Ave Mujica - The Die is Cast -

Episode 4

Hell is other people. Despite her obsessively composed scripts selling them as dolls brought together by a shared fate, the girls of Ave Mujica were not assembled by competing circumstances as with their counterparts in MyGO!!!!!. They're performers hired to do a job, and most anyone can tell you that relationships with your coworkers are pretty different from those with your friends. Different approaches and perspectives are going to clash, tensions are going to mount and boil over, and it only gets more complicated when virtually everyone on the job is a damaged teen desperately in need of therapy, and then a new employee like "Mortis" gets added to the team.

Ave Mujica at first appropriately plays with the idea that Mutsumi switching out for Mortis might, technically, be a good thing for the band. She's responsive and engaging in interviews. She interacts more with her fellow band members, even dispensing solid advice to Uika about looking after Sakiko. Even Nyamu can't help but be impressed by her. Viewers fully in on the issues are aware of what a monumentally screwed defense mechanism Mortis actually is, but the thing about defense mechanisms is that a lot of the time, they work—on the surface, in the short term, anyway.

The true issues of Mortis' presence are obfuscated by the fact that the other members of Ave Mujica aren't exactly hurting for issues themselves. As always, that begins and ends with Sakiko. I half-joke about this anime's wholesale lack of chill, but it can do subdued in its own way when it wants to, exemplified in Sakiko staring daggers into the back of Mortis' head as she co-opts a TV interview. As has been obliquely raised previously, the question of why all the artifice around Ave Mujica is necessary is borne out in Sakiko's frustration at not being able to maintain it. I don't know that it's really party to whatever plan Sakiko still has for the group's rise; this is simply another instance of her frustration at not being able to maintain her literally scripted control.

Revelations indicate that Mortis has long been a part of Mutsumi's psyche, and Sakiko simply gave her a name—and a push. However, it's not that Mortis has actually taken control of Ave Mujica, either. Her split is, as mentioned, a defense mechanism, and the other thing about defense mechanisms is they can't actually play offense. She can put on the show of what Sakiko wants in TV appearances and interviews in order to keep the band together, but her facade can't actually keep up with the scripted presentation, and she sure as hell can't perform. Mortis can also let her hatred for Sakiko slip and even threaten her beloved Mutsumi as another holding mechanism, but it's all tenuous. The threat of the band breaking up is still enough to shatter even the smiling constitution of her backup personality.

I talk up the dense drama of Ave Mujica a lot, for obvious reasons. But much like It's MyGO!!!!!, this is a very funny show when it wants to be, even if the humor is necessarily a bit more of the gallows variety. Watase Yuzuki having Mortis bust out a jarringly perfect Sakiko impression is absolutely spit-take-worthy, even as it's an early sign for Sakiko that something is really Wrong. Similarly, it's darkly hilarious that what shatters Mortis' shouldering of the band is the fact that while Mutsumi is amazing on the guitar, she can't play it at all. It's astonishing, and it also sells the desperation of Mutsumi and Mortis and how short-sighted this personality tag-team maneuver was. It should also go without saying that this is all an opportunity for Yuzuki Watase to kill it on the vocal performance front, even if she's not performing quite as many roles as she did last week.

Those elements converging into the wild ride of this episode do so under especially strong direction from Hiroshi Morita. Morita did storyboards on previous episodes of It's MyGO!!!!!, now pulling double-duty both boarding and directing this Ave Mujica entry, and the synergy shows. Even more typical maneuvers get spiced up. Sure, Sakiko being visually separated from her bandmates via a foregrounded window frame is a solid trick, but then the camera pans, squeezing and suffocating her even further as she stews. Similarly, Mortis revealing herself to Sakiko is played with a cutting pan behind Sakiko herself, as the whole scene is framed in incidental red warning lighting, with the pair standing pushed to the actual edge of the docks they're on. Yuniko Ayana's writing has never heard of subtlety, and it's found a perfect directorial complement here, down to the performatively unnerving music that creeps up anytime Mortis starts Mortis-ing around.

Unfortunately, as for SubsWatch 2025, I'm a little sad I've already got to touch on it so soon after I said I only wanted to bring up egregious issues, but well, they got egregious. The more stilted, awkward phrasing returns, some bordering on nonsense. What does "She became them" even mean, Soyo? On top of that, the subtitles render with several placeholder glyphs peppering speech, mainly Nyamu's. I presume these are meant to be cutesy emojis enhancing her dialogue, indicating that these subs were produced by whatever third-party outfit Crunchyroll farmed these out to, then plugged in without any QC checking to see if they would render properly. It's really annoying, since a flourish like that, or the actual attempt at signaling Nyamu's Kumamoto dialect in the localization point to this having a human translator as opposed to pure MTL. It's just that it's all placed alongside phrasing no human would use in any language.

Mutsumi and Mortis are but one person already broken by Ave Mujica, being unable to stay stably together in their personal hell—even as I suspect the "disbanding" teased at the very end of this episode is a fake-out of some sort. Details about the issues of others are sprinkled in. Even Umiri, who previously performed in over thirty bands with seemingly little issue, has now been forced to copy notes from Taki in her spare moments (or maybe she just wanted an excuse to spend time with Taki). We are four episodes in, where it took MyGO!!!!! over twice as many episodes to get to the point this episode leaves Ave Mujica at. My main question is not how, but if this anime intends to rebound the band into rebuilding mode. It's a question I can't properly speculate on without seeing more episodes of this downward spiral.

Rating:

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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.