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This Week in Anime
Girls Band Drama
by Steve Jones & Christoper Farris,
Chris and Steve plumb the depths of the girl band genre and wonder how things got so dark.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
BanG Dream It's MyGO!!!!!, Ave Mujica, Given, Girls Band Cry, Love Live, Wake Up Girls, Liz and the Blue Bird, and Bocchi the Rock are available to stream on Crunchyroll.
Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night is available to stream on HiDive.
Chris
Steve, I've been a fan of BanG Dream since its early days, but even I'm not entirely sure. The franchise did start with Kasumi inadvertently robbing Arisa, so escalating to even wilder crimes was always inevitable.
It's even wild to me, as someone who only got into the franchise with MyGO!!!!! Despite the familiar cast, it feels like Ave Mujica has been taking the concept of "girls' music ensemble anime" to terrifying new heights and depths.
As someone who was heavily anticipating this series, I expected this going in, but not to this degree. Ave Mujica the band were teased at the end of It's MyGO!!!!!'s original run, and already there they were positioned as the ostentatious artifice opposite the bluntness of Tomori and the gang. I thought the melodrama would be contained to Sakiko's ridiculously scripted stage performances.
Given that the masks come off in the first episode of this anime, it follows that the insanity would spill out into multiple layers of reality, letting us arrive at last week's most hilariously deranged episode of Ave Mujica yet, and as perfect a place as any to discuss the show, and the seeming broader tonal trend it's reflecting in the girls' music anime space.
All the credit in the world to writer Yuniko Ayana for subverting expectations at seemingly every turn. Ave Mujica has stretched out into so many deliriously ridiculous directions, but its fabric has yet to tear. It's funny to think back several weeks ago when I thought, "Surely, it can't get any weirder than this!"
We thought the Ave Mujica moment would be a momentary wild peak rather than setting the stage for what would come. It makes sense when the resulting plot point here is that Mutsumi manifests her split personality, who has become the main axis, so much of the show's story has tilted.
Your credit to Ayana is a good place to start tracking the drastic direction of Ave Mujica. Ayana's been the BanG Dream anime writer since its inception. To hear her tell it in an interview, the more dramatic direction of It's MyGO!!!!! wasn't initially her idea, but originally came at the request of a producer.
Luckily, she took to that new direction like a duck to water.
All anime is a heavily collaborative effort, so I don't want to minimize the contributions of the whole BanG Dream team. But the writing of MyGO!!!!! lodged itself into my brain the first time I watched it. The character writing especially felt authentic and down-to-earth in a way that I didn't expect from the franchise. Anon alone would be a feat to be admired in any series.
It makes me glad that Ave Mujica has committed itself to be a proper follow-up to MyGO!!!!!, with those characters still around and integral. And Anon is still Anon.
It's smart because their down-to-earthiness and slightly more progress on working through their issues make the MyGO girls great for contrasting with Ave Mujica's theatrical escalations.
Even with Ave Mujica's obvious melodramatic extrapolations on the "formula," you still have that continuity with how frankly it treats these character arcs and how distinct each band member gets to be. We'll swerve from Soyo earnestly healing her bond with Mutsumi by way of Mortis to Umiri outing herself as a goofy fumbler to an impatient Nyamu who could not care less. It all fits together.
They never feel like ass-pulls or cop-outs because these characters were kept out of focus in the previous show. After a season where she just seemed like Taki's cool classmate who played in thirty bands, Umiri turned out to be a rizzless wonder both a) tracks and b) is hilarious.
The writing was playing the long game, such as having a whole previous show and three episodes of this one where I was wondering precisely what Mutsumi's deal was, and the payoff with Mortis has now been enough to propel the whole series. The escalations and melodrama are technically absurd, yet they've been led into in a way that feels natural from the preceding series, and even BanG Dream as a whole, to a degree.
That's a fascinating angle to look at here. We can't escape our human brains, so we enter pattern-seeking mode, look at the recent crop of girls' band/idol anime, and see a trend toward "serious" storytelling. MyGO!!!!!, Ave Mujica, Girls Band Cry, Oshi no Ko, and Jellyfish Can't Swim In the Night are just a handful from the past few years that you could argue fit this bill. But is this a revolution or an evolution of the genre?
There's always been a place for dramatizing the lives of performers in anime. Perfect Blue is a beloved classic, after all. I wouldn't doubt that the dramatic abilities Ayana honed with MyGO!!!!! and Ave Mujica weren't first flexed when she wrote the anime adaptation of the boys' band series Given.
The notice of this "trend" ticked up during the double-dramatic musical girls event of the spring 2024 season. Girls Band Cry was already a series whose previews were giving those of us who'd watched It's MyGO!!!!! a lot of It's MyGO!!!!! vibes. And then Jellyfish had its own set of parallels with GBC itself!
It was a combination so powerful that the streaming lords refused to simulcast Girls Band Cry, lest the anime audience become too aware of the transformative power of rock and roll.
Jellyfish had its moments! Kiui is a nonbinary triumph that grazed some of the more potent issues in the modern entertainment industry, both online and offline. But it stopped short of its full potential, for sure. It didn't get its hands quite as dirty as I would have liked.
And if I'm being honest, Girls Band Cry could have been more radical in its rock aspirations as well. It starts strong by homing in on Nina's righteous adolescent anger but loses some of that prickliness and potency in its final stretches.
GBC is a show that felt like it coasted to its close. I'd be down if they picked it up for another season. But I still love the series as it is for feeling so unique, which is pretty impressive given my initial impulse to compare it to one show that aired before it and another from the same season!
Now, I do think it's notable that GBC, Jellyfish, and Ave Mujica all derive some of their drama by touching on the industry side of music-making. That's something that previous BanG Dreams, even It's MyGO!!!!!, hadn't delved into as densely. It's an aspect that makes the worlds of these stories feel more broad and adult and lends to that messy, dramatic complexity.
It also sets these apart from series that used their musical components more generally as vehicles for a broader and familiar coming-of-age narrative. If we warp back to a month ago, in our discussion about Naoko Yamada, we touched upon K-On! as a landmark series in the story of idol/band anime. You could argue that its high school setting aligns K-On! more closely with other clubs/hobby-focused anime than it does with something like GBC. One of my favorite aspects of GBC is that Nina's a dropout!
A dropout, a runaway, the platonic opposite of the kinds of schoolgirls those other shows were sold on; an icon.
Your invocation of K-On! and the more club-based approach of girls' music anime naturally calls to mind those previous standard-bearers and how these sorts of shows used to be, which the earlier BanG Dream felt to be patterned on!
Yeah, don't get me wrong, I fell in love with Love Live because of its over-the-top commitment to the absurd concept of "school idols" and all of its musical theater-esque dalliances. Honoka could manipulate the weather. Nico is my forever girl. Those were good times.
But it's tempting to put on my serious cultural critic hat and say, "Audiences, in response to the world's rapidly accelerating complexity and absurdity, have rejected the sugar-coated unreality presented by the idol escapades of the mid-2010s. They want grittier, more tactile stories now. This is the age of the prestige idol drama."
I was on board for a third season of Love Live Superstar, except by the time it came out, MyGO had aired and flipped my perspective on the whole landscape. An easy redemption arc for Wiene Margarete was never going to land effectively, but the character comes off even more toothless in a post-Togawa-Sakiko world.
We'd seen broader possibilities for what this genre space could do, and the latest Love Live didn't do any of them, even given the opportunity.
Generally, I think that's fine. Something is comforting in Love Live choosing to remain Love Live. This genre, if we even want to call it that, has never been homogenous, and there will always be some variety. That being said, Love Live doesn't seem to think that, and if the teaser for their next iteration is any clue, they're gunning for the MyGO!!!!! crowd.
I want to stress that I am genuinely interested in seeing what this Bluebird project does; I can't criticize Love Live for not evolving and then dismiss it when it does try. But that said, it is extremely funny how obvious Bluebird already is about what specific style it's biting. You can practically hear the board members sweating because Love Live closed down two mobile games while BanG Dream is still going strong.
The transparency is super funny, I agree. Even the subtitle takes after arguably the greatest cinematic accomplishment in the realm of girls + grounded musical melodrama (+ the poetry of Sappho).
From K-On! to Liz and the Blue Bird, even Naoko Yamada's career follows the silly-to-serious musical girls' pipeline.
Still, this underscores the point about these sorts of shows turning drama-ward because, as you said, it seems to be what audiences want. Ave Mujica is the most I've seen BanG Dream talked about in all my time following it, and it's tearing up the charts in China.
I'd also be remiss if I didn't acknowledge Oshi no Ko and its success in the "dramatic show business of idols" space, even as it feels like it's playing in slightly different genres than others mentioned here.
Agreed, I'd say Oshi no Ko is more adjacent than analogous to the scene we're trying to dissect here, but it's too popular to ignore. Like all trends, even if we can definitively identify it as a successful turn, it's much more difficult to pinpoint the reason behind it. It's not like the earlier shows we've discussed were allergic to drama. K-On! had somber moments. Love Live Sunshine embraced the mono no aware of its bittersweet conclusion. Heck, one of the earliest anime with "idol" in its name that I can think of, Key the Metal Idol, tied the entertainment industry into a web of high-concept sci-fi conspiracy.
It's a space that's always been there. Even in the heyday of Love Live, you had series like Wake Up Girls trying to trailblaze into the Industry Evils Bummer Idols sub-genre.
Maybe it was just ten years too early. Or its production circumstances were too much of a tire fire to let it catch on. You could ask similar questions about also-rans like Selection Project and 22/7.
I'd say it's rather telling that nobody is rushing to call Wake Up Girls "ahead of its time." But yeah, there's absolutely a fine line you need to tread between embracing messiness and remaining palatable enough to one's corporate overlords and diehard fans alike. That's not a tango every production can dance.
It's also worth noting that the other side of this is that "fun" girls' band shows are still absolutely a thing. Bocchi the Rock outperformed all of these that weren't Oshi no Ko, and it's got a second season poised to do it all over again.
Seriously, though, I'd say you hit the mark. And if we peek into the future, the upcoming Rock is a Lady's Modesty seems like it might straddle the line between the rock-saturated subversions of Girls Band Cry and the irreverence of Bocchi.
Most pertinently, the Ladies of Rock look Extremely Normal, an important factor in the success of all these shows.
And I'm only half-joking. As you described, complexity seems to be a unifying element driving this seeming shift in these anime. Whether goofy or melodramatic, audiences seem to be gravitating towards messier people and plots, compared to the more polished idol personas of previous generations.
And frankly, I'm a big fan of that! MyGO!!!!! was my anime of the year, and Ave Mujica has been appointment viewing every Thursday. Music and multi-faceted characters make for a winning combination. Like everything else on this planet, we'll eventually reach a point where this, too, will become rote. This is one of the more exciting spaces in the industry.
As someone who thoroughly enjoyed the Love Lives and BanG Dreams of yesteryear, it's been a cool evolution. It's even affected the broader BanG Dream franchise, as post-MyGO!!!!!, the mobile game stories started taking on heavier plots and interfacing more with industry drama. It's been an interesting time!
As of this writing, we still have four episodes of Ave Mujica left to get through. Given everything the series has already done, I'm excited and terrified to see what it gets in before it's done. Some ex-girlfriends could very well end up sword-fighting in Denny's parking lot at this rate.
Pretty sure I've already seen fanart of such. I, too, am excited to discover where Ave Mujica goes and, more broadly, where this trend will take us. The possibilities seem more open than ever—not necessarily more mature, but a lot more tantalizing, thematically and dramatically. It's fine as long as nobody spoils the fun by recommending the name of a licensed therapist to any of these characters.
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