What kind of idols aren’t on social media? The zombie kind! The guy is still trying to look into them, despite not finding any leads into who they are. Their website only has their idol activity, and the assistant looking it over is visitor number 666. Nice touch anime, nice touch.
Meanwhile, with the girls it seems like Ai and Junko are having a little bit of a hard time syncing up during their duet part. Honestly, I can understand poor Junko really well, she’s worked alone during her career and never had to worry about things like syncing up to anyone else.
Ai is working hard, which is a nice change of pace given how reluctant she was too all of this in the previous episodes. As Sakura watches Ai work hard, she gets another flash of memory. Of seeing the Ai that was alive on stage, when she was performing as a real human idol. Ai also has the girls jump on the computer while Kotaro is in the bath and they look up what kind of idols are popular these days.
Yuugiri’s reaction to a computer is brilliant and I love it. She’s just like “What is it?”, “How curious.”, “They really will think of anything.”, smacks it lightly with her pipe. Most of the rest of the girls died after the computer was either in development or had already become a common household item. So it’s not as large of a culture shock for them as it is to her, Ai tells her not to smack it or she’ll break it. They look up ‘idol events’ in Saga and they come across the Saga Rock Festival. The largest rock festival in Kyushu.
Ai and Junko disagree on if you can rush towards a large crowd or if you have to be perfect before you can perform in front of a crowd of that size. Perhaps it’s the difference between a solo-performer and someone in a group, or the mindset of the industry in the time they were performing. I’d have to back Ai in the idea that a fan likes to watch and contribute to a group growing. Also, while they are eyeing web page for the festival, they see that Ai’s old group will be performing there.
Interesting, it’s been roughly 10 years since she died. The group members will all be much older, I wonder if they would recognize her or merely pass her off as someone who looked a lot like Ai.
After this, Kotaro tells the girls that due to their successes last episode they now have fans and they must start interacting with them immediately. A photo op he says, and once again we see the total technology gap. Though this time it’s with Junko, who doesn’t even know what a digital camera is. She knows polaroids, so it’s a start I suppose. God, sometimes I forget how long technology has come even since the time I was a child.
2008 photography and 2018 photography aren’t all that different though, so at least Sakura knows what she’s talking about. Apparently, photo ops also come with a mini concert and merch sales? Huh, i’ve never been a large fan of any band and followed them like that so I wasn’t aware this was a thing.
They have the mini concert, and sell the merch which includes their ugly T-shirts and towels which. Oh no, the zombie dog is on the towel. It’s cute, I want one! Er, and then the photo shoot begins.
Though Junko doesn’t seem comfortable at all with this. She thinks that being an idol means dazzling people from the stage. Were, things not like this when she performed as a person? Did she set her own terms as a solo idol? I really know nothing about the state of the Japanese idol industry over the years, as I said in just the last paragraph, I’ve never been much of an idol junkie. Not for American idols, or Japanese, my knowledge of K-pop extends to the fact I REALLY hate their fashion sense.
Still, I feel like she should be more used to meeting her fans as a previous idol. Ai calls her way of thinking old fashioned, so perhaps it was different in the time that she died. Their ideas of what an idol should be to their fans really is different. They aren’t wrong when they tell her that her behavior effects them all. They are a group, a team, one member doing something like walking out on their fans at a meet and greet makes the entire group look bad.
She’s being selfish.
The second half of the episode answers a few of my questions about what things were like during Junko’s time. There really was no fan interaction, meet and greets at the most but there was a line between the idol and their fans. She had been working hard for that dream and then she died in a plane crash on her way to Saga. It’s tragic, it really is but that’s not how the industry grew, that’s not how the world is anymore. Yes, that’s how it was two generations ago but to make it in today’s world, you have to be willing to move forward.
She thinks she will hold them back and speaks of perhaps quitting Franchouchou.
A plane crash and struck by lightning huh? Those really are two awful ways to go, now we know the way that three of the members of Franchouchou died. Sakura by being hit by a truck, Junko in a plane crash and Ai by being struck by lighting during the middle of a live outdoor concert. Right in front of all of her fans.
The episode ends with predictably, Kotaro telling him that he booked them for Saga Rock! An outdoor concert. So with the band in disarray, and Ai struggling with the memories of her own death at an outdoor concert. Things are getting tense. Next episode, Zombiemetal Saga. Where they will don their outfits from the opening and appear on stage.
I really loved this episode, it took a step away from the comedy to take some time to establish two of it’s characters. Sadly, those two characters were Ai and Junko who already had a pretty heavy focus in the beginning of the series. I’m not saying I mind it at all, i’m glad to get some insight into their backstories and how they died and I don’t dislike a single one of these girls. They are also the two most tightly related to the idol industry, so it makes sense to have a certain amount of focus on them. I’m just saying that we’ve reached episode six with next to nothing on Lily and Yugiri, Tae still hasn’t awakened and we’re putting some more focus on characters that have already gotten focus.
I hope to see some character resolution for these two so we can put some focus on the other girls and from the preview of it raining on the concert, we’re at least going to get some progress on Ai’s character arc. I’m really excited to see where this is going to go and see how the background plot of the reporter looking into them progresses, he was a lowkey presence in this episode but I am looking forward to seeing how that arc progresses.
