For one night only, on August 1st, the three dead IDOLM@STER 765Pro AS radio shows will make a comeback. It’ll be streamed on Nico, and the first actual IDOLM@STER official youtube channel (about…time?) will also host it. Nico gets an omake as usual I guess.
Not that there’s anything wrong with MOR–it’s a perfectly great weekly internet show, it showcases content that direly needs more exposure and covers all the branches of the franchise, even .KR and 876Pro. In the big picture, we lost 3 to get 3 more? There’s now a Shiny radio, there is another CG weekly(?) and there is MOR. I sort of lost track really. But yes, Aimachu and IM@S Studio are also back with Aisute for one night only.
There is just a bit over a day left to send in some fan mail–all the usual corners are available. The info for Aisute is here. There is also a form to send in general letters for the August 2nd live stream, which features the full cast. Again all the info is on this page, include the other corners from the other shows. The deadline to submit a letter is 7/21 midnight JP time, so you have about a day and change to do so!
It’s hard to explain, but the IM@S radio shows played a big part of P culture from back in the days, and that culture carried into the first Deremas and Million weekly shows. At some point those shows became one of the pillars of the series, even if it was kind of its own thing. It’s easy to get attached to them back when it was a big outlet for the series for people looking at the 2.5D content. In retrospect the three shows didn’t even go away for that long, but it’s nice to say the least.
My first Japan eventing trip was when I flew to Japan in 2009 and attended the Super-Dimensional Supersonic Tanabata concert, taking place around 7pm on July 7th, also a Tuesday.
Unlike that show, today’s online tribute is a 77-long video which I didn’t get to watch due to not buying a ticket early and having it sell out on me. I also woke up a bit late so I would have had missed the first part of the event, which is the set up.
Here’s the microsite for 2020’s Tanabata online event. Oversea viewers can still watch the last timeshift, which starts at 10pm Eastern time.
The traces for the 2009 show was removed deliberately after it was over. All the promo went down. It was meant to be a thing that had a short shelf life. Maybe that’s just how art works with Kanno. Maybe that will happen for the 2020 version?
In a lot of ways, the 2009 Tanabata event is literally that once-in-a-lifetime event that you may never forget, as fans of the composer and producer, and her output generally. It was art AF. So art that my post about it got eaten by the void when my site went down and lost about 1.5 years worth of posts back last decade. Just stubs left.
The experience of that show carved its shape into my psyche and I still remember rolling out of SSA with Wah and AlexD like it was some wild and crazy thing, even if at the end it was just Kanno marching around the stage with the musicians tooting a rubber duck.
I woke up at like 6am today Eastern time trying to watch the Japan stream. I ended up staying up watched the 9am Asian stream. Man, that stood with me. Without spoilering, I wish I watched the Europe timeshift too. I will catch the Americas one, so maybe I’ll write more about it then.
It seems that the Asian TS is shorter and doesn’t include additional stuff in the Japanese one, which is also 1000 yen more expensive. Oh well.
I’ve been thinking about this show for over 10 years, and it took the Coronavirus being a global pandemic to bring it back. I think that’s two once-in-a-lifetime events happening at the same time. Please take advantage of this online delivery and watch something really, really special.
My sleep-addled brain cried buckets of figurative tears last weekend listening to Sato Takafumi’s DJ set during the online EDM music event Asobinotes. Why? [Hit play below to hear the relevant part. Full set here]
That question “why” is literally the description of words on the canvas of the deep blue sky described in the song Shinography. It is the reason why I do the things I do. I quote the lyrics from the Shiny Colors 3rd year theme (TL):
The IDOLM@STER is a series that lives and dies in the hands of a, to put it nicely, turbulent company during a time when the future is uncertain. I’ve made the analogy of that tree in the past as a personal metaphor, but it’s a metaphor that is shared between not just other fans, but the series itself as well as its creators.
Million Live’s theme songs since the start had been as follows: Thank You, Welcome, Dreaming, Brand New Theater, Union, Flyers, and Glow Map. Do you see where we are going? We will go into the space over the future. We’re looking for the place under the shining star. And I guess Jam Project is also Lantis, right. Shiny starts at the glowing part already. To paint the visual metaphor of the tree, the OG is the seed, CG and ML are the trunk and branches, and Shiny is some fruit. Maybe also, CG is also all of these.
But this “growing” vibe, this repeating theme from OG, CG, ML and Shiny literally is the type of music fans consumed and loved year to year. It describes the attitude of the content, the attitude of the producers–those who know where they are but they dream big. Shiny Colors especially is that daring fruit hanging from the IM@S tree, bucking core trends and practices for popular mobile games and franchises, eschewing easy and quick play for deep characterization and VN-style rewards.
The lead in to Sato’s set, going back to what I was saying, is the summary of where he is. Sato happens to be the music director for the IDOLM@STER series, so he has a hand in all of this after taking over the role from his seniors. It seems almost like biographic when RE@DY was the start for this portion.
In a lot of ways when you are creating media works for a series like this, you are creating some kind of future that you are building towards, and it’s always somewhat risky how things will play out or not. Granted the risk is pretty low sometimes, but with these big franchises the room for mistake is pretty small, or so it can seem.
This is Manabi-ism. We exist as fans inside the space the work’s creators made, but the difference isn’t building a world, but building a the mechanism that moves the world forward. The difference is similar to having a lot of money versus a machine that makes money. In the year of our Lord 2020, only the latter exists, and it is one derivative higher, more difficult, more uncertain.
It’s about our perception of where this world will go. It is about the perception of the creators, and the fans’, the cast, the execs, the committees, and everyone pushing forward our next software update, our next gacha banner, our next new song. This is the idol festival that never ends, and is never exactly the same year to year.
Because if it was, it probably will end soon.
Now imagine that, all the ideas and emotions I tried to describe, play through in your mind in the span of about 138 seconds, and then add the pandemic-induced issue about having missed ML7th and Shiny 2nd, where for one weekend each you can actually touch, smell, feel and see this world materialize in the physical festivals that marks the typical IM@S anniversary lives.
I have a con to put together and thus not much time, but it helps to put all the relevant things together in one place. Obviously this is my point of view so take that with a grain of salt, but I’ve been a seiota for a while now, and you can’t fairly interpret what 2020’s Hase Yurina said without knowing her relatively turbulent history.
To be clear, I think she is a victim in the end, and I wish her the best, as she’s gone through some crazy patches in life generally, inside and outside of work. But it is really hard for me to take what she said on that stream at face value. For starters, it’s best if you can find a recording of it and the chat she’s reading off of, and watch on your own. Admittedly I wasn’t paying a lot of attention while it was happening so I missed a lot of it, but most of what I’ll write below have little to do with the stream itself. (Working from home lets me tune into twitter-trending Showrooms, but work still had to be done.)
Yurishii (henceforth, to simplify–also it’s ゆりã—ー, not ゆりã—ãƒ, so lulz how bangdreamers hijacked that romaji term on Google) signed into the seiyuu world via Arts Vision back in 1999 via an open audition. She came in with a lot of accolades and was a rising talent. She left Arts Vision in 2006 and became freelance for a short while, then joined Genki Project. It was over there she got those death threats.
The big splash for folks realizing for the first time about the recent Casting Couch post probably didn’t realize that in 2007 Arts Vision blew up with an agency-wide casting couch scandal. ANN has it written up here as I linked, but there was a lot of follow ups, which much has been lost in time in terms of news/fan coverage. I think only a couple showed upon ANN unfortunately, but there were a series of departures. A lot of people left the company around that time, a couple (at least?) formed new companies. It dragged on for a bit. For fans following the industry, it was a big deal at the time. [God bless Canned Dogs.]
The whole casting couch thing (makura eigyou) was an industry-wide (read: geinokai) problem. Actually that is not saying anything not already bloody obvious. Personally the Yurishii story is the seiyuu version of that shadow. Maybe we all got our crosses to bear, so this is one specific cross for this particularly small part of the industry, and it hits home harder. The #MeToo thing last year also mentioned an account where a female seiyuu were invited to mixed bathing in one occasion with higher ups, so you can see how this plays out in a believable manner. What’s really sad is it’s not easy to find official or tablody reporting from back when, as matome blogs were the only real source left. And maybe this? Little bits of shadows are easier to cover up.
In 2009, Yurishii changed her name to Hase Yurina and became freelance at some point during the death threats saga. She was removed from the IDOLM@STER cast in 2010. She joined a third agency in 2013 but eventually Yurishii left the seiyuu industry in 2014.
In 2015 Yurishii went public with her story about the IDOLM@STER changeover, which had to do with her management at the time being unable to properly protect her. If you can get the actual text of this, it gets into detail more as to why it happened. It was a really freaking sad thing to see how Matsuki Miyu played a role in Yurishii’s story too, but in a way this is just to show how so many things are connected in the relatively small industry of anime voice acting.
In the past couple years, Yurishii started to do influencer/personality stuff for her small group of fans. At first it was talking about her time in the IDOLM@STER series, then it escalated to her covering old IM@S tunes–which seems to be fine since she is not related to the series at this point. But at some point it escalated into her cosplaying Yukiho and selling chekis of that, and there was some more escalation in which led to Bandai Namco sending a C&D letter to her. A lot of fans suspect this was the act which motivated her to do that live stream on Monday.
As someone heavily into the series, the attraction of a live Yurishii version of Kosmos, Cosmos or Alright* is quite powerful–you can still buy her versions on CD of these. I can see the allure of what she is offering. There is incentive (as it always) for fans to encourage this stuff, just like how there is incentive for ANN to publish a hot ton of bricks for clickbait, as Yurishii didn’t provide any real details–wow Sunrise engaged in makura eigyou back in the 00s? Color me surprised. It’s spicy week.
Yurishii didn’t drop a lot of details–instead she dropped a ton of spicy sauce. The bullying with Mingos with Eririn joining in? The Chiaking stuff? The Itou Shizuka stuff? Hirano Aya (again)? I’m tired of this, because not only it is weird where the bullies are mad at their shared target in the adult context, it’s also weird to have a history of this kind of thing and still be going at it so many years. She talked about a ton of personal issues she had to struggle with in those years too. Menhara came up, as she could be that kind of a thing, but didn’t wanted to. Again, not denying Yurishii–her claims are entirely believable but I wouldn’t read into it too much without more corroborating details. Ultimately, this is some really ancient salt, over 10 years and going. I can afford to worry about other stuff over this. And it’s not going to address issues like makura eigyo or the DV thing that went down (man that was the shocking part).
Here is an executive bullet-point summary of the Monday stream:
I labeled this post with a date, because this is developing story. It has been developing for 20+ years, and it’s not going to stop yet.
As for rest of us, I guess either do something about it, if you are in power to do so, or munch on the popcorn quietly? There is enough misdirected anger and justice in the world as is, when what we need more is affirmative healing and real change.
Hey it finally happened: I’m helping to run a legit convention. It did start as a joke, but I’m tryna not let it end as a joke? I don’t know.
I can use all the help you can get. The details are on the website, kurocon.org. Check it out. It’s in 22 days or something, so there is not a lot of time left and we only started the “official” PR today.
Lots of stuff to do on the con side, but also a lot of opportunities! Ping me if you are interested in helping or pitch an idea. Probably on twitter.
