©BanG Dream! Project
A bombshell like the one dropped in last week’s Ave Mujica would leave any series with its work cut out for it. This series’ arc had been planned out since the beginning of It’s MyGO!!!!!, but by the director’s own admission (and the general reality of production), some rewrites were necessary along the process. With Uika’s identity shattered into the barely held-together sculpture of Hatsune, reuniting her with Sakiko and bringing together the whole band so they could still play live shows and appear as mobile game cards would be a tall order.
So they had to bring in a ringer: a little-known writer by the name of Yuniko Ayana.
That’s a joke. Ayana is, of course, the writer behind the whole story composition of Ave Mujica, the preceding It’s MyGO!!!!!, and virtually all BanG Dream! anime going back to the first series. Her success at the forefront of the series she’s steered has since seen her rising to a place where she’s hardly written any episode-specific scripts for Ave Mujica as she did for previous entries—though she is co-credited for the first episode and she provided the lyrics for “Ningen ni Naritai Uta II,” heard in the seventh episode. But now, at this crucial moment, when things seem irreparably shattered by Hatsune’s revelations, Ayana must descend from the heavens to personally pen the resolution. The result is as dense, reflective, and referential as her stories are wont to become and, all things considered, probably the best possible way this situation could be ferried where it needed to go by the end.
You can’t please everyone, and so I’m pretty sure Ayana wrote this entirely for herself.
Being that she’s a big-picture writer, starting from the ending and working backwards is a natural way for Ayana to arrive where this episode does. And being that she wields subtlety with the calculated precision of a sledgehammer, this episode starts with the show’s actual ending in place of the opening theme. You know, the sequence that prominently features the burning of everything that comes before? It’s symbolic of Sakiko at last reaching the end of this story she’d been sitting out at her grandfather’s house, intended to limply crescendo with being shipped off to Switzerland. “What an anticlimactic ending” she mutters, before an umbrella sweeps away straight out of It’s MyGO!!!!!‘s opening, and she’s off for a brand-new start. Roll credits.
To put it another way: it had to be so over before she could be so back.
Finding a believable grounds for Sakiko to accept Hatsune was always going to be the most precise needle for Ayana to try threading with her aforementioned sledgehammer. Because she has such a handle on the voices of these characters after all this time, she can find that believability. The heaviest example of that comes from Hatsune, who’s now freed to be her true gloomy, afraid-of-bugs self. Whether Sakiko prefers this person to the Uika she knew is concealed beneath masked reactions, as she’s used so often throughout this story. Sakiko, as she always has, wants control of her own life. If not accepting Hatsune’s acquiescence and defiantly dragging her onto a ferry to return to Ave Mujica is the path to that, she’ll do so.
It is not lost on me that Ayana has Sakiko quite literally ship herself back together with Hatsune.
However, much as her destroying of CRYCHIC was done out of her desperate need for control, Sakiko’s reclaiming of Hatsune (and reassigning her the ‘Uika’ name before this is all through) feels done at the behest of her own emotional agenda. She once again rejects her grandfather, but this time with no intention of repaying him to make up anything. She’s leaving this time not out of desperation, but defiance. She is not going back. And if Sakiko can throw away her past, then why not Hatsune? They can recreate a childhood they never shared in the garden of a home they’ll abandon before going on to a life and band where they won’t be happy.
Sakiko doesn’t take her mother’s doll with her when she leaves this time. She’s found a new doll she can truly call her own.
Ayana has regularly proven herself to be a genuine yuri sicko. Even after making the journey there with and ostensibly for Hatsune, the key item that Sakiko does retrieve from her grandfather’s house is Tomori’s notebook. The look that Hatsune gives it as Sakiko clutches it says it all. Hatsune may have gotten to bandage Sakiko’s wounds in this episode, another in her line of Tomori imitations, but she knows in her heart she’ll never be her. It’s in the same way that after all that “give me the rest of your lives” talk, Sakiko must now acknowledge that this too will eventually come to an end. She’s already come to admit that she hates the smell of the coffee that Hatsune prepares for her.
For now she’ll live a lie for Hatsune just as Hatsune did for her, and if that’s not love I don’t know what is.
Praise be to the treatment of Sakiko/Hatsune, but the other side explored in this episode is Sakiko finally finding her path from CRYCHIC, and specifically Tomori. Sakiko can truly let go of her old band without worrying about the rain, and she can apologize to Tomori, but the two are now joined after another fashion. Sakiko recognizes that their bands are two sides of a mirror now—appropriate for someone who broke the fourth wall at the beginning of this episode, who actualized everything through the simulacra of a stage persona. If I was to be presumptuous, I’d presuppose that everything Sakiko did to arrive at this point was, in her mind at least, staged. It was a show for her would-be bandmates, her grandfather, and any other audience who might be watching to justify how she’s now arrived at this moment.
What is God if not the person who writes your story for you? What is deciding to write your own story if not becoming your new God?
As much of an accomplishment as all that is, the pacing of Ayana’s writing can be…economical when professionally obligated, and I feel that in this episode’s ending montage seeking to, at least evocatively, provide resolution for the other characters. The big one for me, and I know others, is that it’s been two episodes and they still haven’t clarified what the status of Mutsumi and Mortis is. Some things were implied by the visuals accompanying the concert in the tenth episode, but viewers haven’t heard much from her since. What’s given in this episode just comes off like Mutsumi-chan, if suffering a bit less than Little Beepo has been wont to do. I have to hope for some clarification around the musical victory lap that seems set to occur next week. That’s not even getting into Sakiko’s father apparently starting to clean himself up in a single distance shot.
Of course, it might be intentional to leave some of those threads dangling, so the aforementioned mobile game can pick them up. It worked for Rāna.
And I feel that all those loose ends are a little shorter than I might have expected a couple weeks ago, as turning Ayana loose here allowed Ave Mujica to bring these girls back together in a satisfyingly unsatisfying way. The truth of it brutally mirrors the too-clean reunion in the tenth episode. Rolling from the ending theme at the beginning of this episode to finishing with the opener just completes the bookended structure this series has joined with It’s MyGO!!!!! to form;my friendly co-writer and fellow girls band sicko Steve Jones pointed out last week that Hatsune’s ambitious backstory episode actually occupied the opposite position in the run compared to It’s MyGO!!!!!‘s third. Next week brings the coda and the back cover. Like Sakiko, I can only prepare myself for the inevitable ending.
Rating:
Ave Mujica – The Die is Cast – is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll on Thursdays.
Chris is a fan of angsty music girls, BanG Dream! or otherwise, and has even written a few posts about them over on his blog. You can also hit up his BlueSky where he’s surely reskeeting all sorts of wild Ave Mujica art.
