Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to dive back into the increasingly thorny drama of BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!, wherein our heroine Anon’s carefree pursuit of a high school band has accidentally stirred up a maelstrom of drama for the former members of CRYCHIC. Through her blunt pursuit of Tomori’s support, she has conjured a hope of community that Tomori seemed to have abandoned. And though drummer Taki is wary of Anon’s unabashedly narcissistic schemes, CRYCHIC’s former bassist Soyo sees in Anon the perfect instrument of her own ambitions.

Though Anon is socially savvy enough to make friends with ease, she’s also self-absorbed and predictable and kinda stupid. This has made her a delightfully terrible perspective character, and also means she’s no more than putty in master manipulator Soyo’s hands. Soyo plans to exploit Tomori’s clear desire for a bond with Anon in order to secure both of them as bandmates, while using the threat of her own proximity to Tomori to drag in Taki as Tomori’s guardian. Having proven herself a very different but equally compelling brand of terrible relative to Anon, I’m eager to see how Soyo keeps her alleged friends dancing to her tune. Let’s get to it!

Episode 3

“CRYCHIC.” Welp, seems it’s time to learn how everything first fell apart

The band’s stage outfits during this OP are interesting – it appears they’ve created a unified aesthetic building off of Tomori’s familiar denim jacket, seemingly emphasizing how this is a band that is willing to follow Tomori’s lead

“Even before I could feel sad, there were tears all around me.” Oh damn, this is gonna be a heavy one. We open situated in Tomori’s perspective, seeing life through a gray haze, seemingly not meaningfully connected to the world around her

Her whispered reflections as her classmates fuss around her emphasize the disconnect between them, how she’s always seemingly running to catch up with what everyone else is thinking

“I think I’ve always lived slightly out of step with everyone else.” I love how this story is really tackling Tomori’s difficulties with communication head-on. She’s clearly on the autism spectrum, and her fascination with things outside of her peers’ interests, as well as her difficulty picking up on social cues, are being articulated with thoughtfulness but not sentimentality. We’re also swiftly coming to understand the second order effects of those difficulties, as she realizes how her being different makes things harder for both her and her family, thus making her feel all the more self-conscious

Brutal, minimalist sequence of us just seeing the lead-up and aftermath of Tomori causing an incident, after the thrill of finding someone who shares one of her interests causes trouble when she attempts to share more of herself. An early echo of her penguin conversations with Anon – she’s learned over the years to test the waters carefully regarding how much of herself she shares, but being rejected still hurts every time

And we learn the origin of her “tempo notes” had nothing to do with music, and was instead a journal of advice for matching the tempo of her peers

“Even when I’m with everyone, it still feels like I’m alone.” She can’t truly connect with anyone, as her responses to their shared experiences only puzzle them. These reminders of her emotional distance from her peers only make her feel all the more isolated

“I want to be one of them.”

As she reaches for a flower on a bridge, Sakiko tackles her, mistakenly believing she’s attempting to jump

Their first point of connection echoes her meeting with Anon: Sakiko scraped her knee, and Tomori offers her a penguin bandaid. It feels good to have something you can do for someone else, and Tomori frequently misunderstands what others want, so a problem with an obvious solution like this is actually precious to her

You can hear the tinge of desperation in her voice as she shares her notebooks with Sakiko, thrilled to have a common interest

“Kabuto beetle?” “Oh, don’t mind me.” It seems Sakiko is also nervous about admitting to her unusual interests

Aw, jeez. Sakiko interprets Tomori’s lonely confessions as song lyrics, and sets them to a beautiful piano melody. What a poignant point of connection between them, and what a devastating way to express Tomori’s full sense of dislocation. This episode’s gonna break my heart

We flash through a lifetime of memories, all spent looking down at the ground, trying not to make a fuss

Yep, three episodes in and this goddamn band show has got me crying. You sucker punched me, you cruel production. Music isn’t fair!

“I want to be human.” God damn

And thus Sakiko invites Tomori to join a band, based on the strength and sincerity of her confessional writing. Her being the one to initially draw Tomori in makes her callous comments in the first episode seem all the sharper

Unsurprisingly, Soyo’s bass talents stem from playing contrabass for the school’s wind ensemble. I imagine playing in a rock band is a release for Soyo, an escape from the performance of perfect gentility she puts on during her regular school life

Mutsumi is fairly shy herself. It seems Sakiko pulled this whole band together with her force of personality – and for both Mutsumi and Tomori, it’s clear that they would not be comfortable in this group without Sakiko there to push them

The screen gains a slight sepia haze and the voices begin to grow fuzzy as the whole group sits down for a meeting, emphasizing Tomori’s mental retreat from this overwhelming social situation. A nice beat as Taki stares straight at the camera and then looks away – Tomori isn’t good at avoiding staring, and of course Taki is the sort of person to almost take that as a challenge

“We’ll play music together and our destinies will become one!” It was indeed all Sakiko’s enthusiasm that brought this band together

“It was wonderful, wasn’t it?” Alongside Sakiko, Soyo’s calculated social grace is the only other facilitating, binding agent in this otherwise antisocial group

Sakiko encourages Tomori to show the others her “lyrics.” After all this time learning to hide her true feelings, she’s being asked to put her heart on display

“I’ve never written lyrics, so just the fact that you did is amazing!” When asked her thoughts, Soyo of course just presents a tactful evasion

Seeing just how far Sakiko personally pushed Tomori out of her comfort zone in order to achieve this band’s unity, it’s easy to see why Tomori was so attached to this community, and why she’s so fearful of losing another one

Sakiko draws Tomori out into the center of the room, and she’s shocked by her own reflection on the mirrored wall. But for the first time, her reflection is not just a reminder of her isolation – her perspective broadens, and her bandmates enter the frame

But it’s too much for her. We cut to her staring down at her drink after refusing to sing, once again fearful of making eye contact with others

“You can scream as much as you want here.” Sakiko persistently frames her company and the band as a space where it is okay for Tomori to be herself, where she won’t be judged for her behavior. Knowing how this all ends makes this process feel so cruel

At their next practice, she wields her book of lyrics like a shield, blocking most of her face. They’re getting remarkable mileage out of this episode’s perspective conceit – it’s like the camera itself is providing a form of character acting, illustrating Tomori’s emotional turns through the movement of her eyes

“If we told her to sing right away, she’d get nervous, right?” Soyo demonstrating she’s already figuring Tomori out at karaoke

Wonderful montage of the group actually bonding during karaoke. You can see all of them thawing in their own ways – Mutsumi finally speaking up, Taki starting to accommodate Tomori, Tomori laughing

And so she writes Haru Hikage about her feelings towards the group, a set of lyrics that actually bring Sakiko to tears

A close focus on hands as the band plays Tomori’s song – we see through her gestures her new willingness to reach out to these bandmates, and her desperation to hold this unity within her grip

And the song carries us all the way to the conclusion of their first live performance, which was apparently a staggering success

While the band are checking the reactions to their performance, Saki apparently receives some terrible message of her own. And we cut straight to the day of dissolution, with no further explanation as to what caused her to drop out of the band and change schools

In Tomori’s notebook, we see what CRYCHIC means to her – she sees herself as a little pillbug lost in the darkness, with this band presenting her first opportunity to reach towards the sunlight, to rise out of the dirt and find her own place in the world

“Could you please not talk like a spoiled child?” Tomori trusted Sakiko absolutely, and now Sakiko’s speaking like her most callous classmates

“What?” And Mutsumi’s words echo Tomori’s original feelings: always being out of step with her peers, never truly understanding what they’re thinking. Was the unity she thought she’d achieved all a lie?

“Am I missing something as a person?”

“I want something important to me, something so precious it makes me cry.”

And Done

Dear lord MyGO, could you spare some mercy for me? I knew the eventual illustration of CRYCHIC’s formation and dissolution would be tragic, but I didn’t expect to be skewered so acutely, so completely. This show’s illustration of Tomori’s perspective has been thoughtful from the start, but this was a concise masterpiece of dislocation and alienation, demonstrating just how difficult it is to get by when you can’t seem to match the tempo of your peers, and accordingly how important your few genuine points of connection can become. Tomori’s “lyrics” were devastating, and the attention to framing and body language that has consistently characterized this show was elevated to an absurd level by this episode’s refusal to leave her perspective. Having witnessed this, I cannot imagine what Sakiko could have possibly learned that would prompt her to hurt Tomori this deeply. Anon, you better not do a goddamn thing to hurt her again!

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