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The end of BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! showed Togawa Saki appearing to move past her memories of CRYCHIC and work behind the scenes to get a new band started with the help of the shy and melancholic Mutsumi. Contrasted with the long performance debut in which the onstage cast are treated like dolls by the edgy script, Saki returned home to a small, dark apartment and a sorry excuse for a father full of beer, often finding himself escorted back from the police station, and going nowhere. The reason for Ave Mujica’s creation therefore seemed less like the whims of a rich girl who was bothered by something as-yet unknown (though that was still quite true) and more as a coping mechanism for a life that was, by all accounts, horrid.

As if exorcising her own demons in the only way she knew how, Saki’s vision for her new band was defined. Underneath the gothic costuming, stark lighting, and trying-way-too-hard-to-be-metaphorical attitude, Saki seeks an escape. That coping mechanism function the band provides transmogrifies for each member, and it becomes more obvious that as time goes on, not everyone within Ave Mujica’s group sees the band in the same way as Saki. Uika, Umiri, Mutsumi, and Nyamu need the band for their own selfishness, too. It is shortly after they perform for the first time that pushback against Saki’s perception of how the band should function begins to take shape, throwing the band’s idea of secret identities out the window in a gesture that leaves Nyamu smiling and most others shocked. The narrative takes what would on the surface appear to be its main concern, that of maintaining secret identities as stage personae, and says that's not what matters. In so doing, it plays its hand early – the personae on stage are at odds(?) with the personae that wear the masks in the first place. It is a clash of dualities on multiple fronts, ego against ego, The Stage against The Real.

(Saki constructs Ave Mujica as a space where she is in absolute control of everything, countering her real life which seems to rob her of agency every chance she gets. It is within that vicegrip that the other members push against, fueling most of the season’s tension and theatricality. Shots like these highlight the duality theme)

With duality as a binding tether, just about every character in BanG Dream! Ave Mujica is split or tinkering with their own inner convictions. Even here, there is a duality between how the members perceive the band and how they use it accordingly. On one hand is the cold materialistic nature of the music industry and the success that Ave Mujica’s early theatrics bring. Nyamu, evident from her behavior at the end of BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!, is willing to do just about whatever it takes to become a viral sensation, and it’s her rashness that forces the band to reconcile their first real problems. Her materialistic approach with a “whatever happens, happens” treats the band as a thing to be used for her fame rather than a group to be lived in. How else to explain her enthusiastic adoration of Mutsumi’s famous mother, fawning over her with idolatry that we viewers see as shallow and vain? Umiri fails to recognize the band as anything more than a job, one of the many that she’s involved in (like a true session bass musician) and recognizes the group’s capacity to become a bigger splash. She’s dismayingly oblivious to what transpires around her as the threads come undone, doing what she’s “supposed to do” instead of stepping in proactively. On the opposite are Saki, Uika, and Mutsumi, all three of whom rely on Ave Mujica for some kind of mental grounding, therapy be damned. Either as a retreat from their ails or a putting off of what must be faced, they cling with broken nails to the precipice hoping it doesn’t give way under the weight.

A crash is inevitable from the very start. The old adage may say that “opposites attract,” but that doesn’t mean they’ll get along. With Ave Mujica’s status as a band that also does short dramatic plays, arguments both onstage and backstage are played out in vivid detail, replicated for audience members who may be none the wiser to the actual venom being laced. It’s all too real, but under the veneer of the theatre. By the time a few episodes are complete, it becomes clear that all potential stage markers have been replaced with metaphorical chalk outlines instead, the world of The Stage and the world of The Real intermixing with, at times, barely any distinctions and spiritually killing its characters.

(Nyamu and Umiri regard the band as a brazen capitalist enterprise, seeing the monetary and cultural relevancy potential therein. Saki, Uika, and Mutsumi rely on the band for emotional stability and resonance. The members’ clashing ideologies makes it doomed to fail without reconciliation)

It’s through these disparate parts coming together and colliding that poses its own duality between this series and its prequel. In my original review of It’s MyGO!!!!!, I stressed that that series separated itself both tonally and in the construction of its band from nearly everything that had come before in a bid to be new. Despite all those changes, it still seemed at least somewhat concerned with the real world rather than masquerading as a particularly heightened version of reality. It seldom opted for abstraction if it could help it. Almost like a counter, Ave Mujica commits the full dive into its melodramatics, often abandoning logic for the most-deranged idol soap opera imaginable. Given the bombast and superpolymegadeathcorehellmaidens quality of its theatrics both in-universe and as representation of character psychology, to expect anything less would be to uphold a standard of BanG Dream! that was cast aside more than a year ago for this newer take. If It’s MyGO!!!!! wandered into the ocean, Ave Mujica deliberately drew in its breath before surfacing, basking in the sensation of water filling its lungs, and loving every second of it.

As such, BanG Dream! Ave Mujica treats many of its events as earthshaking and monolithic, pulling back layer after layer of defenses for its characters until the only thing left is the empty melancholia and how to deal with it. Every character, often violently, is in a new place from where they started, and even if it cannot give the fullest time and attention to everyone, it rarely misses. Director Kakimoto Koudai, main series writer Ayano Yuniko, and music director Fudanotsugi Taiki knew that in order to sell Ave Mujica’s central ideas, it needed to give every scene a heavy and focused intensity that constantly flirts with toppling over. The result is anxiety within the viewing experience through wondering whether it will fumble, within the text itself through things and imagery only getting more abjectly horrifying, and paratextually through a series made by people loving what they’re doing and abandoning the old standard that tied them down before. By performing as a BanG Dream!, they have moved into a new realm altogether. It is precisely because they love BanG Dream! that they have “killed it.” Lovedeath.

(The imagery and presentational style of theatre is suffused throughout the series, deliberately kicking things into a melodramatic overdrive that is both anxious and hypnotizing. The second picture from episode 11 is a one-woman tour-de-force soliloquy, a grand performance from seiyuu Sasaki Rico)

We cannot pretend that this series (and the franchise as a whole) is not made for the purposes of making Bushiroad a truckload of money. Most entertainment, especially of gacha properties, acts in this way. BanG Dream! Ave Mujica is a reminder that even if the everlasting hunt for the bottom line looms overhead, you can still create something new and truly distinct within yourself and show that it can succeed after all. Flirting with disaster every step of the way, it dared, it committed, and I adored the ride through and through. With the announcement of a sequel, the ride's not over yet...