Not that there’s a whole lot to say about it, though I do continue to love Yoppi’s radical new hairdo. That, and the return of everyone’s favourite character, Kuniyoshi Ota. Huzzah!


Also, I wonder if it’s the only anime to ever feature a Moonwalker poster in the background.

But, hey, I’m in a WUG kind of mood recently. I actually managed to completed my set of WUG*On-Stage prize figures whilst over in the US for Otakon recently (though, man, they proved to be a pain to lug back!), and their first live BD came out just recently. Infact, I just watched the first disk, from their first tour, this morning, though it’s the second disk I’ll be watching tomorrow that I’m really looking forward to – mainly because I’m a real big fan of the I1-Club songs from the series and it’s from the WUG vs I1-Club event. I mean, the WUGs performing Jera from the first disk was a definite highlight, but I’m a real big Little Challenger fan myself.

I’ve been thinking of WUG on-and-off a lot lately, though. Partially, it’s because of the weird conversations I’ve had multiple times within the last year, where the show will come up, followed by the question “Wait, are WUG still a thing?”. It’s a lot of that realisation that, obviously, the English speaking territories for an awful lot of anime are still an afterthought at best much of the time – the anime is the product being sold to us, and often the only product being sold to us.

Which gets into a bit of a weird situation with idol shows, because it’s generally the characters, or perhaps more in WUGs case, the actual idols which are being sold. The anime is part of that, sure, but it’s also typically the only part of the product that most of the English speaking audience would ever realistically, for obvious reasons, have contact with. That WUG have been diligently generating output for their Japanese fanbase for the whole period from the TV anime broadcast ending until now is something that is largely invisible (and, honestly, largely irrelevant) to most folks outside of the country, as is, likely, the fact that they are actually in the middle of their second stage tour right now.

But, meh, I don’t really have much of an endpoint to any of these thoughts. It’s mostly that, as always, watching anime for the sake of watching anime kind of sucks a lot of the time – there’s something kind of unsatisfying about it a lot of the time. Mainly when we’ll clearly never know how something finishes because the source material will never realistically be profitable in English. It’s the frustration of being too linguistically dense to even consider properly learning Japanese, I suppose.

Though, hey, that I don’t generally have access (or, mostly in my case, time) to follow any of the extra-curricular WUG material does mean that I’m not feeling the complete and utter exhaustion I’m feeling with Love Live these days. I mean, I’m still looking forward to the movie and all (and am still unable to separate myself from LLSIF), but I suppose it’s what happens when something gets both insanely popular and has a property owner who is actively interested in chasing foreign money. Love Live content isn’t something that I have to actively chase these days, being more something that unendingly flows out of the internet into folks eyeballs whether they wish it or not, and anime convention dealers rooms being overflowing with mountains of Love Live prize figures is getting a little old at this point. It’s pre-emptively completely murdered my interest in Sunshine, honestly.

Such is popularity, however, and I guess I’m just an idol cartoon hipster.

(On the other hand, iM@S is still great. I’ve really been enjoying the last few episodes of Cinderella Girls. I really need to start writing about that show again, but it’s finding the time to go back and plug in the big gap at the end of the first series that I didn’t have time to do in the first place, you know?)