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More information about the musical dropped last night! First we have the main visual for the show, featuring the main cast and the new antagonists, the Meta Keroro Platoon.

Plus, some comments from staff and related persons have been shared! The first was from none other than Mine Yoshizaki himself:

In addition to the movie and the new anime, the series is getting a musical! Yes, sir! What they all have in common is that they’re all made by people from the new generation. The actors, the costume artists, the writer, staff… All sorts of people who watched and read Keroro have come together to portray the work I envisioned, now as deliverers themselves. This is without a doubt Keroro Gunso, and yet it’s also the “new” Keroro Gunso. I can’t wait to see it. I hope you all look forward to it too!

Our next comment is from the writer and director, Keita Kawajiri:

Keroro Gunso has become a musical. This series, which has been beloved for many years, is exceptionally fitting for the musical format. After all, the daily lives of Keroro and friends are so rhythmic that it makes you want to break out into dance. And this time, the characters and their slice-of-life antics will plunge into a great adventure. They’ll laugh, they’ll cry, they’ll fight, they’ll plot Pekopon’s invasion, and after it all, a battle with the very existence of Pekopon on the line lies ahead of them…but you’ll just have to come see the show to learn more. We’ve made a musical that can be enjoyed by kids and adults alike, making them smile a ton, and get butterflies and ribbit a little. We’ll be waiting for you all.

Last but not least, a comment from Yu, the soundtrack composer:

“Huh? A Keroro Gunso musical?! That’ll be hilarious!” That was my first impression. When I received the script, I laughed my butt off, and all I could think at the end was “Yep, that’s Keroro Gunso.” It was just so awesome, I was at a loss for words. Those who have seen it will totally get what I mean!! I wrote the theme song for this play, and now my two-year-old daughter has been singing the chorus over and over…it’s a work that makes you really happy. I hope people of all ages and genders love it. Absolutely, positively get excited!

And to close out this update, members of the ensemble cast (background dancers, etc.) have also been revealed:

Tomonori Itou

Soma Asada

Hiro Shieri

Yuya Narita

Sumire Miyajima

That’s everything for now, but you won’t have to wait much longer for more…

Yes yes I know I said I have other magazine stuff to translate and this literally just came out today but obviously I was gonna make this an instant priority. I am extremely biased and it is not a secret. Sorry. (Incidentally this article is much shorter than the other ones I was interested in anyway.)

As stated in the header, this is an interview with Kururu and Saburo the characters rather than their voice actors. I’m not sure who from PASH! (or anime staff?) actually wrote the dialogue, but I think they were pretty much spot-on with their personalities! Because the larger special feature is focused on the new movie, there’s several mentions of it here, though no big spoilers (if I get to the later articles such as the voice actor roundtable however, those will have spoilers). Without further ado, let’s jump in!

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"