY A HANDKERCHIEFFFF

extremely early ego renegade boy vibe sketch (rice)

it took a lot more of a cute and determined spin once we got Arusechika-san on board, though!!!!! and i'm way happier with that!!!!!!!!!

if you're not familiar with Arusechika yes you are. she's an absolutely iconic MV illustrator and animator with an insane resume- she has created about 700 MVs, including Goodbye Sengen (160M views).

another big inspiration for this song was the kind of classic, frantic production of Japanese Vocaloid songs from the mid-2010s- mafumafu, rerulili, Guchiry (wrong era but right vibe), so it only felt right that we got not only a Japanese Vocaloid artist but also an incredibly iconic one…..

her particular asset-focused MV style has always been a huge inspiration for me as an MV maker. frankly i'm still in disbelief that we were able to get her for this song…  i kind of brought it up half-jokingly like oh haha what if we got my biggest video-making idol to make this song and then i looked at her page and she'd opened commissions like 2 days ago and i was like OKay. Okay. Okay. Okay. she was sooooo lovely to work with also…. i had so much fun… thank you aruse-san….. (voice of someone who has been visibly crying since getting the artist comment back)

as Arusechika mentioned, i did give some input on the character design, though i don’t think it was really much…

"Ego Renegade Boy" character design feedback (rice)

also there's a detail in the MV that i keep waiting for people to notice but i haven't seen anyone point it out in the comments so i will point it out NOW!!!!! BECAUSE IT COST ARUSECHIKA LIKE 4 ADDITIONAL VIDEO RENDERS sdfkjbsdlfkhsdlkfjsdfklj

there's a fun little visual misdirection in the MV…. the very first time you see Rin, the mole isn't on the same side of the face as Len's. so maybe you'll think, "ah, these are two different people!!!" ← but this is the TRICK!!!

of course later in the MV you do find out that Rin and Len are the same individual… and that's because, this view of Rin is being reflected in a mirror!!

next time you watch the MV, compare every shot where we see Rin reflected in a mirror vs. every shot of where we see the True Rin…….

Vane: I initially tried giving the instrumental a shot! I was trying to channel a guchiry vibe, like abnormality dancing girl!! I think this was a fun base to start with, but i wasn't very happy with it. it ultimately needed to be spiced up to fit the song direction. This would have been a MUCH different song if we stuck with this direction, and I’m really glad jamie flipped it into a much more appropriate demo

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For the second prechorus, I really wanted rin to specifically say “baby, who’s it gonna be?” In the prechorus…I really gunned for it because something about it just felt so Vocaloid to me. I started smiling so big when I heard the final vocals sing this line.

Jamie: (guy who listens to hyperpop voice) i fucking love jane remover. when we were discussing the initial concepts for this song, i had this beautiful vision of making something that was revengeseekerz-esque in form but very aggressively vocaloid in function, and… well, after hearing vane's original demo, i immediately knew what had to be done.

i'm honestly not even sure if we accomplished that particular fusion, but… well, not to pat our own asses, but i think we made something pretty fantastic regardless.

it's actually really hard to come up with other things to say about this song because we made it so quickly! it was another BUTCHER VANITY situation, where everything came together in the span of a couple days. i think the next demo we rendered out after this one was the entire structurally-complete song??

Vane: genuinely jamie and I were so locked in on this production. It happened so fast I can honestly barely even remember producing the song. It kind of just manifested itself. I think something might’ve taken over us to make this to be honest. In all seriousness, it was very fun to channel a lot of my favorite Vocaloid song tropes that I grew up listening to and use them in this song.

Jamie: actually one note that i will specify. as part of the "hyperpop-isms" of this song, i did put some really stupid samples in the second verse. i'd like to give a shoutout to everyone in the audience who recognized them and i'd also like to say sorry for the 500+ hours you've wasted of your life along with me. and that's as specific as i'm going to let myself get about that

rice: ah, and yes, about those mirror themes…. we're officially in the second half of the album, so let's reveal some answers!!

“Human”, which is about celebrating the birth of a new self, is reflected by “Ego Renegade Boy”, which is about mourning the death of an old self.

maybe it seems odd, in the theme of rebirth, to celebrate birth before death… but don't you think the timing of grief is an odd thing?

song art by abi | Return?