ANON TOKYO

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Remember, this only happened in Anon’s fantasy

Anon in a skimpy yellow dress, the rest of MyGo draped over her in equally sexy outfits lookign at her longingly

But what an insight in her personality. From Bang Dream! It’s Mygo!!!!! episode 11, as Anon tries to get the other band members invested in her costuming ideas. That she has to be in the center of attention is no surprise, nor is her need for glamour. She consistently wants to dress the band up when everybody else is happy to just perform in their street clothes or school uniform. What is surprising is how thirsty her fantasy is.

BangDream has never been a very horny franchise; there has been occasional fanservice but much less than in say IdolM@ster. And MyGo!!!!!/Ave Mujica have been even less interested. Only in Anon’s fantasy here has any hint of sexiness been shown. interesting too is that not only does she have Tomori clinging to her, which you may have expected, but Taki on her other side, glowering somewhat but still looking at her. Soyo, next to taki, looks a bit amused by it all but again still looking at her. Raana is the only one not either connected to or looking at Anon. Is this some hint at how Anon sees her bandmates romantically?

Now for all its psychodrama and not so latent lesbianism undercurrents, both series have been remarkably chaste when it comes to romance. Even stalker girl Uika seems only to want to be with Sakiko, not do anything with her regardless of how down bad she seems. Anon’s fantasy here truly is the only hint of anything sexual in either series so far. Honestly, this may be just because every other girl in either band has just too many mental problems to even think about being thirsty, so it’s all up to the relatively ‘normal’ Anon to carry the flag for proper yuri.

Did you know there’s an actual ANON TOKYO website?

We Called Them Giants — Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, Clayton Cowles

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Lori wakes up one morning to discover that not only her foster parents, but almost everybody else has vanished overnight. The only other person still elft is Annette, cheerful, naive and optimistic where Lori is cynical and expecting the worst. How will they survive in a post-apocalyptic world that now also has two alien giants living in it?

The cover of We Called Them Giants shows a blond girl in a puffer jacket, hilding a hockey stick, looking up at a giant red gloved hand coming out of the sky

High concept wise, this is the young adult version of Thomas M. Disch’s The Genocides which has a similar incomprehensible alien invasion (?) destroying civilisation, with humanity reduced to agricultural pests surviving in the niches of their new, alien world. The aliens themselves, giant red and blue figures towering over the landscape, of course have to remind me of Jack Kirby’s Celestials.

The story is uncomplicated. Lori and Annette have to scavenge for scraps to survive in a world depopulated not just of humans, but seemingly most other mammal life, where the only food left seems to be tinned. There’s a gang of other survivors who they try to avoid because they would enslave them. It’s an encounter with the gang that leads to Lori and Annette discovering the giants as well as, Beatrice, an elderly woman who saves them from the monstrous wolves that suddenly turned up in the middle of their flight from the gang. She leads them into the ‘home’ of the red Giant, which seems to be a safe place avoided by the wolves.

All of which is setup for the meat of the story, which is about Lori getting over her habitual mistrust of everybody to accept the kindness of the red Giant. Whereas Beatrice and Annette quickly accept the Giant’s protection, Lori remains skeptical until circumstances leaver her no choice. It’s only at the end of the story that she finally can let go of her suspicions and accept the Giant’s kindness as real, that it is possible for people to act without ulterior motives.

We Called Them Giants is therefore very much Lori’s coming of age story, in which she learns how to take off her armour of self protective cynicism and learns to accept people for who they are. Gillen’s writing isn’t subtle about this: there’s a message here and he will make sure you understand it. Whether it’s convincing is another matter entirely. For me it wasn’t. Maybe I’m just too old for this sort of stroy but I didn’t mesh with it at all. I could see what Gillen was doing and I resented being manipulated into accepting his conclusions here. As Jao said on Bluesky:

It’s very adolescenty and not necessarily in a bad way. It’s just very…. obviously a vehicle to help process certain kinds of thoughts and a developing worldview.

What remains is Stephanie Hans’ gorgeous painted art and that more than made up for the slightly iffy story. A good present perhaps for a bookish young teen in your family.

Yuri Made Her Human and Obsessed — Ave Mujica

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Episode eleven of Ave Mujica and Uika finally gets to tell her backstory. In MyGo we had seen her as a confident, smart, friendly person, able to give Tomori some good advice just when she needed it. That image quickly shattered once this series started to delve more into her obsession with Sakiko, didn’t it? And now we finally got to know what started that obsession and it sounds familiar:

Uika monologing on stage in half close up looking at the audience but addressing Saki with 'You turned me, a pitiful being into a human

From the interview with Iori Miyazawa, the writer of Ura Sekai Picnic had with Rikimaru Mizoguchi, a Hayakawa Books editor, all the way back in 2018 where he went into the details of his philosophy of yuri and how it made him human:

I.M.: You’re seriously on point there. I actually didn’t have any interest in writing about human emotions, originally. There’s a famous saying, “sci-fi is all about the image” (TN: this quote is attributed to Masahiro Noda, a prominent SF writer in Japan). I shared that point of view and, if anything, preferred to only write the setting and the scenes, the sights. But to write yuri you have to focus on the feelings and emotions of the characters, so in the end I had face humans.

R.M.: You first faced humans to write yuri.

I.M.: You could say that “yuri made me human”.

A sentiment Uika seems to echo here. As shimeji spirit corp has it on Bluesky:

there’s a line in hatsune’s monologue that illustrated once again that miyazawa iori was *years* ahead of the curve with “yuri made me human”

This interview was also my first association when I heard that line. As she tells it, Uika is completely miserable until she meets Sakiko for the first time and falls in love with her all through Saki’s subconscious rizz. And like everybody else except Tomori who falls under Saki’s spell, she cannot be normal about it. Understandable though, now that we know where she came from.

At this point in the series MyGo had had its catharsis and was warpping up its story, but Ave ?Mujica still seems to be building up for a climax. Can’t wait for these last two episodes.

Hey! Who Put the Music in My Girls Band Anime?

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Episode ten of Ave Mujica was another brain fryer, so instead of any analytics, have a minute of our favourite blorpos doing an old fashioned heavy metal instrumental interlude, complete with head banging:

As with everything in Ave Mujica, you could see this episode as a dark mirror version of MyGo!!!!! episode ten. That also ended in a bravura performance, one where the band became one as they performed purely for themselves, almost excluding the audience. Here, things are not going as smoothly as you might tell from the way each of them is isolated from the others, performing with them, but not together.

Good fucking song though.