Sometimes you just want to watch a show about girls doing their best
Hanging out with delta is dangerous because it sometimes leads me to using my time in even more questionable ways than I normally do. TV animeâs state of abasement and our disinterest in watching anything middle-of-the-road has resulted to either of us watching only things that really surprise or leave an impression. This means something like the few actually great shows every year, shows that arenât good but do something in an interesting way, and finally, some of the most disgusting, hackneyed disasters Iâve experienced in any medium ever. Or something like the three most important idol anime shows of the recent years.
Itâs all Yamakanâs fault, really. Director and part time anime messiah Yutaka Yamamotoâs meteoric rise to stardom with Haruhi, fall from grace with Lucky Star and subsequent failure to ever make anything well received again is a well known piece of recent anime history. His modus operandi is to take a stock otaku genre, like light novel harem sludge with Haruhi, manga harem sludge with Kannagi or fantasy sludge with Fractale and inject it with some semi-realistic, down-to-earth warmth. Evidently, this doesnât always work and itâs hard to say why, but somehow Yamakanâs projects always manage to squander his amazing talent and that of those working with him. So when he took upon himself to tackle the apex predator of otaku cultural food chain, idols, we were totally on board to see how heâd embarrass himself this time. Of course in our heart of hearts was tingling the tiny hope that maybe this time everything would fall into place and Yamakan actually would save the anime once and for all.
Of couse, Wake Up, Girls! was a trainwreck.
The eponymous Wake Up, Girls! are an up and coming idol team from the small city of Sendai, navigating around the pitfalls on the way of becoming top idols with the dual powers of doing their best and not giving up. Since the concept of WUG is âYamakan-flavoured idol showâ, it flirts with a realistic portrayal of the idol business, especially the seedier aspects. Itâs easily the realest out of the three shows here, but still ends up not having the courage to jam it all the way in. The cutthroat attitudes of show biz are taken to a comical extreme with the magnificently villainous rival idol group owner who frequently observes a militarily organized formation of dozens of robotically dancing idols from a pedestal, until announcing with a megaphone the discarding of the unworthy. The unknown idols-to-be have to sign up for jobs that consist mostly of getting humiliated while wearing embarrassing outfits, but this whole dehumanizing and objectifying culture is never really contextualized. Tensions within the group are mostly solved within the episode and the disastrous consequences and gloomy atmosphere looming over the heroines never amount to anything. Speaking of the heroines, they are mostly pretty low key in an attempt to avoid stock moe personalities that can be reduced to one word, but the creators forgot to actually give them much of a personality at all, which is a vital flaw in a story like this. That aside, the cast is likeable and while the story alternates schizophrenically between milquetoast and hamfisted, it at least tries to be a thing. Certainly, biting more than it can chew isnât what sinks WUG, the biggest problem with it is how terrible it looks. The production mustâve been a catastrophe of cosmic proportions because the animation work is so incompetent that I literally canât fathom how it can have happened. Sorry Yamakan, this wasnât your year either.
WUG wasnât really enough to make us interested about anime idols as such. I didnât think it was good, but I liked watching it with delta and throwing spitballs at the shitshow that was both the anime itself and the idol circus it depicted. The step that really pushed us into a tailspin towards idol anime connoisseur-dom was appropriately degenerate. Delta made a Twitter bot that automatically posts maid themed anime art to spice up your boring Twitter timeline, but a problem arose when it turned out the âhighschool idolâ franchise Love Live! makes up a decent percentage of danbooruâs maid-tagged selection. Upset that he had no idea about the context of all these delicious maids, delta asked me to find out with him, by watching the show.
My expectations going into Love Live werenât exactly high, but amazingly, the show turned out to be quite nice.
In a world where amateur idol groups formed and staffed by highschoolers are somehow relevant to anything, nine girls decide to save their school from getting shut down by forming an idol team, winning a tournament of idols and having all their fans enroll into said school. The story is vapid but at least provides a solid overarching plotline for Îźâs (pronounced as the word muse), a collection of really basic archetypes that somehow are actually quite precisely and well written. The cast manages to feel more than just the cynically calculated spread of moe attributes that it is, especially when the girls interact with each other. The show is enjoyable to watch just because of that. Not that thereâs much else going on. Unlike the other two shows, LL isnât about show business but acts more like a highschool sports anime where the sports club activities are mostly about singing electropop songs and shaking your assets around in ludicrous outfits. Hell, thereâs even a tournament arc of sorts. On paper itâs a minus since it sheds the most interesting aspect of idols as a setting, but probably ends up being a net positive for the show, as it allows more focus on delivering cute girls doing their best, which is all Love Live wants to do anyway. LL is not profound or extraordinary, but it does its thing very effectively, and that alone can get a show pretty far.
Having watched two shows about one of the most repugnant aspects of otaku culture in such a short order, we spent an inordinate amount of time discussing what it means (and obviously, arguing about what are the best ships). For months, we flirted with the idea of getting to know the mothership of 2D idol franchises, Idolm@ster, to sort of close the circle. Thereâs probably some logical fallacy with a Latin name to describe this thought process, but eventually we did end up watching the 2011 adaptation, not the least because I said Iâd write this post if we did.
It wasnât a good idea. Idolm@ster is bad.
Im@s is an anime realization of the video game series of same name, where the player takes charge of an up and coming idol group and navigates the pitfalls on the way to producing top idols with the extraordinary power of positive reinforcement of emotionally dependent teenagers. Because Im@s doesnât have to establish itself to the audience, it gets off to one of the worst starts Iâve seen in any anime by spending a full 10 episodes on atrocious, content-free episodes about characters it assumes (not unfairly) the audience already loves and doesnât give a shit about what context they see them in, as long as itâs lovingly animated (and it is). Too bad this was nearly my first contact to the Idolm@ster girls and the first third of the show certainly failed endear them to me. Iâve rarely seen a cast this onedimensional. Each character has exactly one stock personality trait and exactly one thing they do, and when the early episodes arenât meaningless filler stories, they consist mostly of a chain of scenes of Hibiki talking to animals, Haruka falling over herself, Takane eating and so on. Once the characters are thus introduced, the show becomes an idol show for real and starts throwing all kinds of monkey wrenches into the works. It works nicely for most of the remaining episodes, towards the end even showing really promising glimpses of what the show couldâve been it wasnât Idolm@ster. The girls donât really get much nuance or development, but when the baseline cast is made of unlikeable one-note characters with zero chemistry, it wouldnât make much of a difference. Idolm@ster is meant for people who already like Idolm@ster.
For a concrete display of how lame Im@sâ cast is, look no further than the lesbian porn section of pixiv or any sort of *booru. Despite Im@s having orders of magnitude more fanworks made of it than LL, it is so poor in character interplay that even the well-honed minds of people who draw gay anime porn all day struggle to extrapolate salacious material from the former while LL yuri doujins keep the lights on in half the printing presses in Tokyo. The reason for this, obviously, is that Im@s is a harem game/anime where the lynchpin of all character interaction is the male viewer proxy Producer-san (even when heâs offscreen!) whereas LL is forced to make the girls work off each other in absence of a harem lead. WUG can be disregarded in this comparison because nobody liked that show and thereâs next to no fanart of it.
What sets idols shows apart from other moe delivery systems? None of this threesome really does much with the setting of (idol) show business. WUG makes a genuine attempt but lands short and Im@s spends most of its runtime on worthless filler, though it ends up kinda delivering in the end. Again, as LL isnât about the biz at all, it gets a free ride out of having to deal with anything more real than Hanayo and Honoka having to diet to preserve their girlish figures. The thing with all of these shows is that they want to sell you the same idol fantasy that actual idols do, while also lifting the curtain to show whatâs going on behind the scenes. These two goals donât really go that well together. Itâs hard to make an audience believe that any dream can come true if you try your best, when that dream is to become an exploited and objectified workhorse of entertainment industry. So you have to clean it up, after all this is not some exposĂŠ documentary and no one should expect so either. Sadly, it ends up with the shows just dancing around anything salient, mostly hitting good notes by accident. Many of the troubles faced by the idols are pretty softball, silly or otherwise have no impact, at most managing to get only a few steps above the God Empress of shows about fretting about nothing, Maria-sama ga Miteru. The problem with this kind of storytelling is that without anything bad ever actually happening, resolutions are less meaningful and catharsis is harder to come by. Marimite makes an art form out of solving this narrative conundrum, Love Live goes straight for the nuclear option of melodrama warfare by inserting a BIG DAMN emotional peak moment into almost every episode and both Im@s and WUG mostly fail to make me care at all about whatâs happening on screen. When they do though, they deliver some of the best things seen in any of these shows.
Idols are the limit break of otaku culture: beings of pure objectification. They exist solely to create value through merchandizing and brand loyalty. Since the concept is to make the faces and bodies of cute girls the actual brands, having the idols be fictional is a perfect plan: it allows the polishing of every blemish, every kink, every shred of humanity off the product to maximize its desirability. When the fiction is spun around these characters, it runs into same conflict that makes real-life talent agency producers control their protĂŠgĂŠes so tightly: there are great stories somewhere in there, but they canât be allowed to be told because thatâd make the idols too human.
As a bonus, because shows of this kind are only as interesting as the characters in them and because the idol circus is all about finding your very own special favourite girl and cheering on her forever or at least until she retires and gets married (which fictional idols never will, thatâs why theyâre genius), here are the most memorable characters from each of the three shows:
I like characters who arenât just semisapient moe golems so the antithesis of moe, a cognizant and emotionally independent girl, is what often gets me going. You could ask me what the fuck Iâm doing watching shows about idols then and I wouldnât have a good answer, but in WUG this preference is best embodied by the responsible big sister of the group, Kaya. Granted, all the girls except one are likeable, somewhat balanced and grounded (itâs that Yamakan touch), but Kaya especially so. What really elevates her to the status of âbestâ is her involvement in the regrettably best arc of the story where the crew travels to her hometown to find out what being an idol is really about: tenacity, hard work and inspiring hope for a better tomorrow, exactly the most positive qualities expressed by the people of Japan after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that within this story, ravaged Kayaâs home and killed her love interest. The show even invokes 9/11 later on for similar parallels, to the maximum terror of self-aware writers everywhere. But whatâs important isnât this dreadful hackery, itâs Kayaâs levelheaded approach to resolving issues within the idol group. In this case the problem is Nanami, who is actually so much more talented than anyone else in WUG that she thinks theyâre holding her back. Of course because this is an idol anime, she ends up not leaving the group in a heartwarming moment of friendship and feelgood fuzziness.
A career schemer and troll, Nozomi enjoys putting on mysterious airs, pushing othersâ buttons and ultimately being a puppetmaster of sorts. She manipulates the social fabric of the group by instigating pillow fights or revealing embarrassing secrets, all in an effort to strenghten the bonds of friendship between the girls. Nozomi does this to alleviate her own past loneliness and awkwardness, a backstory that supports the idol dream thematic, but in trade fails to provide her with a good character arc. Instead, like with most everyone in the show, what really makes Nozomi shine are her interactions with the rest of the cast. She acts as a good cop to Eriâs bad cop, a friend who wonât let the aloof Maki to isolate herself from the others, a much-needed reality check for the narcissistic Nico and more holistically, the levelheaded advisor of the group. Unfortunately Nozomi is also the frequent assailant in some casual girl-on-girl molestation fanservice that in the absence of a male character reminds us who Love Live is made for.
Miki is not likeable, but she stands out in a crowd full of onedimensional 2D girls. Sheâs annoying, vain and lazy, which her creators decided to balance out by making her be naturally amazing at everything. Miki is a Mary Sue, knows it, and isnât afraid to take advantage of her plot superpowers or othersâ infatuation with her. Since most of the time Miki acts like a shallow and thoughtless child, these tiny glimpses of self-awareness she has for contrast are her best side, even if they last only for a nanosecond. They extend to her issues too. The drama and problems with Miki are caused by her immature personality and selfishness, not some external plot nukes. Sheâs a bratty little shit, and when someone puts her foot down and doesnât immediately give her what she wants, sheâs forced to face it and actually grow up a little⌠for all of 30 seconds since no one in Im@s can be allowed to experience actual character development. Plus Miki still is a Mary Sue, so the show keeps pushing her down your throat until youâre nearly guaranteed to be sick of her guts. Still, even later on her flirting with the audience proxy male isnât enough to completely sink Mikiâs character, but I sure couldâve lived without it. Or even better, the show couldâve actually resolved the issue and have Producer-san take Miki aside and tell her itâs not okay. Now that wouldâve made for a good story arc. But of course something like Idolm@ster wouldnât even dream of doing that because then it couldnât milk the same joke over and over anymore and whatâs worse, it would alienate its audience by refusing to pander to their dream of being the object of a 14-year old pop idolâs affections.
