One thing that I’ve noticed about a lot of Mari Okada’s anime
original scripts: the one thing she has trouble with is being
interesting while building up. Especially in the first halves of her
longer series have these flashes of brilliance intermixed with dull
slice of life. Take Hana-Saku Iroha’s long wring of random episodes,
Aquarion’s boring romantic set-up in its first half, or even
Kuroshitsuji II’s first four episodes that were nothing but random
hi-jinks. We too are now on that point for AKB0048
unfortunately, but the end of this episode did remember to actually
deliver.
And it did so with some very weird succession rules that showed even
more what a strange organization this AKB0048 is. So everyone is set to
become a succeeding member of one of the founding members of the AKB,
and who gets to succeeds is decided by strange flying blobs based on
very vague criteria, they are ruled by a strange shadowy figure who
writes unnerving lyrics. And also: we’ve seen people talk plenty of
times in this series about “graduating”, however nobody has actually
explained what that entails to.
AKB0048 was about that really strange phenomenon known as “hand shake
events”, together with unreasonable fans. I again like the focus on the
darker sides of being an idol (having young girls like that listen to
death threats like that), but the creators did miss a few opportunities.
I mean, this episode did focus on the good fans, but we saw little of
the really creepy fans; there was only one scene of that: the obsessed
grown man who kept clinging. That could be a hint for things to come
though. What probably won’t be treated is the whole commercial farce
that idols can be, since with this series, the characters actually have a
justifiable reason to get as much exposure as possible.
AKB and pandering. Of course you can have a cast with
females. When it becomes a problem is when the creators start using moe
and fanservice as an excuse for not trying, which unfortunately still
happens way too often. AKB0048 doesn’t have that… or didn’t at least. I
really began to fear that right the first episode after I decided to
blog this show, the characters suddenly got a day off, we got a bath
scene, a bunch of very stupid antics and this disturbing focus on
pheromones.