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God damn, how long has it been since I last felt this excited tuning in to a new episode every week?

Ave Mujica is an avant-garde experiment that stretches the girls band genre to its absolute limits, not just in its technical prowess and impressive production value, but also in its idiosyncratic narrative choices. It is dark, at times twisted, but it is ultimately also the purest celebration of the themes of hope, friendship, and perseverance that its cutesy moe peers adapt.

It might sound bizarre to say a show that puts forward such authentic and ugly character drama ultimately still has much in common with its predecessors, but to consider otherwise would be mistaken. Ave Mujica’s narrative genius works its distinctive plot into a story that amplifies the core message of hope and dreams in the genre. With Sakiko’s avoidant and manipulative personality (stemming from traumatic domestic abuse) as the catalyst, each member of Ave Mujica is slowly stripped down to their very cores. Then, the flaws inherent within the characters are not resolved superficially, but rather pours out into the open for all to see, with everyone’s insecurities embroidering each others’. The instability of the band because of Sakiko’s actions triggered Mutsumi’s dissociative identity disorder live on stage; Nyamu, relatively new to the entertainment scene, mistook Mutsumi’s paralysis as god-like acting, and hence crippled by her inferiority complex ever since. And as Sakiko began holding herself accountable for causing Mutsumi’s meltdown, Uika went down an emotional spiral, triggered by a constant back and forth between her separation anxiety and the immense guilt she bore from living a life of lies. Yet in the face of all the things they’ve gone through, the five manage to reignite the band spirit and build back Ave Mujica into a group with pure intentions.

Such a refreshing take on the genre is truly what the Bang Dream series needs to keep it going strong. Too long have idol anime been about its cast’s smooth road to success, with anything remotely resembling an obstacle on the way flattened by the power of love and friendship. Ave Mujica, in stark contrast, throws its characters into the deepest depths and hands them no recourse. Yet ironically, it is exactly the heavy themes and weight of the drama present in Ave Mujica that arguably better cements the love and friendship narrative: there is nothing more endearing than seeing people overcome hardships together despite everything in their circumstances working against them. 

Now, to tell a story filled with twists and turns like this in a short 13 episode runtime is certainly a challenge, but Ave Mujica does it with flying colours. Much like modern TV’s best of the best, the show packs in incredible information density by unabashedly utilising minute details, heavy symbolism, and implicit dialogue to communicate with its audience. The most unique, and perhaps technically impressive, of which are its cast’s detailed facial expressions and subtle gestures. The faces in Ave Mujica have achieved such a high degree of specificity that, in many cases, the camera is the only thing doing the talking. In the Imprisoned XII performance in episode 10, for example, the music is uninterrupted by any exposition or internal monologue, and the framing, momentary editing, and acting becomes the language in the scene. By removing everything that might be distracting to the present, Ave Mujica draws the audience’s attention to what’s on screen, conveying so much with no words at all: Sakiko’s change of heart, Uika’s emotional weight, Mutsumi/Mortis’ transformation, and Nyamu’s insecurities. It illustrates the intertwinedness of the cast’s personal issues and links them together with a level of fluidity that explicit language simply cannot achieve.

This is something Ave Mujica does that, once again, far surpasses its peers. Its willingness to leave things implied and unsaid captures the beauty and effectiveness of vagueness that the medium rarely engages with. In lieu of hand holding the audience to the answer, it provides just enough context and subtextual clues and trusts us to come to our own conclusions. The result is a show that’s extremely concise and efficient with its screen time with little bloat holding it back; an absolute joy to watch.

However, Ave Mujica’s execution does occasionally slip. Episodes 7 and 11’s way of storytelling notably fall back to business as usual, with one being much more offensive than the other. For the former, there’s no excuse: CRYCHIC’s Haruhikage performance chose to emphasise frustratingly mundane internal monologues, breaking its usual striking visual brilliance. For the latter, Uika’s 20 minute long exposition is an unfortunate but calculated effort to flesh out her background with the little runtime remaining, and the show does try to compensate by delivering it in a visually interesting and thematically consistent way. Nonetheless, it’s a less than spectacular way to develop her character and incongruent with what Ave Mujica has done for the other band members.

The blips don’t stop there either. The eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that Umiri has been left out of any discussion thus far, and that’s intentional. The character development of the bass player in Ave Mujica has been muddled, to say the least. She yearns to become more trusting and trustworthy at the same time, certainly an admirable goal, and understandable given her bad experiences with band break-ups. But her sudden change of heart towards Ave Mujica from being indifferent to obsessive is puzzling: she is demonstrably on good terms with at least one of her band’s mates, and the fractured nature of Ave Mujica should be the last thing she desires. So, when she reveals that she has quit all other bands for Sakiko’s, the sentiment rings hollow. It is disheartening that the pivotal moment for Umiri in the show relies on the idol genre fairy dust that this show has tried so hard to avoid.

It is also undeniable that there’s a missed opportunity within this season to take a drastically different path from the last to further display the genre’s potential. We have already seen in MyGO a story of how empathy, communication, and understanding triumph over individual differences, and Ave Mujica just felt like more of the same. By showcasing the worst sides of humanity, it could have told a story similar to that of a Greek Tragedy: about how we can never escape the circumstances that shape and mould us, but we should still play the cards we’re dealt the best we can. Such an approach would play well as a juxtaposition of MyGO, as well as making it even more of a thematic stand out. Instead, the choice to end the series on a lighter note required a dramatic 180 on its last episodes, and although well-executed, audience members who are less familiar with the roots of the genre might find the sudden tonal shift jarring.

All that is to say, Ave Mujica is not perfect, but in the aspects it excels at, it shines like no other. And the best way to explain its genius may be to point to its choice of subtitle: “The Die is Cast” is both a reflection of the band’s story in-universe and the show’s experimental position in the genre as a whole. And just like how careful thought is put into naming the series, similar attention is paid to meticulously craft every moment of Ave Mujica, and for that it deserves high praise. The show, both in its writing and production, has led the whole genre past the Rubicon. 

“Alea iacta est.”

It’s frustrating that its ambitions fell just short.