If 2016 starts off like this, it might inflate my expectations for the rest of the year so much.
Category Archives: Idolmaster
Year in Review 2015: The St@te of the Union
I feel writing about IM@S is a good way to write about my feelings in 2015 because it basically tracks with IM@S news, marketing strategies, and trends. Such is a life of a Producer in its employment.
News recap: First of all, two posts on HPT’s site explains basically some stuff. The first, just a list of announcements to give you an idea how things ramp up to IM@S 10th. The Yukumas Yurumas end-of-year nama, which we’ve had it the second time on 12/29, went over the year in a pretty succinct way.
The first part of the year, life was still coasting on the residual feels of the IM@S movie and IM@S 9th (even though I did not go…) which hits a point at the February event, the “uchiage” for all of that. Then it is about the 10th anniversary. In the middle was dying to go to ML2nd but didn’t pull the trigger, some events to distract me from that, and Asapon North.
Events: Second, this is kind of the roadmap of IM@S 10th, as Dire1 describes his plans for the three IM@S franchises. (This is the original JP interview.)
Personally? I have definitely reached a point where I am mellowing out from this fandom. I am still excited about 765pro and the entire year of CG bombardment means I now know some of the CGs well. The funny thing is besides the Cinderella Project 14, I know about the idols mostly from other Ps talking about them and the Deresute game. The anime didn’t do much besides floating that CG boat, and carried some nice sakuga moments.
I kind of want to deep dive the article so let’s briefly. First, LOL Dire1 called Rei & Yui’s Bunka Housou Home Run Radio to get some info on Seibu dome. Getting info from boots on the ground via Team Baseball Idols is hilarious. In this case I think Amiami not only had a hit seiyuu nama/radio on their hands, but who knew how far this had gone…
Then there’s the live-driven aspect of ML. I think it’s worth a post on its own so I’ll do that. Let’s just say that in the end, CG, ML, 765Pro and SideM are all pretty similar, and it’s just a matter of if that thing will get an anime or not.
I said I’m mellowing out only because I’ve reached the point where I feel like I have extended myself out far enough that I feel pulling back sounds like the right thing to do. There’s a place where I’m most efficient or comfortable at, I guess, in terms of my involvement as a fan, eventer, someone who buys IM@S stuff, who spend so much $ on mobile games this year (whatever I spent last year I probably spent 5x that).
Oh, yeah Deresute. Week 18 update–I blew a lot of money this past few days because of the double SSR rate, and on Mika SSR. That I don’t have.
Game-wise, the only real notable thing is that I switched to a Nexus 6P and there is a different input lag (not music lag) than my last phone that it took about a week for me to adjust. If I play with no sound, I have to hit the notes slight earlier on the N6P than slight later on my Moto X 3rd gen… Well, it cannot be helped.
Event-wise, I’m glad we have a dance groove because I can now star level my Vocal SRs that I don’t want to keep around for support. Also my luck has skewed a lot more on Vi and Da so I field some really strong teams in this groove event. And isn’t this event just the Deresute version of Derepa…?
akom
— ????? (@coloruri) December 31, 2015
Also, with the Christmas event introducing the double-stam feature, scores did go up within expectations across all the tiers on this basis. So you can kind of guess what happened.
The game is firing on all cylinders and I’m expecting things to go through without too much boat rocking for a while as there is still a lot of content to be delivered by, I think, ultimately, a content delivery mechanism that is this F2P game.
Looking back, though, this is the really the most dangerous thing out of IDOLM@STER in 2015–you can lose both your money and resistance to cute unvoiced idols who are caricatured in the most endearing way that IDOLM@STER does best.
This is on top of how Deresute came into the rhythm game F2P Socia-ge space like how WoW came on top of the MMORPG market. Considering WoW is a 2004 game and lots of people don’t MMORPG, maybe that figure of speech is lost. But never had a genre got so much of an upset by a copy than WoW, and its enduring success since plays partly due to that interruption. Deresute copied and perfected upon the LLSIF formula in a big way. It is a killer app. And unlike most it also kills people’s bank accounts if they’re not careful.
In terms of fandom, as I mentioned over time, I love the present. More newbie fans are one thing, but overall things are so much better today out west than ever. Thanks for all the shoutouts from not only the team in Japan but all the other cool cats who helped make our lives as oversea Ps better.
In 2015 we made a lot of flower stands. HPT itself is responsible for over $4000 USD worth of flowers just at 10th alone. I don’t have the exact counts because some HPTers sent their own flowers, and others participated in other stands arranged by other Ps. We got a lot of help from Akiba nerd flower start-up Hananoki Flowers so here’s a shout-out to him. We used many other shops, so just on this aspect alone “we” have advanced miles since 2014.
Well, that’s just eventer talk.
Domestically, I already listed Lantis Fest as my favorite event of the year. That served as the template of my favorite offkai of the year, which is the one in Toronto with those crazy Canadians. And yeah I will write this up but that was also a big budget event. The ballpark total (including the cake) was well north of $2500 CAD, and you still had to buy alcohol. I guess it can’t be helped.
I love how offkai and hanging out with Japanese Ps opened doors, and they returned the favor in Japan when HPT hung out in Ikebukuro for a couple hours after 10th Day1. And that was a very the-world-is-all-one moment. The bus was pimp.
I also feel the pressure of trying to one-up the JP producers and one up our own tricks in 2016. Not to say it’ll happen but who knows? It’s never too early to come up with cake ideas.
The future is bright for IDOLM@STER. And maybe for its oversea fanbase too. I don’t know, really, but I enjoy this thing, whatever you call it–fandom? Series of vidja? Going to events? What GamiP said during the Yukum@s nama was that 2015’s theme was “a step” and this just means 2016 will be yet another step. At least we are going places, and there are reasons to be excited.
What we do know now is that IM@S will get its PS4 release probably sometime 2016. PS4 is now about $300. Thank Jesus. Because spending money on IM@S is now something so conditioned in me that I just hope for the master to be kind to its koebuta farm. Looking at the near future though, ML3rd is already killing me softly.
Year-in-review 2015:
- Introduction
- Shirobako, Kurobako
- Sounding Off
- Eventing
- The St@te the Union
- N-Listing
PS. Due to unforeseen events the last two posts are delayed, but it’s not even 12 days since Christmas so maybe this is OK.
Side-English
The Idolm@ster SideM idol subunit SEM stands for “Science English Mathematics” and supposedly the seiyuu team put on a hell of a show on the live stage. But it gets me thinking–these idols have the image of that futuristic exoticism that comes with these “SEM” notions, but how?
Science? OK I can see that. What’s exotic about English? Okay, maybe from a Japanese point of view there’s something exotic about the West. But Mathematics? What is exotic about mathematics? Maybe it can be kind of esoteric?
SEM also reminds me of another abbreviation, STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or what is commonly known as “curriculum that will lead to gainful employment that actually makes money.” The SEM idols are three ex-high school teachers who taught those 3 subjects, so it triggers the “public education policy” line of thinking and that leads to STEM.
And SEM is kind of like STEM–they are the hard line items in public education in Japan, which focuses on stuff that is going to be more important and relevant like how STEM subjects are.
If the last blog post I titled is any clue, I recently read a couple bio write-ups of Elon Musk who paints himself as a physicist-engineer-entrepreneur who happens to also be a genius and wants to send a million people to Mars. Is that the kind of appeal SideM wants to uh, emulate?
To mix it up, recently I came across a spoiler about the latest Metal Gear Solid (V), which in short, reminded me of Itou Project’s Genocidal Organ. In both cases, language is part of a greater science-fictional plot about killing a lot of people. I’m not sure, but this seems a very novel idea. Which is to say, does English have a place in STEM? I think it absolutely does.
Of course, this isn’t really the case if you are talking about public education in an English-speaking country, but English is the language of science, and not knowing English as a scientist or tech/engineering person is like being a weeaboo who can’t understand Japanese. I can’t imagine someone who is at the top of the game in those subject matters not know enough English to get around. Maybe they don’t speak it (since most of the time it’s reading and writing only) but it is just another kind of barrier, perhaps, that the Japanese feel especially. And I can see how some people would take that idea far enough–to equate English as some kind of symbol of western imperialism, or what comes more recently as American dominance of global culture, in popular or as a world police-type entity.
Well, making SEM seem sexy is all good in my book. Very positive development if you ask me.
Musk-Style Idoling
I side with Elon Musk when he (subtly) complained about the comparison of what SpaceX has accomplished with what Bezos tweeted about landing a (part of a) rocket, back when Blue Origin announced its feat. I think we cannot overstate the difference between landing a big thing that’s in freefall at near zero speed at its apex with landing a big thing that’s traveling at something like Mach 7. Or however fast 16000 kilometers per hour is. And that’s just its lateral velocity.
This is what I feel stands between IM@S and Love Live. They are both about fake idols and are media-mixed IPs with the usual attachments to them. But in rocket speak, IM@S is somewhere between finishing its second stage burn and going to the third, far beyond its Max Q point. Love Live on the other hand is still rocking that main burner. And I suspect the two idol ships are not even going to the same places, taking the same trajectory.
Maybe that’s just how far it takes to go beyond the glittering future.
I think we will want both to do well. And not only these two, but WUG, Aikatsu, Pripara, SB69, whatever you got, right now, floats all boats outside of Japan. Because the west doesn’t get idols. Those who think so somehow understand it only in the context of the infamous AKB and all the drama that name brings. But we have to realize while the 48Gs revolutionized what that concept is in practice, they are not the idol industry nor are they even representative of it outside of the very mainstream. And mainstream Japanese entertainment was never really relevant to the West anyway, speaking on aggregates with broad strokes.
The more people who get LL, and it doesn’t matter if they get into LL or not, the better it is for everyone else. I think East Asia generally gets it; Koreans are a good example of improving on some of that formula, while sticking to what works for them. But it’s also different than the kind of less-glamorous, oddly homely and otaku-friendly version of these things. Still, writing as someone from the USA, it is a change welcomed.
With Love Live’s Tokyo Dome event on the horizon, and how the movie release shattering late-night anime records, I hope this is just the beginning of something more wonderful for everyone, not just livers. And I think while it’s okay to get nervous and jittery about going to LL 6th (RIP if you are attempting), don’t worry. If it was as awesome as IM@S 10th, you will be in for a treat, and it wouldn’t even be that severe to score tickets.
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I have posts to write, but I don’t have that much time. We’ll see. One thing for sure all those “Year in Review” posts will come after Christmas.
Cinderella Chiaking; Wives; Miscellany
I was reading this translation of Takahashi Chiaki’s write-up on the seiyuu business, her career and some notable past stories she wanted tell. It occured to me, the way she talk about seiyuu is really similar to how IDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls works.
Pilot + seiyuu doesn’t quite exist in CG universe, or is there? Maybe in SideM… I guess, it’s okay to be the best French or Russian or Esper or Rock or Mushroom or Creepy or Smiling or Flutist or Dairy Farmer or whatever. You get the idea. Who knows what will happen to you?
Just to talk about Chiaking a bit more, recently, she participated in the Aice5 Reunion as a part of the Sore ga Seiyuu event featuring Aice5. There was the drama about her torn achilles heel, possibly a stress injury as a consequence to her knee problem from a couple years ago. It happened during the Aice5 event rehursal, and people were obviously upset over that. The silver lining was that she was very much up for the event regardless, and there was enough time between her immediate recovery and the event to plan around having a Chiaking who can’t walk unassisted. Namely, a cool couch and someone to push it around.
It’s pretty neat.
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I searched my blog to see when and how often I use the term “waifu.” The first hit date was in 2010. Recently more and more I feel otherwise about the term, however.
The bottom line problem here is that waifu is equivocal to the “yome” in “ore no yome.” Japanese otaku claim their wives, 2D or 3D, it doesn’t matter, in this way. But this is not exactly with that tinge of irony that a weeaboo-ized term of the same literal meaning carries. In this sense you are just declaring your wife in that otaku context. It still can be ironic, but this is not why it’s done. But I think when westerners co-opt this concept in “waifu” we do it in a way how we use “otaku” to equivocate “fans.” And I mean this is the super-gate-keeping, lock-us-up-and-throw-away-the-keys kind of way. It really should only mean “hardcore fans” at the most, but that’s not how marketing out west handles it. Obviously in glorious year 2015 of our Lord the O word no longer carry the thick stigma of yore in Japan, but when a blessed nerd finds and declares wife (or husband), this is done without irony, East or West. Because it would be disrespectful otherwise.
And this is why I find waifu problematic. The term is built-in with irony. Like, at best, we use the term to signify the context in which a wife is declared, like an anime nerd and his or her animu character. But this context is always never positive; maybe it’s pretty much neutral usually, but why even bother? If you call Shimakaze your wife I don’t think anyone will be confused, or at least no more than if you were to call Shimakaze your waifu. So why the linguistic twist? What does it mean?
If people were calling their wives ironically in Japan I don’t think I would be as bent over this. Or maybe I just don’t have the same notion about marriages in general, since I probably lean conservative in those topics? I don’t think that even matters.
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It’s that month of the year. I have stuff planned. Will write. God speed in Deresute.