#im not personally a huge fan of the 4th or 5th anime parts

[lupincaps]

[kenzokuki]

Yes, Serendipity! Part 1

Because of the lack of a better title, I’ll just call it Yes, Serendipity!

So it has been over a week since I was in Japan for Cinderella Girls 5th LIVE TOUR Serendipity Parade!!! and up until the moment of writing this, I am still gathering my thoughts about the whole experience. Honestly, somehow it still feels very surreal to me and I still can’t believe I was there, on such a big venue to watch the Cinderella Girls perform live.

I will (probably) have too much to say and I want to write out properly instead of spamming my twitter with all the ramblings, so I thought that I should just write it out on one big post in my dead tumblr blog. I also thought that it’d be a pretty funny memory to look back to one day. A fair warning that this post is long, rambly, and likely full of grammatical mistakes so I apologize to whoever reads it in advance.

Before anything else, I want to start with an introduction about myself. Since I gained a few followers this month, I feel like this is a good time to know me a little bit better, how I became a Producer and ended up in CG5th, etc. I go by the name “chun” on the internet, and that’s the only name I’ve used ever since aside from my real name. I started following anime religiously back in 2012 when I started this anime blog though my interest at the time was nowhere near idols, if some of my old tumblr friends read this then they know what I was into back then. I did have a bit of interest in seiyuu back then though I didn’t follow them as seriously, seiyuu like Kondou Takashi, Sawashiro Miyuki, and Tsuda Kenjirou to name a few but my interest have now shifted to more female seiyuus like Sumipe, Matsueri, and Shimayuki. Contrary to what most people think, I haven’t been a Producer for a long time like most of the Ps that I have encountered, I’ve only been a fan for a little over a year and a half though I’ve been aware of iDOLM@STER ever since my young anime days but didn’t care about idols at all.

To be honest, like most “how I got into x series/franchise” stories go, I also never really saw myself getting into iDOLM@STER or any idol stuff in general until I got into Love Live. And yes, I was a huge Love Liver way before I became a Producer, just to get that out there. I’m going to skip the whole Love Liver part, but basically I finally took notice of iDOLM@STER in 2015 though I still couldn’t get into it back then because I was a filthy Love Liver (see this tweet). I even tried Deresute when it released but I was too deep into SIF that time so I just shrugged it off since I had my hands full with different mobage. It wasn’t until my friend convinced me to play Deresute again cause an Anya event was coming which is what got me to play Deresute continuously up until now. I’ll talk about how I became an AnyaP in a separate post when her birthday comes around, but basically he knew I liked Anya despite not being into CG at the time. So I picked up the game again and eventually it led to my fall to Deresute then ultimately to CG, this was also around Final Live so I guess it somehow came off as me being “traitor” to the other series, but thinking about it now I don’t really regret it.

I did try to actively support both series but I knew it was impossible for me to like both equally, eventually I would have lesser time for one series while I dedicate all my time to the other. Since I got interested into CG by the time µ’s was ending, it was also around the time when they started pushing so much Aqours stuff, I had to pick between getting into Aqours or diving deeper into CG. Naturally, it was an easy decision for me (nothing against Aqours, they are good but I couldn’t bring myself to like them fully as much as I did with µ’s). I guess you can say everything fell into place at the right time? It’s kind of silly actually, one of the main reasons I’m so deep into CG right now is all thanks to Love Live. Now that I think about it, I would often get into friendly arguments with the same friend who got me interested into CG about the usual LL vs. iM@S debate and it’s funny how I moved over to the other side now and he became an Aqours fan instead, how the tables have turned as they say. This is just one of the silly reasons why I got into CG though, one of the main hook that got me was the anime which then eventually got me interested in all the idols (and seiyuu).

I know a lot of people dislike DereAni because of the emotional baggage and unnecessary drama it brings, but I personally really loved it and up until now I still rewatch it and get the same feelings like when I watched it for the first time. Through the anime, I feel like I got to see another part of the idols’ lives, personalities, and feelings that I didn’t get to see in the games or any other media. Because of the anime, I feel like I got a bit closer to Anya and I got to know her more since there is barely translated content for the CG games and it’s not only Anya, the same applies for all the other idols too.

I eventually found myself replacing my entire playlist full of Love Live! songs to all Cinderella Girls. I still remember the first song that got me hooked on their music was Rin’s version of S(mile)ING!, I couldn’t stop looping it for a couple of weeks until I found another song to listen to which was Yuubae Present (still remains to be one of my favorite songs until now). Shortly after that I got into more of the anime songs and the rest was history.

Which leads me to getting to know the seiyuu of Cinderella Girls, I genuinely want to get to know them better through whatever content is out there. Since I’m considerably a new fan, there is so much content to catch up on and I feel like I’ll never get tired about getting to know all of their unique and colorful personalities. I know it’s not humanly possible for me to actively support them all, but I still try what I can to appreciate the things they do (be it solo work or for CG) and do little things like watching anime they’re in or simply sending tweets of support to them. At the very least, I know a little bit of basic stuff about all the CGs from names/nicknames, the characters they voice, etc. so that’s something.

And now I’ve covered most stuff about myself and how I became a P, I’ll now talk about what really made me want to go to CG5th. To be honest, it was a far-fetched dream that I never knew would become a reality. My CG5th plans were already in the works as early as November 2016, nothing was announced back then but my desire to go to a CG live was so strong at the time that I didn’t care about the circumstances and just “yolo’d” it. I’ve read all of the writeups, tweets from the kaigai Ps who went to CG4th, I’ve seen the drawings from some Japanese Ps, and the seiyuu pictures and tweets from 4th which all the more fueled my desire to go. Before anything else was announced, I talked with Oxide about which places and dates that we could most likely go to and I told him that Osaka or Tokyo around July was the best possible scenario for me so I was planning somewhere around that. Fast forward to January 2017 (or was it February) when they announced the locations, dates, and performers for the first 3 stops which ruined all the planning that I had in mind. There was no ideal scenario for me, Anya was in the Sendai stop and it was happening as early as the 2nd week of May which I 100% couldn’t go to due to it being thesis period. The next one was the Ishikawa stop which had a lot of personal favorites in it but I wasn’t sure if it was something that I REALLY wanted to fly for so I decided to wait it out, the same goes for the Osaka stop. By the way, I was only limited to go to 1 stop of the whole tour so I really had to choose wisely on which stop did I want to fly for.

Ultimately, I wanted to have the best CG live experience so I decided to go in blindly for the SSA stop. I knew I couldn’t do this half-heartedly, that’s why as early as February (only the dates for SSA was announced this time), I already booked my flights in order to fully commit myself to it. It was a moment of no turning back, I figured that no matter what kind of crazy cast they put out, I would still like it. Honestly didn’t expect the cast to be so crazy that it had over 60 performers for a 2-day live, so even though there was no ideal scenario for me, I feel like this god-tier cast was enough to compensate for that. I could talk more about my “road to SSA” experience, but this post has already gotten crazy long so I will cut it off here.

To conclude this post, I hope that whoever is reading this got to know me a little bit better and how I ended up to where I am now. The next post, I will talk more about the “road to SSA”, CG5th buppan, and up until Day 1 of SSA maybe.

[hyourinmarus]

Yes, Serendipity! Part 1

Because of the lack of a better title, I’ll just call it Yes, Serendipity!

So it has been over a week since I was in Japan for Cinderella Girls 5th LIVE TOUR Serendipity Parade!!! and up until the moment of writing this, I am still gathering my thoughts about the whole experience. Honestly, somehow it still feels very surreal to me and I still can’t believe I was there, on such a big venue to watch the Cinderella Girls perform live.

I will (probably) have too much to say and I want to write out properly instead of spamming my twitter with all the ramblings, so I thought that I should just write it out on one big post in my dead tumblr blog. I also thought that it’d be a pretty funny memory to look back to one day. A fair warning that this post is long, rambly and likely full of grammatical mistakes so I apologize to whoever reads it in advance.

Before anything else, I want to start with an introduction about myself. Since I gained a few followers this month, I feel like this is a good time to know me a little bit better, how I became a Producer and ended up in CG5th, etc. I go by the name “chun” on the internet, and that’s the only name I’ve used ever since aside from my real name. I started following anime religiously back in 2012 when I started this anime blog though my interest at the time was nowhere near idols, if some of my old tumblr friends read this then they know what I was into back then. I did have a bit of interest in seiyuu back then though I didn’t follow them as seriously, seiyuu like Kondou Takashi, Sawashiro Miyuki, and Tsuda Kenjirou to name a few but my interest have now shifted to more female seiyuus like Sumipe, Matsueri, and Shimayuki. Contrary to what most people think, I haven’t been a Producer for a long time like most of the Ps that I have encountered, I’ve only been a fan for a little over a year and a half though I’ve been aware of iDOLM@STER ever since my young anime days but didn’t care about idols at all.

To be honest, like most “how I got into x series/franchise” stories go, I also never really saw myself getting into iDOLM@STER or any idol stuff in general until I got into Love Live. And yes, I was a huge Love Liver way before I became a Producer, just to get that out there. I’m going to skip the whole Love Liver part, but basically I finally took notice of iDOLM@STER in 2015 though I still couldn’t get into it back then because I was a filthy Love Liver (see this tweet). I even tried Deresute when it released but I was too deep into SIF that time so I just shrugged it off since I had my hands full with different mobage. It wasn’t until my friend convinced me to play Deresute again cause an Anya event was coming which is what got me to play Deresute continuously up until now. I’ll talk about how I became an AnyaP in a separate post when her birthday comes around, but basically he knew I liked Anya despite not being into CG at the time. So I picked up the game again and eventually it led to my fall to Deresute then ultimately to CG, this was also around Final Live so I guess it somehow came off as me being “traitor” to the other series, but thinking about it now I don’t really regret it.

I did try to actively support both series but I knew it was impossible for me to like both equally, eventually I would have lesser time for one series while I dedicate all my time to the other. Since I got interested into CG by the time µ’s was ending, it was also around the time when they started pushing so much Aqours stuff, I had to pick between getting into Aqours or diving deeper into CG. Naturally, it was an easy decision for me (nothing against Aqours, they are good but I couldn’t bring myself to like them fully as much as I did with µ’s). I guess you can say everything fell into place at the right time? It’s kind of silly actually, one of the main reasons I’m so deep into CG right now is all thanks to Love Live. Now that I think about it, I would often get into friendly arguments with the same friend who got me interested into CG about the usual LL vs. iM@S debate and it’s funny how I moved over to the other side now and he became an Aqours fan instead, how the tables have turned as they say. This is just one of the silly reasons why I got into CG though, one of the main hook that got me was the anime which then eventually got me interested in all the idols (and seiyuu).

I know a lot of people dislike DereAni because of the emotional baggage and unnecessary drama it brings, but I personally really loved it and up until now I still rewatch it and get the same feelings like when I watched it for the first time. Through the anime, I feel like I got to see another part of the idols’ lives, personalities, and feelings that I didn’t get to see in the games or any other media. Because of the anime, I feel like I got a bit closer to Anya and I got to know her more since there is barely translated content for the CG games and it’s not only Anya, the same applies for all the other idols too.

I eventually found myself replacing my entire playlist full of Love Live! songs to all Cinderella Girls. I still remember the first song that got me hooked on their music was Rin’s version of S(mile)ING!, I couldn’t stop looping it for a couple of weeks until I found another song to listen to which was Yuubae Present (still remains to be one of my favorite songs until now). Shortly after that I got into more of the anime songs and the rest was history.

Which leads me to getting to know the seiyuu of Cinderella Girls, I genuinely want to get to know them better through whatever content is out there. Since I’m considerably a new fan, there is so much content to catch up on and I feel like I’ll never get tired about getting to know all of their unique and colorful personalities. I know it’s not humanly possible for me to actively support them all, but I still try what I can to appreciate the things they do (be it solo work or for CG) and do little things like watching anime they’re in or simply sending tweets of support to them. At the very least, I know a little bit of basic stuff about all the CGs from names/nicknames, the characters they voice, etc. so that’s something.

And now I’ve covered most stuff about myself and how I became a P, I’ll now talk about what really made me want to go to CG5th. To be honest, it was a far-fetched dream that I never knew would become a reality. My CG5th plans were already in the works as early as November 2016, nothing was announced back then but my desire to go to a CG live was so strong at the time that I didn’t care about the circumstances and just “yolo’d” it. I’ve read all of the writeups, tweets from the kaigai Ps who went to CG4th, I’ve seen the drawings from some Japanese Ps, and the seiyuu pictures and tweets from 4th which all the more fueled my desire to go. Before anything else was announced, I talked with Oxide about which places and dates that we could most likely go to and I told him that Osaka or Tokyo around July was the best possible scenario for me so I was planning somewhere around that. Fast forward to January 2017 (or was it February) when they announced the locations, dates, and performers for the first 3 stops which ruined all the planning that I had in mind. There was no ideal scenario for me, Anya was in the Sendai stop and it was happening as early as the 2nd week of May which I 100% couldn’t go to due to it being thesis period. The next one was the Ishikawa stop which had a lot of personal favorites in it but I wasn’t sure if it was something that I REALLY wanted to fly for so I decided to wait it out, the same goes for the Osaka stop. By the way, I was only limited to go to 1 stop of the whole tour so I really had to choose wisely on which stop did I want to fly for.

Ultimately, I wanted to have the best CG live experience so I decided to go in blindly for the SSA stop. I knew I couldn’t do this half-heartedly, that’s why as early as February (only the dates for SSA was announced this time), I already booked my flights in order to fully commit myself to it. It was a moment of no turning back, I figured that no matter what kind of crazy cast they put out, I would still like it. Honestly didn’t expect the cast to be so crazy that it had over 60 performers for a 2-day live, so even though there was no ideal scenario for me, I feel like this god-tier cast was enough to compensate for that. I could talk more about my “road to SSA” experience, but this post has already gotten crazy long so I will cut it off here.

To conclude this post, I hope that whoever is reading this got to know me a little bit better and how I ended up to where I am now. The next post, I will talk more about the “road to SSA”, CG5th buppan, and up until Day 1 of SSA maybe.