Tag: BanG Dream!

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch BANG DREAM YUME∞MITA – Episode 8

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the BanG Dream Yumemita column, new entries will be posted either on each Thursday an episode airs, or as soon as possible during the week thereafter.

We’re gonna take this one in reverse order, because a decent bit happens in this episode, but almost all of it—at least as far as “developing the plot”, if we want to put it that way, goes—happens at the end. Miyako has been in a foul mood more or less permanently since the events of last week’s episode, and here, it comes to a head. During a practice session, Nonoka attempts to cheer her up in her usual direct, lively fashion, and it has precisely the opposite of its intended effect. Miyako’s resentment toward the rest of the band and her frustration with herself boil over, and she has a full-on seething breakdown, where she rages at Nonoka for what she sees as a very shallow cheerfulness and at Arale and Ritsu for “pretending everything’s perfect.” Just when it seems like things have hit their nadir, Yuno abruptly joins the session and announces that she’s quitting the band. Quite the place to leave us for the next week!

As opposed to talking about the events that lead up to all of this, it’s perhaps worth evaluating Miyako’s emotional state. Miyako’s resentment has been building for a while at this point. It was introduced to us more or less as a joke way back at the start of the show where she chastised herself under her breath for making trouble for her supposed betters. It’s been gradually building since then, and at this point she both sees herself as responsible for the backlash Mugendai Mewtype have been getting online. (The concert may have technically been Viola’s idea, but Miyako was the one who proposed it to the rest of the band.) The fact that no one is openly angry with her seems to both baffle and deeply bother her, playing as it does off her mile-wide self-loathing streak. To make things worse, a phonecall from her editor earlier in the episode sees said editor offer to extend her deadlines. Even though this would almost certainly be a good idea, and the editor probably meant it completely neutrally, it contributes to the self-loathing spiral as well. Miyako feels like this is proof that she can’t handle all of this stuff at once, and she’s failed to “shine” even with her manga.

Arale and Ritsu have inadvertently perhaps made things worse as well. Earlier in the episode they agree to give Miyako some space. (Because this is Yumemita, they come up with this idea by imagining themselves as the leads in the Precure pastiche they’re both fond of.)

Is the fact that this conclusion is arrived to via a Precure pastiche a completely meaningless diversion that sidetracks the episode or a clever bit of foreshadowing that this simple idea derived from a children’s cartoon won’t work out in the often-complex real world? You decide!

Unfortunately, this seems to have just left her to seethe on her own, and made things worse. (As mentioned, she accuses them of deliberately pretending everything’s fine during her rant.) What Nonoka’s reaction will be to being told off so hard we don’t yet know, and Yuno, as always, is a bit mysterious. She claimed to be enjoying things during a rehearsal earlier in the episode, even saying that “the fun part” of being in a band is when the group’s sound starts to click, so her sudden desire to leave warrants some explanation. One also has to really feel for Arale here, who takes Miyako’s resentment pretty hard even in the early part of the episode, calling her description of Viola as her biggest fan “heartbreaking.” I also can’t imagine that she’ll feel great having seemingly caused an emotional rift by inaction. Given her past fears of causing problems by saying too much, she’s now caused one by saying too little.

This is all, more or less, where we’re at. I’ve left quite a few things out here—including Viola and Ritsu’s standoff near the start of the episode where Vi does some excellent villainous shit by going on a weird tangent about the Garden of Eden, and Ritsu admirably holds her ground despite this—because I’m trying to make these writeups breezier and less recappy. (And also because, to me, Miyako’s state of mind and the breakdown that results from it are the most pressing things about the episode.) Hopefully I’ve succeeded and this isn’t simply incoherent as a result!

I am aware, of course, that there’s been no shortage of discorse that the show is too much about Viola and her girlbossing as opposed to Mugendai Mewtype themselves.1

Despite that she’s mostly only in the opening minutes of this episode, she’s still played a crucial role in setting up these events—the concert was her idea, after all—so I doubt this episode is going to satisfy that particular crowd. (And I must stress, I don’t remotely agree. I like all of the Mewtype girls a good deal, with Arale and Miyako as my favorites, but Viola remains my favorite character in the show overall.) For those of us who are just along for the ride, I’m really quite interested to see what the fallout from this all looks like. I cannot imagine things simply snapping back to normal immediately next week.

Until then!

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

1: It’s worth noting that someone who doesn’t seem to feel this way at all is Miyako herself. Or rather, the pseudonymous VTuber that voices the character of Miyako. She’s spent the past few weeks drawing shipping art and even writing a delightfully unhinged bit of fanfiction. (Mind the Twitter link.) Of course, Miyako is not one of the writers, so you could easily wave this off as simply her playing the character on social media as well, if you were so inclined.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch BANG DREAM YUME∞MITA – Episode 4

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the BanG Dream Yumemita column, new entries will be posted either on each Thursday an episode airs, or as soon as possible during the week thereafter.

It’s an interesting move to make the first “regular” episode of BanG Dream! Yumemita as much about Ritsu and Viola as any of the girls in the actual main band, but it does make sense. Ritsu is our little lost lamb. We get further confirmation in this episode that she is, mainly, a victim under Viola’s thumb and, accordingly, Viola gets to do her whole evil vizier routine up and down the entire episode. She’s the real star of the show here, and I think she’d be thrilled to hear me say that, because in this episode we get some indication of why she does what she does.

As I said in the first impressions article, it’s fairly rare for an anime in this genre to have an out-and-out antagonist. But there are some logical extrapolations you can make from how the music industry works—especially the very online digital space that Mugendai Mewtype work in—to craft a compelling villain. Viola’s is just that she’s a complete fucking clout shark. Viola wants big views, she wants the number to go up, and she wants the attention on her specifically. Much of this episode details the brief history of the LaLaLaLaGirls, her previous group with Ritsu and Arale. (There are two other girls but, bluntly, they don’t matter. One of them is literally named “A-ko.” The only thing you need to know is that one of them was the group’s center.) This is also scaffolded with the very specific way that she wants to tailor herself for her audience. In the context of the LaGirls’ group dynamic, she’s the imouto, the cute little sister that everyone’s supposed to want to dote on. She’s pretty insistent about this from the word “go” and is all the more so when the LaGirls actually get signed to a proper agency. The contrast between this and how much of a complete snake-in-the-grass she actually is is both obvious and absolutely delicious. This is a real kind of person! I think anyone who’s on the internet enough has tangled with at least one person who puts up a paper-thin façade of obnoxiously twee cutesiness to hide an inner core of jealousy and venom. I’m not the first person who’s made jokes about Viola posting Google Docs, and I surely won’t be the last.

You know this girl runs the absolute gnarliest antiship blog you’ve ever seen in your life.

The villain cred-building reaches its apex during the episode’s climactic story beat. Where we actually see the real conversations that Viola clip-mined for the edited-together “erea01” video from the premiere. I have to admit, I actually assumed myself that Arale really was being that blunt—I didn’t think she was being mean, mind you, but it’s not crazy for someone so forthright to occasionally stick her foot in her mouth—but no, even that much isn’t true! Viola straight up “Coolsville Sucks!”‘d her. Of course, when the video actually hits the group’s page and the consequences roll in, she plays ignorant and makes with the crocodile tears, all while being absolutely thrilled just offscreen.

Did I mention that the only way she even could do any of this is that cameras were set up to film the LaGirls hanging out together basically whenever they were around each other? And that earlier in the episode, the previous center of the LaGirls mysteriously and suddenly resigns, almost as if Viola had a bunch of dirt on her too and was jealous that she wasn’t the main focus of attention on the group? (She’s definitely the main focus of her new group. Which, incidentally, the other two girls in that band seem to be just fine with Viola’s open displays of domineering behavior toward Ritsu. Birds of a feather, one supposes!)

In any case, the video results in Arale being outed from the LaGirls, and Ritsu, in a moment that seems to really haunt her, does not do anything to help or offer support. After all, Ritsu’s image within the group is that of the perfect model student, and model students, as Viola is keen to remind her, don’t associate with troublemakers. (Never mind of course that Viola is the one causing the problems. To her, the image matters much more than the reality of the situation.) The episode ends with Ritsu once again meeting Arale by chance back in the present, and attempting to apologize. But Arale, who seems understandably hurt by Ritsu’s lack of support back then, smacks her outstretched hand away. This is not something that’s going to be resolved quite that easily, it seems.

There’s more I haven’t gone into here, of course.. Yuno, for example, seems to have a hunch that something is up with Arale (she saw her and Ritsu meet up in one of last week’s episodes, so she knows something is going on) and is doing a bit of investigating near the episode’s start. The preview for next week also seems to imply that the full band might be in the same place as Viola next week, which would certainly be interesting. Viola, it must be pointed out, is obviously being set up to either undergo some sort of comeuppance or one hell of a redemption arc. I think both options are interesting, although she’s so fun as the gleefully evil fame glutton that I’d almost prefer the former. We shall see what the weeks ahead bring us.

I’m going to be keeping these Yumemita writeups pretty casual. I love the show so far, but that has more to do with it being extremely fun to watch than me necessarily thinking I have a ton of deep insightsTM to offer, so I will be keeping things breezy. See you next week, Girl Band Fans.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Enter Oblivion with BANG DREAM! AVE MUJICA

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

“Will you give me the rest of your life?”

God help us all, a short girl with blue hair is here to make her trauma everyone’s problem.

At the end of the final episode of BanG Dream! It’sMyGO!!!!!, the show was essentially hijacked. That series’ finale doesn’t really have anything to do with MyGO directly. Instead, it follows Togawa Sakiko [Takao Kanon], a cryptic, antagonistic presence for of much of that season and a former member of pre-MyGO band CRYCHIC, whose extremely messy dissolution still haunts that show’s cast. MyGO‘s finale made the argument that Sakiko, actually, was more haunted than any of them. Recruiting a supergroup of musicians from across BanG Dream‘s talent-overstuffed universe, she made them wear black lace face masks and gave them goth metal code names; Doloris for lead singer, guitarist, and childhood friend Misumi Uika [Sasaki Rico], Mortis for rhythm guitarist and also childhood friend Wakaba Mutsumi [Watase Yuzuki], Timoris for bassist Yahata Umiri [Okada Mei]—she of the famous “I’m in roughly 30 bands” screenshot—Amoris for capricious drummer Yuutenji Nyamu [Yonezawa Akane], and, finally, Oblivionis for herself, Sakiko, composing and on keyboard. It is their story, we’ve been promised, that BanG Dream! Ave Mujica will tell us.

Thus so established, Sakiko joined a long lineage of real and fictional masked musicians. From Slipknot to Daft Punk, from MF DOOM to KISS. Her reason for adopting a mask is, at its heart, the same as many real musicians who do so: a rejection of her “real” face allows her to become lost in persona, the old self subsumed into a dramatic, shadow-casting new self. A puppetmaster in a near-literal sense, given how her stage shows involve so much doll imagery. Welcome to her beautiful dark twisted fantasy, right?

Wrong. A driving theme here is that Sakiko is not nearly as in control of any of this—not her band, not her life—as she’d like to be. Most of this first episode, aside from Ave Mujica’s killer performance of opening theme “KILLxKISS” at the start, an interview immediately after where there is some tension between Sakiko and Nyamu, and a sequence at the end, is flashback.

Here, we learn a little about Sakiko’s life. The usage of traditional animation for some of these flashbacks is interesting. Readers may recall that Girls Band Cry used a similar technique to similar ends; to emphasize an idealization of these moments, to underscore that we’re not necessarily seeing them as they really were but rather how they felt. Ave Mujica, befitting its goth theater kid vibe, hammers the point home further by also drowning the earliest, still mostly happy memories in an amber sepia filter. More memories follow, and these get no filter and no flat animation; we learn how Sakiko’s mother died suddenly, tragically young. We see her inspired to found a band for the first time after seeing BanG Dream! veterans Morfonica in a small concert. We briefly retrace the rise and fall of CRYCHIC, Sakiko’s father losing his high-paying job at his own father-in-law’s company, and his collapsing into a broken drunk. Sakiko’s struggles to find some kind of job—any kind of job—to make ends meet for herself and her father. We relitigate CRYCHIC’s breakup, this time from Sakiko’s perspective and with a whole lot more crying in the rain, making it clear that leaving the band was just as painful for Sakiko as it was for anyone else. At one point, later in the episode and back in the present day, her father chucks a beer can at her face, giving her a noticeable bruise, and tells her to leave the house. Sakiko can’t take any of this. Thus, the mask.

All of this theater, mind you, lasts for less than a single full episode. On the stage before Ave Mujica are set to give a performance to their largest audience yet, Amoris promptly torches the entire thing, tossing her mask off and unmasking the rest of the band’s members in short order, underscoring both her status as the cast’s wildcard and her general lack of patience for Sakiko’s theatrics. There is something genuinely bold about undoing your characters’ central gimmick right at the end of the first episode, but it only matters so much. It’s true that the audience now knows of Ave Mujica’s civilian identities, but the real masks are something much less material than the flimsy lace that Amoris chucks on the ground.

The command of drama throughout this first episode is superb, but it’s fair to say that where any of this will go is still very much up in the air. Ave Mujica is a theater kid at heart, it lives and breathes drama, and drama, as we’ve seen in anime like MyGO, or, to name an even darker example something like Oshi no Ko, can keep the fire burning for a long, long time. But not forever! This upturning of a core component of the band’s—and thus the show’s—mythos is a promising start, but I do hope we get some actual character growth here, in one way or another. Sakiko’s awful home life is another factor that I do hope the show explores. It’d definitely be a lot more interesting than another rehash of the usual commercialism vs. authenticity stuff, which some of Nyamu’s antics can’t help but bring to mind, given that she’s an influencer off-stage. (Any commentary along those lines is doomed to fail anyway. Ave Mujica are a lot of things, and they make great music, but they’re not any kind of “authentic,” in-universe or out.)

That’s all hypotheticals though. The real nitpick as of now is in the subtitling. What would a girl band anime release be without bitching about the subtitles? I’m only going to touch on this, since other people have already pointed out the obvious, but Crunchyroll’s subtitles for this first episode are notably subpar, stilted in places and lacking song translations. Hopefully this will be fixed at some point, to say the least. Regardless of this glaring issue, which isn’t really even the show’s own fault, I’ve left the first episode confident that we’re in for a hell of a ride, episode 2’s title, Exitus acta probat, “the outcome justifies the deed”, is hugely promising. 11 more weeks of this! Strap in.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit: The Empathy of Invitation in Episode 3 of BANG DREAM! IT’S MYGO!!!!!

Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.

Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

Well, I did not expect to be covering this.

BanG Dream is foreign territory to me. I’m vaguely aware of the general contours of the series, both in terms of its anime adaptations and the mobile game that I believe (I’m not double-checking, so if I’m wrong you’ll have to forgive me) is the original spawning point for all this. Before two days ago, I’d never seen a single second of any of the BanG Dream anime. A friend* convinced me to give the most recent season a whirl, and I was assured it’s legible to newcomers. To be honest, I was a little resistant, mostly because It’s MyGO!!!!!, as it’s called, made the decision to drop its first three episodes as a single bundle, an increasingly-common practice that I remain undecided on where I stand in relation to.

The show, on the whole, is perfectly fine. Episodes 1 and 2 did not exactly knock my socks off, hence this being an Anime Orbit article and not a First Impressions article (although I might file it under both archives anyhow) but I thought they were pleasant enough, if maybe populated with a little too much melodrama that’s not quite to my taste. Anon [Rin Tateishi, in what appears to be her debut role], who serves as the lead for those episodes, is a fun character, being weirdly pushy and inconsiderate in a way that the show neither condemns nor glosses over but which propels the story forward in a nicely economical fashion.

More interesting than her though—at least to me—is another of the characters, who episode 3 focuses on, and in fact, takes place entirely from the perspective of. Yes, for 22 unbroken minutes, we inhabit the POV of Tomori [Hina Youmiya]. Some people will, I suspect, learn some things from this episode. Others, like myself, will already know deeply and intuitively the emotional territory explored here. The series doesn’t use the term, but Tomori is very obviously neurodivergent, and I feel comfortable going the extra step and calling her autistic. The episode inhabiting her viewpoint is, then, an exercise in empathy-as-invitation. It explains to us, without her ever saying all that much, what the show’s world and characters mean to her. She doesn’t need to say anything, we get to see it directly.

I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call the episode “important,” but it is a remarkably successful exercise. We start with her as a small child, where we see that she is more concerned with collecting rocks and “things that roll” than she is in directly socializing with other kids. (There’s a bit where she tries to give a would-be friend a bunch of pill bugs as a gift because she thinks they’re cute. This doesn’t work out as planned.)

As we see her go through life, she feels a distinct disjunct from other people. Sometimes we have to intuit that disconnection from the episode’s visual language—where Tomori often feels “crowded out” by other characters—and other times we see her diary, where she writes about this feeling in those words exactly. She’s on a different wavelength from most other people, and is keenly aware of it.

I should here pause the recap to disclose something. I myself am neurodivergent, but I will admit that I have ADHD rather than autism itself (the two are presently considered to be part of the same spectrum of alternate neurologies, and are often found together. As far as I know, I am not also autistic, although given my current material situation I’ll never be able to get tested, in any case), which might change how I read some of this.

Nonetheless, to me, this sequence of events comes across not as pitying Tomori, which would be condescending, but as simply trying to get as inside her head as possible. Even neurotypical teenagers often deal with feelings of loneliness and isolation, so when Tomori can’t connect to her peers, her loneliness feels immediate and real.

The good news is that she’s not alone for the whole episode. Tomori’s first real friend is Sakiko [Takao Kanon], who she develops a connection with after the latter sees her reaching out for a flower over a bridge and gets the mistaken notion that she’s trying to jump off. Sakiko is taken with Tomori, and her habit of collecting things (which as she grows expands to include a color-sorted crate of notebooks she uses as diaries, among other things), and after rather rudely riffling through one of her journals, finds what she assumes to be song lyrics. Tomori doesn’t correct her, and this misunderstanding is the predication on which the two eventually form a band, CRYCHIC. Tomori, naturally, as the “songwriter”, is also drafted as the vocalist.

Despite the obvious problems with this idea (and the notion that she’s kind of being yanked around, which, as a point of criticism, the episode never entirely gets past), she rolls with it, and eventually does start writing actual song lyrics. In a school performance that we see only glimpses of, Tomori floors her school’s student body.

This kind of thing, where a shy wallflower “comes out of her shell”, is a pretty typical story template for this genre of course, but MyGo!!!!! deserves full marks for making this all feel believable in such a short span of time. Indeed, the episode could itself be considered the same kind of plea for empathy that Tomori writes in her lyrics. It’s an interesting way of making you actually feel the journey of these five people, who initially have basically nothing in common aside from a vague desire to form a band, to a believably warm friend group.

But if it ended there, that would probably be too tidy. The other side to all this is that, in the aftermath of the concert, Sakiko suddenly loses interest in the band and stops coming to practice (possibly because of rude internet comments or something, it’s not entirely clear at this point). When she finally shows up again, Tomori makes an accidentally insensitive comment, and that’s that; CRYCHIC are no more. What the show really succeeds at getting across here is that sickly lightning bolt of shell-shock, where Tomori (who, again, is our POV character) can definitely tell that she said something that she shouldn’t have but can’t really think of any way to rectify the situation. And, well, ask anyone who’s been there; people are not nice to non-neurotypical people when they make fuck ups like that. Sakiko is angry, the band’s drummer, Taki [Coco Hayashi] eventually becomes very protective of Tomori. The rest of CRYCHIC mostly just seem hurt and confused.

This is all a very complicated situation, and the episode ends on that unresolved note, as the rest of the series takes place some time later (this episode is, in addition to everything else, essentially backstory for Tomori and the other ex-CRYCHIC girls). Tomori openly says that she feels incomplete somehow, an emotional beat that just absolutely punched yours truly dead in the gut. Her new school in general doesn’t seem kind to Tomori, and the show’s actual description notes that in-universe she’s given the not-very-nice nickname of “Honoeka’s Weirdo.” So the episode just ends there! With Tomori alone again. It’s a rough scene, one I’ve literally lived through, and it’s only the implicit promise that things will get better that makes this come off as realistically sad rather than a complete downer. That’s a hard thing to pull off.

It’s hard to say how, precisely, things will improve for Tomori and the other former CRYCHIC girls. But I’m confident that they will, simply because this episode is so intent on wholly inhabiting her as a character. Compassion this immediate doesn’t happen by accident, it has to be actively worked for.

*hi Josh

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.