Tag: Mugendai Mewtype

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 7

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.

Last week’s episode left us off with the idea that Mugendai Mewtype might be putting on a live show. This week, we open with that liveshow, both confirming that it happened and that Viola’s scheming is going according to plan. Regardless of the reason—in universe or out—this is a solid decision. It gives some spotlight to Mugendai Mewtype’s actual sound—the show’s normal OP is a bit atypical for them and, as many commenters on its official Youtube upload have been keen to point out, sounds a little like Unison Square Garden—and gives the animation team an excuse to cut loose. We get a lot of fun posing and giddy expressions here. Also a lot of headbanging, which is a bit funny considering the computery dance-rock that Mewtype actually make. In particular though, it’s mainly just a nice excuse to hear Arale’s singing voice, which is quite lovely, and which we’ve had rather few chances to actually sit with yet so far in Yumemita. Being their first proper performance in the show, this sequence also gets to show off Arale’s visual gimmick of singing into a giant day-glo megaphone, something the animation takes full advantage of here.

I admit that I’m not as much of a fan of Mugendai Mewtype’s actual music as I am of their immediate predecessors MyGO and Ave Mujica, but it’s a sound they own pretty well, and the fact that the lyrics for both of these songs are outright defiant should not be written off as coincidence. In-universe, these are Arale’s songs and presumably Arale’s feelings. If we were going to wedge some performances in before things really start going off the rails, around now—halfway into the season—makes sense.

The band themselves seem pretty satisfied with the whole thing, too. Especially Arale, who spends much of the rest of the episode totally over the moon. Now, what goes mentioned only briefly at the start here is that a lot of the attention that Mugendai Mewtype get from that concert is not positive. Still, this detail aside, as a collective, Mewtype spend much of the rest of the episode walking on air. This especially noticeable in the case of Ritsu who, previously seen mostly in the context of being pushed around by Viola seemed rather quiet and withdrawn. Here, she’s actually revealed to be quite the goofball, and she’s got an impressive appetite too. (A brief gag where she and Arale go out for snacks after the concert and Ritsu’s “snack” is a massive foot-long corn dog is genuinely an excellent character detail but, also, where did she get that? Can you just get those at any old corner shop in Japan? I have so many questions.)

Another member of Mugendai Mewtype who’s all fired up after the concert is Miyako. She gets her next manga manuscript turned in two days early and spends some time imagining Viola making shoujo manga faces at her.

One wonders how many times she’s had this exact thought bubble between the last episode and this one.

Of course, things don’t last.

Miyako is the first to find out about just how bad the backlash to Mugendai Mewtype. The idea seems to be that while comments during the concert itself were mixed, they’ve really gone out of control since it ended. She takes Arale to a cafe’ (the same one she and Viola met at last week, in fact) to express her concerns over all of this, saying that she’s even been getting rude replies under ordinary day-to-day posts. Arale, meanwhile, has largely been oblivious to all of this, between trying to get her hands on Miyako’s manga and palling around with Ritsu. Even when it’s explained to her what’s going on, she seems to take it pretty well, and it seems for a moment like things might work out fine.

And then, naturally, Viola walks in. Things escalate, Arale storms out, dragging Miyako with her, and she starts absolutely laying into Viola. Cathartic as this may be for some members of the audience, we have to remember that Miyako only met Viola recently, and as far as she knows, Viola is a perfectly innocent fan of her work and also someone that Miyako is clearly crushing really hard on. So, when Arale leaps to accusations, Viola leaps to her defense, and the entire thing ends on a very uncertain note, with a rift developing in the band between Arale and Miyako.

Viola makes this face while Miyako is defending her honor, because of course she does.

This may all seem like Viola being a master manipulator at work, and she definitely has lined the dominoes up just so, but really her plan isn’t actually as complex as it might first appear. She’s been playing off of Miyako’s insecurities (and flattering the hell out of her) since they met, so Miyako being defensive of her isn’t surprising. Nor is it surprising that, when Arale blows up Viola, just straight up calling her a liar to her face, Viola can just turn the crocodile tears on and watch Miyako jump to her defense, driving a possibly-permanent wedge into the band. It’s one of the show’s great writing tricks that through all of this, Viola doesn’t really do much of anything. She lies and bullies, for sure, but it’s more in the way of turning people into their own worst enemies than anything else.

This is insidious in its own way, of course. The “push someone’s buttons on purpose until they blow up so you can act like the victim when they start yelling” tactic is a classic, and I’m certainly not the only person watching this show who’s had it used on them in the past. This is all part of why Viola is such an effective antagonist and is so lovably hateable. Oh, and as this whole scene ends, she’s revealed to have been recording the entire exchange, which is presumably going to blow up later. (Okay, so maybe she does do some things. Even then, this is another example of Viola’s schemes mostly working due to her being observant of other peoples’ flaws. It would not be hard to anticipate Arale blowing up here.)

The episode ends with the revelation that Ritsu has transferred to Arale’s class! We get an opportunity to end on a small joke here as Ritsu’s backpack is revealed to be absolutely overflowing with snacks, and on that sugary note, we end an otherwise very emotionally up-and-down episode. 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

Let’s Watch BANG DREAM YUME∞MITA – Episode 6

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 open this week’s episode with a dose of surprising realism. Yeah, Arale pulling Ritsu away from the concert wasn’t the most sensible thing in the world, for sure, but going by what we see here, it seems the groups’ management staffs are working on the fallout of the incident with each other. This is what Mugendai Mewtype’s manager tells Arale, at any rate. (Incidentally, this episode is the first time we get to ever see what she looks like in the show’s real world. All I will say about this is that I am heartbroken we don’t get to see that design more often.)

What I mean by that is that I think she’s attractive.

This leads to Arale apologizing to her bandmates, and there’s an absolutely delightful little sequence where Arale becomes a volleyball in VR and the rest of Mugendai Mewtype spike her back and forth as she says sorry. She eventually hits Miyako in the face, of course. For a minute, it seems like everything might be resolved just like that.

Still, she knows Viola is still a problem. She makes herself sift through nasty tweets to get a sense of what the public thinks of the situation, and, predictably, between the unexpectedness of the incident itself and Viola’s crocodile tears, everyone blames “Erea.” Bummed out but not defeated, she resolves to face whatever comes next head on, and interestingly we here break into a flashback to some time before the events of the series. The timeframe being some point after the video that got Arale booted from the LaGirls came out.

We see her struggling to cover a song from that magical girl anime she likes. Despite a lot of struggle, she eventually does, and she takes the comments she gets from sharing it—praise and criticism alike—to heart. The flashback ends with an email reaching out to Arale, saying she has potential as a singer. Presumably, this was the recruitment email for Mugendai Mewtype. There’s something interesting and a bit subtle going on here; now that she’s away from the immediate panic of the moment, and now that she and Ritsu have each others’ back, Arale seems to gain a level of resolve we haven’t really seen from her up to this point, and she confidently declares that this time, she’ll fight back for real!

The next day, she spends some time with Miyako, who can tell she’s deep in thought but can’t really think of any condolences or reassurances to offer, so the two split after spending some time together at a manga shop. Just when it seems like the episode might pass without any DramaTM, we come to the most important part of any episode of BanG Dream Yumemita: Viola doing some shit.

After Miyako and Arale part ways, Miyako is approached by a starstruck fan on the street. Except it’s not a starstruck fan, it’s Viola. Miyako, who (somewhat ironically) just doesn’t seem to really be online in that particular way, doesn’t recognize her from the ongoing drama or from her group. She does, however, think she’s incredibly pretty, and spends the rest of the conversation getting full-combo’d by Viola’s natural charms. It’s a bit lopsided, as far as such things go, and Miyako spends the remainder of the episode with her head in the clouds over having such a beautiful fan. (Her manga is apparently doing well, too, so she’s over the moon about that as well.) In fact, Viola spends much of the rest of the episode essentially seducing Miyako. The next day, she runs into her (waiting for her deliberately, more likely) and woos her by quoting Miyako’s own manga back at her. (Sidebar; there’s no fucking way she read that for any reason other than to do this, right? Viola does not strike me as a closet otaku.) Still not content, she also takes her to a swanky cafe’. Miyako doesn’t pick up on it, but Viola says something pretty interesting here, basically saying that she resents brilliant and beautiful things if she can’t control them, but loves them if she can.

Given what we know of how she treated Ritsu, there’s some truth to that. But again, Miyako is at this point so head over heels that she doesn’t pick up on anything, you know, red-flaggy about these statements. Instead, Viola steers the discussion back to Miyako, and mentions wanting to see her shine in a live show.

We don’t know if they’ll actually get to do that live show, however. Back in VR, the manager tells everyone that Ritsu will be joining Mugendai Mewtype. Evidently, the groups’ respective managers worked this out, although she acknowledges that this will make it look like Mewtype poached Ritsu from Fairy Bouquet. Arale is a bit frustrated at all this, and—well-meaning as ever—wants an opportunity to seize control of the narrative. Miyako, of course, suggests a live show.

Now the obvious thing for the show to do here would be to reveal that everyone is going along with this and a show is on the way posthaste, but that doesn’t actually happen. The manager explains that a live show at this point will just make everyone look worse, and that messaging is harder than Arale thinks. The episode thus ends on a bit of an uncertain note, as we don’t know whether the live show is happening or not. Still, despite everything, including Viola just straight up seducing Miyako, this is an overall lighter episode than the previous couple, filled with goofy pull faces and Arale hyping herself up. Overall, I think it indicates that the power of music might be able to pull through for our heroines after all, even if it’ll take some serious doing to actually get us there. The preview for next week describes Mugendai Mewtype’s “battle” as “just beginning”, so with that in mind, I’ll see you then, 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, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch BANG DREAM YUME∞MITA – Episode 5

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 open this week with Arale down in the dumps. As we saw in last week’s episode, Ritsu tried to reach out to her, and Arale quite literally slapped her hand away. She feels bad, because she knows her friend is in trouble, but doesn’t really think she can do anything about it. This is also affecting her time with Mugendai Mewtype, and she’s so checked out that she doesn’t even sign into the VR program the other girls are using properly, instead being relegated to a flat square with a picture of her and the words “SOUND ONLY” written on it. She pops in for a few perfunctory moments before bouncing. The situation is clear; Arale is really banged up about this whole situation.

Elsewhere in town, Ritsu is streaming, and, crucially, when she goes to stop streaming, she’s distracted by one of Viola’s nasty little texts and actually forgets to properly turn the stream off. She then plays Arale’s song from their LaGirls days, and absent-mindedly mutters “Arale-chan…” out loud to herself, as one does when they are a forlorn yearning lesbian. Viola being Viola, is watching the stream elsewhere and immediately hatches a plot to turn this little incident into more numbers for Fairy Bouquet, the new girl group that she, Ritsu (as Clematis), and two other girls going by Popo and Bell have since formed. (F.B. have been around since the beginning of the show, but this is the first episode where they’re truly plot relevant as a unit. And, in fact, their scene here where Popo, Bell, and Viola are at some kind of…rooftop pool place? demonstrates that they’re both actively complicit in Viola’s behavior toward Ritsu, since it’s Popo who tells Viola about the stream and describes it as her “doing something interesting.”)

Fast forward to Fairy Bouquet’s first in-person event a few days later, and Arale, still depressed and also very frazzled after an incident with Nonoka earlier in the day, finds herself near the event, by total coincidence. Seized by some inner desire to, we must suppose, do the right thing, she actually enters. Unfortunately, Viola spies her in the crowd, and things very quickly go off the rails in the episode’s second half as she calls her out by name and Popo and Bell (who I suppose in addition to being the other two members of Fairy Bouquet are also Viola’s little personal Team Rocket) promptly grab her and shuffle her onstage.

Viola’s little scheme here appears to be to squeeze Arale into panicking in front of the crowd, and if that is the case, then it certainly works out pretty well for her. She frames Arale and Ritsu’s “reunion” to the audience as making up after a fight. (That anyone in the crowd would buy any of this strains credulity, but for someone like Viola who seems to largely just want to be the center of attention, any publicity is good publicity. Gotta turn everything into #content, after all.)

What she may or may not have anticipated is that Arale’s reaction—after freezing up in front of the crowd, at least—is to pull Ritsu offstage and straight up run away. (That she reacts to this by probably-fake-crying tells me she at least thought this might happen and is going to spin it to her own ends.)

In spite of how obviously bad an idea this is, it does make Ritsu remember her admiration for Arale. A small sequence of Arale briefly losing her grip on Ritsu’s hand, only to snatch it again, is a legitimately sweet moment, regardless of anything else. It has also been pointed out to me (by a friend*, I can’t claim to have noticed this on my own) that, interestingly, it is a nearly shot-for-shot mirror of the whole “lost girls” scene from It’s MyGO!!!!!

Ritsu and Arale spend some time talking as the episode comes to a close, and despite Arale putting herself down, Ritsu recognizes her old friend acting to help her. (And, she says, more like how Arale used to be.) It’s nice to see Ritsu being assertive, too, assuring Arale that regardless of what happens from this point on, they’ll figure it out. It’s touching! And a great way to end the episode! Except for the fact that the final shot, as it zooms out and crops in, goes up in CGI flames, pretty directly implying that things are going to get worse before they’re fully resolved. (Which only makes sense, we’re just nearing the halfway point of the series now.)

If you wanted to say that there was a problem with Yumemita that it needs to solve—I don’t think this, but some might—it could, perhaps, be with Viola. The show’s narrative frames her as almost an abusive girlfriend sort of figure, keeping Ritsu under her thumb not just because she’s a sadist (although she’s that, too) but for the sake of controlling Ritsu. What the show has yet to provide is any deeper reason that she does this. Whether it be some underlying trauma, being treated like this herself at one point, whatever it may be. So far, it really seems like she just is that way because that’s how she is. I don’t personally consider this a huge problem, but it’s definitely a different style of character writing than what fans who hopped onto BanG Dream with MyGO and its sequel may be expecting, so if it loses some people because of this I do more or less understand why.

Still, I cannot stress enough that the above does not describe me. I’ve seen more than one person observe that at this point, the show is more about the trio of Arale, Ritsu, and Viola than it is about Mugendai Mewtype as a band. (Plot elements about the latter have largely been relegated to the margins at the start of each episode.) This would be frustrating, perhaps, were Arale, Ritsu, and Viola not extremely compelling characters. But they are! And three weeks in, I have not gotten remotely tired of Viola’s cackling villain shtick, even if I’m as curious as to what deeper reasons she may have for her actions as anyone. (In particular her seemingly almost compulsive need for attention is very interesting, as is the whole imouto image she attempted to cultivate for herself as part of the LaGirls and indeed still seems to. I do think the show will probably address these points at least, in some form or another, so in the final estimation the character writing may not be as different from the prior two BanG Dream seasons as it first appears.) The flames closing the final scene, and the next-episode preview, both imply that Viola is not remotely done Viola-ing yet, which I can only say that I’m extremely looking forward to. Even the series’ promotional materials have gotten in on it, and I will end this week’s writeup by making you all aware of this promotional video, uploaded to the official Mugendai Mewtype account earlier today. It is, essentially, a 30 second compilation of some of the best Viola Moments from the series so far, and features a truly deranged, vore-tastic promotional image as its thumbnail. I don’t know where we’re going with all this, but I am very much still here for the ride

*Hi Astro 🙂

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, 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: BANG DREAM YUME∞MITA Is Out of This World

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.

2026 has been, to undersell it, a strong year for anime thus far. But if we’ve been missing anything, it might be the girl band renaissance that’s consistently been a highlight of the medium’s last few years. A year-ish since the last major show of this genre is not, by any means, a drought, but it felt like we were absolutely swimming in them for a little while, so it can feel like an absence regardless. If you’ve been feeling that way, fear not, the drought is over; Mugendai Mewtype are here. BanG Dream! Yume∞Mita (which I will be spelling without the infinity symbol interpunct, cool as it is, from this point onward) is the latest entry in that longrunning series. It dropped with a gargantuan three-part premiere earlier today, because, well, of course it did. BanG Dream season waits for no one.

Mugendai Mewtype are a bit of an oddity within BanG Dream on the whole, however. This anime is absolutely accessible to anyone who’s not been following them for years—they’ve been active in some form or another since 2022—but it is nonetheless notable that this thing was only made after a retooling of their overall concept. (My very limited understanding, as someone who is a casual BanG Dream fan at best, is that they were originally mostly a VTuber outfit and only became an actual live band later. This anime was, presumably, conceived somewhere after that point.) As such, Mewtype are underdogs of a sort, so it’s nice to see them getting their own story.

As for what that story is like, I’m going to actually flip my usual script here and talk about the style and tone of the series first, and save the actual plot for the bottom half of this article. Worth mentioning, more than anything, with this multipart premiere, is the show’s extremely expressive visual style. A far cry from the frozen and elegant gothica of Ave Mujica, its immediate predecessor, Yumemita is a cartoon-ass cartoon. Characters bend and stretch to express contentment or shock, other art styles or locations are beamed in for a few seconds for comedic effect, the works. I would go so far as saying that off these three episodes alone it really gives Girls Band Cry a run for its money in terms of being one of the most visually impressive 3DCGI anime to date, not just within its genre but outside it as well. The colors are, similarly and once again in contrast to Ave Mujica, brighter than a fresh lightbulb and more colorful than a pack of Skittles, extremely vibrant and practically radiating off of the screen. Ultimately this is the sort of thing you need to see to truly appreciate, but if my recommendation is worth anything I can safely say that the anime is worth watching for its visuals alone.

From this, you might surmise that Yumemita is on the lighter end of the tonal spectrum. You’d be correct to! Overall, this is a pointedly less heavy affair than the previous two BanG Dream anime have been. That’s not to say there are no stakes (there are, and there’s one delightfully glowering exception to everything I’m about to say that we’ll get to), but there is, for example, no long-simmering backstory involving—spoilers for those two shows, by the way—parental abuse or incestuous niece/aunt romantic pining. Yumemita is thus perhaps more in line with a “normal” BanG Dream anime, if what I’ve seen of the first season is representative. But this isn’t a show content to rest on its laurels. In its more straightforward moments, Yumemita experiments visually, as previously outlined. In its more serious ones, it turns that experimentation toward something more tense. It manages to pull this shift off with surprising ease, and the show’s few (few so far, at least) darker moments read more as deliberate contrast than lack of cohesion.

It’s worth taking a detour to discuss one further aspect of the presentation; the subtitles. Mostly, they’re fine, but seem to be strictly single-line, meaning there are a couple of cases where lines aren’t subbed because they’re spoken under another, usually longer, set of dialog. (There’s a particularly annoying instance of this in the third episode.) In a few cases, pretty important-looking text messages aren’t translated at all. This doesn’t majorly impact the show’s basic comprehensibility in the same way that Ave Mujica‘s truly busted official subs did, but it’s still annoying, and it feels like we’re missing a bit of nuance, and it’s aggravating to have to take time out of so many premiere writeups I do just to note that the subs are scuffed. This may be another one where the wait for fansubs is worthwhile, but I don’t think the officials are bad enough to wave anyone away from entirely. It will come down to personal preference, in the end.

Speaking of the show’s writing, Yumemita also has an exceptional command of comedy, and I’d in fact say that were it not for the aforementioned exceptions you could get away with just calling the series a comedy outright. (As-is it’s more of a dramedy.) Much of this revolves around Arale1, our main protagonist, vocalist of Mugendai Mewtype, and owner of a truly impressive mile-a-minute motormouth that she tries and often fails to keep a lid on. Bandmates Nonoka, a happy, bunny-coded airhead that serves as the group’s guitarist, and Miyako, a mangaka who also does illustrations for Mewtype and is their keyboardist, get their fair share of jokes in, too, however. Final group member Yuno, Mewtype’s DJ and general doodad manipulator, is essentially the group’s collective straight man and is more a subject of comedy than anything else.

(From left to right: Yuno, Arale, Miyako, and Nonoka, rocking out while singing the OP)

With all this said, the actual plot of the show is an interesting beast in its own right, and we shouldn’t discard it. In premise, Mugendai Mewtype’s actual formation is extremely straightforward. Our heroines were individually-successful creators in their own right—Nonoka livestreams, Miyako has her manga and illustrations, Yuno both contributes songwriting and composition to other artists’ projects and was in a previous band of her own, and Arale was also in a previous musical group (a different one, it should be stressed). As would be expected of people who meet as part of, essentially, a business arrangement, none of the Mewtype girls directly knew each other before the events of the first episode, and it feels safe to say that none of them are on the same page. (Although some of them were at least aware of each other. Arale in particular fangirls to hell and back over Miyako’s manga.) In fact, none of them really seemed to know that they were going to be in a band together as such at all. Especially not Miyako, who explicitly simply didn’t read the terms of her contract. (Get a lawyer to go over these things, kids!) Worth mentioning here is also the band’s manager, a horrible little voxel FunkoPop thing, because the band’s actual meetings, you see, occur entirely within something akin to VRChat.

The main point-of-view character for most of these three episodes is Arale herself. Arale’s past experiences with online fame lead to her to be, to put it nicely, a little neurotic about how she acts around other people. Constantly, over the course of the premiere, she wants to say something but doesn’t, or can’t stop herself from saying something that she doesn’t want to. In neither case do either of these cause much issue for Arale in the present at least, but they clearly embarrass her and she spends most of the premiere trying to worm her way out of having to sing as part of Mugendai Mewtype at all. (In fact, in a commonality with the MyGo/Ave Mujica trilogy-to-be, there’s pretty much no actual music in this first trio of episodes aside from the OP and ED themes.) Especially early on when speaking to her IRL schoolmates, she only says a few words out loud while an entire internal monologue plays over top and, indeed, is what’s actually subtitled.

Arale gets up to quite a few antics over the course of these first three episodes, but trying to avoid singing (especially in front of anyone) is her main thing at the moment.

Why? Well, as mentioned, Arale used to be part of a different group. The LaLa Girls, as they were known, were together for a while until they weren’t. We don’t know all the details, but one thing is quite clear: a video of Arale talking shit about both her bandmates and some other, unrelated people was leaked on their Youtube page, and our girl got very cancelled. We first learn of this when she runs into two of her former bandmates. Ritsu, who really seems to miss her and want to reconnect with her, and Viola2 [Kaede Hondo], who is, even in just her brief screentime here, a magnetic presence who seems very determined to make sure that doesn’t happen. Both are part of a new band with a flower theme, we don’t know a ton about them (or there other two members) yet, but it seems like they’ll be an important presence here.

(From left to right: Bell, Viola, Ritsu aka Clematis, and Popo)

Earlier, I mentioned that this series has a largely fairly light atmosphere compared to the last two BanG Dream anime. That’s mostly true, I mentioned an exception, that would be Viola and her general role in this story. Arale has a flashback / bad dream at the start of the second episode that really makes it seem like she’s in the wrong with the whole “leaked video” thing. But a good chunk of Viola’s dialog, and her weird, touchy-feely actions while speaking to Arale (including petting her hair and talking about how she looked better with twintails), definitely imply something weird going on. This comes to its head at the premiere’s conclusion, in a post-credits scene after the third episode. Here, she pretty heavily implies that she either somehow set Arale up, or kept the video in her pocket as a weapon the entire time. Ritsu, in particular, seems very uncomfortable with all of this, and Viola is clearly keeping her under her thumb by threatening to hurt Arale even further unless Ritsu cuts contact. She goes on a monologue here that is just pure cartoon supervillain shit; she strings together a speech about how human civilization rose because the first humans weren’t afraid of fire and how it only takes one spark to set something alight. If she didn’t draw attention to it herself, you could easily miss that this is pretty much entirely just wordplay riffing on the term “getting flamed online.” The performance from her voice actress, the permanent cat smile plastered across her face, and the deployment of the show’s SD squishiness to highlight just how much sadistic joy she’s taking in this all serve to make her almost outlandishly EEEEEEVIIIIIIILLLLL. The only thing she’s missing is an ojou laugh and a threat to kick someone’s dog. It’s quite a contrast from the rest of the show! Arale, in spite of her past mistakes, is trying to better herself and most of the interpersonal issues between Mugendai Mewtype themselves seem comparatively minor! So this is all a bit of a twist, for certain.

It’s not necessarily the only thing in this premiere to suggest some darker directions this series may take—Miyako has an entire subplot about pushing herself to the brink of exhaustion to juggle the band and her existing job as a mangaka, for example—but it’s by far the most obvious.

This is, of course, still nowhere near the kind of hair-raising stuff that happens in, especially, the later parts of Ave Mujica, but the tonal pivot is pulled off with such finesse that’s easy to forget that this is the same show where, an episode earlier, Arale and Nonoka lure Miyako into talking to them by scattering a bunch of candy on the ground in front of her. Or, indeed, earlier in this same episode that same pair of characters convince themselves that Yuno is secretly a highly-advanced AI and try to trick her into revealing herself by making her solve captchas and shit. (This gets a hell of a punchline a couple minutes later where it’s shown that, while Yuno herself is not a robot, she’s perfectly happy to use ChatGPT to reply to Nonoka’s incessant text messages. Ouch.)

Suffice to say, if Yumemita wants to make a more permanent pivot to darker material, it has the tools to do so even if the material in question is a bit different in presentation than that of other recent BanG Dream entries. Viola is being set up as an outright antagonist, and not a ton of band girl anime actually have those! Usually, a character in that position has sympathetic motives of their own, and while it’s very possible that something like that will eventually happen with Viola as well, nothing here telegraphs that at all. So far, she just really seems like a possessive, sadistic bitch! It’s honestly really compelling! If in part, admittedly, because it’s such a contrast to the goofball shit in the rest of the premiere.

Still, I’d hasten to say that I don’t think these two halves of the show contradict each other in any way, either. If the past few years of BanG Dream anime have proven anything, it’s that the wild risks these shows take tend to pay off. I am here for this, and you should be, too.

1: Normally, this is where I credit voice actors. However, to my understanding, all of the Mewtype girls are just credited as the characters themselves in all BanG Dream projects. This seems weird to me! but it’s how they do things with this particular part of the project, for whatever reason. If I had to take a random guess, it relates to their origins as a VTuber group.

2: Viola’s group all have stage names, and given the flower theming, we can guess “Viola” isn’t her real name. Whatever that real name might be, we don’t get it here.

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.