Ave Mujica - The Die is Cast -

Episode 9

Misunderstandings are a misunder-stand-by of these kinds of anime. Love Live! Superstar!! can get a whole episode out of the group thinking that Ren and Mei were in some illicit tryst when, really, they were just gaming. Twenty minutes of hijinks ensue before everyone makes up over the mess-up and realizes how much they care for one another. It can be a good enough time.

So early in this week's episode of Ave Mujica, Sakiko misunderstands which band MutsumiMortis is practicing guitar to put back together. Less than twenty minutes of episode later, this has ignited a full-blown girls band civil war.

It's as hilarious as any other twist of fate in this show that the measured, satisfying, concluding concert that closed out the memories of CRYCHIC in the seventh episode has only gone on to make everything worse. There are those reflections again, after MyGO!!!!!'s seventh-episode show ended on a harsh, sour note but wound up putting everyone on the path back together. But whereas MyGO!!!!! was formed from members of CRYCHIC accepting its natural demise and moving on (however lost), Ave Mujica is poised to be recreated by a group of girls who will actively murder it to take its place

Speaking of murder, the duel between Mutsumi and Mortis reaches what could be its climax (could be, this is Ave Mujica, there is always potential for another escalation) in this episode. It feels exquisitely dark that Mutsumi is first seen going on the direct internal offensive, trying to strangle out Mortis. That's not even the only act of explicit violence glimpsed in this episode, however tied to the realm of imaginary it all is. There's also the point that Mortis arguably threw the first metaphorical punch by starting to learn the guitar, an act that was made clear could wind up killing Mutsumi. It just happens more quickly and indirectly than might have been predicted.

Of course, I don't believe for a second that Mutsumi is truly dead, just banished to the depths of her own mind for the time being. What's important is the uncharted territory this leaves Mortis in, as someone who originally only existed as a defense mechanism for Mutsumi. There's the apparent irony at the end, of course, as Mortis dons the mask of Mutsumi to salvage Ave Mujica. But as things escalate, this episode spells out the cruel contradiction of Mortis' overall existence: She's here to protect Mutsumi, but that requires that Mutsumi always have something she must be protected from. Mortis seeks to keep her alive, but miserable. Ironically, that was her state at the end of CRYCHIC, but now that there's a glimmer of hope within that tunnel, Mortis sees Ave Mujica as a more fitting cage. After all, everyone from that band is miserable!

With that in mind, it's at last time (for the first time this whole season, really) to properly talk about Uika. I could have told you she was not doing okay, but I admit that I greatly underestimated the degree to which she was not doing okay. Sure, it was fun to joke about her apparent cyber-stalking of Tomori back in It's MyGO!!!!!. But now it seems that is just a canonical thing she does with anyone about to draw her beloved Sakiko away from her, as she follows Anon's profile and slides into her DMs trying to get information.

The derailing train that is Uika's mindset in this episode only feels like it's barrelling off at top speed because she's been kept so strategically out of focus in the prior weeks (despite sitting right behind Taki and Umiri in class!). Umiri, Nyamu, and especially Mortis are all having bad times too, but they were built up. Suddenly swerving back to Uika, showing off her haggard eyes, twitchy body language, and unadvised impulses comes with whiplash, and I want to make clear that this is a good thing. It not only details the kind of psychological damage the other girls are dealing with from an angle that enhances how serious it must look to concerned outsiders, but it also confirms how Uika has been prime Ave Mujica material the whole time. She's tearfully cradling the actual discarded remains of Oblivionis. She's fantasizing about violently throwing Mutsumi down a flight of stairs. I warned you about Uika, bro! I told you, dog!

Uika's flight-of-stairs of fancy is the other imagined moment of stunning band girl violence in this episode, and arguably the more potent one. I understand the truth that everyone has intrusive thoughts defined by their decisions to act on them or not, but in the context of Uika here, it brings the question of, as a character, how regularly she has been entertaining these thoughts. Has this been the background noise of her sweet support the whole time? Or did being discarded by Sakiko, as it did to a degree for everyone here, cause a turn within her? What is it about Togawa Sakiko that does this to women?

It might truly be that cult of personality. The coming clash between the Ave Mujica and Neo-CRYCHIC factions parallels Mortis' existential conundrum as fueled by the seduction of Sakiko. All of the Mujica members only found purpose as a defense mechanism against Sakiko's sadness, and once she convinced herself she had moved past it, these people, embodied in their stage personas, effectively ceased to exist. They're now all fighting for that right to exist, regardless of whether it's healthy or happy. I love Umiri being the one to directly declare this. It was a moment of piercing insight from someone who was probably meditating on it for the past several days. "Do we have to be happy?" are the words of someone who has always treated music as workaholism, who never let herself be happy in the first place because that way led to misery.

It's a potent peak for this point in the story to reach. It's tempered with valleys of humor, in an outlandishly gallows style, like Uika realizing that her songwriting advice to Tomori put her on the path to temporarily reconciling CRYCHIC with Sakiko. It's also funny in entirely intended ways, like the entire sequence with Umiri and Nyamu and the latter's doorbell intercom. These are all the intense emotions provoking strong emotional reactions, which I will always come back to Ave Mujica for. Here, it's proven that waiting to reveal the actual damage it could do to a character like Uika was the right call, and I'm sure there are plenty more stairways left to cast the die down.

Coming back to Subswatch 2025, I just wanna say that the "two separate sub teams" theory seemed to apply to this single episode this week. The first half of the episode is rife with a conspicuous lack of contractions and awkward contextual phrasing like "play as Ave Mujica." But then, later on, the writing effortlessly deploys colloquial phrases like "leaving me on read" or the fundamentally fantastic instance of Umiri accusing Saki of "going back to your ex." It makes sure to properly caption text messages. So I've got no idea anymore, but at least they're doing slightly better than Crunchyroll's episode summaries.

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.