from overseas, it can be difficult to accept that comiket is a physical gathering when most of our contact with it is limited to the spoils that end up scanned, or more recently, ripped from digital storefronts. if you are more plugged into the japanese artist starter pack, then you likely have some familiarity with how deeply comiket relies on physical logistics from the number of booth display setups that will flood your timelines on event days. as the battle hymn does go, everyone is a participant at comiket. lottery applications must be distributed and processed so booth space can be assigned. masking tape surveying must be exact so there is a clear origin point for the grid of tables that will fill those spaces. circles must arrange for timely delivery of books and navigate line management as they process cash transactions or bumble with monacoin, all while respecting that tablecloths can exceed no more than five centimeters of droopage. attendees outside of this early entry class, however, can generally remain focused on the mission: sit on asphalt parking lots and do your very best not to die out on the battlefield.

while attendance has transformed rather dramatically in recent years, most people determined to attend comiket are generally not to be deterred by the extremes of weather, but will still find it colors the experience overall. comiket in its modern scheduling, starting from the harumi fairgrounds, established the pattern where you will once bake in the august heat and grimace against chilling winds in december each year. much the way event rules and guidelines have become studied documents, bracing for weather still ensnares small talk for even otaku. on 5ch, where humans once gathered, one thread collected predictions on what the weather for the upcoming C70 might be like. ignoring that the first reply questioned why the thread was made at all, or that such an open inquiry of expertise now would be saved for a kalshi bet, comiket’s online after reports stretching back to C60 do not shy away from qualifying themselves more as weather reports. a long-standing legend has held that the supernatural power of the otaku has always parted the clouds so that most days of comiket are sunny. in exchange for this power, C60 and seemingly every summer comiket report beyond has lead with a note about another scorching heat wave and how many attendees required first aid from heat stroke that year. if there is any doubt about the wallop punched by a tokyo summer, pulling down daily records from meteostat confirms that you should expect summer comiket to crack 30°C and not uncommonly kiss 35°C or higher.

despite the usual otaku irreverance, comiket’s attention to heat and health in after reports is a responsibility that is typical of how much the preparatory committee does till their history. while the beats specific to each comiket can blur before they are even discarded, C42 is still colloquially recognized as the “genocide comiket” from the hundreds of attendees that year requiring attention from heat stroke due to long entry queues. although most people will consider the gamera dome most iconic to the harumi fairgrounds, which comiket would continue to expand its use of as it grew during this era, most of these incidents were concentrated to the second floor of the lesser thought of new hall. with poor ventilation and unusually clear skies this event period thanks to a typhoon that had veered off course from tokyo, new hall’s second floor was tropical enough that oxygen tanks were prepared beforehand and the tatami room with the best AC was reserved only to help people get just well enough to walk out upright.

the conditions in new hall should not have been a surprise to veterans by this point. although it lacks a grand title, or in some cases is even complicated as being the original genocide comiket, C34’s extreme heat as it returned to the harumi fairgrounds made sure that the second floor was called out directly in comiket’s official chronology. in tall tales of combat regaled by veterans, C34 would be the first time that a cloud of visible condensation could be seen hanging over the crowds, with C42 sighting the phenomenon after. by the C43 catalog, all of this mythos had calcified into the comiket cloud (コミケ雲) being a rare weather event, not unlike thundersnow, that had to be seen to be believed. in the sweaty fog of war, there is always uncertainty about the death toll of fallen soldiers that were dumped into tokyo bay. generations onwards, when the memory of your sweat mixing with blood has taken on the cloud instead, the suffering will instead be commemorated with a confectionary that recognizes a golden jubilee of lining up early for captain tsubasa comics.

without access to a full archive of comiket’s earlier catalogs, and because comiket’s online after reports beginning inside big sight do so often emphasize extreme heat, aligning the data does give sense of the actual sweats outside of the drumbeat. initial reports like C62’s emphasized that the early years of big sight were graced by cloudy weather, with the fact that heat being the biggest problem that year suggested there were no other major issues to mention. C64 again skirted a typhoon and brought milder temperatures, but only because a full slate of rainy days was, to the color of this after report and the abridged description in the chronology, the worst weather in comiket’s history. the color almost certainly has as much to do with not wanting to be wet dogs as it does with scrambling to find blankets and hot drinks, absent the summer heat you had prepared for by stockpiling cooling pads. the diversion of rations was probably missed by C67, when the first day dumped enough snow to shift delivery schedules to a rainy day pattern and threatened to strand attendees arriving by the yurikamome and rinkai lines¹.

comiket inside this century should be qualified as a mature event. with an old guard that values the heritage, the ability to adapt to the suite of pressures squeezing comiket is what has most enabled its longevity. C72 reminded staff that an incredibly hot summer was still possible at big sight by giving a truck heat stroke, but it also exhibits many of the lessons that were learned inside C42 by it being cited directly in this report. anticipating a heat wave, coupled with an ongoing moe boom that was quickly establishing big sight with a burgeoning seichi, first aid moved into a space double its usual size and a paid rest area was established for the first time to accommodate still one of comiket’s largest surges in attendance. C84 found itself in the middle of a heat wave that swept record highs and death counts across japan, along with the peak of a new posting heat dome that brought with it a new opportunity to bitch in the heat alongside the usual diary entries and blog posts. sustaining highs above 40°C each day, a regular customary reading from one outlet was able to record an unfathomable 43°C from the rooftop exhibition era. inside, the ghost of harumi’s past returned and photographic evidence of a comiket cloud was captured for the first time. first aid areas again overflowed. a few iterations later and a venue change wiser, however, staff had now buttoned up emergency procedures: besides the addition of even more drink trucks in the east parking lot and more cooling mist fans throughout corridors, first aid could be reallocated to staff waiting rooms. C84, despite any gripes of the otaku sweating out their shirts and potentially thousands of the fallen, reportedly ended with fewer hospitalization incidents than C42. today, it can mostly be feigned glibly as a battle scar, or evaporate and condense again in the media cycle as a soft science.

touring comiket over a weather log may be an admittedly narrow attention, with the chart being no less immune to asterisks and daggers. much as the sun will come up to sweat you tomorrow morning, the regularness of the heartbeat is useful for an event capturing so many different heartbeats, particularly as I could anchor it from the many times I have consulted after reports. comiket is still cherished to this minutiae, logged to metadata so that genre code lovers can accelerate the perpetual motion of contents panics and smears. while it has not yet receded to a counterculture where doujinshi is not the backbone of multi-national companies, comiket has undergone tremendous internal and external pressures, though perhaps with no more of a vocal critique that it is outmoded than since its covid shakeups. physical books do not enjoy the benefit of other analog booms when paper is heavy to any download. broadcast anime run for shorter lengths compromised to a single cour and earn less fixation as they are rotated for a new seasonal harvest. wall circles have abandoned event distribution to enjoy far greater spoils, without the nag of non-profit celibacy or being confined to a strict medium, from fielding skeb requests or by selling goods on booth. as female-oriented genres still flee into regional events, leaving a remaining core of coagulating male genres and aging participants, it is also more fair to judge that doujinshi is being decoupled from a large tent like comiket so that it can sprout events that better match the contents fauna of online creatives. many of the adaptations comiket has taken on to ensure its survival, caught between the miyazaki murders and being kicked from the messe, are entirely vestigial to these new realities. if you can arrive at asking why circles for male-oriented genres are typically scheduled to the last day, it may or may not be surprising to discover that it is a defacto policy of the preparatory committee to not negatively impact circles and attendees on the preceding days.

comiket, as it has always competed for turf, still reserves agency in how it can navigate unprecedented shifts. some of the question marks it must now confront, like a generative AI crowding out other expressions, may one day (not quite today) require a stronger arm of restrictions than its current ethos clings to. others are a trickle that have now built into cascading shutdowns of specialist print shops², disrupted by online festivals that never end. comiket may be famous for its flexibility given the circumstances, but the choice to adapt on these questions would likely be a worse poison than allowing itself to fade away with pride. the smaller touches it does tweak like cooling fans and rest areas, or bombshells like ticketed entry, are still not without their worth in nudging against force majeure. smaller satellite events with less weight to throw around when confronting these pressures should hopefully realize that comiket may currently take on their effects more often, but it is also more likely to absorb the blows on a longer term where it survives because of its sheer size.

comiket’s after reports, from which it is possible to sift passion from procedure, were all written by yonezawa yoshihiro, one of comiket’s co-founders, until his death in 2006³. twenty years on, it is not entirely challenging to imagine how he may have thought of the retreat of large-scale doujinshi into more insular crowdfunding and satellite events when the discontinuation of manga magazines like COM in the 70s had pushed experimental manga underground. yoshihiro was not able to steward comiket through the moe boom that gave it new global profile, and yet the continuity of the after reports that have succeeded him have not broken on cadence or tone. the institutional memory, much as I try to parse the aliases of legends that steered it in its infancy from retellings of retellings in online accounts, remains with the rank and file comiket participants that carry his legacy. each report, invariably, will still have small talk to say about the weather and the way the winds are blowing. the struggle for survival on this battlefield, in the new theater of the attention economy, should still brace to one day crawl through deployment in a new sweat of war.

hare hare yukai will soon be a two decade old song. surely this does also mean haruhi is a two decade old anime, but I don’t need to pretend there’s a cultural footprint where there is none to inspect. haruhi after her disappearance is, appropriately, a franchise missing in action, except when it is a carted out for another kadokawa light novel showcase or cast stage event. besides the meta of it being the most common answer to queries for once popular and now forgotten shows, I don’t really see myself disagreeing with the popular assessment when the pachinko heatlamp burnt out over a decade ago and my phone is permanently on vibrate now. we should, however, keep some perspective that even expired memes like this would still make it about twenty million times more remembered than any digipaint show that is now stuck in standard definition.

assessing hare hare yukai might validate the quip without a need for any funny accounting. the choreography was probably always going to enjoy some reappraisal on tiktok, even if we weren’t sure people in the future were going to find money in performing dance covers online. to its full historical breadth, it amped up japan’s streaming video boom through bedrooms and akiba flash mobs, enough to become a feature to almost every popularly recognized kumikyoku. when many radio ranking shows at the time were doing their best to ignore anison, the single punched into a top 5 slot on the oricon charts. while you might be troubled to pull on these threads directly when confronting haruhi as a forgotten franchise, the heisei nostalgia compilations and camcorder footage from the last gasps of civic freedom that are being trudged up are very real and very everywhere, even when the coinages like エモガキ following them aren’t. when haruhi itself only manages to land in its shadow with 3DCG mocapped dance mush, I imagine whoever was sent down to the kadokawa basement to steward it must find some sick joy in twisting the knife further on its best legacy. twisting the knife is, after all, a yamakan speciality that doesn’t quit.

yamakan’s trademark, when you can separate the art from the shithead, is nailing the physicality in dance choreography. although I have seen it suggested that yamakan hates having himself labeled with a narrow legacy as the haruhi dance guy, when he has always wanted to be anime’s white knight by announcing his retirement for a fifth time, he does seem to wear it with enough pride to seize opportunity over it. by 2010, he was hosting “yamakan dance night”¹ and invoking himself as “the director of haruhi” in commercials for his first live action film, enough that it allegedly caught kadokawa’s ire. characters have of course been dancing in endings since at least urusei yatsura and tokimeki tonight, and any haruhi mook will already tell you that the decision to make haruhi dance was inspired by hare guu, but the follow-ups by yamakan in kannagi and lucky star absolutely center the modern concentration where every show must have a tiktok exploitable. unsurprisingly, yamakan has a big mouth that doesn’t shut up and has more to say on the matter, which is for once valuable for more than an eye roll: hare hare yukai’s inspiration actually goes back even further to kodocha’s ultra relax.

even though hare guu isn’t necessarily an incomplete trace for yamakan, given the episodes he directed for it and kyoani’s coupling to shin-ei, ultra relax does feel like more of a rosetta stone. this is less because it is a prototypical example of dance in a fixed perspective and more that it was clearly geared for imitation, now that I’ve collected three anecdotes, along with yamakan’s, of university clubs performing it for MADs on film or tape. dance is of course a social communication, and therefore it has always been a potential pathway to online collaboration and community, but the social functions of digital communities still require a discovery even when they may be low-hanging fruit. the surviving example with a light evangelion parody by dentsuudai maniken (電通大まにけん), UEC’s anime and manga club, I am pleased to say finds itself surrounded by plenty of hare hare yukai videos as one of the earliest uploads on nico tagged with 踊ってみた. while dance covers have of course exploded outward on the web, treating nico as the site of their collaborative cambrian explosion would not necessarily be an excessive fanfare. taking the trace back even further² to entirely different and longer-living collaborative cultures, exhibited by videos like this one, I still find useful when revisiting these brightline certainties.

the act of this video’s creation itself, and the bravery to shake your butt on gainax’s stoop, is of course a courage that deserves the majority of its kudos, but to publish without specific aim or goal and even only a nebulous sense of audience I characterize as closer to a philanthropy. the participants in these activities, in this case faffing in circles with their friends and digitizing the results for filesharing, aren’t performing a unique or virtuous homesteading. while I know they would not accept the laude I am heaping here tying them to a larger cultural moment, certain examinations, at least this close to their emergent digital mediums, currently do require a mania that can appreciate camgirls as an amateurization of media rather than a cheap smut. when we do advance the social contagion of the haruhi dance back onto CPDRC inmates and stay home calisthenics, or dance apps that have become the new propaganda, the anthropological digs that reveal these links are more valuable with the elevation. throwaway uploads to sites treated as file lockers, or casual forum discussions aired in public, are challenging to convince to participants and hosts that they are not entirely disposable artifacts without the fanfare, but even alone they are still the untapped proof for digital legacies. to the right person, the web that they are buried under is still accessible to the voyeur, and the artifacts remain available enough that there is an entertaining challenge to be had in the dig for things like scanning haruhi’s legacy, even if only to model the trash we think is the coolest. much of the freedom left to find in the web, I have found, is in excavating this trash: wiser wielders of this power may use it to navigate truth in digital goon hazes, rather than spend their time watching haruhi dances, but the paths to both walk along similar trails.

any number of tours over personalities or their popular artifacts will tell you that it is generally presumptive to suggest your own cultural longevity, with very few exceptions. yamakan, as late as 2012, has naturally preferred to boast that nothing may ever surpass the haruhi dance, if you can forget that most of the choreography was already borrowed. given that he has been effectively blacklisted and shamed out of the industry, for reasons too perverse and sprawling to enumerate here, I instead counter that yamakan will now never surpass anything other than an ability to dig a deeper hole for himself. undoubtedly, the conditions for media today do make it difficult to imagine an equivalent dance could seep as fully into our cultural watershed, but to suggest you sit on top of the last mountain is both a special arrogance and a disrespect for what has come before and will come after you. yamakan’s most famous flame out, at this point, fully overrides his own kemoko deluxe shame. he lacked a crystal ball to see into a rotoscoping future that has already made one close brush against his legacy, or that dimension W would get a sweet OVA variant, or that the akiba mecca for dance assemblies would not last forever. perhaps, we will need a little more time for the right artifact to find its supplementing trash, so that it can be raised up to his level.

last year was the wednesday of all years, which is a difficult accomplishment for anyone with a living memory reading this post close to when it is first being published. if that’s not you, I’m honestly thrilled you’re reading another new year post, because it means I’m either successful or controversial enough to have everything I’ve ever said combed over, or you are also the kind of person that ignores publish dates.

establishing tradition on the web is difficult when most of the tectonic movement on it results from mudslides that wash away our geocities shrines. tradition, even in meatspace, is already a difficult and transient accomplishment too. americans will probably eat ham on easter until we find ourselves fully unchurched. kentucky for christmas only started from the 70s, which still might qualify it as an ancient tradition the further it lasts after the post-war period and the closer we get to preheating the next great war nuking it in the microwave. pekora keeping my chicken cold is fully tradition this year too, now that it has gone through enough ritual posts that have allowed it to emerge as a festivus for the rest of us. the further removed we are from a sincere tradition of food shrines on christmas, a pure love, the more I will still never change my hikikomori ways.

publishing online, especially independently, is a tradition I considered under threat even before taking on a website like this one. this has less to do with publishing being a hard accomplishment, but either there being less appetite to publish online or even less meaning in the act at all when it cannot be discovered or can be hallucinated privatively. discovery was hardly a serious concern when we were making geocities shrines and checking our guestbooks, but I think it probably is the residual expectation of winning the algorithm that makes people go public when their selfies are now being mined in grotesque ways. even as the novelty has dramatically diminished, when being online in its widest and most open surfaces now feels actively detrimental, the expectation is hard to unlearn. running dedicated websites that do not make contact with socials is, in some ways, reverting to what has always been true about going online: you need a qualified sickness and ego to bother announcing your presence, or think there is a commons inside the noise worth enriching. there are sickos that do this purely for hobby, with no expectations of eyeballs or dollars, that will outlive any outlet that subsists on advertising revenue. there are also lolcow tippers and their aligned parties, seemingly the uncomfortable last lines of defense for publishing remaining a reasonably accessible option at all.

a lot of that tradition I have managed to breathe life into this year, thanks to discovery not being completely dead on the open web either. as far as I can tell, this blog doesn’t have all that many inbound links. the handful that have popped up around are the only reason I know this blog has achieved any readership at all, or why I have been fortunate enough to contribute on an anthology like vocaloid culture. what that has imparted on me is that the doujin ethos does, as always, struggle not only to survive against hardship, but has continued forging the backlinks that bridge creators and audiences in ways that platforms have forgotten. the great fortune of this ethos is that it has mostly, until very recently with crowdfunding and some digital storefronts, remained insulated from an expectation of audience or profit and has strong bones. for the web at large, where the initial hysteria over government control on it was missed for the weight of corporate influence that would infect it, it is not such a hopeless endeavor still to dream and work for better. I am still hopeful, as well, that making a living on the web can be more completely separated from malicious hosts.

there are parallels on the web in the corporate pressures that have attempted to wash it, and yet people are finding their way to each other one way or another. game jams are being scheduled, zines are being mailed, and collaborative anthologies are being bound. virtual worlds are creative undergrounds that are not drunk with their technologies or formats. comiket and its descendants are an important flare that return participants home, even as they have teetered on uncertain futures. while tuning to the signal on the web is probably more difficult than it has ever been, without better social glue than invitation-only discords, it is broadcasting out there, faintly, if you are hunting for it. out on reconnaissance or inside enemy territory, it is comforting to tune back and recalibrate to the fuzzy lincolnshire poacher.

survival was already my personal repeating mantra last year, before it became its overall tenor. for as much as can be seen surviving against adversity, the retreats are often unseen, unknown, or initially numbing. one of 4chan’s only remaining heartbeats is its celebratory traditions, the sora no woto broadcasts and mogra threads, which were luckily not caught by the one month of downtime it experienced in april. with how much has been fantasized about the site finally kicking the bucket, I found myself mostly aloof about the seeming finality of it all, knowing these communities would pick up the pieces elsewhere in hobbled IRCs or on other alternatives. platforms, even at 20 years of age, are shifting sands. they are only as long, or as good-natured, as their inhabitants and hosts want them to be. the sands from 4chan have long been scattered, both good and bad, to other websites and communities that do better to enforce against shitposting ironically. without an equal intake seen on alternative bulletin boards matching its contraction, I expect to find even more comfort with decay and dilution this year. it is difficult to give up comforts and hope for better, much the way I have refused to give up IRC.

the numbness is recognizable, either from hikikomori behaviors that have long enveloped me or a self-preservation that I see more of you around me retreat to as chaos rains needlessly. the reality for an atomized site like this one is that when I am gone, it is likely to survive only as long as the readers for it are around to fish for it in archives and keep it fresh in working memory. survivor, fittingly, was one of my dad’s favorite shows to tune in on regularly before he passed a few years ago, and while I have not made tremendous effort to continue the ritual of mugging jeff probst every week, the longevity as it approaches a 50th season does leave me a little awed and fond for the regularity when we did watch it. I am certain, with more time and distance to accept the fate of what is lost, I can develop more fondness for an absence that breaks through any numb.

the ambition for longevity on this site, or even to potentially blossom it further, is not misplaced. it was effectively the first full year that it has gone off in its own direction without another platform anchoring the presentation or providing even a minimal feedback. my desire to have more regular posts of “idle explorations and simple curiosities” sputtered simply because when it comes to fishing expeditions, I can’t help myself from wanting to pull up and exhibit whole oceans with me. I’d like to survive long enough to see myself develop a better discipline for this. what I have fished up this year, however, I recognize is a pride mostly for myself, inspired by artificial flower stands and banks of digital dust. when you look up to see fire pouring down even harder this year, surely our final denouement, I hope at least a few of you will see I have left the light on for you to find some comfort, or enrichment, or curiosity in the results too.

Hey, this world really is cruel
You wished for a day like this
But your silent body
Is blooming here

japan may have one the most developed muzak soundscapes in the world. its best vistas, yamanote departure melodies and muji, depend mostly on a casiopea or YMO touch. for anything else, you can mostly expect sickly sweet MIDI synths that are a hybrid combination of hold music and commercial jingles. you can’t, however, hang up on the don quijote loop while you find yourself shopping for tube socks and underwear at 2 AM. outside of unfortunate contexts like this, it’s also a gut-busting choice for a middle school lunchtime broadcast or conveying realism in yakuza.

theme songs are such an assumed part of the corporate identity for big box and discount stores in japan, like mosquito buzzing and parking lot tattlers are stateside, that I’m not convinced they aren’t also an employee retention repellent. one hopes there are studies rotting on company intranets that say cheap-sounding songs like this are a good grounding for equally cheap crap, which justifies keeping them on a constant rotation. coming up empty on anything real to cite here, I still have to presume they have a bigger psychological footprint than logo snobs already assume when dissecting serifs and color theory, given how many regional varieties and defunct examples exist that quickly expand a potential tier list of store melodies. yamada denki is, obviously, best girl. you have your nostalgia goggles strapped on too tight for bic camera. they don’t make them like dospara used to. you seriously like lopia’s amateur attempt at brainwashing? have some respect for yourself, terry. should you ever find yourself at this stage in discerning the low-brow, you may already be the incontrovertible snob susceptible to grading broadcast bumpers and sandwich porn.

lamu, sort of a dented can store crossed with costco attitudes about passing savings to the customer, is an arrow shot at a mid-aughts eroge opening. I had some awareness of this heading in to my encounter with one, but eating chewy 100 yen takoyaki and drinking canned coffee that tasted like dirt while bumming it in nagoya was enough to confirm to me that it is the best store music ambience of all time. see-saw’s jusco, with the kajiura yuki touch, might have come close in this respect if I ever got the chance to pair it with near-expired food. respected ranking science following energy drinks and fighting games, however, is not controlled for in a lab with a youtube video. lamu’s theme is, so far, the only thing that I believe is qualified for sweeping blue sky camera pans and lens flares. daikokuten, the parent company to lamu, does seem to acknowledge they know what they have when advertising it as a free download directly on their homepage.

premium quality, hidden in an aisle of discounts, really is what getting a good deal is all about. it also begs question when a deal appears way too good to be true. most supermarket songs are never worth elevating to an idol pop hit, but I can see why daikokuten would have it performed at a suit and tie meeting of managers the same way aiscream was irresistible to the tiktok awards. mizna, the signer, blogged about stumbling over the lyrics and how exciting the experience was. supposedly, it was a rather big deal that she made a public appearance here for the first time, as I would learn there may be good reason for the shroud: scratching a little deeper reveals mizna is the stage name for tamura shoko, credited almost entirely on happy science projects under their new star production talent agency.

japanese businesses, or really any business anywhere, being connected to death cults isn’t tremendously groundbreaking. APA doesn’t exactly conceal that they are connected to the fundamentalist right when they furnish propaganda in every room. daikokuten doesn’t appear to be as overt, but their recently departed president wasn’t entirely shy to say he sipped from happy science as well. according to okawa ryuho’s disowned son, they are directly responsible for billions of yen in incoming donations. ramu, I’ve now learned, is the name of one of the branch spirits preaching the miracle of happy science. plenty of career prospectives praising lamu’s logistics and mission can be found from the happy science academy. their stores initially being branded as happy shops (幸福の商店) and happy markets (生鮮市場ハッピィ), before they would adopt lamu as a front, might have answered the question of any connection too directly for comfort.

viewing the metadata on the theme’s download earlier could have saved me a lot of trouble from having to assemble the details myself if I noticed the composition was attributed to mizusawa yuichi, the main point man composing for happy science’s infamous anime films. a lot of questions about a cult brand, it turns out, are answered directly by its cult members. when it is already a sprawling media empire, one making it to the top of japan’s box office charts, I can’t feign any surprise that they are also fully integrated as a sprawling supermarket chain. the patterns in dianetics and free personality tests aren’t exactly a very localized phenomenon for anyone that has observed new religious movements with any suspicion, or mocking, as they gain foothold with famous celebrities. supermarkets are, of course, only just a different kind of celebrity.

I’m not mistaken about the impact of consumer boycotts or how difficult collective action is. I’m also, in general, not willing to wash my hands of consumption not being a very real material support. when I can avoid it, I don’t like giving money to jeff bezos or the walton family, or knowing that my money will flow upwards to drone manufacturing. to be perfectly clear, lamu speaking in happy science symbols is enough for it to be a disqualifying choice to me when substitutes exist, but I also know exploit is likely to follow the facade of every brand when they all consolidate under a few umbrellla companies.

this never means dismissing their unique harms when we do decide to scratch at the underbelly. happy science was the only group to oppose recent revisions restricting religious donations from people in a “state of confusion”, which I think alone is enough to color its character, but there are plenty of second and third generation accounts that do itemize the kind of damage they have inflicted on japan’s families and social fabric. supermarket jingles are, probably, a reasonably divorced curiosity that we can remove from having to address such heavy concerns. even if I have arrived to them this time by ranking store background music, reserving an empathy when probing what appears to be a pithy curiosity is still not something I would ever choose to forfeit to a mindless consumption. the critiques end up more entertaining themselves, and ingesting them is a valuable fiber.

discovering that lamu’s theme is more of a soft gospel does perfectly color my own encounter with happy science, which admittedly sort of makes me it love it even more approaching the sardonic. it is already fairly likely you will be approached with a flyer of mount fuji if you are a white person traveling in japan. happy scientists, having optimized for idol worship, at some point figured out they can bum around concert halls by feigning an interest in the performing groups, so I have also found myself unwittingly chummy to the charm before being pitched on heading to a famiresu retreat and ejecting. there is, unsurprisingly, strength in the number of idol fans you can find that share this experience.

there is no ethical consumption of eroge songs under supermarket capitalism. my light brush with lamu and the dissections of happy science I’ve performed from a safe distance, but mainly the children that have had their hearts broken by parents getting lost in the sauce, are enough for me to conclude that I’ll probably try to stick with nobikomi-kun when shopping for produce in the future. suffering alone with my spirituality, I have learned with these enlightments, provides enough nourishment on its own. still, I pray everyone receives the discounts and bargains that we all rightly deserve.

“The empty pleasures of this world
The unhidden obsession of a dignified young man
[...]
All the workings of this world are evil deeds!”

japan’s annual buzzword trends, a season that seems to arrive earlier every year, have started trickling out. while stateside we settle only for a word of the year announced by a dictionary, japan is lucky to have teams that yearn for data warehouses and are employed to make us funny charts about kids’ slang. if there’s any takeaway to be found so far in what’s being released, it’s that italian brainrot is explosively popular with the youth. this probably isn’t all that surprising, if you have kept an ear to the ground on roblox or tiktok, which itself was already a qualified sickness of mine. it’s also fairly likely to be an uncomfortable watch, if you’re on the other end of being a tween and are only being exposed to it now for the first time.

oricon, much the way billboard has needed to reinvent itself multiple times over through the rise of compilation albums and streaming, is still trying to find some statistical ground truth with digital media. critical sakuga fanatics have always recognized its reports are consistently flawed, rather than absolute truths, and it still relies heavily on an old world model of media that ingests data from retailers and publishers. with public-facing metrics on socials becoming worse than useless as they inflate beyond comparison, consistently flawed data actually ends up being a pretty useful promise. we don’t exactly know what back channel data oricon might be sitting on for a comb of trends online, but we trust that a simple survey conducted jointly with shogakukan also wants to find that ground truth if they’re going to be selling to kids and having to pitch advertisers. it’s certainly better than I would likely do if I were the guardian of corocoro comic, where it would be justifiable to fudge the numbers and report puniru in all fields.

even if you have skirted around its characters like bombardino crocodilo so far, crunching the numbers isn’t really required to know that fads like italian brainrot are the tenor of all global platforms now. if you thought logging out was an escape, you can still glance up to see it projected on buildings in shibuya, or sitting on shelves as card packs to be resold later on mercari, or rigged in crane games, or charting interest for karaoke. if you doubt its staying power as memes usually cycle out on a timeline of days, the nikkei picked up a full profile of it only a few days ago. plenty of past examinations on this site have examined encroachments of net culture into the real world, and while I think we are all sober enough now to understand that the luster for that pure of an ideal is far beyond expired, an encroachment into the real world might be one of our strongest signals left in knowing if an online fad is more than just smoke. the proof exists in cheap manufactured plastic, and unless the market needs a dramatic correction, kids currently really do want skibidi toilets and tung tung tung sahur rubber straps.

one thing I have found myself stewing more on with emergent fads like this, maybe equally to the attention we have given to outrage bait, is how participatory kids are online now. delineated social spaces for kids, the club penguins from years gone, are extinct. to be a kid online today is to now exist on the same three websites and apps that all adults do, no longer sitting ducks for tired trolling on habbo hotel, but as convincingly equal participants that steer conversation as much as they may have once passively observed. children have all the free time in the world to occupy theirs doing both. when the success of these gatekeepers is so tightly coupled to attention retained, it is not tremendously surprising that they do much of the steering for us. the character of tiktok, with little doubt, is children being the first movers for turning over old culture and reappropriating subculture outside of its containers. when only slightly fabricated, that can deliver the invented simulacra of frutiger aero. when shame is left for dead, there’s little to wonder in how yajuu senpai and his inmu pals have also escaped containment to become generated pop idols for children as YAJU＆U, beyond the clutches of corporate reappropriation.

as a champion of the sound MAD and its focke adjacents, I feel confident in saying that one man’s brainrot is another child’s high culture. extremes have always been seen at all ends, with truly horrible flash animations to commercially licensed mega franchises like bobobo. it is hardly unique, then, that italian brainrot’s tiktok rise is being cast as nonsensical and devilish by adults today as much as beanie babies, or pokemon, or garbage pail kids were during their cultural peaks, simply because its awareness has penetrated a pop culture. for as much as italian brainrot does lack structure, it has also birthed a wiki attempting to categorize its many expressions, no less collaborative and in search of categorization than the SCP foundation or anime bath scenes. it’s also imperative, I feel, to recognize when generative content does experience a cultural resonance across the web not as porn or deceptive content, so far its most proved realizations, but as a category novel from its ingestions. if generative AI is to discover itself as a new medium, the rare moments where it has been seen to discover a shared language of characters, evolved from solitary personal experiences like chatbots aping existing characters, could suggest its arrival. for now, it still does not appear to extend much further than its digital pulps.

most people who reach any level of this analysis in trying to dissect italian brainrot, I suspect, are likely to view it with some scorn. while I’m fairly confident I’m not that much more charitable in my read, having watched enough to be reluctant to embed any in this post directly, I don’t see much reason to leap further than recognizing that children have always liked cheap, bad, and crude entertainment, with many of those kids also growing up to have a palette that only accepts media mush. if media is how we complete our identities, then its exposure and infection through socials has already become its fast fashion equivalent for every demographic. distribution online through socials for the past decade, well before generative AI’s arrival, hardly has ever felt that it is promoting creatives with recommendations as much as it has been staking signposts for paths that wind you even deeper, often of content stolen or without attribution.

today’s kids, probably unwisely, do not play in their own media landscapes where content is restricted to their circle of friends or presented in a digestible chronology. the corners and traps of the platforms that are already sharp for adults are even more hazardous to them, where their attentions are no less statistically likely to be sucked into house MD clips or communities for suicidal ideation. the static mediums it is displacing are unfortunate casualties across all demographics, but it is doubly wounding for children that may lose access to them altogether. television, even as boob tube entertainment, still exercises some controlled curation that allows for more encounters with enriching programming. while I suppose television could conceivably claw back its legacy of morning cartoons, fifty shorts on tiktok or youtube, consumed for free in a permutation uniquely gripping to each individual, provides more micro-climaxes and excitements than an episode of pretty cure padded for time every week could ever hope to achieve with stock transformation sequences. those same transformations, squashed into a mega mashup on youtube or as interrupts in a dynamically adjusted feed, are simply more likely to do a better job when repackaged as the media equivalent of a pacifier.

what does it say, then, about the current mechanics of producing children’s entertainment that super sentai is getting killed off in its fiftieth year, while italian brainrot and equivalents are sucking up even more attention? not all that much, maybe. commercial kids entertainment is still clearly discovering winners, which suggests shorts are not so filling as to make children ignore pangs for media variety, but the long tail has dried up as much as the long tail has dried up for all commercial entertainment that has to turn to safe bets. sneering digital trends like brainrot will always be an available stance to critique that our children are beyond repair and are responsible for entertainment’s demise, even when there are analogs of nonsense in our not so distant pasts of animutations and youtube poops. when content is done for free and spread at scale, there are already no guardrails on it being calorically meaningful to any recommended media diet. cocomelon already does deliver empty calories to billions, but its contours are at least well understood in a top-down delivery model of entertainment. with amateur content like italian brainrot, where children lead with prompted approximates or donate labor themselves for monetized roblox games, it is easy to understand that anxiety over its influence stems equally or even more to an access that children are granted on an open web, where most parents are only just now coming online to understand what a discord server is.

finding meaning in the disjointed clips of italian brainrot itself is, of course, a deliberately pointless exercise. while I have tried to find a shape to its container, it is mostly that I have found it bereft of any graspable meaning except as a lightly-oriented cyber punk. today’s children have grown up in a world where we have impressed on them that everything must be hyper-optimized under constant surveillance, while screens are also destroying their focus and ability to ground themselves to the humiliation of an impossible to achieve career drudgery. we have relentlessly drilled that the web they are now entering is already beyond any stage of recovery. forfeiting their time to the nonsensical instead occupies a rebellion that pirating hollywood movies on bittorrent or downloading music on napster may once have been a beacon for as a digital native. they are not entirely blind to recognizing that the systems they are only now beginning to be exposed to are engineered to addict and break them with overexposure. with an unavoidable and boundless abundance, however, there is doomscrolling, gooning, and parasocializing available in their extremes and to an optimization that has already been invented for children on their first exposure, punched to their tiktok shortest or stretched to their podcast longest. if you have them, why wouldn’t you smoke them? many that find themselves caught in these webs, of course, will skip past bothering or thinking to ever ask.

my examining of italian brainrot by writing this post was never necessarily to discover some kernel of worth in it, but to digest whether my general disgust with it was potentially reflexive to looking at younger generations with derision, or if there is more to learn in examining the scaffolding that birthed it. even as I have approached the latter here with some balance, I am less shy to say more pointedly that I believe many of the large players controlling the platforms hosting it are the ghouls that would profit off of a literal brain rot if allowed to. italian brainrot on its content scale, at least in my dive into its world, still mostly seems to fit benignly into the expected contours of cheap shock expected of these platforms than as a uniquely corrupting influence. its infection, even as a generative slop, leans towards a glib and irreverent that is recognizable across a sum total of digital cultures, rather than one of the many other directly enumerable and targeted harms enabled by large platforms that can’t be bothered to care.

if there is any alarm to be summoned from italian brainrot more specifically, then I would suggest it is as study for how social platforms breed and reward outrage trending closer to its youngest participants. this is hardly much of a secret to all engagement online now, and especially in japan, brainrot appears to have seized on overflowing outrage every time it has been flushed so far. zabyan (THE BYAN), a self-described vocaloid producer, has attached himself to italian brainrot by prompting suno AI songs and morphing its generated images into melting animations that are proving to be its catalyst in japan. his most popular song upload, having leapfrogged an escape into the mainstream, achieved 29 million views in a little over three months. while vocaloid has begun flirting more with generated audio content, most recently with the mushoku tomeisai song festival softening its rules to allow for suno AI instrumentals, it remains mostly rejected by its core subculture. vocaloid’s fans, still of a subculture that struggles to process its internal drama and that has experienced a similarly young influx globally, are not well-situated to ignore the bait of any intrusion or to know when not to feed the trolls.

zabyan has adopted a mocking stance to promoting his spin on italian brainrot, mostly by prodding vocaloid fans. for a paltry 100k likes, he promises that he’ll remove the vocaloid producer label that’s proudly perched on his different profiles. he has, of course, now earned more recognition for brainrot than any of his honest attempts as a vocaloid producer have ever come close to achieving, though his die being cast as a vocaloid producer has become convenient ammo and reason to keep his name close at hand for flame wars extending to surrounding cultures. some cultural critiques I have seen openly ponder if this moment is, perhaps, the beginning of the end for vocaloid’s latest boom period. zabyan, however, does not have much anything as interesting to say with his success, either in crude attempts at music or even as a culture warrior. his presence is largely outrage for outrage’s sake, an unpopular opinion swords guy affixing a “kick me” sign to his own back and reaping the rewards.

there is hardly any way to critique the approach without also feeding into the troll yourself, yet it seems difficult to expect we will ever be able to recalibrate our attention collectively against attempts like it in the short term without developing a more conscious understanding of how they spread, particularly in an already vulnerable period for social media. human behaviors, we can accept, may not always be possible to guide to their most positive on large platforms hosting them, but we should expect some baseline empathy and correction from their stewards if we are to allow them to continue existing. when communications platforms instead hire psychologists to soothe their unease by smoothing over internal studies, cover their eyes when they encounter unavoidable maladies, and raise the flood gates on moderation to buoy their sinking engagement, it doesn’t take a mark zuckerberg apologizing to a crowd of parents with dead teenagers to understand why they are undeserving of much slack in their rightfully earned negative characterizations.

the immediate solution remains in that even as brainrot wins gamified attention with kids, we are starting to see the youngest users of social media proactively retract from it, although not with any urgency that would be needed to correct for how they are monopolizing attention. without having attractive substitutes to fill the gaps left from their time scrolling, zabyan’s cat avatar being deep fried by chino may be all that’s left to air in public as slop is left to snowball with even more slop. somehow, and with a regrettable twinge of what seems inevitable, I sense that even more punchy and absurd forms like it, supercharged by generative content, will only continue to overflow containers until we arrive at a solution to address the bloom of outrage that tails them. it is difficult to see much further past the horizon online, but with how concentrated our access currently is, it will take a long time for any correction to produce observable results.

the bright side is that it should be fairly obvious if someone does engineer a silver bullet to pull us out of our dark forests of closed discord servers and group chats, rather than continuing to hop laterally between platforms: it probably won’t go through a round of seed funding and struggle to discover paths to monetization. fortunately, elementary school festivals do not yet find themselves steered by this kind of corrupting brainrot. it is one remaining space where kids are still allowed to be kids, without being goaded by malicious gatekeepers that must squeeze their attention for dollars, and without needlessly prying eyes like mine searching for meaning in the behaviors of online zoos.

小学校のお祭りにイタリアンブレインロットのトゥントゥントゥンサフールがナルトダンス踊ってる顔はめ作ったの正解だったってことやな☺️

— いあら (@iara_AmI) Nov 26, 2025

one thing that can be fun to track the appearances of in anime, like clock pillow shots or ojou laughs or burger girls, is bulletin boards. while we once had shows that relied very obviously on 2ch as a plot device or for gags, more nebulous social media platforms or white label video sites have largely supplanted those uses. for some sense of my gut feeling on this, mekakucity actors and the rest of shaft’s prior heyday I suspect have a relatively high concentration of fake bulletin boards.

food court de mata ashita, broadcast this summer, is a modern abnormality. besides having the restraint to aim for a modest six episodes instead of a full cour, it’s amazingly proud of its dryness and KFC placements. it’s also one of the few modern invokes of 2ch, made more anachronistic with it shown being browsed by a cute JK. wada, an emphatic shitposter, seemingly leaves no platform unturned for pithy arguments, no matter how expired. perhaps more to the point is that she also celebrates characters with cake, which used to be the standard measure of nijikon love before whaling.

there is an operating difference between 2ch, far more likely to host arguments about food courts, and any other bulletin board, but it pretty universally does not matter to foreign audiences when 4chan is the overriding point of reference. for someone that can parse the difference between 2ch and futaba, or even textboards and imageboards in general, it is a little more informative than slipping an A113 in somewhere. akane preferring futaba over 5ch and superfes over wonfes in gridman makes her a believably smelly kaiju otaku. panty and stocking is clearly angling 4chan even without the theming, though it’s mostly informed succeeding little witch academia putting a blue board on display with a red text banner that was probably begging for new janitors.

studio trigger having a storied history with bulletin boards, or even this style of reference, shouldn’t register as all that surprising. while 4chan wasn’t wholly responsible for the success of little witch academia’s crowdfunder, a common perception was that it had an outsized role in funding it in under six hours. tattun, trigger’s head of socials that posted during the TV broadcast run with a verified capcode, is probably the closest /a/ has gotten to ever actually understanding any part of the production process. there are good nuggets found buried in these posts, like the color of his pantsu and that everyone knows yoshinari mogs, but they are mostly incidental. the chain of custody for this participation is clear: one bilingual man connected to some of the greatest talents in animation wanted to hug diana and probe barbara’s butt on a mongolian basket-weaving forum.

Anonymous 05/02/15(Sat)11:21:24 No.124805690

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Anonymous 05/02/15(Sat)11:25:34 No.124805821

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>it's almost Sunday
Yes!

show by rock, then, would be qualified as a solar flare event that arrived without warning. studio bones is certainly not without link to the west, though retoree probably lacks a good english contact that will tell her she needs to be 18 to browse sb69chan. while this level of reference would usually be enough to leave alone, these posts were triangulated to a throwaway three reply sequence on /a/ that was made the day before this episode’s broadcast, down to the quote links and analogous thumbnails. either this is all a cosmic coincidence of monkeys like wada at typewriters, or “kawaiiyone” is the divine translation for 2cute that no one else is exploiting with a needed attention today. while I imagine someone more sakuga-brained may be able to comb the episode credits for a reasonable suspect, the mystery, at this point, seems better fermented in anonymity.

this was all fairly quickly noticed after broadcast. futaba was looped in for the cultural exchange. 4channers opened up dev tools and performed their best faithful recreation in a translation party. for as brightly as this flare burned for that day or two, it was a brief celebration with local impact. otaku creatives, being down in the hole with the rest of us, do seem to thrive on being in this sort of winking conversation with fans. mostly, I’m thankful for what is allowed to rest as dusty triviaーwe no longer want or need to fantasize about how a big flare over trivia can break the grid.

logos, emblems, custom fonts, and branded pantone swatches are a deeply unserious attention when the consulting firms contracted to shuffle the deck chairs for them can bill in the hundreds of millions. much of the language we use to talk about their design critically is also, to put it very bluntly, extremely lame. most of the critique you will find online from the armchairs dissecting them is caught between misdirected ire about comic sans and complaining about the difference between typefaces and fonts, again. brand new, covering brand and logo redesigns for the better part of two decades, figured this out from the outset, and has led most of their before and after comparison posts with horrible, no-good puns. you can only experience so many serifs and glossy gradients (we’re so back?) being dropped for a lowercase geometric sans serif before you also agree that we should abandon the decorum and take the piss.

broccoli’s logo prior to this redesign is perhaps not even its most revered, but it is still one celebrating vegetation and offering a plausible segmenting of “users, partner companies, and the company itself” to explain the abstract B in all its crookedness. there’s no need to imagine my shock upon seeing that a new broccoli logo now looks like a rejected placeholder, since I can also sense you may be reacting with a similar horror. broccoli, named as a counter to apple computer, and also because broccoli translates well across multiple languages, has seemingly adopted an egg motif. somehow, it finds fitting to boast about this in its press release. an exciting, hearthrobbing tagline is professed with flat punctuation, set in a system default kana. the bulbous teardrop terminals of the type have been ironed out, and its spine with jaunty attitude has been corrected with ruler beatings. hip corporate reimaginings like this of our recent past have sometimes allowed soberness to intrude long enough to leave recognizable consumer branding untouched. rest assured, broccoli wants to quell any doubts that this may be an out of season april fools joke, and has already begun phasing out the old logo in promotions and packaging.

broccoli is an interesting slice of corporate churn in japanese entertainment. more of its history has now existed outside of takaaki kidani’s leadership, who has established himself as something of a kingmaker for otaku media. broccoli’s identity as a subculture behemoth, bridging commercial interests in conversation with fans through franchises like di gi charat and galaxy angel, effectively went along with his departure to bushiroad in 2007, and while that departure can be considered an inflection, broccoli was already threatened by decline under his supervision. in 2005, it was already years deep into a hemorrage thanks to an overeager retail extansion that made bad bets on aging franchises, and was in a 300 million yen hole of debt. broccoli international USA, a notable attempt to capitalize on the then-latest overseas anime boom, would shut down under the weight of the global recession. their retail interest in gamers would later be sold off entirely to animate in 2011, though you might still find the mascot represented if you tilt your head far enough. by 2017, broccoli had effectively zombified into a shrinking utapri holding company for some diminishing loyalist that had not already been run out by threats of enforcement against doujin goods. more complete accounting would show dejiko’s lunch was eaten by idolish7, ensemble stars, and every other franchise that was able to learn and iterate on utapri taking the otome plunge first.

it’s not accurate to qualify broccoli as completely rudderless, though it’d be difficult to argue otherwise from a contents perspective when reviewing their aging IP. while di gi charat in a not too distant past would have been led by broccoli, reiwa no di gi charat in its uncomfortable HD sheen and adjustment to the era probably only exists thanks to the reins being handed over to a bushiroad production, stemming from a strategic partnership that brought broccoli back under kidani’s wing in 2020. the strongest clue to broccoli’s current trajectory is found in their current ownership: happinet, an intermediary running sales networks with the additional sexy fame of packaging home video, took the company private in 2024. while broccoli is still whetting some contents appetite with sub-brands like licoBiTs, which successfully put out their first otome game last year with more already in the release pipeline, the overall spirit of the company appears to be in leveraging an undercurrent of licensing and logistics. broccoli, in a not too distant past, was co-producing and offering planning cooperation on anime, and since 2014 has been manufacturing (and cancelling) figures alongside other contracted character goods. searching for the next tentpole franchise is a risk that has become dizzingly difficult to target in the current otaku landscape, and it’s one that broccoli has already experienced falling flat on its face with before. offloading the creative uncertainty so that they may live to be a brand sponsor chant at another concert, rather than make any ambitious bets of their own on the direction of otaku media, is a safe retreat. perhaps a logo that also looks like it should only belong to a safe, unambitious consultant is not so much a betrayal of the rich past it should represent, but a necessary aesthetic downsizing to appeal to the manager class they now engage with more regularly: strip down to nothing, and find any way to tightrope survival for another decade.

broccoli has at times boasted about being a moe pioneer, or quipped about being the guardians of unlimited moe works. the thought that a designer somewhere may have potentially ran off with a bag holding millions of yennies to produce this soulless dredge devoid of any such character, particularly when adjacent to a field with some of the best corporate design anywhere in the world, disturbs any comfort. only a vice president dragging around textboxes on a word document can take ownership over this embarassment. worst of all? broccodess, moe gijinka darling to a logo that deserves equal recognition alongside a saul bass or paul rand grid of emblems, has now been shunned in disgrace. with any luck, bushiroad-no-mikoto will give her the makeover and snazzy new necklace needed to save her from falling out of content heaven; the responsibility for that, however, can only be offloaded to koge-donbo. try not to get in the way of true creative genius if you can help it this time, you broccoli fuckers.

as I work on a much larger effort with matplotlib, here’s a little aside I put together scraping the titles from every video on sandwiches of history, which got dumped in my recs last month. if you’re not familiar, barry every day prepares a sandwich that he sources from old cookbooks and other recipes, then scores the taste out of 10. it’s shortform video in the polite sense of that category, and it tends to be a nice routine break as I try to swim upstream flooded by vtuber clips. if only I also had a daily sandwich to eat, and weren’t stuck with holographic meatloaf again.

sandwiches of history scratches the sort of itch that ordinary sausage does, though without a performing affect and a mark ruffalo sidekick. that doesn’t, however, also stop him from venturing into historical stupid food, which is also a returning presence on this site. if you’re in that lane as well, remember that an additional lane always solves everything and that you can plus things up with his second channel, in the chips. or you can go to one of his live events, it seems? vaudeville really has changed.

on susumu hirasawa’s birth certificate, it says he was born on april 2nd. in his heart, he says he was born on april 1st, head first onto the earth’s surface. in my heart, it is because he wanted his birthday to be even closer to jun togawa’s, his longtime friend, on march 31st. nisu aniki, the touhou cookie delegate who first recirculated p-model’s “LAB=01” for MAD fodder, now covering the song with teto for her birthday, exists at some impossibly satisfying intersection of these things.

one aspect of teto that is less accounted for, at least in discussions of her rise as a totem of career drudgery and back pain, is that she is also gender. in her original birth thread, character traits were determined by the OP anchoring (安価) future post numbers that would then assign their values; for example, an initial post specifying that future post number 5 would determine her hair color. most VIPPERloids born through this process usually would overlook asking about gender at all, with a few notable exceptions like yokune ruko. for teto, gender was such an afterthought that it was only broached after determining almost every other profile detail, including her three sizes. with some finesse, she ended up not as an effeminate man, or a cat, or a woman with a strap on, but as a chimera.

twindrill were never the ones to chart teto’s course, and they have always punted on deriving any specific meaning from isolated posts made approaching two decades ago. as teto has attracted a demographic divorced from her creation, they have only further embraced the ambiguities. no one can actually be entirely sure if disliking “DMC” ever meant devil may cry, detroit metal city, or darryl mcdaniels, and the assimilation of posts into a crowdsourced character creator is more appropriately akin to database fuzzing than any sort of rational logic. while teto being a power drill doraemon is not something that ever had much chance of transposition, “chimera” has been seized upon to project teto as bigender, nonbinary, intersex, agender, genderfluid, and really any other identity that you can apply with reasonable interpretation. much of vocal synths are already a convenience of infinite possibilities, but teto is unique for how presciently she has captured a zeitgest where queerness and identity are being explored with more visibility. kasane ted shortly after her reveal may have captured this idea most specifically among a sea of other genderbent fanloids, though as we have learned from recent discovered trends like on tiktok and indeed the totality of vocal synth fandom, decades-old kindling often insists on another spark to find new and wider appreciation. teto, mostly indifferent to the inquiries, is just teto.

teto’s sensation, pointed since her synthesizer V redebut, echoes twangs of jun togawa. while teto is not placed much in the guro lane, there is a similar intermix of rewritten nostalgia, for a bulletin board original content culture that has largely fallen off of the map, and an evaluation of self-constructed identity. jun occupied idol pop to construct it as farce, cycling archetypes in costume, and although she is haunted most predominantly by the structures and gender roles of a post-war japan, teto, and all other trending voicebanks that emerge beyond miku, must additionally exist in miku’s shadow, haunted by expectations of recreating a cultural ascendence that was centered around her. the collection of voicebanks in this shadow is staggering, and almost all voicebanks, even the free UTAUs, are chasing to touch some of this same fame and audience under a pop guise, as even jun does under the same commercial structure she is parodying. miku, of course, serves as a default instrumentation for vocal synth music; more importantly, she is primarily seen as a character with sustaining idol presence, and has conformed to those conditions. miku is by no means shackled to specific interpretation, but she has increasingly operated under a commercial umbrella that requires presenting primarily as one in the conventional sense, dressed in school uniforms and traditional okinawan garb mobilizing japanese cuteness. teto, thrust almost accidentally back into a spotlight, more often that not is still more likely to be found lounging in a gray sweatshirt and baggy sweatpants, or an unironed button down. the subversion has developed as a core facet of teto’s appeal, and provides some relief. teto could not have been born conscious of popularity, and it is only with an accumulated context that the initially groaned-over peculiarities of her profile like her age and gender have earned a reclassificiation as humanizing traits, providing one of the clearest counters to the manicured designs and profiles of the many emerging voicebanks sourced from utaite and vtubers angling a more twee nostalgia.

teto may be more cybernetic than jun, a lump of meat and an insect women, but she has also molted into a new form. given a second lease on life, she remains as much of a mess as she was on the first go around. bugged before by a expanding lost decade and a looming recession, and now the uncertainty of any career stability, she is a modern bridge to a long-lasting endurance: refuse to conform.

いよいよ明日は！ #アイマスハッチポッチ2

— 凪庵（なぎあん） (@nagian) Mar 28, 2025

hotchpotch 2 was held at saitama super arena this past weekend. hotchpotch, webster’s defines, is when the casts from idolmaster intermingle into a fine concert stew. while million live is formally under the 765 umbrella, live events in their standard idolmaster template are limited strictly to the members of each core branch, meaning you won’t normally see haruka showing up next to julia, or miki being glazed by tsubasa. the events like this where we do see branches cross over, masters of idol world most famously and one-offs like ijigen fes recently, have become legendary exceptions for this reason. hotchpotch, absent other branch equivalents, and tagging in the talent and core discography that has guided the franchise’s 20 year history, means it is especially revered by anyone like me that you will allow to chew your ear off.

quite a lot has changed for idolmaster in the interim since hotchpotch was first held in 2017, and it is less a gap in absence and more a considerable gulf. interest in live entertainment in japan, pertinent to a branch formulated around concerts, has mostly bounced back from a dramatic covid crater. bamco has fully embraced live streaming, and the FOMO of not being on-site for a live has been significantly reduced. mirishita, now nearing an eighth anniversary, back in 2017 would still coexist alongside the original GREE feature phone game on its first year in service. murmurs of a million live anime announcemement that also swirled then, cycled once again by the 4th anniversary PV tagging back in A-1 veterans, no longer register as strongly as the anticipations following their movie cameos, sideM sidestepping the preordained order, and a surprise additional stop on the 6th live tour that was supposed to finally tee things up. it was not until the year after, during an anniversary stream, that we would get signs of life when shirogumi was tapped to imagine it as 3DCG. leaving fans to mutter to themselves again after shiny colors was given a 3DCG kiss of death, it would be another three years before it eventually made its way to broadcast. the critiques, neither of astounding praise or utter contempt, fall somewhere north of adequate, depending on your initial feelings about the ambition of computer-generated cat faces. million live, in a nutshell, has always felt to this definition: managed with ambition, and respected by its fans, but also with a sense that it remains forever adrift, out on its own isle.

million live has never escaped being a middle child. drawing the demographic boundaries around branches, it is sometimes, with only a touch of snark, considered a retirement home. as the bridge back to 765AS (765 allstars), it is in many ways lucky to be dyed with an even-tempered fanbase that has already lived through multiple lukewarm console releases, confused adaptations¹, and less than fair conditions for a franchise that has appeared on the brink of extinction before. it has lived long enough to see its sibling branches also enter old age, made more painful by a planning leak suggesting baton passes and game sunsets that has so far continued mostly to spec. cindrella girls, despite content reductions and bleeding the interest elections once carried, for now continues to be a workhorse with deresute, and still measures some successes like U149 that extend beyond its direct orbit. 765AS has seen the the stars realign and rushed to get a half-baked arcade game out in time, an interesting cling to the past where their live events have otherwise forged ahead. sidem has been excommunicated and shipped off to saint helena so it may live out another end of service. on the other end, new entrants have been either slow burns, or roaringly successful beyond even generous expectations. million live, by comparison, has largely traveled sideways in stasis. it has never ruled the realm of secondary contents, or held that crown or mindshare even briefly at its peak. the anime, a touch too late and airing a touch too early for it be the entry point other adaptations were, did not attract streaming audiences that weren’t already invested, but had allegiance enough to record impressive disc sales. the korean and taiwanese servers for mirishita, toes dipped in the water judging global expansion, ended service and flushed whatever interest remained back downstream to blue archive. that the base game continues to hum on sales rankings running alongside shinyson, though, is a feat that says more about shinyson’s failure to launch than mirishita’s longevity, even if it is a longevity with loyalty enough to chart meaningful bumps during anniversary events².

hotchpotch 2 is a precise point on that loyalty. after 11th live’s abrupt cancellation this past november, a trauma that prevents me from ever wanting to do a weekender trip again, hotchpotch 2 is now bridging the abnormally long gap left from its announcement at the end of 10th with no concerts between it. some, jokingly, have taken to calling it 10th act 5, a wink to 10th’s final performance last year and also 6th’s sudden addendum. nothing at this age of a franchise can be considered a given, and while million live has not lost ambition, it is presenting at an interesting crossroads where it is floating with uncertainty. 10th’s peak, managing to wrangle the entire cast together for one concert, is one that is unlikely to be repeated at all, and 11th’s mission statement in beginning to target specific character-themed lives feels as much a recognition that we’re coming down from the top of the mountain, even when the follow-up happens to be one that dragged me out of any thought of retirement. hotchpotch 2, by comparison already at the time of its announcement, is comparable to a reunion tour and a chance to make good on past and remaining appetites. the initial hotchpotch was a touch too early for a new wave of fans that entered after mirishita, and its sequel is now a window for the lingering long tail of that wave that stuck around this far out, plus the old wave that celebrated the first event and are already committed to riding until the wheels fall off. together, they have tempered each other, and keep the 765AS diehards from descending entirely into no mutants allowed.

hotchpotch was venerated not just for its cast comingling, but also for how it was able to perfectly pepper surprises in a setlist plucked from classics. tenchan and aberika on little match girl. mocho with harami on kiss. kouri on arcadia. the problem with this expectation is that, by hotchpotch 2, much of the low hanging fruit like this has already been picked. there is always the possibility that a classic like virgin load will one day appear in concert, but that would be mostly only to my satisfaction. for hotchpotch 2, many of those 765AS classics do still show, and while the setlist is not without its share of surprises, it seems to be as much aware of the moment by falling back to orimen (original member) groups almost by default. in a hotchpotch, anything certainly goes, and seeing a full-cast hoshikuzu no symphonia and diamond joker is as much an expectation here as beat the world was the first go around. the setlist, as a total, still punches with a matching emotional weight; appreciated in million live’s greater context, though, it is absolutely a seized opportunity and a staff entirely aware that the chances of a three-peat reside uphill when it already took seven years to get another crack this time. while the meal does fill me up all the same, in a world of endless combinations and possibilities that already gifts us punny combinations of funny logic, it is hard not to wonder what galaxies of flavor we may be missing out on.

broaching this criticism should be paired with a mindfulness that a balanced setlist, for both performers and audiences, takes savvy to assemble, as much as we would like to pretend the fans can do it better. jungo has been at this for all too long, and while he has sponged more criticism than he has probably needed to absorb in the post-3rd live era, the logistical difficulities of an expanding discography make crowd pleasers inherently tough to target. positive is an arcade classic, and while the calls for it are lodged deep into the lobe on my brain that also involuntarily breaks into furicopy, you would be hard pressed to think anyone in the venue on the day knew them based on the relative silence I heard on stream. all grumblings aside, there is far more for me to celebrate here that fell right into my lap. any atsuki highlight is a sure pleaser, even when she is having her twintails threatened. do-dai is maybe my favorite song altogether within 765, and apparently it’s nigo’s as well³. maji de and do the idol⁴ are not machiuke prince, but takafumi satou songs they are nonetheless. yuiton became only the second navel-presenting puchi with lalala wonderland. it is here that we should acknowledge that a crowded cast is a super power that many of million live’s tour lives don’t have access to, which keeps filler to a reasonable limit. hotchpotch 2, despite the name, is careful to thread itself away from the similiar setlist refrains that can dog previous events, and I think has executed well enough to prove that the formula has legs beyond its initial debut.

hotcpotch ended without incident, and to my social media snooping mostly positive reception, but it also floated high enough to fling us back into uncertainties. all of the expectations for 11th reburn details (the presumptive name, after 7th’s redo) clouded here with the same confidence that hung over potential anime announcements, and instead, we’ve been treated to more meaningful details about the upcoming 12th live this year without so much as a crumb about 11th. for what is supposed to be a potential shift in how concerts are approached, this announcement for 12th feels uneased with itself by needing to couch itself in apologies, and is a bitter sting to close the curtain on what was otherwise a strong event. has bamco forgotten how to count in a new way?

maybe more amusing, then, is that the anime is also still hanging in the balance this far out, now that an OVA is on the way without much urgency. for any longtime fan, the ambiguities are more familiarities at this stage. perhaps with more loyalty than anything else, million live is continuing to proceed at its own winding pace, retreading old ground and, sometimes, stumbling into new territory. now that it has seen the top of the mountain, perhaps it will also allow itself to take a breather, and figure out what sort of path is best for it ahead.