Shibuya Rin in the ongoing Cinderella Girls anime gets paired with flowers. I remember vividly still the first episode as she gets her first look at Uzuki’s smile. Director Kouno’s transformative climax paired with blossomed plant reproductive organs is not at any odds with the fact that Rin’s family run a flower shop and at times she adorns the shop’s front door.

The initial telegraph during episode one has Rin, Uzuki and Mio run into each other at a live event, each handling one behind-the-scene aspect. This flower girl Rin is, in a very literal sense, just like our flower girl, if you belonged to the growing number of fans who purchased flower stands for events. In retrospect that these flower stands got prominently showcased in the Dereani concert scenes should come as no surprise. It’s nice to imagine that behind every expensive order we put in for a live, there’s some Shibuya Rin putting the wreath together and hauling it to the venue.

Flowers from fans are, perhaps, a vain exercise, but it is nice. In the big picture, perhaps Rin’s existence isn’t so different. Both she and her fans hope, at least, the flowers will match her.

Comparing young women to flowers is the easiest thing.

Sometimes I watch Cinderella Girls from an agency point of view. By agency I mean via the character’s point of view of self-realization and self-empowerment. It’s a fitting term, isn’t it? In this sense, the Producer is an agent for exactly this, in order to further the idols’ careers. An agent for change? How does TakeP’s character bring it about? And will the change be the kind I am looking for? For better or for worse? From whose perspective?

Thinking back to season one, when the police mistook Producer for a creeper, it gave the Dekoration girls an opportunity to do something, even if it is to right what may be called a wrong (it may not be). And there are other instances of this, where agency is cloaked in some form of a challenge, like giving Cat and Rock the same unit song and to work out their differences, or just giving Minami a lead role as the eldest. But aren’t these challenges just normal tasks? It seems by giving them mundane idol work the Producer produces. In fact Mio’s big scene in the first half revolved around the most ordinary thing ever, although it might not be fair to trivialize the challenges that Mio overcame.

The same is true for Rin’s eventual change of mind in the recent episodes, or what Mio decided to do. But to what ends? And are the changes good? I think this is the real talk part of the show. Imagine if the idols give up something to become one. No dating the boys (or even girls?) that they like, for example. Leaving their familial responsibilities or betraying their parental expectations to pursuit what they dream of doing, to make a career out of it, outside of the entertainment industry context, can be framed as noble and sympathetic things. Being chased down by a tall, stoic dude trying to hand you some business cards is a weird turn-on-head approach to career guidance. Basically, a lot of these challenges in Cinderella Girls may be silly, but the show treats them no less real than the “real talk” items of the seedy underbelly of the Japanese idol biz. It’s as if we were handed placeholders for these things, even if we didn’t quite address them head-on.

This is probably why I always thought Rin as “the” Cinderella Girls character. Once I look beyond the intercharacter relationship Rin has on NewGen and see it as Rin’s personal struggle as a Millennial, anyway. I mean, to spell out what I think is obvious, if we think of Cinderella the fairy tale as a story where someone grew true to her potential with Theatrics, help of a magical godmother, and a mean adoptive family, then IDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls takes this time-honed adage and time-honored, little-girl-marketing mechanism and spin it into Japanese idol regurgitate targeting otaku bros. This is a little weird, but also a little bit the most strangely gender-fair approach: Do boys like Cinderella like girls do? I mean, who doesn’t enjoy this generic kind of coming-of-age spin? This is way better than making a male-twist version on the same story. It’s like we are re-making a cake, using the old cake as the original material.

Is TakeP’s Producer the real pivot as our Fairy Godfather, whose CV was formerly just 17 years old?

Maybe I’m looking at this from the perspective of someone who has been through the wave of otaku material in the 00s when Japan occasionally addresses its outcasts with encouraging messages such as “Don’t be a hikkikomori, there is hope” and such? Or is that way too subtle?

Anyway, all I want to say is if Rin blossomed, it’s only because she was born to do it. It’s natural for a character of her nature to do so. The response of seeing it is either admiration and awe, and/or a desire to have what she has. This is where Cinderella Girls get interesting, in terms of that and the setup it has to trigger whatever expressions from its viewers, both reactions engineered and not so much.

In the year 2015, it is the war of idols. Actually, it’s the war of mobile games. The battles wage across battlefields all over the world, and I’m just here to write about one of them.

There are two schools in mobile games. The newer term for the first class, social games, is really just a cover term for mobage because it’s kind of trademarked in Japan. Well, that aside, the idea behind these games is content delivery. The other type of game is the mobiles games that has some kind of gameplay baked in, but also deliver content around it. Think of it like a sliding scale of pachinko machines or what you might find in a casino. On one end it’s just a RNG, on the other end you have minigame puzzles and what not, like solitaire or blackjack or IIDX (you get the idea), that the numbers change based on what “cards” you have or whatever.

By content, I mean things like the idols that I love. Or rather, the narrative material in which depicts these lovely characters. It’s stuff I will ignore for now because you can find out about it via the well-stocked Project IM@S wiki and the greyer namassuka site.

What this post will cover is the long play, mid-term play, and short-term play goals of the IDOLM@STER Million Live that I stick by. It may not be the best way, and I don’t do anything that blatantly violates the TOS (no botting or multi-accounts or RMT etc), so I welcome anyone with a better approach to let me know. I won’t go over account creation either because I assume you are savvy enough to do that in order to play this game. The only caveat I will make here is that trading is disabled if you don’t confirm with a Japanese phone number, which makes certain things more difficult. I’ll call them out as necessary.

Continue reading

TL;DR – it’s not about quantity, but quality, once overhead has been accounted for.

Evirus says here:

There are entirely too many Cinderella Girls. It wasn’t a problem during the first cour when it appeared the show was content with keeping the story on the 14 main idols; that worked for its two-cour predecessor. However, the current season of THE iDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls seems intent on cramming more and more of the game’s enormous battery of idols into the anime, presumably attempting to placate ardent fans of niche characters with cameos. Unfortunately, this practice dilutes the show as a whole, making this half of the Cinderella Girls anime somewhat underwhelming.

and concludes with

I’m sure there are disappointed Harada Miyo fans who just want five freaking minutes watching her gap spark plugs, and Yorita Yoshino apostles who want a subplot about her talking to strangers, but neither of these scenarios is likely to do much for the Cinderella Girls anime as a whole. How about spending more time with the ostensible lead trio in New Generations? How about that?

It’s a fair ask, but it’s the wrong ask. Here are some arguments against what Evirus is asking.

First of all, the first season is more or less in line with the same formula as season two, because it cannot possibly focus on all 14 main idols. So what happened was each idol was assigned a grouping and put into the canonical network of interpersonal relationships, and when it’s their turn in the spotlight, we get an group episode. I mean, compare the Miria episode in season 1 versus the Miria episode in season 2. What Miria episode in season 1? The one she just tags along Rika and gets lost? LOL.

I’m just going to interpret what Evirus is whining about as the usual ask in the context of focusing on the development of the main characters. It’s why I say it’s a fair ask. But that’s not the IM@S way.

Which is to say, second, New Generations is kind of meh. Meh in terms of what? There are reasons why there are Yorita fans. Or Momoka fans (in the case of episode 17–look at how those 2-bit minor characters present for fanservice diluted a great episode! Wait). If you took a look at the regularly scheduled elections in the game, you’ll notice one thing: The New Gen girls are just so-so popular until the anime. They may be spotlit as “lead” characters but they cannot carry the show by themselves. That is both true cynically/critically, and true to the theme of IDOLM@STER.

[I am just glad Mio has fans now ;_;]

Also, they’ve been dropping hints on TriPri so I’m sure we’re just going to get a giant ball of mess coming our way when that setup pops. Honestly when Cinderella Project was first announced there was some minor murmur of discontent, because some weren’t sure if Uzuki and Mio can really pull it off.

Last, to answer the question I posed in the title of this post: one idol is too many if it is the wrong one. Unfortunately the anime has only enough time and resources to showcase so many characters while giving them a fair shake, and the Animas formula that Deremas anime is following dictated the kind of complex character development which involve a lot of intercharacter exploration, further limiting how many characters the show can write for. There are going to be times when idols most don’t care about go on stage. (I get the feeling Evirus is knee jerk about his comments based solely on the variety show episode, given the 4 season 2 episodes, thus far, are all very similar in the showcasing-extra-idols aspect, at least by the clock.) But so far every time this happens in Deremas anime it was done in a context that goes with the story of that week. It’s the most we can really ask it to do. The concept behind Cinderella Girls is to have at least one idol you care about than trying to sell a handful of idols that you don’t, and unfortunately it also means having to deal with many idols you don’t care about to get to the ones you do.

If they can make such crafty episodes like #17 every week, I don’t think I would care which idol it is about, because quality is what’s important. And much like that episode demonstrates, one can showcase minor characters just fine while delivering a great experience. Quantity is just an obstacle that needs management.

In that sense, the compromise I offer is that the writing has to account for this aspect. I imagine if you weren’t moved by the Big Sisters moment, the whole episode was a little on the dry side. Maybe we can’t please everybody but the same can be said of all the prior episodes. It comes down to just how well the execution is, I guess.

PS. Here’s a man who has not the right idol in the show.