![]() ![]() The latest installment in the “side:Nova” storyline, released January 19th, showcased more interactions between the two girls, how the couple started dating, and the status of their relationship. It’s these small meaningful interactions that, while similar to the usual sort of speeches, feel more meaningful because there’s no anxiety about it being “plausibly deniable” by the production. Kokoa affirms this by saying that Hayate is special to her. For example, in Episode 4 of the first “side:Nova” event, Hayate says “I still love you, Kokoa” in order to calm her frustrated girlfriend down after finishing in second place at a local competition. This is a major step forward from the common practice of subtextual dialogue hinting at romantic feelings between bandmates. Kokoa’s biography states: “In junior high, she formed a two-man unit with Hayate, and their relationship has progressed to the point where they are a couple.” Hayate’s biography confirms that “She is in a relationship with Kokoa.” Within their bios, two of the new girls, Shinomiya Kokoa and Tendo Hayate, are shown to be in a relationship as girlfriends. During the game’s second anniversary promotions, a new unit, later named UniChØrd, was introduced during an ongoing storyline about secondary character Kaibara Michiru finding a unit of her own. This is par for the course in games within this genre, and within other Bushiroad properties such as Love Live! School Idol Festival and BanG Dream! Girls Band Party.ĭ4DJ also goes beyond this, though. Art players can unlock in-game has implied yuri connotations as well. The relationship between the DJ unit RONDO’s Aoyagi Tsubaki and Miyake Aoi is a strong example of this: Tsubaki visibly has a crush on Aoi and tends to get flustered around her, and Aoi often seems to want to confess her own feelings to Tsubaki but always seems to get interrupted. Like its peers within the genre, D4DJ is no stranger to subtextual queerness, with many implied ships and tons of flirting between female characters. While the anime is charming in its own right, what I want to focus on within this piece is the mobile game D4DJ Groovy Mix and how it pushes the envelope and raises the bar for what to expect from these franchises. While it has a large cast, the franchise’s story centers around Aimoto Rinku, a high schooler who returns to Japan after living abroad and gets inspired to start a unit of her own, dragging friends she meets along the way into her dream. The series was launched with an anime, D4DJ First Mix, in 2020, and as is commonplace across mixed-media properties of this type, the voice actresses also serve as pseudo-idols who represent their DJ units IRL. ![]() This makes it stand out as one of the most inclusive, earnest, and affirming music franchises that I’ve experienced.ĭ4DJ is a mixed media project started by Bushiroad that follows the adventures of various DJ units. While it started out as another franchise building off of the foundation that Bushiroad’s BanG Dream built, D4DJ has managed to craft its own identity by pushing the boundaries of what is expected from a mixed media music franchise-particularly in how it integrates canonical queerness and themes of gender identity within the text, D4DJ manages to go places that very few franchises in its peer group manage to do. There is one recent series, however, that manages to go against this sparkly mobile game grain. Often, however, these games have a tendency to fall into the same established, familiar patterns in terms of the story points, the character arcs, and how they speak vaguely about whatever the gimmick is. As a self-described resident of what the masses call Idol Hell, I’ve sampled and enjoyed a couple of them. It seems like every season there’s a new mixed media project promoting a tie-in idol/music group with an app and an anime to jump start or adapt the story. ![]()
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