Ave Mujica - The Die is Cast -

Episode 6

I really enjoyed this episode of It's MyGO!!!!! Season 2 this week. With the members of Ave Mujica thoroughly shattered and scattered in their own show, it falls to the MyGO!!!!! girls to play therapist for what's left of them. That's not necessarily a great idea, given how many of MyGO!!!!! are still Going Through It to some degree. But it speaks to what semblance of stability they have found in their own band following its story, and the growth they've gone through as a result—the starring example in this episode being Soyo.

I appreciate that the anime hasn't yet spelled out, and hopefully never will, exactly what feelings have prompted Soyo to try helping Mutsumi. It's probably more a lot of little reasons piling up than one big one. There's her growing amount of empathy, glimpsed in her post-it note offer to Tomori in this show's premiere episode. There's her mounting guilt over how she treated Mutsumi, expressed in previous episodes. And of course, there's Mortis reenacting Soyo's own desperate, ignoble hand-grab from It's MyGO!!!!!, which Soyo has a visceral reaction to. Soyo can claim she wasn't close to Mutsumi, but she's a perceptive person who can see herself in anyone when it's this plain. That's gonna play havoc with her tendencies now that she's learning to care about other people.

One of many dark ironies is that Soyo of all people is the one reaching out to Mortis, as it seems nobody else considers themselves close enough to Mutsumi to try and help wake her up. That's a laundry list that covers plenty of others in this episode, including Umiri revealing how hard she compartmentalizes her band gig work. She comes off cold enough to make Taki storm off, and I wonder how much that'll provide Umiri motivation to become invested in people who aren't Taki. Though maybe she has the right idea keeping her work and personal lives separate.

But back to Soyo for the moment. Soyo, like those others, has mostly had her trauma driven by the question of why CRYCHIC was disbanded, and whose fault it was. She doesn't blame herself the way Tomori and Mutsumi do, but obviously she always wanted to believe that Sakiko hadn't wholly dedicated herself to its destruction either—she genuinely thought she could get Sakiko back into a band, after all. So stumbling face-first into the details of Sakiko's past decisions, including a harrowing encounter with her father, is going to cause some rapid recontextualization for Soyo. It's viciously poetic at this point: Soyo has confirmation that there might have been a way to resolve Sakiko's issues in the past, but it's far too late, and now she knows enough and has grown enough to feel like shit about how she acted.

I will say I do not know how to feel at this stage about all of MyGO!!!!! just getting Sakiko's story spelled out for them via third-party news sources. It's a little too quick, and there's potential for it to be a cheap on-ramp to fixing things in a way this story doesn't need fixed. But I'll give that point the benefit of the doubt for now, at least until Sakiko is able to assert more agency into this side of her own plot. For the time being she's taking the approach that Anon recognizes from her own failure overseas: push past everything, try to forget, and just start over. Everyone can see that that's a bad idea just as easily as Rāna can see how Mutsumi and Mortis are headmates.

The troubles of the other former Ave Mujica members (including the conspicuously sir-not-appearing-in-this-episode Uika) are fear for the future though, as the current downward spiral still firmly has Mortis as its nexus. Did she know what she was doing when she used that groveling move on Soyo? She claims to Soyo that Mutsumi actually loved CRYCHIC, but it's been apparent for weeks now that Mortis is a desperate child who will say whatever she thinks will get her way. What's more recently apparent is that this actually puts her at odds with Mutsumi, who she's shown trying to suppress, only wanting her out when it's time to play the guitar, like some sort of girls band Severance. It's supposedly out of fear of Mutsumi getting hurt again, but sharing a body shouldn't make that entirely Mortis' choice, and the ensuing fallout is…hoo boy.

Ave Mujica is an anime I was counting on going places even compared to its predecessors, and the public episode between Mutsumi and Mortis is definitely one of those damned destinations. It's a tense, fucking hard-to-watch occurance that follows the characters with jump cuts and anxious simulated camera movements, and it crescendos with Soyo desperately shielding her from a crowd of gawking onlookers. Hey, remember that whole thing about the relationship between performers and the audience? Fans' investment in seeing performances is a valid transactional relationship with those who put them on, but they sure as hell shouldn't be entitled to jeering and recording at someone experiencing a genuine crisis. It's pushing past what I might have expected a Bushiroad-sponsored music multimedia project to allow, even as it pulls back a bit with the excuse that some viewers assumed it was an in-character performance. I talked before about the story's ways it could handle Mutsumi's mental health issues, and the cruel lack of sympathy from the crowd speaks well to the sympathy the writing feels Mutsumi actually deserves.

The intensity of that scene is the centerpiece of an episode that looks especially excellent overall. The direction drenches several scenes in moody, colorful lighting, starting with Sakiko moping in the purple glow of her father's home. Scenes lovingly linger on sunset locations as Mortis anxiously follows Rāna, both lost girls crossing conspicuously between buildings. And of course the returns to Mutsumi's mind palace are as bold as ever, playing with perspective and dollhouse scale, while also using the flourish of the imaginary to break out the scarier sides of Mortis' presentation. It's all strong stuff that helps carry components of the episode that might feel more underbaked, including the aforementioned abrupt resolution of Soyo learning about Sakiko's past, to say nothing of the way the episode just sort of stops at the end of its runtime. Plus the subtitles miss several on-screen text messages this week. Even with those unbalanced shortcomings, even hardly focusing on its titular group, Ave Mujica still delivered a central, meticulously orchestrated train wreck I couldn't let myself look away from.

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.