Honkai: Star Rail: Japanese schoolgirls reclaim Herta’s Kuru Kuru Kururin meme
Honkai: Star Rail’s Herta’s viral catchphrase “Kuru Kuru Kururin!” (eng: Time to Twirl!) has been growing even more popular recently, spreading outside the gaming community, with even Japanese high school girls joining in on the fun.
Herta is a character from Honkai: Star Rail, a space fantasy RPG by HoYoverse, the developer of Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact 3rd. Herta is the master of the Herta Space Station. She is a great scientist with superior intelligence but lacks empathy and is rather eccentric with her words and actions. She appears in front of the player in the form of a doll that can be controlled remotely. Her true state is unknown, but she displays a cute appearance and oddball behaviour. In the Japanese version, she is voiced by Haruka Yamazaki, who also voices Grani in Arknights.
One of Herta’s in-game lines has been particularly popular on social media recently. While attacking enemies as a party member, Herta exclaims “Kuru kuru kururin!” when launching attacks. The English version translates this line as “Time to twirl!”, but the Japanese version is essentially just Herta repeating an onomatopoeia for a spinning/twirling motion in a cute, childish way, which hypnotized users to the point of Kuru Kuru becoming a viral meme.
The Kuru Kuru meme has been popular for some time already, but recently it seems to have made its way outside of the gaming community as well. For some reason, Kuru Kuru has been claimed by Japanese high school girls, with even TikTok videos of students dancing to the Kuru Kuru song appearing.
The trend originated from a post by TikTok user @hatena_mikann. Their post uses the audio from a popular video of Herta saying “You’ve never seen a diamond this big, right? I’ll give it to you” and spinning around to the ending track of Super Mario World and combines it with a video from Splatoon 3 of a girl swinging around a Fizzy Bomb. The audio used in the post exploded in popularity for its cuteness and has been used in 15,000 videos already.
By looking at the contributions one can see that the tune is especially popular among young women and schoolgirls. Some of the videos still have a connection with the original source and consist of people drawing their favorite character against a black background and having them spin around, but a portion of the videos simply use the song for its cuteness, such as in the videos of people matching their expressions to the expressions of a cat, which is the most popular type of video. Videos of people themselves spinning to the song are unexpectedly few.
On TikTok and similar platforms, it’s not rare for music and sounds from games to become popular completely independently of their original context and become loved in their own unique way. This has previously happened with Nintendo’s OSTs such as the Coconut Mall theme song and the Koopa Troopa Dance (Related Article). The Hatsune Miku song ”Tondemo Wonderz” by Sasakure.UK also went viral due to parody videos being made of the YouTuber @SeikinTV dancing to the song. In a similar way, Kuru Kuru Kururin’s popularity also seems to have gone beyond the context of the original character and game.
According to a report by the GameAge Research Institute, Honkai: Star Rail’s user base has a considerably higher percentage of males than Genshin Impact does. Although it’s a report by a third-party organization and not the publisher of the game, it is still interesting data, as it suggests that teenage girls, who are not the primary user base, have found an element of the game to love in their own unique way.
On a side note, the original audio of Herta saying “You’ve never seen a diamond this big, right? I’ll give it to you” becomes “I’ll give you this really big diamond” when played at double speed. This shortened version of the line has become popular on its own.
Written by. Amber V based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-06-26 19:53 JST)
Ayuo Kawase
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