Well folks, it’s finally happened. Just a year and change after the conclusion of the fantastic BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!, we have arrived at the long-awaited/dreaded debut of Ave Mujica, the gothica-drenched followup to the adventures of Tomori and friends. While Tomori took the breakup of her beloved band CRYCHIC as an opportunity for personal growth, and ultimately drew together four fellow “lost girls” into the symbol of persistence that is MyGO, Sakiko has apparently spent the interim dedicating herself to becoming as mentally unwell as possible, and has now resurfaced in a lace mask and corpse paint on a stage that looks suspiciously like a sacrificial altar. You guys here for a good time? Ready to party? Too bad, wrong fucking band. We’re here to have a bad time.

So yes, I am pretty darn excited. With both director Kodai Kakimoto and series composer Yuniko Ayana returning from MyGO, I have every expectation that Ave Mujica will maintain its predecessor’s playful elegance of cinematography and richness of character drama, offering a new tangle of expectations, allegiances, and one-sided grudges to furnish its melodramatic performances. And given the maximalist aesthetic of Ave Mujica itself, I’m confident that constancy of execution will extend as well to MyGO’s just-barely-tongue-in-cheek tone, allowing us in the audience to fully sympathize with its characters while still finding humor in their self-important histrionics. Is the night of Sakiko’s liberation at hand? Let’s find the fuck out.

Episode 1

Oh my god, the episode titles are gonna be in latin too? Sakiko, you are so much. So we’ve got “Ave Mujica” to start, a riff on “Ave Maria” that instead positions music in the place of the virgin mother. Already plenty to dig into there – is Sakiko saying that through music, she hopes to achieve a purity akin to Mary Magdalene? That would make sense given what we know of her history and home life, as well as her general psychological tendencies. Sakiko excises to avoid being hurt, cutting away that which is aberrant to her – she did that with CRYCHIC, and she seems to be doing it with the identity of “Sakiko” as well, erasing the daughter of a broken home so she can become purified and “liberated” as a member of Ave Mujica. Of course, running away from your anxieties is basically the worst way of dealing with them, but this is Sakiko we’re talking about – is anyone surprised she’s making a theatrical production out of avoiding therapy?

Anyway, our first episode title is “Sub rosa,” which means “under the rose,” generally referring to acts performed in secret. So my first inclination would be this episode covers the “secretive” formation process for Ave Mujica, but let’s see!

We open on stage, with our girls under a projected full moon and chandelier. If anything, Ave Mujica seems to be immediately harkening back to the operatic drama of something like Dear Brother, which I am all for. Animation is a natural medium for embracing visual maximalism, and that in turn lends itself to dramatic maximalism – the call towards naturalistic framing has been a scourge across film and television, but there’s no need for anime to follow suit

The girls appear to have gathered around Uika, who sits in a shadowed chair while they stand under spotlights

Her stage name is Doloris, from the latin “dolor,” meaning grief or anguish

“If you force her to wake up, you might break her soul.” Their dialogue offers a direct answer to my earlier proposition – if Sakiko were forced to truly confront her reality, she might be destroyed by it

The moon brings the “poor doll” back to life. Moonlight is frequently used as a motif to signify revelation, from werewolves to Sailor Moon. I wonder if Sakiko is positioning something else as the “moonlight” in her life; the first guess would obviously be these performances, where she is apparently free to embody a new self

The cinematography is actually neatly matching the rotating shots of CRYCHIC’s original breakup, here repurposed to add a sense of gravitas to the beginning of Sakiko’s next act

Also nice to see they’re maintaining their dedication to animating their actual fingerwork on piano and guitar

Interesting that Uika is framed as the last to awake, and also serves as singer. Does Sakiko see her as their collective avatar?

Clever use of blurred models in these closeups in order to evoke anime smears, thus creating a much greater sense of frantic motion. One of the awkward things about CG art is how precise it is, how lacking in a fluidity we tend to associate with both animation and movement as it is perceived more generally. Blurring these models actually makes their movement seem more natural

“You seem like such a fragile thing. When we fool around beautifully, people begin to fall apart.” Lines that seem to be mythologizing her friendship with Tomori

“My planet yearns to know all about yours, you know.” It’s a funny contrast – Tomori distills her feelings down to their purest, most direct essence through song, while Sakiko cloaks hers in layers upon layers of grandiosity and metaphor

“KillKiss Juda” as a chorus also seems appropriately tortured and self-involved – simultaneously expressing that she loves and hates the song’s subject, as well as seeing them as a betrayer. Sakiko, you’re the one that broke up the band!

I like that Nyamu maintains her perky smile the whole performance, never dropping her own personal facade

“What you are about to see is her story, with a secret.” Of course Sakiko would editorialize her own season, and of course she’d admit to being an unreliable narrator right from the start. While Anon was an intruder in Tomori’s world, and her perspective resultantly unsaddled with any expectations or baggage, Sakiko is positioning herself as the director of her season, meaning everything will likely be saturated with the intent that she wishes to assign to it

Their backstage banter immediately returns us to MyGO’s naturalistic conversational style, where characters often talk over each other, rather than acting like they’re reading from a collective script. It’s a bit like Robert Altman’s style of handling dialogue

“We would be delighted if you also submerge yourself in the world of Ave Mujica.” Again, the exact opposite of Tomori. Tomori sings because it’s the only way she can earnestly express her feelings – Sakiko performs so she can conjure a mass illusion, cloaking her feelings in a collective veil of fantasy

While the others speak confidently at their interview about their upcoming Budokan performance, Mutsumi is extremely shy as Mortis (just “death,” no surprise there). She has not reinvented herself for Ave Mujica – this is simply the only way she can stay close to Sakiko

“Send the stills as soon as they’re out!” Nyamu obviously sees this band as nothing but a self-promotion opportunity adjacent to her solo work. Her willingness to “break the illusion” by taking off her mask emphasizes this further, underlining that she has no investment in Sakiko’s larger project

“So does that mean we’re going to wear these masks forever?” A direct echo of Tomori’s “can you promise to be in this band together,” and similarly mirrored – being in a band is shorthand for emotional sincerity to Tomori, while it’s clearly a disguise to Sakiko

Nyamu pushes the point further, emphasizing how their fame would actually increase with their masks removed. These characters are very good at making expressions of absolute contempt, as Soyo was fond of doing last season

“I liked it yesterday, but got bored of it today.” Nyamu emphasizes her fickleness as not just identity, but credo. The modern world revolves around novelty – as a streamer with an entirely feigned persona, Nyamu is accustomed to following the tide, not charting a defiant path of her own

And like most people who don’t believe in anything, she finds Sakiko’s commitment to the act suspicious

“I am not going to let this band be just a passing fad.” In spite of all the artifice, Sakiko still wishes to make this band a home

“We will take the mask off at the best stage and at the best moment.” So the band itself is a secret, to be revealed at the moment of greatest opportunity. Or perhaps an act of revenge, a triumph over those who, at least in her mind, doubted her

After practice, Uika expresses her happiness at Sakiko’s dedication to the group. “My dream of being with you forever came true”

Sakiko’s joy is interrupted by a call from the police. Her father was picked up drunk in an alley again

Quite a literal metaphor as she drags him home, and attempts to close the door of his room. Beer cans block the door’s path, emphasizing how she can’t actually isolate this part of her life

The music is an escape – she distracts herself from her father with thoughts of songwriting priorities, burying herself in the work, transforming into something else

We flash back to a younger Sakiko, the time shift cheekily conveyed through sepia colors and a fuzzy camera filter, as if her youth took place sometime in the 1870s

A doll on her piano as she plays for her mother. More Dear Brother vibes, raising that general, enduring metaphor of a girl who is framed as a perfect isolated moment, and who cannot successfully grow beyond the doll’s shadow

“I practiced it a lot because it was your favorite song!” Sakiko’s mother was the one who fostered her love of music, clearly. Presumably it was her death that set Sakiko’s father on his current course

The entrance of her father clarifies a great deal – Sakiko’s mother is the daughter of a wealthy man, and her husband is set to inherit his company. They live in a gilded palace, but all of it is conditional

Her mother’s funeral reveals Mutsumi as the only band member who was there to witness this moment

Mutsumi’s relationship with Sakiko seems much like Tomori’s; both of them are extremely shy and have trouble with communication, and both see in Sakiko a vector for more general engagement with the world. After being abandoned by Sakiko, Tomori was forced to start over, and eventually developed friendships based on mutual respect and honesty. In contrast, Mutsumi is still clinging to Sakiko’s coattails, and still seemingly unable to engage with strangers without Sakiko to act as a mediator

Sakiko’s memories carry us through a school festival performance, where she saw the hope of community represented by a high school band, and onward to her first meeting with Tomori. Oh damn, are we finally learning why she destroyed CRYCHIC?

“I’m sorry for pushing you, but you mustn’t die!” This played as deadpan comedy from MyGO’s perspective, but feels a lot heavier coming from Sakiko’s side

“What were you writing up until now?” Soyo barely features in this episode, but she still manages to sneak in one offhand snipe regarding Tomori’s lyrics

“It’s better to mute than block.” Wait, she gets one more line, explicitly revealing her experience with online haters. That’s our Soyo

Meanwhile, Sakiko receives a brutal text from her father, saying that they can’t live together anymore

He took the fall for a failure at her grandfather’s company, and has been dismissed. But her grandfather wants to keep her around, explicitly as a reminder of his own daughter. “You’re Mizuho’s memento.” That doll imagery immediately put to work

She keeps her mother’s doll, but bids farewell to her grand piano. The two of them similarly trapped in a moment, a memory, unable to escape their last encounter

With her father already a wreck, Sakiko begins looking for whatever part-time work she can find. But her family circumstances also work against her in terms of finding employment. This really bitterly contextualizes her obsession with facades – what she thought was her actual family was a fantasy, and now her inability to maintain the aesthetics of that fantasy are preventing her from holding onto the fragments she has left. No wonder she’s learned to place such a premium on never breaking poise, never relinquishing the mask – for her, it’s literally become a matter of life and death

She first loses her private school, but is determined to maintain CRYCHIC. But taking care of her father then begins to overwhelm her practice time as well. Brutal detail in the local police station being an unknown number at this point, but an established contact during her conversation with Uika

And then we at last see Sakiko in the wake of the breakup, suffering the worst of any of them. No wonder she felt such pain at seeing Tomori move beyond her, and find the community she was so desperate to maintain

We cut to the MyGO girls, where we can already see that Soyo has adjusted her attitude towards Tomori. Where she previously held nothing but disdain for Tomori’s fascinations, she now offers her own sticky notes to help Tomori’s process

Anon got Ave Mujica tickets! “Wow, good for you” is a pretty good translation of Soyo’s dismissive congratulations

Anon is of course an avid Nyamuchi follower, and reveals Nyamu has already basically given up the game regarding her secret identity

Excellent Anon faces as she considers inviting Soyo to the concert. I’m sure Yuniko Ayana understands exactly how strong of an adversarial pairing she’s got in those two

“When I see that you are such a fine daughter… I feel miserable. I beg you, get out of my sight!” God, every moment at home is torture for Sakiko, as she pleads with a man who’s entirely given up to at least keep living for her and her mother’s sake. No wonder she wants to escape this world, to invent a new reality

“What a rotten father! Does he understand how I’ve been feeling!?” Once again, it is only Mutsumi who gets to see the true Sakiko

“Cut off the unfulfilled memories and forget all about it.” A survival strategy she has been forced to employ several times, with her mother, father, and CRYCHIC

“What a boring script.” None of this is real to Nyamu; it’s just another facade among many, and not a particularly engaging one. And I’m sure she gets a transgressive thrill out of threatening something that means so little to her, but clearly so much to her band leader

“Oblivionis. I do not fear forgetting.” And yet, for all the artifice, her on-stage persona yearns for precisely the same thing as the girl behind the mask

“You must show the best of yourself to the guests.” Her script echoes her personal attempts to brush life with her father under the rug

Nyamu begins her rebellion, tossing off her mask and mocking Sakiko’s forced smile, then forcing a group reveal

And Done

Nyamuchi you absolute bastard! Well, the group wouldn’t be nearly as fun without a toxic irritant, but my lord did Sakiko make a mistake in recruiting that self-absorbed streamer. Our first episode of Ave Mujica proved just as tortured as expected, swiftly revealing the context of Sakiko’s behavior during MyGO, while also promising the path forward is as tangled and treacherous as we could possibly imagine. As parallels to the Tomori and Anon of MyGO, Sakiko and Nyamu demonstrate the profound relative toxicity of Ave Mujica; rather than wanting to express herself honestly, Sakiko wishes only to conceal and redefine herself, while our new agitator Nyamu takes a decidedly un-Anon-like glee in actively torturing her bandmates. Our new group have engineered a perfect vehicle for indulging in all their most unhealthy fixations, and I can’t wait to see what terrible choices they make next.

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