Million Kanshasai Tea-Leaf Reading

DZeal pic.twitter.com/RvKyH95ggA

— ???????? (@nagian) October 23, 2018

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.