Ave Mujica - The Die is Cast -

Episode 13

One of the not-so-secret best entries in the BanG Dream! franchise is the Film Live 2nd Stage movie. An animated concert movie that's necessarily story-lite (though it does include some interstitial interactions and chatter between the bands), it primarily subsists on showing off how far SANZIGEN had come in their animation of musical performances and virtual concert camerawork. Those abilities have continued to serve them well through subsequent BanG Dream! entries, as crafting naturalistic, inhabitable settings and directing characters to behave believably in them has particularly proved valuable through It's MyGO!!!!! and Ave Mujica—to say nothing of swinging around to the unnatural and uncanny. Now, as their final episode victory lap, SANZIGEN sees fit to reinvoke the full-concert format, delivering a sort of mini Film Live 3rd Stage alongside everything else they've accomplished this season.

Cramming five songs into the big finish makes sense. The titular group hasn't gotten to play much music in this music anime on account of *gestures* everything this season. As well, compared to that aforementioned movie, this song-filled send-off for Ave Mujica is anything but story-lite. It's not just a matter of including Ave Mujica's expected theater-kid stage-play indulgences either, though those are absolutely a factor. Rather, this episode is a mic-drop of a showcase of how dense and character-informed the lyrics of MyGO!!!!! and Ave Mujica are, and how much else the anime can communicate about them just in the framing and direction of their performances. It's a reflection of the backscatterings that embody the duality of this duo of stories: one more round of MyGO!!!!!'s scrappy sincerity clashed against Ave Mujica's angsty artifice. As it began, so it ends, like the bound back cover of a book.

Not that this genre-redefining epic doesn't have what could be its own Messiah already announced as on the way, but for now we focus on the coda in front of us.

With that in mind, once again, thank Sakiko that Crunchyroll, Bushiroad, and whatever other corporate powers-that-be who have their fingers in this pie have seen fit to make lyric subtitles a regular feature of this simulcast. The episode would be all but devoid of text, otherwise, and viewers would miss out on the lyrics to the songs that, like all great musicals, chart the development of the whole show that led to these final numbers. Tomori's lyrics still express her desire to wander in search of herself and the others she's grouped with, but that's now mixed with a longing and gratitude for where her connection with Sakiko brought her. They don't know where any of them are going, but that's the point.

Even before this episode gets to Sakiko's squad, the idea resonates that she's out from under the aspects of her life predetermined by others. MyGO!!!!!'s music has always been personally meaningful, sung for themselves, but now it also reflects their love and wishes for others they connected with across this story. I think that's pretty beautiful, and it's expressed further in gestures like Tomori acknowledging Soyo's compassionate growth, or Anon coming far enough that she can kinda keep up alongside Rāna. She still steals the center spotlight at the end, because she's still Anon, but all of them have learned about themselves in learning about others.

It's honesty and healthy growth that's important to see, since Ave Mujica have only gotten as back on their bullshit as humanly possible once the episode hard-cuts over to them. Oh, don't worry, their reforging means they're absolutely internalizing Tomori's encouragement to keep moving forward, but it just means they're now under a seven-layer dip of coping mechanisms in the bed they made for themselves. Doloris is belting out lyrics about her status as a pretender as the stage lights drench the band in every color except their true ones. As in the end of this anime's first episode, they aren't wearing masks, but now it's clear that it's because they've evolved beyond needing them in order to hide who they really are.

The preoccupation with forgetting, both in Ave Mujica's new lyrics and the stage play acted out, harmonizes with Sakiko's resolution to forget, to "pretend it never happened" between her and Hatsune last episode. They can go through these motions over and over, as the cycle of struggle repeated through this series' script showed, so long as they return and pretend they're starting over fresh. It's the reason an assembled family of dolls to play house with was Sakiko's ideal set to become God over. And her willingness to go along as that sort of plaything marks Uika/Hatsune as arguably more unhealthy than when she was pretending to be someone else to be close to Sakiko. But at least she's open about it now, as she and Sakiko move forward playing house at her place in a way at least one of them knows is doomed to break eventually. They wrote lyrics about it. I'm sure it'll be fine. If it's predetermined, it's something Sakiko predetermined for herself.

The episode is loaded with those little characterful touches that reveal where everyone is with the smallest details, amazingly more so than the detailed dialogue between the songs. After three episodes of wondering where, exactly, Mortis is, a simple smile from within Mutsumi's mirror makes clear that she's still in there. Her expressions slipping out during the performance show how the pair are working more in harmony on stage together, with Mutsumi making her guitar sing and Mortis lending personality. It's enough to strike a kill-shot in Nyamu, who's undergone a complexifying of her earlier instigating role by virtue of her now very complicated feelings for the Little Beepos.

All that is in addition to the indulgences of this episode as a set of simulated concerts. Flourishes like a guitar-neck cam for Anon recall the full faux-filmed concert experience of Film Live 2nd Stage, while the…fixation on Timoris' backside helpfully reminds us that there are at least a few perverts working on this anime. It couldn't have been made this way without them. I'd previously joked about this anime arriving at "swordfighting my gf in a Denny's parking lot," and here it simply arms the whole band with blades by the end. They're sharp souvenirs of a show that always dared the audience to say it was doing anything halfway. Now and forever, "Ave Mujica does not undersell."

Ave Mujica has been an overambitious, often messily paced series held together primarily by its raw ostentatiousness, but that did so with nearly airtight strength. While it was a show that lent itself well to watching and picking apart episode by episode, week by week (just look at all the words I wrote about it over these past few months!) I think it'll honestly flow even better when watched together. With a palpable arc to its roller coaster and an almost relieved sense of knowing where it ultimately goes, it forms a fondly escalating second half with its sister series in It's MyGO!!!!!. Lord knows going through both of them all in one go would probably feel like a literal marathon, emotionally. Ave Mujica has imperfections, but they're marks of the passionate human craft that created it, and they resonate against the artifice it's both emblematic and critical of. In how well it leaned into all that flavor, it can be easy to forget that this anime was taking risks both within its parent franchise and its broader genre. Sticking to its guns and sticking the landing with a showpiece like this stands as an accomplishment.

Rating:

---

Ave Mujica - The Die is Cast - is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Chris is a fan of angsty music girls, BanG Dream! or otherwise, and has even written a few posts about them over on his blog. You can also hit up his BlueSky where he's surely reskeeting all sorts of wild Ave Mujica art.