Friday, 29 March 2024

Vivi-kun

 It isnt that hard to figure out where this fella gets his name. V.Varen's mascot is named "Vivi" . . . or should that be spelled "V.V." The question, however, is what on earth Vivi is supposed to be. The club adopted the Nagasaki prefectural bird -- the Mandarin Duck -- as its symbol way back in 2005, and V.Varen has been proudly wearing the nickname "The Mighty Ducks" ever since. However, when it came time to actually design a mascot to represent the team, something went terribly wrong.

Not that Vivi-kun is a "bad" mascot. On the contrary, he ticks all the boxes in terms of cuteness, colour and uniqueness. However, as anyone can clearly see, there is some sort of confusion about Vivi's parentage. For reasons that are not easy to explain, somebody was unhappy with the choice of a duck, and wanted the Nagasaki mascot to be a deer, instead. Maybe the team looked at Kashima Antlers' history of success in the J.League and decided that the team might do better if the mascot had horns on its head. In typical Japanese fashion, rather than choosing one design or the other, the compromise was to fuse a duck with a deer, and then give him the short, squat body of the cartoon mice Pixie and Dixie.

 Vivi is not the only example of genetic engineering run amok. Just look at Kataller Toyama's mascot, for example. Lets just hope that Vivi and Raika never run into each other at a postmatch party. The potential results are frightening to consider.


Old Uniforms

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2008 (H) 2008 (A) 2010 (H) 2010 (A) 2012 (H) 2012 (A)
2013 (H) 2013 (A) 2014 (H) 2014 (A) 2015 (H) 2015 (A)
2016 (H) 2016 (A) 2017 (H) 2017 (A) 2018 (H) 2018 (A)
2018 (夏) 2019 (H) 2019 (A) 2019 (夏) 2020 (H) 2020 (A)
2021 (H) 2021 (A) 2022 (H) 2022 (A) 2022 (夏) 2023 (H)