Just want to talk about the now-ongoing voting for the next round of outfit SR cards for Theater Days. Happy Christmas, New Years, and cheers to another day commemorating the late civil rights leader.

For background and recap, the mobile-rhythm-idol-gacha game IDOLM@STER MILLION LIVE: Theater Days (MLTD hence) has an election where players can earn ballots and vote for one of the 5 choices of outfits to be available (in gacha, but at least it’s not impossible to get for free) to be implemented in game later on. The second election has started today featuring the same 5 outfit choices from last election in 2019. Like last time, the voting is separated by each idol, but the choices are the same: a spring “one-piece” dress, a “china outfit” dress, some kind of swimsuit, a waitress or “maid” outfit, and whatever “sexy spy” meant. Spirited debate between players did occur in 2019 and will occur again, although every character now only as 4 choices as 1 of them have been implemented. Overall it took about a year for everyone’s Closet SR to be added to the game, although some were faster than others. It took about another year for the Closet cards to be added to the medal pool (free to play pool). There has been like 3 support tickets since in which you could have picked it up, so I don’t think it’s particularly egregious, given that the voting itself is part of the fun.

Unlike 2019’s election, we now actually know what the outfits look like and what the card art looks like, as well as the gist of the commu you get from pulling the card. This has further lowered the stakes of the Closet voting “game,” but the long wait time since 2019 means there’s still some significant incentive for Producers to rally up behind their ideal outfits. To me, a core aspect of IDOLM@STER game series is collecting the various outfits, so this event keeps being relevant to many players, yet still in a way that is “gloves on” versus, say, the annual Cinderella Elections. No P loses out on anything important in the end.

Thanks to Fleur from one of the MLTD discords I can read some tea leaves after the initial hours of voting, and give my own opinions on all of them. I will also highlight some meta undercurrents, as they say. This is super early impressions, so things will change!

The 2019 election breakdown was:
Spring One-Piece: 14
China Dress: 21
Swimsuit: 2
“Maid“: 10
Spy: 5

For one, there were some close battles from the first election that will leave the losing team seek re-election. I think most of them will end up winning, especially the second place outfits that were, as I put it, “on the right side of history.” Not every character’s Spring Dress or China Outfit looked good, I think that’s the big lesson learned. Only two idols selected the swimsuit, and waitress was significantly under-elected given people didn’t know what it really was. Both of those outfit categories can run a wide range, but now we know what they are. That being said, I’m still not sure if anyone else would look as good in that specific swimsuit as Karen.

To sum it up, though, the overall trend this year will be Maid versus One Piece. This would be the default template to break out of, whatever the P-hiveminds decide for each idol. Part of it is the aforementioned dynamics from 2019, but part of it is just math, as the possible choices are reduced.

I will walk the rest through one by one, with my favorite pick for each, plus what I project the eventual winner is using the very limited, unreliable, current data. Disclaimer: this is extremely preliminary data from less than a day’s worth of voting. Things will definitely change for some of these, especially ones projecting for One Piece dress.

Seeing the VOY@GER MMXXI trailer on this past Sunday morning was something, to say the least. Goripon is back to do another project with the IM@S content that he is still purportedly a fan of is definitely a sight for sore eyes. The studio Khara link is curious, and the most important “Animas team” tease is a seriously strong dose of hopium.

What is worth also noting is that on the 15th anniversary, July 27 2020, we were not only in the depth of the COVID-19 pandemic, but we saw the Million Live anime teaser. That means in the gap of a year we saw 2 anime teasers, but the only anime since were some Cinderella Girls Gekijo stuff? I might have missed something but that is it, right? Oh, there was this.

We did get an update from WakachikoP last month with the annual Million Live Theater Days anniversary issue of Famitsu. So I can say that at least this is the minimum fans deserve–even an update that they need more time is needed for a fandom this engaged.

As an aside, even if a big project like Theater Days are run by a big team with a lot of people working on it, with planning that span years, having Hazama-san in charge feels like the product and franchise is just in a better place than KominoP as we had in the past when he took over the role during WakachikoP’s leave.

Back on topic: What is there to expect about VOY@GER MMXXI? I don’t think it’s anything more than just another extended trailer, similar to the one they released 5 years ago to celebrate the 4th year of Million Live. (By the way, I guess this is worth watching if you care about new folks doing research and not knowing about the team Anim@s connection.) If we’re lucky, it might stretch beyond the 10-minute mark, but since it has been referred to as a concept movie or promotional video, I won’t bet on it. It’s suppose to come out soon, so given the neck-breaking pace that Goripon had to deal with regarding the latest Eva movie, that only means there has been about half a year of actual production time when staff can actively create the animation, at the most. Depending on how many people are actually working on the project, of course, it could mean a variety of things, but there has been enough time past since the last time team Anim@s has done anything.

At the same time, we still don’t have a release date for the video, but the song will be out soon in mid-August. The cast has yet record for the work, if the announcement stream reactions were genuine, although they of course have already recorded the song. I don’t think it’s good to dwell too much on it, other than to celebrate the first animated anything for the 3 Shinymas characters, and the other characters who were left out of their respective anime previously.

If I were to actually speculate, VOY@GER was suppose to be a project launched along with the 15th anniversary festivities. On the music side, VOY@GER turned into the same release format as Nandodemo Waraou which seems like a logical thing they will want to do every year going forward. But IDOLM@STER Five Stars songs probably had 6-12 months of lead time, similar to a new mobile game event/content drop for MLTD or CGSS. If we take the cancelled Theater Days PSTour event as a measuring stick, it took them about 9 months to redo it as it’s scheduled for early October. There are other factors affecting these so we can only take that number with a healthy amount of salt, but +/-3 months seems reasonable.

Predicting anime production schedule during COVID seems like a foolish thing to do, so maybe guessing about staff is more productive. If you are good you can probably guess staff from the cast list, because, as MingosP mentioned on the livestream, of course Makoto is in this project because Goripon is a MakotoP. Maybe you can find the biggest Derem@s animator stans for Minami as the next one up.

In summary, it’s like what they say, it’s just more IM@S. MillionPs have been through this before, but this time we’ll have the newbies from Theater Days along for the ride. For CG folks, they know how Spin-Off is like. For the other old timers though, this is all gravy.