Monthly Archives: October 2018

October 24, 2018

Asakura Momo First Solo Live: Day 1 Report

By omo

Asakura Momo, the arguable “center” of Trysail, had her first solo live (1 and 2 out of 4) on Saturday/Sunday, October 20-21, 2018. She will do a series of 4 lives, called LAWSON presents 麻倉もも Fantasic Live 2018 “Peachy!”, on 10/20-21, and then 11/10-11. All shows are schedule to take place at Maihama Amphitheater just outside of Tokyo proper (it’s Chiba!), which is just by the Disney resort complex in Maihama. She goes by the nickname Mocho. I attended the first of the showing so here goes writing it up…

It helps me to center the experience by explaining a bit about my history with Mocho, and her background as well. On one of my very early eventing trips to Japan back in 2014, I saw her, for the first time, at a stage greeting (for the IDOLM@STER movie) and I was smitten ever since. She was an unknown quality to me at the time. It was really her attitude that got me–someone who is a straight-backed go-getter in the most child-like, natural kind of way. She was still just 19, and was spending her second winter in Tokyo. There’s this twisted sense of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington crossed with Beverly Hillbillies crossed with just good fashion orthogonal thinking. She generally held on to the simple stuff, but it works for her and not most other people in the same disposition, at least in my opinion. Okay, I gave her Fukuoka countryside upbringing a lot of credit, but in reality she is the best kind of airhead, the D&D character sheet of 18 WIS but 7 INT, or at least as close to that you’re going to get in the entertainment industry.

In terms of looks, Mocho is actually rather blessed with her Kirby-esqe style going on, and I mean that in the most positive and flattering way possible. Back when she was really holding her weight (in the winter time) she had these adorable cheeks, which now has been largely tamed. It all makes sense to her fans because she’s the kind of person who gains weight in the winter and loses it in the summer, fairly visibly, and this past summer she did a photo book in Guam (comes out this week), showing off some actual chops in the process. We know how that goes in this industry, even for a seiyuu. But the fact that she’s got the curves (as Kirby does), there’s a lot of Mocho to feast your eyes on, for a seiyuu anyways.

Asakura Momo the seiyuu is part of the trio that marks the second “class” of the Music Ray’n seiyuu agency (Muray for short). This SME-attached, seiyuu-idol management produced the four talents of Sphere for Muray’s inaugural class. Muray has actually moved on officially to the third class with the Music Ray’n 3rd audition last year, but this means the Trysail ladies now have even more solo opportunities as the second Muray class move into the next stage of their development as idol seiyuu talents.

The second class hasn’t been in a whole lot of massively popular shows (when’s the next K-ON guys), so it might be a little hard to hear them if you don’t look for them. Mocho is probably best known from her role in IDOLM@STER Million Live as Hakozaki Serika, but westerners probably would have heard her sing in the Witch Craft Works ending as well as some oddish roles like Sumi from Sakura Trick, Yuka from Pripri Chii-chan, or Ayumi from Charlotte (as we’d call it, Imocho #1). She was the lead role in the first Honeyworks film, and will play Iroha in the upcoming Magireco anime (and of course she’s in the game too, being the equivalent of FGO’s Mash in that).

For those of us following Mocho a little closer, we know Mocho is a big fan of showa idols and shoujo manga. Partly influenced by her family, she is really into Matsuda Seiko, the famed mainstream idol who is a fixture in the Japanese entertainment industry since the 80s. Given how Muray always let their talents drive their solo artist styles, it is little surprise that Mocho first live, and building largely on her first solo album, evokes a strong sense of showa idol-dom, with songs that have a more positive and modern vibe than your standard love ballads and pop tunes.

Speaking of all of that though, while Asakura Momo the anisong seiyuu artist has been releasing singles the past few years, everything seemed to lead up to this October where she releases a single in late August, full album (first, called Peachy) in early October, and photobook in October just after the first 2 shows of her first solo live. It’s planned-out marketing I guess, but it makes things challenging for fans to ramp it up all of the sudden.

Setlist:

Just going to walk things in chronological order based on what happened.

Continue reading

Leave a comment | posted in Conventions and Concerts

October 23, 2018

Million Kanshasai Tea-Leaf Reading

By omo

One thing about long-running franchises is that they are cyclic and have patterns. You can read into it and figure out what’s going to happen next to an extent. For IDOLM@STER, they’ve even started an official schedule list of events, as of 2016 onward (the event-only history goes from 2013). It makes a lot of sense as something fans need to keep track of the dozens of stuff that happens every month. Unfortunately it is not that forward-looking, so it is more useful as an archive.

The biggest news for prognosticators I think, that came out last weekend’s Million Live event, was that the next Theater election program will include the 765Pros. It’s pretty obvious that Million Live plays with the inclusion of the 765Pros both ways. It was first a booster, but now the Millions are also dragging their senpai team into the next decade. Not even mentioning the successor aspect, being a mobile game allows the Millions to do stuff all year long, where as the core 765Pro AllStars run on yearly cycles for the current gen of PS4 games, which might be coming to an end with a pattern change.

In the past, the Million elections could not have had included the 13 revered figures of 765Pro due to the need for all 37(+2) of them to get a footing in fandom by themselves. Five years in, this is no longer a necessity, and I agree.

The other thing this addresses is the fact that Million stopped having 765Pro AllStar music. The SP@RKLE line, or the latest line of character solo songs, only featured the Million Stars 39 and not the other 13 that LTP and LTH has had. I think this makes a lot of sense, for one, those early solo songs almost never gets performed. Sometimes it’s performed at 765Pro events! What would Million Ps have to do to see those performances? It’s kind of a mess.

This also means we might get a lull during which the 765Pros might not get a lot of solo activities. We know 2020 is the 15th anniversary of the franchise, so if we expect MOIW 2020 (hopefully featuring all 5 (6?) branches) then a chill 2019 makes sense. I think there will be more of a flurry of activity next year from the production side to support a MOIW level thing in 2020. Considering if the next Million election occurs towards November/December and we get the CDs released 9-12 months out, that would time things well into the 2020 hype cycle as such a big live will have a long lead-in.

The other nuggets of info I thought relevant were:

  • ML6th tour is once a month and broken out by type-teams (Angel, Princess, Fairy). No Tokyo regional stop.
  • Generations series is ongoing.

Each of the Million tour stops is 2-days over the weekend. None lands on this year’s longer-than-usual Golden Week. But the progression is obvious even before the announcement because Shiny 1st was announced to be mid March, so we know Million tour had to be after March. Here is the Lantis-M@S live scheduling like from now on out (ignoring release events):

  • October: Million Kanshasai
  • November: Anisong Premium (SideM)
  • December: Lisani TW (Million)
  • January ’19: Lisani (SideM and Million)
  • Feb: ??? (HK?)
  • March: Shiny 1st, 315Pro Promeet
  • April: Million 6th Sendai
  • May: Million 6th Kobe
  • June: Million 6th Fukuoka
  • July: ??? (AWM?)
  • August: ??? (Anisama? AWM?)

Assuming the Generations line resumes its release cadence of 1 Generations CD per month, we have D/Zeal in December, and 3 more by April–probably including April’s release makes 5 Generations CDs. It’s hard to say what this means for the release events in April though, but the release event is unlikely still going to be once a month or so, give or take.

Last year we have the SP@RKLE series during the same time as Generations series, so this might mean after Theat@r Boost 3 (due out 11/28) we will get a new run of something. This could probably play into what goes into ML6th. New LTDs? That would be swell.

Leave a comment | posted in Idolmaster

October 18, 2018

Nerd-Factual Accuracy in Fiction

By omo

Last season there was this anime called Cells at Work. It was a fun(?) story about how different cells in a human’s body can be personified into the usual anime characters and interact somewhat based on their perceived biological functions. Swallowing foreign substances and breaking them down become the equivalent of hacking at a monster with a knife, for example.

Cutting to the chase, I dropped the show because of its depiction of the digestive system as a volcanic pit of acids. There are no good bacterias the show, ever (at least at where I dropped the show half way through). And frankly that’s just not how it actually works. The way bacteria is depicted in Cells at Work suggests a particular view about the body that is a little too germaphobic for me. Plus, isn’t it just a really “derpy” way to detail, say, House? We are seeing some common human illnesses depicted in epic proportions. Maybe it’s kind of nice to see a message about cellular mutation happening dozens of times a day inside the body of an adult but, I don’t know if I dig this worldview. It puts too much emphasis on “us” versus “them”; when at the microscopic level, we’re all just a bunch of biochemical mechanisms. Mutations always will happen, and humans evolve because of it–it’s such a cartoony black & white take in Cells.

It’s a lot more offensive to my senses than, say, how in Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai’s (Senshun Butayarou (the series) henceforth) description of the thought experiment of Schrodinger’s Cat. Like, okay, you are 90% there but you miss the big fat quantum quality to it. It is the crux of countless FTL theory talk or why giant robots could be made as spoken by countless middle schoolers. I don’t really mind it that much, other than I wish mass media would at least get the science right. If the idea was observation affects the experiment, then that point was made, which is why I’d give Senshun Butayarou at least a passing grade.

For a high school romantic comedy revolving around supernatural mysteries, though, framing the inquiry with a thought experiment is a classy take. I always liked those X-Files episodes. The wiggle space of a different, unexplained phenomenon makes using a thought experiment to explain how the protagonists figure things out makes a lot of sense as long as they don’t rely on it too much. One could say Senshun Butayarou crossed that line, but maybe not far enough.

PS. Slowly unpacking new anime of Q42018, but I’m getting there. I left a lot of Q3 shows in the dust because of my trip to Taiwan and Hokkaido in late September. I’m not sure I’ve recovered from that yet (thus a 30+day gap on blogging). I only learned about “Thunder Thigh Takarada” the other day but I did not know canon fetishism baked into the design could spur this kind of outpouring. Gridman is coincidentally good, so maybe that contributes.

Leave a comment | posted in Hataraku Saibou, Modern Visual Culture, Seishun Buta Yarou

October 17, 2018

IM@S MUSIC ON THE RADIO & The End of IDOLM@STER STATION

By omo

The long running IDOLM@STER mainline seiyuu radio program, IDOLM@STER STATION, has ended this week with a farewell live stream on Nico. To be very technical and fair, it never ran that long, as the weekly program would change cast periodically and rebrand itself slightly (like, IDOLM@STER STATION!!+). It was originally the IDOLM@STER Radio which morphed into this program as other weekly streams started, in 2009. Today, there are 5 weekly broadcasts for the franchise, covering the different sections. The name perhaps more so refers to the program concept that spawned a series of its own spinoff media products, such as all the radio cover songs, the radio original music, and the handful of live shows they put on. The Aisute weeklies would feature some segments that involved characters acting out viewer-submitted scenarios often (a characteristic in other IM@S radios today as well) and other more seiyuu radio-style segments. But if you were just counting the brand, the show falls a bit short of its 10th year! That’s very long for a tie-in seiyuu radio.

Aisute ending means the main 765Pro franchise no longer has a seiyuu-focused radio. In its stead, IDOLM@STER MUSIC ON THE RADIO takes its airing spot (really, it’s produced by the same Nippon Columbia crew that produced Aisute, and it takes over Aisute’s Nico channel) and is going to be a music-oriented program. Its main host is Numakura Manami, with a co-host rotating probably every 4 weeks. The first co-host is Takahashi Rie. For sanity’s sake I’ll call the program MOR for short (based on the official hashtag #アイマスMOR).

Over the long 9 years of Aisute, there were a pretty overt effort to interview Columbia composers who worked on the music, especially the stuff that graced the later Playstation games. And it makes a lot of sense–music is arguably the most noteworthy and radio-worthy thing that IDOLM@STER generally offers. Cinderella Girls, Million Live, SideM and even Shiny Colors are churning out many songs every year. A lot of it is from Lantis, which naturally doesn’t get as much coverage on a Columbia program focused on the original 765Pro, but Aisute always had crossover coverage with guests from the other branches (at least more than a few Million and Cinderella guests).

What has been left behind with the departure of Aisute is still pretty regrettable–it was almost its own thing during the peak years, and maybe MOR can get its own live show. It certainly will be more cross-franchise than before, so we will see how things swing on a month-to-month basis.

Overall, it is probably overall a good thing that there is now a show to highlight the stories and personalities behind the music. MOR should be a good time and generally this is a positive vibe going forward. Hosted by two cast members, MOR should also remain fun and neta-heavy enough for the usual and core listener types into seiyuu radio-type programs. Two-personality shows dominate this landscape anyway.

PS. Wish they’ll cover some Aisute music down the road!

Leave a comment | posted in Idolmaster, Seiyuu, Idol, Pop