Anime

Episode eleven of Ave Mujica and Uika finally gets to tell her backstory. In MyGo we had seen her as a confident, smart, friendly person, able to give Tomori some good advice just when she needed it. That image quickly shattered once this series started to delve more into her obsession with Sakiko, didn’t it? And now we finally got to know what started that obsession and it sounds familiar:

From the interview with Iori Miyazawa, the writer of Ura Sekai Picnic had with Rikimaru Mizoguchi, a Hayakawa Books editor, all the way back in 2018 where he went into the details of his philosophy of yuri and how it made him human:

I.M.: You’re seriously on point there. I actually didn’t have any interest in writing about human emotions, originally. There’s a famous saying, “sci-fi is all about the image” (TN: this quote is attributed to Masahiro Noda, a prominent SF writer in Japan). I shared that point of view and, if anything, preferred to only write the setting and the scenes, the sights. But to write yuri you have to focus on the feelings and emotions of the characters, so in the end I had face humans.

R.M.: You first faced humans to write yuri.

I.M.: You could say that “yuri made me human”.

A sentiment Uika seems to echo here. As shimeji spirit corp has it on Bluesky:

there’s a line in hatsune’s monologue that illustrated once again that miyazawa iori was *years* ahead of the curve with “yuri made me human”

This interview was also my first association when I heard that line. As she tells it, Uika is completely miserable until she meets Sakiko for the first time and falls in love with her all through Saki’s subconscious rizz. And like everybody else except Tomori who falls under Saki’s spell, she cannot be normal about it. Understandable though, now that we know where she came from.

At this point in the series MyGo had had its catharsis and was warpping up its story, but Ave ?Mujica still seems to be building up for a climax. Can’t wait for these last two episodes.

Episode ten of Ave Mujica was another brain fryer, so instead of any analytics, have a minute of our favourite blorpos doing an old fashioned heavy metal instrumental interlude, complete with head banging:

As with everything in Ave Mujica, you could see this episode as a dark mirror version of MyGo!!!!! episode ten. That also ended in a bravura performance, one where the band became one as they performed purely for themselves, almost excluding the audience. Here, things are not going as smoothly as you might tell from the way each of them is isolated from the others, performing with them, but not together.

Good fucking song though.

Is seeing the obnoxious puns the translatoer has come up with for the cat girl this time:

Four episodes on, I still cannot stop thinking about Mutsumi and Nyamu’s relationship, as it was in episode four, just before everything came crashing down for Ave Mujica:

I’ve been trying to write about Mutsumi and Nyamu for ages, ever since the first episode of Ave Mujica came out. Mutsumi has fascinated me ever since Mygo; the little we saw of her there reminded me so much of Tomori. They seemed to share the same sort of awkwardness, the same sort of differences fitting in with other people and reading social cues. There’s a scene early in that series where Mutsumi is greeted by a class mate and it takes her a few seconds to react, that first gave me that idea that she’s like Tomori. The present she gave in episode ten to congratulate Mygo!!!!! on their ‘reunion’ concert was another big hint for me. Here’s somebody who’s portrayed as being neurodivergent, not exactly the same as Tomori, but similar. If we can draw parallels between MyGo!!!!! and Ave Mujica, she’s clearly the latter’s version of Tomori.

Does that make Nyamu Ave Mujica’s Anon?

There certainly are similarities. Like Anon she’s a newcomer to the established relationship between Sakiko, Mutsumi and Uika (does that make Umiri the Raana equivalent) and like Anon did to Tomori, she latches on to Mutsumi for her personal gain. What she’s lacking so far is Anon’s innate kindness. Anon wasn’t above using Tomori or Soyo to increase her own popularity, but her selfishness has limits; she doesn’t want her actions to hurt them.

Not something Nyamu seemed to care about with regards to Mutsumi.

Anon found something in Tomori that she lacked herself, but the same was true in reverse, with Tomori finding a strength in Anon she lacked herself. The relationship between Nyamu and Mutsumi is more complicated than that. Like Anon, Nyamu does find something in Mutsumi she’s lacking herself, but it frightens her. Enough that she rejects an invitation to do a stage play because Mutsumi’s acting talent scares her so. Neither is she perceptive enough to understand the change ‘Mutsumi’ had undergone at the end of episode three. All she saw was the acting talent that scared her.

It is the Anon/Tomori relationship as seen through a glass darkly, distorted, wrong, fitting in well with how Ave Mujica as a whole seems like a dark mirror version of MyGo!!!!!.

Episode six of Ave Mujica was filled with heavy scene after heavy scene, but this particular one stood out to me:

Umiri was introduced way back in MyGo as Taki’s classmate, maybe friend and bass player for sixty bands. She’s always been shown as a professional, never emotionally involved with any of the bands she played for. Her role in Ave Mujica was the same, always the one who kept reminding the other members of their engagements and such. This must be the first time that somebody has told her that this isn’t enough to be in a band. If all she can see is just the band and not the actual people in it, how can she claim to be a part of it?