Category Archives: Franchises

February 7, 2023

We’re Going to Master of Idol World 2023

By omo

For long time readers of this blog, you might recall back in 2013-2014 I did some stuff to prepare for Master of Idol World 2014. After that I wrote something like, 13 thousand words to try to sum up the experience. I am doing nowhere nearly as much this time. Why? Because I don’t have to. Flower stands are not allowed, and instead we have these Bandai Namco-sanctioned flags that you can fund, and there are at least several oversea Producer ones. I joined probably the most popular one of those, which looks great by the way.

I don’t have to plan a big meet up after the show, because charitable Japanese and Oversea Producers are doing it, so I am just going to theirs. It is definitely a different world in 2023 versus 2014. I might even have multiple things that I could go do, I don’t know, just not too focused on it.

The difference to me, I think, is mostly on me–I just don’t have that much time and attention span lately to spend on this stuff. I play some mobile games…and it’s already too much. I guess I only seriously play Theater Days, and even then that is a very light load. I sorta-serious play JP Priconne and semi-casually play Global Priconne, but those combined is still a light load. JP literally runs 5-10 minutes a day and up to 30 for CB, while Global is not much more. I’m so behind on those games too in terms of commu and what have you. I have a love-hate relationship with Blue Archive still, but I think I have to shed this game despite it being occasionally fun and frustrating. And it’s a light-weight game as these things go, being largely a Priconne clone.

All this is to say I still watch a bunch of anime, but even then that’s always kind of the struggle, since as long as I have been watching seasonal anime. I guess we are in February, where I don’t have any Baseball to watch and there’s just 1 game left in the NFL schedule. Speaking of which, is there a bar or somewhere in Tokyo where I can crew up to watch the Superb Owl and all the dumb ads? I guess I can do it in a hotel room (or, more likely, at the airport) thanks to unplugged television services, but it isn’t the same (at 8am).

When the NFL is the only main thing on my mind during MOIW weekend, is a good thing. There are other logistical items to note, at least some out of many:

  • The buppan (goods sale) area spans 3 separate locations this time–Tokyo Dome, The Science Museum (near Budokan), and Kanda Square (about 10-15 minutes walk from the Museum). Looks like Tokyo Dome won’t have all of the stuff, and the heavy lifting is going to be at Kanda Square. The music CD stuff will be at the Science Museum. Along with the lottery on ticket time, this could be tricky for folks wanting to pick up stuff. I haven’t had much time to look through the goods list, but there are a few things I want.
  • I’m going to an Asaka concert on Friday, just to get the juices going. Also Asaka with a live band is always a fun time.
  • I’m going to Lonesome_Blue’s first show on Saturday, so this is going to be tricky trying to get tickets out before MOIW lol. I hope I can make it from Shibuya timely and meet everyone. Ideally the day before.
  • Tokyo Dome has an amusement complex attached to it. There’s a MLB cafe. There’s the JP Baseball Hall of Fame museum. There’s a Ferris wheel…? A lot of stuff there. There is a collab with IM@S that weekend at the various shops there. This means I can literally line up for Shake Shack and get, I don’t know, an imas sticker or something. The details are all online.
  • After MOIW weekend I am going to have a proper vacation while shepherding my folks around town in Japan. That’s also on my mind.
  • And on a similar note I have to go to l-tike and buy tickets to Ghibli Park on the 10th, for May. Sigh.
  • For fandom extra-curriculars, besides the meetings after the show, there are some producers doing a display at a rental office/meeting space, and the usual call guide handouts at several locations.
  • At some point I should at least learn all the group songs, especially the SideM ones. Pretty sure I got 765Pro All Stars and Million down pat. For Cinderella Girls, I watched their show from November on live stream, so that’s something. I don’t know any Deremas calls for anything 2019 and onward, though. Now that calls are unbanned, Ps are gonna yell out loud. Do Shiny Colors even have calls besides Urya-Oi LOL. I’m pretty much up to date on Shiny except maybe just the latest series.

Did you know that same weekend has a ton of other events? It’s the weekend before Valentine’s Day. It doesn’t really matter to the Ps out there I guess. Worse comes to worse, there’s a stream and an archive viewing.

I think going to see all the IM@S happening in Tokyo is exactly the kind of escape and relief I need. I hope to see some of you there? This is like a very perverse victory lap.

2 comments | posted in Conventions and Concerts, Idolmaster

January 23, 2023

THE IDOLM@STER Million Live! 9th Live Impressions, Thoughts

By omo

After the missing years of COVID, I was able to return and attend a Million Live solo show. Before 9th, I attended stops of 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 2 stops of 6th.

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Leave a comment | posted in Conventions and Concerts, Idolmaster, Seiyuu, Idol, Pop

December 8, 2022

Spite for Transformative Coercion Is the Fuel for Rock Music

By omo

Let’s talk about Bocchi the Rock. First of all, here’s a nice video on Youtube talking about its qualities as an anime adaptation.

I think the gist of the video is pretty much the explainer for “Anime no Chikara.” And on a basic level, when you sic 100s of animation creators to create something based on a comic that a handful of people put together (at best, as with most 4koma works), you’re going to likely get something that’s more amazing than what the original manga team can put together, on average. (The video says how some people who checked out the comic for Bocchi because of the cool anime were disappointed. Isn’t this exactly what happened to some people during K-ON era? And that adaptation is quite straight-laced.) Frankly, this should be the case every time, but isn’t, is a post for another day, but we are on Youtube on 2022 and people hamming on something as basic as this still gets some stuff wrong.

In this particular case I feel the youtuber is a bit overexaggerating or using language that could stand to be more precise. Unfortunately I think being a little bit over-gushing about it is kind of the selling point of this sort of videos, correctness be damned. Maybe the algorithm has its upsides, but I don’t think I can approve any implementation that further encourages the selling off of veracity for clicks, which basically makes Youtube’s the worst offender there is. And, I guess, that is also another post, but there’s something more egregious about that video’s comments that I want to highlight. (Want to hate society? Go read Youtube comments.)

The top rated comments (as of this writing) says that Bocchi is an extrovert who has crippling social anxiety. Well, the social anxiety part I think we all can agree on, but who can possibly say Bocchi is an extrovert? It boggles my mind, but the person lays out that it’s because Bocchi seems to chooses or wants to do social things but can’t due to her, uh, issues. I’m sorry to say but doesn’t this mean this person has never met an introverted person who wants to party? (Has this person never has talked to people like myself?)

All of which is just to say, even engaging with the anime and story about an introvert, and a huge part of the appeal of Bocchi is just how she thinks and feels like an introverted person, is upended when you engage the thing that I would charitably call as society. Youtube served me a video about something I like and it just irritated me. This is how an introverted mind works, this is how Bocchi’s mind works.

Wanting to burn down society makes a great villain character if you are an old-timer JRPG creator, but it is even better if that motivation becomes the burning soul of a rock band. This is the third-level meta I want to see in Bocchi. I get it that cute girls can’t be bad girls in a Kirara 4koma, but I think there’s space for it and Bocchi will only get better the more chaotic it gets, which I think we all agree.

PS. The most serious foul in that Bocchi video is putting it in on a pedestal in a season when Pop Team Epic is airing, and then praise Bocchi’s…non-anime parts as if it was rare or even the first time something like this happened?? In another time, maybe it won’t be as offensive, but talk about applying the same analysis without paying attention to the context, the context of this season in 2022, as well as the context of this introverted thinking that characterizes Bocchi. Like if it was science, maybe it’s okay, but literary analysis? I’d give you no better than a C.

1 comment | posted in Bocchi the Rock!

December 3, 2022

Anime NYC 2022: Wrap

By omo

It feels weird blogging about Anime NYC while attending its sister con, Anime Frontier in Fort Worth. On the other hand, AF is basically the same setup as ANYC, just much smaller…and has Gundam Aerial HG in stock.

Anime NYC comes back from its Omicron-shaded 2021 edition and is a victim of its timing, yet again. This time it’s still not its fault. Japan opened its doors in mid-October which made booking guests feasible. Record high inflation and strong US demand for entertainment in 2022 means every international act is trying to play here, resulting in a slog of perfomer visa applications. This is partly why fhana and Flow dropped out of A-Kon earlier this year, but this is also why ANYC, despite various tries and attempts (as heard from the grapevine) couldn’t really come through with much. With help from CR, the Mogra DJs made it to the US, including the once-denied-by-visa DJ Wildparty who was supposed to show up at Porter Robinson’s show earlier in October. Rock band [alexandros] was literally announced on Friday of the con with a concert on Sunday, curtesy of Bandai Namco and their huge Gundam push. There’s a video out there of them talking about their visa limbo. It is a very 2022 eventer feel for Americans.

Anime NYC 2022 is a big Gundam con. I would say a good fifth of the programs are related to it including guests, screening, and the Alexandros concert. Bannam brought two huge Gundam displays and a large Gundam Base shop, along with other Bannam stuff. It was so big that it took me a while to find where the Tensura and music stuff were sold. Mixbox had a booth as collaborated with MAL, so I guess that technically is also Bannam? Bannam brought over the producer and director to Hathaway’s Flash. I finally got to tell Murase how I feel about Witch Hunter Robin! Maybe it’s blessing in disguise it wasn’t Reina Ueda at the con. Anyways they had a big presence.

Sort of overshadowed by them are Aniplex, and Toei. It’s hard to overshadow the huge One Piece displays they had at the hall, though. Literally a giant Luffy balloon towered over everything there, with regular cosplay gatherings riding on the hot Film Red stuff that’s going on.

Aniplex did their usual best, and I thoroughly enjoyed their panels, or at least the ones I could go to. Kagura panel was a ton of fun, and you can watch it streamed still. The big Mahoyo displays though…it is a vibe, as they say. I guess I need to dust off my Switch for the holidays.

Being mostly an industry thing, ANYC let the big companies bring their stuff, and it worked out because Bannam, Aniplex and Toei are real deals and I am impressed with what they did. Gundam Base did brisk business all weekend. If you spent $500 there you could get front row Alexandros concert. I’m not sure people realizes the value of this.

Alexandros are bros through and through. Two of them are fluent in English so it helped. It’s my first time seeing them in person but these guys are chart topper rockers (and I guess played in NYC in 2018). Still wild that they came with basically 2 days of notice. We were able to coax an encore out of them so that was good.

For reasons, I actually missed out on most of the Mogra stuff. I hated it, but it can’t be helped. The show was combined with the JP DJ with this LA DJ (she’s Taiwanese?) who played basically half the time. LIO from NIOLION was there with Teddy also, who I was able to see on Sunday.

The last thread from ANYC in terms of programming was the Tensura stuff. The movie just came out in Japan and was right after ANYC. Mindaryn and RON from Stereo Dive Foundation came over to do some music from the movie. In fact, Mindaryn had to fly back on Saturday because she has a movie event literally the day after. The mini-concert at the Tensura panel was fun. RON also did a solo show the Wednesday after ANYC (literally day before Thanksgiving) which was basically the same set plus a bunch of his older stuff. RON has written a lot of anime and game music so his solo work from SDF is kind of just scratching the surface of his catalog but do check it out.

What else is there to say? The con is huge–49K plus unique warm bodies, and it’s only because they weren’t booking the entire Javitz. The lines were a non-issue this year due to the lottery system. That said the lottery system is a bit of a mess, so I hope they clean that up for 2023.

On that note, Flow said at their panel at Anime Frontier that they want to go play in NY, because they only played in NJ and toured NY during their off day (sup Anime Next). Maybe this is a sign.

As for the rest of the con, I actually spent most of the time there, despite working Friday. It was crowded, and the exhibit floor was pretty much buzzing most of the time. Since panels were lottery for a good number of them, I didn’t really try to go. I didn’t even get to see Kawasumi… and the aforementioned miss on Mogra DJ left a bad taste in my mouth because I wanted to see them (and even paid VIP..)…well it’s partly my fault, but everything was announced kind of last minute, including the schedule of when the DJs will play. I think those issues aside, ANYC was actually a good time that renergized me (even if it was at the tail end of a eventing spree). Good time with friends were spent, especially making this ANYC special as covid’s grasp on events continue to weaken.

I gave away a bunch of these Minami Saki photo books. They come with a DVD. Not sure how many people even know her at this con... Why do I have these? Someone gave them to me lol.

PS. Eats… if we take the full time from Friday to Wednesday after SDF’s concert… Went to 3 izakayas and they were all pretty good. The Henn na Hotel in Midtown has a proper izakaya inside of it, just really expensive. We went to 2 other places around Grammercy, one being a staple and another more traditional. We ended up getting “hot pot” which is just meat foudue Japanese style. It’s weird. Other spot has become a bit of my regular place with tebasaki and boozy milkshake made from nigori sake. We had late night dimsum on Wednesday after ramen for pre-show pregame. I mean what else is open at 11:30pm the day before Thanksgiving, am I right?

Leave a comment | posted in Conventions and Concerts, Gundam

November 4, 2022

Context the Rock

By omo

I’m not fully sure what the angle is to Bocchi the Rock! Evirus isn’t wrong* about the humor aspect, and the anime adaptation carries the cuts, however (slightly) blunted, and the laughs. Yoshino Aoyama does an admirable job with those reactions and fun noises that comes out of Bocchi. It’s a fun anime series that I look forward to enjoying every week.

But to me Bocchi the Rock occupies a particular set of contexts. Here is an anime based on a 4-koma comic from the same magazine that published K-ON, and it existed largely due to the post-K-ON boom of high school girl rock content. The animation takes direct cues from that, and the adaptation also directly pegs some key aspects on K-ON. My spine shivers hearing Ikumi Hasegawa do her version of Mio’s power vocals. When will she cover Don’t say “lazy”?

There is yet another layer to this context where many rock and roll creators are folks with far-from-perfect psyches, each dealing with their phobias, insecurities, and other maladjustments. Sometimes I think good musicians all struggle with some inner problems, darkness or whatever you want to call it. Well, nothing remarkable there I guess, that seems entirely human. Whatever that drives Bocchi to join a rock band is what it is, but these reasons and motivations do run the gamut and having a range of them in the same group is one way to create a remarkable sound or experience. It can make for good art.

At the same time, the way rock bands make art is through dealing with those issues while at it, and this is all assuming the band doesn’t break apart sooner rather than later, of course. Making music can be both creative and/or destructive. Just like any other art.

How do you create great music? What goes on in the minds of successful rock-and-rollers? Isn’t Bocchi the Rock a story that sort of plays on these stereotypes? Yeah. And if the opening to Chainsaw Man was inspirational, Bocchi is a whole TV show of it because that’s in its bones.

Bocchi the Rock is not glamorous, and maybe this is the one big thing that sets it back from its aspirational target, its idol. If anything the sheen of CloverWork’s excellent visuals cut against its faux glam. Regardless, in being the opposite of glamorous, Bocchi the Rock will hit those who gets hit that much harder.

This style or philosophical take on rock and roll is the kind in which art is the window into the mind of the unsettled, the disturbed, the distressed. It’s not glamorous at all. Bocchi’s little band is actually as rock as it gets.

*Turns out there is something shared between Bocchi The Rock and Hitori Bocchi no Marumaru Seikatsu so Evirus is still wrong.

Leave a comment | posted in Bocchi the Rock!, Modern Visual Culture