oops. way too much rambling about Ave Mujica!

I'm uh. gonna get into some stuff but first I want to clarify that I did really really like the show. It's really good. I'm gonna get a little emotionally complicated, but I hope no one comes out of this thinking I didn't like the show. Because I did. anyway:

Over these past three months, Ave Mujica has dominated our mind to an extent that... well, a usual extent, really. After, all, we watched MyGO a little over a year ago, and we've never really stopped thinking about that series either. But Ave Mujica, which I watched weekly rather than binge over the space of a few days in the middle of watching the entire Bandori franchise as I did with MyGO, made a specific kind of lasting impression that I'm not sure any particular weekly anime really has before.

The larger-than-life teenage melodrama of Ave Mujica felt like it could stretch on for an eternity. Instead, it only spanned thirteen episodes, spread across thirteen Thursdays, spaced over twelve weeks. Now that those twelve weeks have concluded, and about five days have spanned since the series finished airing, and a sequel was summarily announced, it's difficult for me to compile all my feelings in an orderly manner.

Ave Mujica takes almost every risk imaginable for its genre. The amount of bold creative decisions on display, for an anime like this, a new anime entry in a franchise that depends so heavily on selling merchandise, concert tickets, gacha sales, etc, is astounding. For some, these narrative developments fell beyond the pale; were far too dark or upsetting or indulgent in a way that fell outside the purview of their personal taste for a franchise that they had been so invested in emotionally and financially.

I, on the other hand, loved every minute of it.

Well, I want to say I loved every minute of it, and in many respects I did. I left the last episode in love with this anime. About as much as I loved MyGO. Maybe even more.

But, when I think back on the big picture, I feel unsure. I wonder if I was right. If maybe my memory is tricking me. As of writing this review, I haven't rewatched the show since it ended. And I wonder, well, I haven't seen most of the episodes for weeks at this point. And... what if they were actually bad?

A "good episode" in the context of a weekly airing doesn't quite necessarily mean the same thing as a good episode in the context of a binge. You feel the high of a good episode from week to week, and so long as it gives you what you hoped for last week and promises what you hope for next week, you keep looking for that high. An episode that doesn't move the plot in the direction you hope for, or which doesn't answer a question you had last week, is not the biggest of issues when you have the whole series in front of you and can just immediately move on to see if your desires are satisfied in the next twenty minutes.

But when you have to wait a week for the next episode, it comes to matter a lot more. Because it failed to give you what you hoped for last week. Because you don't feel the regular high.

And Ave Mujica episode 12 may very well be one of the strongest case studies in this phenomenon.

Okay, I'm now really going to spoil the series, so get out of here if you don't want that.

On February 21st, 2025, the twelfth episode of Bang Dream! Ave Mujica aired.

It wasn't a bad episode. It was actually quite a good one. The plot of the episode, following Sakiko Togawa as she disobeyd her grandfather’s orders to fuck on off to Switzerland and instead trudges all the way to her family’s old villa back on the sleepy country island of Shōdoshima in order to meet up with her deeply obsessive not-so-secret admirer and aunt, Uika slash Hatsune Misumi, and,

uh

...functionally become an accomplice in her crime of impersonating her sister and subtextually homosexually elope with her...

Was really quite good!

It's a good little episode about Sakiko and Hatsune escaping both of their lives together by more or less brute-forcing their way out of the cages that the Togawa group has formed around both of their lives. But it failed to follow up on many of the questions left behind by plot points introduced in the previous episodes. The real Uika, Sakiko's dad, Mutsumi's mom, Nyamu's rivalry, Umiri's whole hangup about her previous bands and what the hell happened to Mortis- and most importantly of course what is the status of Sumimi. where's Mana. can we get an update on that

There was just a lot going on and episode 12, with exactly one episode to go, did its utmost to just sweep it all under the rug.

And in the week-long vacuum between episodes 12 and 13, those questions lingered. Episode 12's non-committal attitude, and especially Sakiko just, telling Sadaharu to fuck off and leaving after much of the plot was spent building him and his financial influence over her up as an active obstacle to her goals, felt like an active denial of catharsis.

So my feelings on it are just, complicated by that.

I liked episode 12. And I suspect I'll still like it when I rewatch the series, but it's emotionally complicated at the moment because one of my currently foremost memories of my weekly viewing experience with Ave Mujica is that there was a week where I sort offffffff didn't like it.

I know I'm not the only one who felt complicatedly about this. People posted wondering where Mortis was and being annoyed that the conflict of the series felt too easily resolved. People saw the next episode preview, saw that it was just a concert episode, and wondered if there would be time for all of those questions to be answered.

And making the week long vacuum feel more fraught was the unexpected Tweeted commentary of MyGO and Ave Mujica's series compositor, original Bang Dream creator Yuniko Ayana, who said, essentially, "I didn't do all that creepy shit you saw in the show, stop asking me about it, it ain't my fault!" and threw shade at some unknown other member of the staff.

She would later delete these posts, but they were up just long enough to fuel discontent and rampant speculation in the fandom. Clearly, some creative strife occurred behind the scenes, though we don't know what, or who caused it, or if Ayana left the project voluntarily or was dismissed, and what, if anything, they added after her departure that she disliked. I have my own ideas, as do many, but it doesn't really matter what exactly happened to cause her to post this. It is a fact, however, that it further divided the fandom.

Sure, it was already divided to an extent, after the semi-mixed responses to the Crychic episode and Mortis plotline in the Chinese side of the fandom, and the reveal of Hatsune's identity as Sakiko's blood relative splintering the English-speaking fans along pro/antishipper lines. But now, because of Ayana's tweets, and the knowledge of her creative discontent reaching all three major regions in which the show was popular (Japan/China/anglosphere) produced a new faction of fans-turned-hatewatchers.

And naturally they have to go harass everyone except Yuniko Ayana about it.

Well, realistically there's probably still people harassing Ayana, but, y'know.

So, yeah, I guess that turned the experience of following Ave Mujica, at least in its last leg, from the fun kind of stressful, to the stressful kind of stressful. And, like, sure, I could log off of social media, I guess, or mute all the Ave Mujica tags and words, but then I'd miss, y'know, the cute art of Sakiko kissing Tomori, and the delicious blooooooood art of Hatsune bleeding all over Sakiko (usually with someone else's blood), and Mortis being all clingy with Mutsumi or dancing with Nyamu or not wanting Sakiko to kiss them. And that'd be kind of a bummer. But.

Also, I dunno. I like following discussion about the anime I watch. Even when the discussion turns into discourse and starts just kind of sucking.

Does bad discourse about a show make the show worse? I don't know. It definitely can make the viewing experience worse, but that's not quite the same thing.

So, I guess I should actually tie this together somehow.

Ave Mujica is good. It's uneven, complicated, ambitious and emotionally ambiguous, but it's not like anything else I've ever seen. Granted, being memorable is not always the same as being good, but here, I think it very much is. Where MyGO undertook a slow and deliberate, natural dramatic curve that accelerated to a peak and then happily parked its finale, Ave Mujica lights its engines from the word go and doesn't exactly conclude so much as it unloads all its important plot beats and then slows down before crashing, like if its script was the explosive-rigged bus from Speed if we never got to see it explode. And following it weekly sure did feel like the TV viewing equivalent of being on that bus.

Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense.

I loved the MutsuMortis plotline, which definitely did not break our brain a little and make us question the nature of our plurality, again. I loved Hatsune as a character, I loved seeing the MyGO girls return and get wound up in all the madness, I really liked Nyamu's resentment of MutsuMortis turn into belligerent homosexual rivalry,

And, I really liked the final episode! What I said earlier about feeling uncertain if 20 minutes of concert could really bring a satisfying conclusion? Well, the thing is, I forgot that I actually really like musicals for the music. There were so few musical performances throughout all the wild band relationship drama that I almost forgot how fucking good music is. Did you know how fucking good music is? It's REALLY FUCKING GOOD!

And also, the finale brings purpose to the inconclusive nagging tension of the penultimate episode. The characters commit to not solving their problems. To not caring what happens to them next. The lack of catharsis, the feeling of the stakes being deflated by Sakiko just deciding to escape and then escaping, that troubled me for a week was immediately fixed once I realized,

She didn't escape. She ran away.

I liked it! I liked all of it! It's all really good! And I'm looking forward to rewatching it, and if you couldn't tell from my posting and my retweeting of the art, I genuinely am excited for the sequel, and, y'know, um

I guess this is my review of the experience.

I was really glad to be on that bus.