#KERORO GUNSO NEW ANIME REAL??? MAYBE?

[mydreamsarejanked]

if this is an april fools joke i swear to ALL THINGS HOLY

[tamamatango]

“Holy shit they actually froggin did it”: A Keroro Gunso anime revival preliminary info and speculation post (late as hell edition)

Okay first of all,

AWAKEN

That’s right, vanished-into-the-void bastard Kirb here, I am an alive person still, though I’m certain a lot of stuff on this blog is horrifically outdated. Don’t get too used to my presence, I’m a whole ass adult with a 9-to-5 now and don’t really have the energy to put into consistently maintaining this account, at least not to the degree that I used to (took me well over a whole ass MONTH just to write this post). However, I’ve returned for a special occasion, as basically anyone still in this fandom is already aware considering it’s been forever now:

We are so fucking back

It took thirteen years and counting, but here we are, a brand new Keroro anime project is in the works—no “the short anime of all time” Flash series here, this is the real deal, straight out of 2004–2011, and goddamn is it beautiful. I might’ve been off the mark when I called it for the 15th anniversary, but it’s now the 20th, five years later, and the madmen did what was once thought impossible by many.

So let’s break down what the hell is actually going on here, because when this got revealed last month, Keroro fans on all sides of the globe basically started collectively running around like headless chickens. I’m gonna divide this aggregation post into the following sections:

Where did this even come from

Clearing up misconceptions

Okay so like what is “““Project”””

Collection of statements from official accounts, staff and cast, etc.

The Localization Question (TM)

Miscellaneous thoughts that don’t really fit anywhere else

I was originally going to make this a living document of sorts but some small stuff has already happened since I started drafting this the day after the reveal happened, so this should be it for the time being. It’s a hefty enough post as is. I am just a master procrastinator :V

That takes care of all the goofy intro nonsense, now for the parts you actually want to read, starting underneath the cut!

Section 1: The Signs Were There

As previously stated, 2024 is the 20th anniversary of the Keroro anime, along with the 25th anniversary of the manga’s serialization but apprently even they don’t care about that since they’ve made no fanfare around it whatsoever, unlike the joint 15th & 20th anniversary back in 2019. Maybe they will as we get closer to the manga anniversary in November, but for now-obvious reasons the anime has been overshadowing the manga side by a lot.

If you’ve been monitoring the Keroro PR account on Twitter (you bet your ass I’m still calling it that) you’ll have noticed an increasing output of Stuff over the last year or two, even compared to the prior anniversary. These include but are not limited to:

In 2021, the series opened an official YouTube Channel, where they’ve been doing reruns of the anime (region locked to Japan), PR podcasts, etc. It’s also where the revival announcement premiered on April 1 at midnight JST.

In 2023, the series opened an official Fan Club with a paid membership. Originally it was a temporary project meant to last for only the two anniversary years (2023 for the pilot oneshot’s anniversary, and 2024 for the anime/manga), but was ultimately extended indefinitely due to “good reception” (my guess is it was always planned to be more than two years but they didn’t want to make it too easy to guess as early as last year that the anime was returning lol). They have a merch store, giveaways, and some kind of social component. I don’t know much about it otherwise because it’s a paid membership that I don’t have access to.

The series has had an overall increase in merchandise and collabs since 2022 or so. This has pretty much always been the case, but there was a bit of a lull between the Flash series ending and the ramp-up period to this (I’d start at 2021 when the YouTube channel opened). Save for the 15th/20th stuff in 2019, for which the major project was Keroro UC, a spinoff manga/plamo line that just…never released all the models and has never been brought up again. Guess it didn’t do very well :V

A number of international releases/rereleases happened as well, but I’ll get into that a little bit more in its dedicated section. For now let’s just say that the anime being finally licensed and put up on streaming in North America may indicate the new series will be English translated in some capacity. It’s also made a resurgence in Korea, its biggest market outside Japan, where it’s had new exhibitions and collab cafes, a redub (that only got through 2 seasons I think), and even a new mobile game.

And finally, a week or so before the announcement, a new Twitter account was created specifically for the anime side of the brand. I think this was really the big tip-off, as Keroro PR has been the hub for all things related to the franchise for the last nearly 15 years, even when the original anime itself was still running during Twitter’s infancy. Keroro PR has posted everything for every other anime anniversary. The fact that now all of a sudden they had to sector off the anime stuff into its own account made it clear something bigger was going on. (Accordingly, the Keroro Anime account has labeled Keroro PR the “original work” account, AKA the manga side of things.)

Essentially I think they’ve been planning this to some degree since as long ago as 2021, the first time the president of Bandai Namco Pictures (animation studio comprised of Sunrise staff that took over the Keroro IP in 2015 and are now producing the new anime) openly acknowledged the possibility. I’ll just link my own tweet with the translation of his statement here. This was right around the opening of the YouTube channel, so I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

tl;dr Momentum for the anime component of the franchise has been building for the past couple of years pointing toward a new anime around the 20th anniversary, so I wouldn’t say this comes off as a huge surprise, though I was expecting something smaller scale than what we might be getting (more on that in the “what is this” section).

Section 2: No It’s Not April Fools, Guys, Plus Other Clarifications

With the announcement spreading across the internet, I’ve seen a few points of confusion going around that I’d like to clear up before I go any further.

As I’ve made clear in the section title, yes the new anime was revealed on April 1, no this is not a prank. A lot of Japanese companies do post April Fools pranks, but keep in mind April also marks the start of the new fiscal year in Japan, so many legitimate announcements are made as well. Plus, the original anime’s exact anniversary was on April 3, just a couple of days after the announcement.

I’ve seen a lot of people call this a new series, season, etc., but officially, the only term used to describe this so far is “new anime project”. That could mean literally anything, from TV series to movie to ONA and so on. I am leaning closer to a certain interpretation, which is what the entire next section is for, but for the time being, calling it anything other than “new anime” is technically not concrete info.

There seems to be a little bit of confusion on what studio is working on this, but in short: it's Bandai Namco Pictures (BN Pictures or BNP for short). As previously mentioned, this is the studio that inherited the Keroro IP when it spun off from Sunrise in 2015. Sunrise, the anime's original studio, is now a brand name for the larger anime management company Bandai Namco Filmworks. Although they've held the IP for almost a decade, this is the first time they've really gotten to do anything with it besides merchandise licensing and some anti-piracy commercial from a few years ago that they’ve ironically scrubbed from the internet now. If you've seen the name Studio BIND (Mushoku Tensei, Onimai) floating around, they're assisting with the production but are not the primary animation studio. Of course this is all assuming this setup continues on to the final project and not just for the PV, but I see no reason to assume otherwise at the moment. It would be rather unusual for BNP to outsource anything if it was solely for a 30 second trailer.

I think that does it for the main points of contention I wanted to address for now, so moving on to the thing we all really want to know…

Section 3: Okay But What Is It Actually???

Well, as I said in the previous section—we don't know, lol. At least not officially. But if we put our thinking caps on, we can make a few deductions:

The anime project will be broadcast on TV. In other words, it won't be an ONA (original net animation). This is determined based on the fact that TV Tokyo, the network the original anime aired on, is on the production committee. For those who don't know, a production committee for an anime is the collection of parties/companies who contribute to the production and funding of the anime. For comparison, the Keroro Flash Series, which aired only on the TV channel Animax to accompany a dedicated timeslot for the original anime reruns, did not have TV Tokyo in its committee. So, it will likely air on TV Tokyo once again.

It's (probably) not a movie. This is going to be more evidenced by point 3 than anything, but BNP has been pretty clear about when something is a movie specifically in the past, such as when Kaiketsu Zorori had various feature films in the 2010s before getting an actual TV anime revival in 2020. Still, we can't be 100% sure until someone directly says otherwise.

It's going to be more than a one-off. I will post the statement in full in the next section, but the Keroro PR account uses specific wording (“resumption,” “new start,” etc.) that sounds very much like they’re making a longer term commitment, so this is straight from the horse’s mouth, essentially.

The series will be a continuation of the 2004-2011 series rather than a reboot. This one’s probably my flimsiest prediction as the PR statements sort of obfuscate whether it’s one or the other, but the character bios section on the new anime portal site gives away a big hint: the Garuru Platoon, Pururu included, is there. This means that we can reason that, at minimum, all or part of Season 3 has already occurred. The character bios themselves also summarize things that weren’t revealed until a little while into the show, such as how Momoka and Tamama met. That all said, the Garuru Platoon members do not have bios, so I suppose they want to keep what’s being done with them a bit of a secret; perhaps they intend to reintroduce them with some kind of dramatic arc again. Either way, if the series does retread/retell some old material, it probably won’t be the bulk of the story. This makes sense to me, as it’s not like the show has been so hard to find in the last decade that a reboot is necessary to get a modern audience on board—it reruns constantly on kids’ TV channels like the Japanese version of Cartoon Network, is available in full on multiple streaming platforms (movies included), and is now on its second rebroadcast of the whole series episode by episode on the YouTube Channel. Unless you’re a literal toddler, if you’re interested in the series, you’ve probably watched at least some of it already.

In conclusion, based on the above (admittedly sparse) evidence, I am inclined to believe the new anime project is a TV series that will air on TV Tokyo as the 2004 anime did and will be a continuation rather than a reboot; however, there is no way to determine episode length, episode count, etc. at this time. It could be a cour (for those who don't know anime, "cour" is your average 12-episode season), it could be consecutive cours, it could be split cour (in other words, goes on break for a season before returning), it could even be a year-round anime if they really wanna go all the way with it. Granted, I hesitate to believe that they would do the latter simply due to the nature of anime production these days, and as far as I know, BNP has not done a single year-round airing since its founding. Even the aforementioned Kaiketsu Zorori revival was a two cour (24-25 eps) series each year from 2020-2022. My guess is we're looking at something similar here, but Keroro is a pretty big deal, so could they make an exception? Maybe, but this setup would already lead to more episodes than the vast majority of anime these days, so it would still be plenty enough to be happy with.

Considering all this and the list of numerous hints that we were potentially getting a new anime as far back as three years ago as bulleted in Section 1, you might question what made me doubt that it could be a series in the first place. Well, besides just the series being so old and it being so long since the anime ended that it felt a little like wishful thinking, at least three members of the cast said that a new series was not something they were specifically looking to do...I think, anyway. Let me explain.

Last year, on December 9, a Keroro birthday event with Kumiko Watanabe (Keroro), Etsuko Kozakura (Tamama), and Takeshi Kusao (Dororo) was hosted in person and livestreamed on TwitCast for fans that paid for a ticket. There were two timeslots for the in person event, and only the evening show was streamed, with the afternoon one being in person only. Now that I have adult money, and being the impulse driven gremlin that I am, I paid for the virtual ticket. Most of it was just cute little segments like the three cast members doing live commentary on some of the birthday episodes, discussing the results of a “favorite lines from their characters” poll hosted on Twitter a few weeks before the event, and a brief visit from Jashin-chan of Jashin-chan Dropkick/Dropkick on My Devil, a series that Keroro recently collabed with for a series of merchandise. Unfortunately the event wasn't archived publicly and they specifically asked to not upload materials to social media, and I'd like to respect that request mostly out of consideration for the cast, so you will just have to take my word for it :P (besides those who were watching me talk about it in real time on discord).

The reason I'm going on this tangent is because, at the end of the stream, a special prerecorded video featuring the three cast members was shown exclusively for virtual attendees. In it they essentially explained that they still greatly enjoy the characters/series and would love to partake in more events and projects, but "not necessarily a new series." I promise you I listened to this clip over and over the entire time it was available and that's what I heard. Now look, the room they recorded this in was echo-y, and my Japanese is pretty decent (enough for my N2 anyways, yeah I did that while I was away from here clap clap) but listening comprehension is my weaker area, so maybe I just take a massive L here. When I started writing this post there was a sentence here guessing about whether they were just being cheeky or didn’t know yet, but an interview came out last month that gave what’s all but a conclusive answer to that. More on it in the next section but tl;dr, they likely did not know it was happening at all. Well, at least they got to be as surprised as we were :V

Anyways now that the thing has been revealed none of the last two paragraphs even matter, so I just prattled on for no reason besides to admit my own shame. Next bit.

Section 4: SAUCE PLOX??? (Current testimonies from relevant people/entities)

Naturally, when the trailer dropped, we got a pretty decent handful of comments from whatever staff and cast are on social media. Most of these are just people going “yay we’re back hooray!” (paraphrased) but the Keroro PR account statements are actually kinda sorta hints? So I’ll start out with those. There’s two tweets that I want to highlight here:

First is from April 1 (JST), the day of the reveal. In this tweet the account wishes everyone well for the new school/fiscal year, but the important part is the last sentence, This can be translated any number of ways (thanks to yoroshiku onegaishimasu and its 50 potential meanings, every Japanese translator’s worst nightmare), but essentially it’s something along the lines of “we hope you’ll support the restart/resumption of the Keroro anime for a long time to come.”

The keywords here are obvious: 再始動 (saishidou) meaning either restart or resumption. I know you’re probably thinking those are two very different things, but the nuance here is that it’s more of a restart in production than restart of the continuity. For the latter, I think it’s more common to see リメイク, which is just the English word “remake” in katakana. Worth noting that the Flash anime used none of these words in its marketing, but it did use language such as “brand new invasion plan,” “rebirth of Keroro,” and so on…in addition to, you know, having a completely different artstyle and a title change to just “Keroro”, which this clearly does not (the artstyle is relatively faithful to the old one and the project is under the original Keroro Gunso name).

The other big word is 末永く(suenagaku), which…also doesn’t have one exact translation, but implies somewhere between years or even an indefinite period of time. I didn’t want to say a specific unit of time in my translation of the statement because well, we can’t really be sure of anything here, but either way, they’re signaling that they’re most likely in it for the long haul.

Then there’s the tweet from the PR account commemorating the actual anniversary of the original anime (April 3). This one uses 新しいスタート, “new start”—no real multiple definition shenanigans here, this is about as literal and straightforward as you can get. In terms of the reboot or not question, this could lean either way, but it definitely adds to theory that it is a series of some sort.

Okay, that’s all for the individual tweets I’m gonna totally overanalyze, otherwise I’d be stuck here for even longer than I already have been. Here’s a quick list of involved staff who tweeted about the reveal:

Unsurprisingly, Kumiko Watanabe (Keroro) posted that day, reiterating that it is real and saying “believe usssss!” (As a reminder, half the internet was convinced it was April Fools for like a whole week)

Adding to the cast comments, Etsuko Kozakura (Tamama) says, “Whoo-hoo! Can’t wait for more news! Keroro Gunso is still the greatest!!”

Jouji Nakata (Giroro) didn’t make a specific comment about the trailer, but has been retweeting the other official accounts and such and replying about it, so he has acknowledged it otherwise. As a substitute, here’s a picture of him visiting the Keroro Exhbition in Ikebukuro a day early.

Here’s an interesting one—Haruna Ikezawa (Momoka) said about the trailer, “Really?! Is this real?!?!?!” While no cast members outside of the Keroro Platoon were officially revealed to be reprising their roles, I’m assuming they’re going to try their best to reassemble as much of the cast as of season 7 as possible—besides Keiji Fujiwara (Paul/Narrator), who sadly passed away in 2020—so I kind of figured Ikezawa would know about this, but maybe not…? Well, considering that the main five were completely blindsided by this to the point where they weren’t even sure this was a real thing until they were in the middle of recording it (as I said previously, more on that later), I suppose the other cast members were just. Not told. I don’t really doubt Ikezawa would return (she even stated it could happen someday all the way back when the then-final season ended in 2011 and did come back for Flash)…but unless they were like really worried about leaks why even keep them in the dark to learn with the rest of the public, idk man :V (so much for not overanalyzing tweets huh)

On to production staff now, here’s the tweet from Satoshi Koike, animation director of the latter third of the original and also the reveal trailer, indicating that he’s most likely back for the new project. It’s just a simple “Welcome back! (de arimasu)” but the images he used were drawn back in 2019 to commemorate the start of the Reiwa era, spoofing the original lyrics of the first opening. The reveal trailer tweet itself from the Keroro Anime account does this too (“Starting today, the Reiwa era shall be known as the Keroro era!”).

New to the staff is Jouji Furuta (yes we have two Joujis now har har), who did the storyboards and direction for the trailer. He’s relatively new to the scene as a whole, with his most well known project being Shaman King Flowers. Although he never worked on the series before, he did a pretty good job emulating the original, and based on the last line of the tweet, it seems like he will be staying on for the full project as well.

And now for a kind of weird section where I talk about the few related accounts that the Keroro anime twitter is following but haven’t made any kind of verbal acknowledgement yet.

First and foremost is Mine Yoshizaki—you know, the guy who created the fucking series, whose name is on the copyright string and whose explicit permission they had to get to do another anime in the first place? Yeah so it’s been over a month since the reveal now and there has been zero acknowledgement from him. I do know his personal social media account has been inactive for quite a few years now (I feel like the anime account is only even following it for symbolic reasons), but he had multiple other opportunities to say something at this point. He did contribute some signed artwork to the anime-focused exhibition that just ended but nowhere in it does he directly mention the new adaptation, and so far he hasn’t commented on it in Shonen Ace (maybe in the next volume, assuming that’s soonish). I have my theories about his relationship to the anime, especially now that the Kemono Friends fiasco has occurred, but that’s all a story for another day or never. I’m sure he’ll contribute something later, but even so it’s just really bizarre to have nothing to say about your biggest creation’s first new adaptation in over a decade. Oh well.

Character designer Fumitoshi Oizaki, who has been around since the beginning if I remember correctly, has been retweeting things, but no official comment just yet. (He discretely left a message at the expo apparently, but didn’t post it online, so no idea if it mentions the new anime.) He isn’t credited on the trailer, but considering he’s still been pretty involved with the franchise’s promotion over the last few years, I would be very surprised if he wasn’t returning.

Last but certainly not least is Junichi Sato, the chief director for the original anime for the first two seasons, arguably its most well-known and critically praised era. He’s also a very notable director in his own right, having headed other famous series like early Sailor Moon and Ojamajo Doremi. Sato didn’t direct the original anime for the majority of its runtime (though he did direct the first four movies), but he still directs and storyboards on projects to this day, including for other franchises’ major anniversaries (namely Doremi and Precure). Though not certain, I think it’s very possible that he returns for this in some capacity, if not as director than perhaps for storyboarding or general advising.

To close out the testimony section, I’m going to share here the translation I did of the aforementioned interview with Kumiko Watanabe in last month’s issue of Newtype (anime-centric magazine published by Kadokawa). I won’t re-summarize it here since it’s not particularly long, but the main takeaways from this in terms of hints as to what we can expect are that a) the cast was surprised by this and potentially didn’t even know back in December when they last discussed the possibility of working on Keroro again, and b) as I previously speculated, this is going to be a long term enough project that at least Watanabe feels the need to physically prepare for it lol. And thankfully, it seems they’re all excited to go back to the series. I spent a long time thinking they might not be up to it again since it’s been so long and they’re much later in their lives/careers (Nakata just turned 70 oh man) but I’m glad I was wrong! Though I don’t expect this to be another 300 episode commitment anyway; in spite of the PR comments I don’t think we’re going for that long with the nature of anime production these days lmao.

And now for a topic which I think many of you are concerned about…

Section 5: “But what if my 日本語 is not 上手???” (The Localization Question)

If you did not get the joke in the above headline without looking it up, it’s probably safe to assume that if you want to watch this Thing, you will need it in a language other than Japanese (and even if you did get the joke you will know if you are truly 日本語上手 when people stop saying 日本語上手 to you). I’m going to focus on English for this post since that’s the primary language of the audience here, though I would be very shocked if there isn’t at minimum a Korean translation—dub more likely than sub imo, since the most famous version of the show there had different names for the characters and was changed to be set in Korea, and the series is HUGE there to the point where it almost rivals the Japanese market.

So, English. Well, if it were a few years ago (say, if this came during the 15th anniversary like I was originally coping over), I would be markedly less optimistic about getting any official translation at all. At that time, the dub was explicitly dead and the only English sub had been delisted for a few years, and even that was only available in a select few countries in Continental Europe on a pretty obscure streaming service called Viewster for like a year or two before getting pulled. It’s no surprise that this particular sub eventually became more well known as the subs on the torrents compiled by ColdFusion (whoever that was, I’m still not sure myself). That was until…

…the magical year of 2021, when our heroes at Discotek licensed the ENTIRE SERIES (minus the movies) for an official English release using Viewster’s existing translations! That’s right, we got all of it. And not only that, the whole series was also added to Crunchyroll, though only the sub; Discotek had the Funimation dub but it seems it did not get ported to Crunchyroll when the merger happened this year. It does seem that Crunchy has still not made the series available outside of the US and Canada, which is a shame, but man is it still surreal to have the entire series legally available both digitally and physically after nearly two decades of scattered fansubs and hardly accessible official releases. Surely this was a huge win for Discotek, right?

Weeeeeell…no. Of course they weren’t able to say it out loud, but it’s been extremely heavily implied that unfortunately the BluRay/DVD releases flopped for them, and they did say they definitely won’t be getting the movies or the Flash series. They also stopped releasing the discs on a one season a year basis and started bundling them together, with seasons 5–7 coming out all at once later this year, so they’re clearly trying to just get it off their plates. To be honest, this was pretty predictable because…it’s been on Crunchyroll since before the discs even came out. Look, physical media is super cool and all, but who in this economy is going to pay $40-60 per box for a handful of seasons at most when they can get the whole damn thing on their phone for like $8 a month. Crunchyroll isn’t necessarily a disc killer; their release of Digimon Adventure, for example, still seemingly did well despite that series being available on Crunchyroll two years prior, but in addition to Digimon being more popular in the west, it’s one $60 purchase for the whole series versus having to spend like over $200 for 358 episodes. I applaud them for rolling the dice and trying to get this behemoth of a release out there, but I’m not surprised about the lack of financial returns.

However, since Crunchyroll now has set a precedent of having the original series available on their platform, we just might get the new series available on there as well—if not as a simulsub, then at least dropped in batches later on. I’m not 100% confident in this, particularly because technically Discotek still holds the license, but my guess based on the way they’ve talked about the series is that they’re pretty open to someone else taking it off their hands when they’re done releasing the original series (and the translations weren’t originally theirs to begin with anyways, they purchased them and did some touch-ups to the existing translation with added typesetting). As far as simulsubs go, the kids’ shows that get simulsubbed tend to be from Toei, with whom Crunchyroll has a known partnership. But if it is split into cours rather than being a year-round anime, I think the chances of a simulsub go up. Whatever the case may be, it’s for sure in a better position to get an official subtitled release than it ever was before. I’m certainly praying this happens because I believe most of the people capable of fansubbing (with good translation anyway) have gradually moved away from the fandom over the last decade for various reasons—myself included, though mostly I just quit fansubbing/scanlation in general for Personal Reasons(TM). Fingers crossed, everyone.

So subs remain as a not-guaranteed-but- definitely-not-low possibility. But what about a dub? If you recall, Keroro has had a very rocky history in 3D with English dubs, with the American dub being in licensing hell for years before finally falling into Funimation’s lap and subsequently failing to take off despite remaining a beloved cult classic to Some Fans (I am not as high on it, but longtime Kirb followers probably know that by now), and the only other English dub is relegated to the network Animax in Hong Kong + Southeast Asia with no official home release, leaving all of it besides parts of seasons 3 and 4 as lost media (and the voice acting sucked ass but at least the script was accurate). But we’re not in the mid 2000s to early 2010s anymore; this is the screamin’ ’20s, baby! So much anime is getting dubbed now, sometimes at almost the same time as the Japanese release! There must be a chance, right?!

Eeeehhhhhh I wouldn’t bet on it. Even the Toei kids’ shows Crunchyroll started simulsubbing usually don’t get dubs (Digimon is an exception, and the reboot’s dub took YEARS to come out). Anime dubs, as far as I’m aware, are not cheap to produce (though it’d be great if more of what the companies are pocketing went to the actors’ wages >_>), and if the show does have the potential to become somewhat of a long runner, I think they’ll need to see more interest around the IP to fund one, and both Funimation and now Discotek’s releases have proved that the audience for it isn’t always there. I also speculate they’d be doing a lot of recasting; the casting process is not as smooth and (I believe) more expensive than it is in Japan, and a lot of the original cast are not working as often in the field anymore and/or have been involved with some pretty serious controversies—I’m sure those in the know are thinking of a specific drawn-out conflict but I’m pretty sure it’s more than just About Him at this point. So let’s just say that while some of the cast still remembers the show fondly, I think trying to get them all in the same project again would potentially open some cans of worms better off left closed. It’s not 100% impossible it gets dubbed, you never know what the industry can manage to make work these days, but I’d wager it’s like 90% not happening. Just a hunch. If anyone more knowledgable than me on anime localization (this goes for both the dub and sub stuff) would like to argue me with better explanations than I have I’d very much be glad to hear it.

Section 6: The Stuff That Doesn’t Fit Elsewhere + Final Thoughts

There’s not going to be any real organization to this section. Here’s just some bullets of miscellaneous stream of consciousness thoughts related to whatever:

The character bios page on the site linked in section 3 has some WEIRD romanization choices. I don’t expect these to reflect on any official localization because chances are they’ll go with what Viewster used, which is largely what the fandom is used to besides the Kululu/Kururu split. It is indeed Kululu here and Kululu has been the de facto official spelling for a very very long time now but I still have a personal preference for Kururu because “Kululu” loses the onomatopoeia joke and I’m a rebel. But like. “Tololo”? Since when has Tororo ever been called that in any media? And worst of all, “Pole��? POLE?? That’s literally never been a thing what glossary did they pull these from.

Also worth noting, Alisa and the Narrator had merchandise sold at the Keroro expo (will talk about that next btw) despite not being on the characters page. This isn’t a confirmation of anything but I would be very surprised if Alisa doesn’t return at some point since she was pretty prominent later in the show and Yoshizaki seems to have a particular fondness for her, and the Narrator will obviously be there with a recast, though jury’s out on if his little ’sona guy will show up too. It won’t be the same without Fujiwara :(

I do want to touch upon the “Keroro expo”, officially known as the “Keroro Gunso Super Gerogero Museum” (expo is a fine shorthand because the Japanese word can mean exhibition also), since I’ve mentioned it a couple times throughout this write-up. This was an event that was held in Ikebukuro just recently from April 27–May 12 that was basically a walkthrough experience recreating settings from the anime, having artwork and stuff sprinkled in between (all reused, no new concept art or anything sadly). The main gimmick was that the venue had an exclusive app that let you take AR pictures with models of the Keroro Platoon. It also had an AI chatbot feature where you could talk to each member of the platoon, and not too many posted pictures of this feature but apparently the chatbots were uhhhhhh weird. I have no idea how much of it is generative from other LLMs, and I’m assuming they programmed it at least partially with their own original input/databases (which is the only way to make generative AI even close to ethical), but from the few screenshots I’ve seen their speech was just a little bit awkward and some of the stuff they said was really bizarre. At one point users started to turn it into an otome game and successfully romanced the frogs, which I’m assuming is a little bit out of the bounds of what they were expecting from this experiment. If they do release that app publicly at some point—they labeled the version at the expo to be a “test version,” so maybe—I sincerely hope they at least fine tune it because Good Lord. Finally and maybe most importantly, there were new voice lines recorded for the exhibit to give it an audio-drama type simple story, but unfortunately it was probably not archived because video recording was not allowed inside the venue. The platoon all had new voice lines along with Fuyuki and Natsumi, reportedly still played by Houko Kuwashima and Chiwa Saito respectively, so most likely they will return to reprise the roles for the new anime, though I don’t think those two were much in question. That’s really like the only important part of this for the purposes of this post I’m not sure why I mentioned anything else here actually. AI chatbot Dororo wants you to know he enjoys tickles from Giroro and Tamama. Yeah this thing’s a little fucked

I didn’t want to get too deep into this in section 3 because it’s not really a production related question, but…are Shin Keroro and related new characters gonna be in this or not? For what it’s worth the site seems to count the Flash series as part of the anniversary celebration, and screenshots with Shin in them are there even if he is completely absent from the character page. Flash was a total reboot so I don’t think it will be that exact iteration of the character if he is in the new anime, but there must be some way to work his stuff into the existing anime canon even with its many differences from the manga. Honestly I think the main obstacle to him appearing is just that the guy is not very popular lol. He’s hardly in the manga anymore and Tomosu and Myou are in it even less. I’m not sure if it was just franchise fatigue following the end of the anime but the reception to Shin was very meh across the board (at least among longtime fans, kids might’ve liked him I think. Which makes sense). So I could totally see them skipping him entirely. There’s still a lot of post-anime manga-only stories without his involvement at all, some that included him but he could easily be changed to some other character, and for the stories that revolved around him, well, the Flash anime got to a decent amount of them. This could really go either way but for now I’m going to lean toward him not being included. If he’s put in I think it will not be until the “second season” (whatever the definition of that ends up being) so we can be eased back in to the existing cast first before shaking things up significantly.

I like the new artstyle, assuming it carries over from the trailer to the final project. It looks like they hit a happy medium between the early and late artstyles of the original anime. This is the most obvious with the human cast who haven’t received new official artwork by Koike and/or Oizaki in a looooong time, and they look much better than the last time we saw them in season 7 where everyone got weirdly lanky for some reason.

Okay FINALLY I’m done here for now I think. At the time of writing we’re pretty much just in a “wait and see” phase with no other real concrete info around that I haven’t touched upon in this post. Trust me, I’ve tried digging for more, but I couldn’t find anything really interesting staff-wise and very few of the staff credited in the trailer are even on social media (sometimes staff can be a bit loose-lipped so it’s possible to get hints there). I’ve also checked every nook and cranny of the official sites of both animation studios and the companies on the production committee and turned up with nothing of note. I’m hoping we get some more info at least sometime between now and autumn.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end (or speedscrolling here, don’t worry I won’t be disappointed lol). I hope you found it informative even though I probably spent way too much time yapping about dumb shit. It took me entirely too long to write this post, but I don’t have as much time as I did as a teenager and it’s been a good few years since I’ve done a really deep dive into Keroro stuff. Needless to say, I’m beyond excited for this project and can’t wait to see how the last seven years of me huffing unhealthy amounts of copium pays off. I’ve had like a month and a half to sit on it now and it honestly still doesn’t feel real!

I will most likely return to report when we get some amount of substantial info—hopefully with way fewer words lmao. Until next time! Ge-gero~

[upsettlspaghettl]

Empire City Con 2019

I can say with confidence that this has been the best weekend of my life. People will be so quick to say that the Steven Universe fandom is one of the most toxic fandoms out there, but in all my years of going to conventions, this has been the most welcoming and friendly by far. Now, this could be because it’s a convention based on one singular fandom, as opposed to the mishmash of fandoms that gather at other conventions, but even Bronycon was nowhere near this level of welcoming. Then again, I only got the chance to go to 2 Bronycons so I don’t know if I can say much.

The flight to North Carolina was surprisingly not that bad. I’m very prone to getting lost, but I left 4 hours in advance and I didn’t even need those 4 hours. But this was my first time ever flying somewhere completely alone.

I got the chance to meet Deedee Magno Hall, who signed my Guide to the Crystal Gems. Now it’s my goal to get all the character pages signed. But it’s got all the fusions of season 1, so chances are I won’t ever get the chance to get Sugilite’s page signed. Oh well, a fan can dream, right? Just kind of a bummer because she happens to be my favorite fusion.

She also validated my OC ship with Yellow Pearl which was super cool of her. Deedee is a really sweet person. While waiting in line to meet her I made friends with a kid, and he was fanboying like crazy. Later on we met somebody else, and we all did karaoke together. Then they got to do a group Karaoke with Deedee, which I was unfortunately too nervous to join. She said she would try do one with me but we never got the chance, but either way I’m so grateful. She’s a really kind person and I hope I can meet her again!

My part in the karaoke was still really fun though. Me and my 2 friends were having a hard time figuring out what song to do, and since the instrumentals were live, the people playing only had a limited number of songs they could play. Eventually we agreed on Stronger than you. But the instrumental team couldn’t play that one, so one of my new friends asked everybody to sing along and be inclusive. I got to to do the Peridot rap onstage too! Only me and 1 other person in the audience did that though so it was really scary and I fumbled a lot... but I’m still so happy that I got to because it was just such a good time for everybody.

There was actually a garnet cosplayer who’s act was right before ours and they were still by the karaoke lineup, so one of my friends asked them to come join us. Toward the middle of our act, this same friend spotted a Jasper in the front row, dragged them up on stage, and we had an adorable fake fight scene. I had to hop off stage right before the song ended to hug somebody in the front row who was crying. I was relieved to hear that they were tears of joy. In the end, they invited my group to sit in the front row with them.

Right, and Garnet’s act! They actually sang the original SU opening in German which was super amazing. Toward the end, there was a Pearl cosplayer in her Mr. Greg tuxedo who sang It’s Over isn’t it with Deedee, and a Yellow Pearl cosplayer who did an amazing Yellow Pearl-y take on Do it for her. So yeah the variety of acts was fantastic and the whole thing was just so feel-good all around.

At the very end of the karaoke, after everyone had gotten a chance and we were all just hanging out in the karaoke room, I was given a Spinel promo pin by a Mystery Girl. Not literally a Mystery Girl cosplayer, but somebody who I thought was just... well, somebody. They mentioned having extras from the movie screening in CA, and were handing them out to Spinel cosplayers. Of course I was hopping up and down being super thankful to an awkward degree, like I normally do.

That night, I told my roommates what happened, and they told me just who that Mystery Girl was. None other than Mackenzie Atwood, creator of the Pearl’s Secret Rap Career series. My facial recognition is terrible, so I didn’t realize at the time. I was lucky enough to run into her again the next morning during breakfast in the hotel lobby, so I got to thank her personally in the end.

Speaking of Mystery Girls, there actually was a Mystery Girl cosplayer who was especially awesome. Not even ten minutes after arriving at the convention, I see 2 Spinels who welcome me into their Spinel group. A Mystery Girl cosplayer is with them, and they hand me a pair of shoe squeakers. They look like tiny clear whoopie cushions, and Mystery Girl was handing them out to all the Spinels. I don’t know about everybody else, but mine drew a lot of attention from other con-goers because I was super happy and energetic at this con so I ran everywhere I went. People were always laughing and it made me so happy that I was able to make people smile. I’ll definitely be using them again in my future Spinel cosplays.

One of the people I shared a hotel room with was a Spinel cosplayer on the first day, and they were carrying an amazing Spinel plushie that I remember seeing a photo of on Deviantart, and later showed up for sale on Etsy. It was super expensive and I remember wanting it, but I couldn’t be jealous because I know I was super lucky to even see the thing in real life!

On the second day, I met a sweet little girl who seemed to think I was the real Spinel. She drew me a picture of Baby Spinel, and I gave her my drawing of Baby Spinel which I’d made earlier that day in the quiet room. Later on, one of the convention organizers was holding a game session, and this kid crushed me in a round of Gem Gem Clod... which is Duck Duck Goose, but better. Note to self: playing games that involve running when wearing pink high heeled boots probably isn’t gonna go well!

After some games, we made some meep morps. Somebody started a trend of drawing Lion on the little canvases we were given, but my Lion wasn’t coming out quite right, so after I finished drawing his head I just. put it on one single leg. You’ve heard of Leg Pearl, now get ready for Leg Lion. I was super happy about that too because I made everybody laugh.

Once we ran out of canvases, the organizer offered to take polaroids of some of us, so now me and this adorable little kid had matching photos, which we put in tiny pink frames and put a Spinel gem on each.

oh also! the game organizer had a tattoo on their leg of a bunch of anime characters, mainly the cute “squad mascot” archetype. There was Hawk, Happy, a few other characters, and Keroro! I totally freaked out over Keroro because it’s a relatively obscure series, and it was the first show that really got me into anime! I’ve always loved things like Pokemon and Naruto, but Keroro Gunso was my gateway to the anime community as a whole.

At around noon, I spent a little more time in the room where the games were held, which had some board games of its own, books, and art supplies and overall functioned as just a room to hang out in. There I met a Pink Diamond cosplayer in a pink schoolgirl uniform and an Uravity hat (really cute outfit!), and a goth Spinel cosplayer. The Pink Diamond cosplayer was a great artist and drew a really cute magical girl Steven. These 2 people also taught me what a vsco girl was when they were joking about the fact that Pink Diamond would totally be one. I was super confused but it was really funny after they explained it.

There was a cosplay fashion show much later in the day and I made friends with a Ruby and Sapphire while sitting in line. They were a couple irl and went on stage together and they were adorable! They were also both Hazbin Hotel and Harry Potter fans, so we had a lot to talk about. We kept talking while we waited in line for the Sadie Killer and the Suspects concert too, and a few other people joined us. I’d only just met these people but I really felt surrounded by friends.

Earlier in the day, while I was waiting in line to meet Kinetic Cosplay, I ran into an amazing Sour Cream and Buck Dewey. I got their photo, only to later see them on stage as a part of the real life Sadie Killer and the Suspects. Jenny Pizza was also on stage, but I didn’t see her before that.

While the convention was great, something also happened that scared the hell out of me. At NYCC just last month, I bought some very tiny stickers, one of which was Froppy from BHNA. When I got home and unpacked, it was gone. I thought maybe it fell into the fabric of my backpack, and if it did, there was really no way to retrieve it unless it decided to fall out again. However at the convention... I was at the registration table, decorating my con badge. I pick up my phone, and suddenly the Froppy sticker falls out of nowhere. It looked like it came from the phone, but I can’t imagine where it would have fit and gotten stuck. It kinda just fell out of the void. Either way I’m glad to have it back.

Lets see... I also got some pictures of the real life Mr. Universe van... and later on I ran into the owner of the van in full Mr. Universe gear.

The Garnet cosplayer was Cotton Candy garnet on the second day and I still can’t get over how sweet and nice they were.

There were some family cosplays. On the first day I saw a Yellowtail carrying a baby doll dressed as Onion, and then on the second day the same person was with a Vidalia cosplayer, and an actual child dressed as Onion.

There were also a pair of parents dressed as Connie’s mom and dad, and their kid dressed as Connie.

On the first day there was a Mr. Smiley which was super cool and unexpected, and then on the second day they were Bismuth. There were actually 3 Bismuths in total at the con which was surprising because that wig looks super difficult to make. Anyone who can pull that off is amazing!

The last day only went on until about noon, but my flight didn’t leave until the next day. I didn’t book my hotel room for that night because I wanted extra time in case I got lost on the way to the airport. Turned out there were free shuttles. I ended up in the same shuttle as that Pink Diamond cosplayer and her dad, and she showed me this adorable RPG game app called Wholesome Cats. We took some snapchats together and now I know what I’d look like as a boy...

Since there was a shuttle to the airport, that meant I was super early for my flight. Super early as in, almost 12 hours early. After going through security, I was planning to just sleep at the gate, but my gate number wasn’t on the screen. So I asked an airport employee, and he told me that I wasn’t even supposed to be let through security until the next day, which was when my gate number was supposed to show up... whoops. It wasn’t so bad though, either way I’d just be hanging out at the airport for the night. I decided not to sleep though, just in case. It felt weird late at night, when the airport was more or less completely empty. It was so nice and quiet, and the Starbucks was still open so I had a super yummy dinner of pumpkin bread and cheese danishes.

I think that’s about it? If you wanna see pictures, I’ll be posting them all to a public album on Gnomie Leviton on Facebook, and I’ll also select a special few to post on QueenGnomie on Instagram.

If you add me on FB please tell me your url! I only add people who I've talked to before.

In conclusion!

This was by far my favorite convention I’ve ever been to, because you could literally just go up to someone, start talking, and you’d immediately have an awesome new friend. I’ve never been to a con before where every single person was so approachable. It really felt like everybody there was one big family. I already have a potential roommate for next year, so I really hope to get back on my feet soon so I can go!