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The Veef Show Episode 52 - AKB0048!

I am joined once again by Carl aka SDshamshel of Ogiue Maniax to discuss the recent anime AKB0048, which was directed by Shoji Kawamori with Mari Okada as the head writer.

Check out his post on how actual AKB48 songs are used in AKB0048.

Visit Archive.org to listen and download. 

If I had to sum up AKB0048 in one image it would be this:

Freedom fighting idol singers just doing their thing.

Beware of spoilers and the No Fun police.

Posted 20 April, 2013 - 22:52 by VF5SS

Comments

2 comments posted
If there's any sentiment I

If there's any sentiment I disagreed with on this podcast, it had nothing to do with what was said about AKB0048 itself. It's Carl's statement that there are still plenty of fighting game/RTS fans out there who are not of the Shoryuken.com / TekkenZaibatsu ilk of being very sternly obsessed with competitiveness and the need to win at all costs, no matter what. Maybe, MAYBE, that is true...IF AND ONLY IF you live in a city with several million people as Carl does. Perhaps he can--eventually--find...20 people who won't play fighting games that way. But the rest of us have to put up with who's on Xbox Live, and THAT is the "reality" of the situation. We can kind of extend this logic out to anime fans with similar results. (Okay, I also disagreed with the notion that Quinton Flynn sucks, but to be fair he's most famous for having to copy Nathan Lane...who does suck.)

Now that AKB0048 over, I've been watching the assorted live-action variety show torture segments involving the band members. In doing so, I've noticed that a lot of the successors, not just Itano, are drawn to bear physical similarities to their real-life counterparts. Atsuko Maeda really does have those kinda weird eyes, for instance. Several of the successors' abilities in the show reflect the various abuse segments that were heaped upon them. The real Mayuyu had to put her arm in a guillotine, and so "Mayuyu Mk. 3" has a cybernetic arm. I understand the super-fans of the variety show were able to map the trainees' experiences to the real members in order to predict who would actually succeed whom.

Personally, I think Kanata is the best character. She combines the sports heroine lead protagonist with the sensibilities of the classic mecha lead...and yeah, there's a pathos aspect to her which does indeed elicit a sympathetic response from the viewers. People are naturally inclined to root for the underdog, and she's got the biggest hill to climb. Even factoring in the sharp detour they had to take at the halfway point (it feels like the season's story arc was mapped out in advance, but rewritten halfway through such that there wasn't time to fully hit every originally intended beat), I'm not really sure if there can be a follow-up to AKB0048...but I'd be down for seeing her arc resolved.

And no, I don't think of AKB0048 as "a robot show," but there's also no way I would have started watching this were it not for Shoji Kawamori's involvement. I still liked it enough to say it was the best anime of 2012, a year which also had Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine.

Daryl Surat's picture
Posted by Daryl Surat on 21 April, 2013 - 12:45
Oh, on the fighting game

Oh, on the fighting game community comment, when I said not everyone is the SRK type, what I meant was that in spite of what people themselves may believe, a lot of people are not devoted to pure competition when playing fighting games. Basically, it's important to people that they're using Akuma and throwing Hadoukens instead of a fairy girl throwing rainbows, that it has to on some level have that aesthetic appeal which affirms their idea of how a rough and tumble fight should be. On the opposite side of that is people who play fighting games because of the cute girls, but that's another topic for another time.

sdshamshel's picture
Posted by sdshamshel on 21 April, 2013 - 13:10