[EN] Mask, Mirror, Floor: The Metastability of Individuation in Ave Mujica

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Abstract

This essay reads Ave Mujica (2025) through the material details of its image and sound, rather than through plot or character psychology. Across four observational layers—the bipolarity of the mouth, the mediation of the voice actor’s body, the continuity of the floor, and the editorial paradox of dissolve and cut—it traces a single proposition: that the work implements what Gilbert Simondon called the métastabilité of individuation. The voice actor Watase Yuzuki performs thirteen voices from a single body without acoustic processing; the floor is never cut between reality and the inner world; the editing produces a coexistence of continuity and rupture that resists resolution. Ave Mujica, the essay argues, does not depict the formation of stable individuals—it records the oscillation of individuation itself, in counterpoint to its precursor MyGO!!!!!, where individuation unfolds as a temporal process.


Contents
Chapter 0: Introduction
Chapter 1: The Bipolarity of the Mouth
Chapter 2: The Voice Actor’s Body as Medium
Chapter 3: The Continuity of the Floor and the Distance of the Camera
Chapter 4: The Paradox of Dissolve and Cut
Chapter 5: Completing the Visual Layer—The Differential Use of 2D/3D and Its Convergence
Chapter 6: In Closing—An Open Question

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Chapter 0: Introduction

In Ave Mujica, the girls wear masks from the start. The mask is supposed to anonymize them. Yet by the end of the first episode—far too early in the narrative—the masks come off. And on the faces beneath, something remains. Or rather: something has not been lost. It is as if some veil still hangs over their bodies.

Then, in the third episode, in Mutsumi’s inner world, another device—distinct from the mask—appears: Mortis, a puppet—or a humanoid persona, an alter—whose mouth moves excessively.

We have, then, two devices: the mask, and the Mortis puppet. A “veiled body” that lingers once the mask comes off, and a “voluble puppet” that surfaces abruptly in the inner world. Devices for what?

One could begin at the level of setting, plot, or character psychology. This essay begins elsewhere—with the material details of image and sound. How the mouth moves. How the voice resonates. Where the camera draws close, and how space is handled. How reality and the inner world are joined, and how they are cut apart. Four layers, taken in turn.

Let us begin with how the mouth moves.

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Chapter 1: The Bipolarity of the Mouth

The major turning point is Nyamu’s mask-stripping at the end of the first episode. Stripped of her mask, Mutsumi suffers a psychic shock and covers her mouth with both hands. From this moment on, movements of her mouth occur in proximity to her mother, Mori Minami, or are drawn toward her mother’s appearances. Almost without exception, the mouth twitches and parts faintly. The mother’s relentless intrusion into Mutsumi’s private space, and the moments when topics relating to the mother surface in interviews, become the triggers of catastrophe. When Mutsumi opens her mouth, the psychic equilibrium between herself and her surroundings breaks down.

This reaches its peak just before the live scene of the second episode. Her quasi-retirement remark; the hyperventilation and pareidolia brought on by the recriminations around her; the swarm of mute Mutsumis encircling her[1]—and at last, on stage, she gives way. Once she has given way, her mouth seems perpetually slack. The slackness of the mouth, which for an ordinary person is the medium of dialogue with others, has in Mutsumi become a boundary line marking departure from the ordinary.

There is a major reversal here. In the real world, Mutsumi keeps her mouth shut, yet in certain scenes the mouth is staged with abundance. After the live performance is cut short, after the heated argument backstage, Mutsumi sits at home with her guitar and her remorse. At that moment, Mortis—Mutsumi’s humanoid puppet persona—appears before her. In this inner world, Mutsumi has regressed to the form of a small child, and is holding out the guitar toward Mortis. Rain falling, ground patterned as a grid. Mortis in adult form; Mutsumi regressed to childhood. Mutsumi moves her mouth in something close to a moan. In this inner world, the Mortis Theater, the child-regressed Mutsumi expresses mouth and emotion as a unity, with striking naturalness.

The depiction accelerates further as Mortis acquires Mutsumi-like features. Mortis moves mouth and expression volubly; Mutsumi, by contrast, groans. Whether or not they wear masks—indeed, precisely because they wear none—they oscillate between suppression and release under the strong gravity of the inner world.

Even without a mask, Mutsumi’s mouth is suppressed in interpersonal scenes. Yet in depictions of Mutsumi’s past, the mouth moves volubly. The mouth that does not move in present interpersonal scenes; the mouth that moves in past depictions. This contrast shows that suppression and release are inverted along the temporal axis as well. Present = suppression, past = release. This temporal bipolarity, posed here first as “coexistence,” will serve as foreshadowing for the configuration that follows.

The mouth is at once an object that is seen and an organ that produces voice. So far, we have described the mouth as object of vision. Next, we turn to the mouth as the organ of voice—where another bipolarity awaits.

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Chapter 2: The Voice Actor’s Body as Medium

From the movement of the mouth, to the quality of the voice. In Ave Mujica, Mutsumi and the Mortis who appears in Mutsumi’s inner world are voiced by the same actor: Watase Yuzuki. The two voices sound distinctly different. Mutsumi’s voice is low, restrained, and prone to breaking off. By contrast, the voice of the humanoid Mortis is unnaturally bright, buoyant. The line of puppets does not stop there. The inner world is inhabited by a chicken puppet, a bear puppet, a cat puppet, a penguin puppet, a hill myna, a firefly, a jellyfish, a hedgehog, a puppet of Mutsumi’s mother, a father puppet, a guitar puppet, and a narrator—a population of puppets, each with its own grotesque vocal coloring. All of them are performed, alone, by Watase Yuzuki. And here, there is no technical processing. No EQ to manipulate frequency bands, no pitch shifting, no reverberation to stage acoustic space. Through changes of vocal coloring alone, thirteen distinct voices are produced.

If acoustic processing were used to alter a voice, the altered voice could be treated as something separate from the original. A voice transformed by a voice changer circulates as an acoustic entity distinct from the voice before transformation. In Ave Mujica, however, no processing is applied. From the same vocal cords, the same breath, the same actor, thirteen different voices emerge. The differences among them are not differences of audio equipment but differences in the mobilization of bodily organs.

Here a paradox emerges. The act of “performing Mutsumi and the various Mortises distinctly” is plainly conscious. Watase Yuzuki chooses which voice to produce. This is performance—a symbolic act. At the same time, what implements the differences between voices is the tension of the vocal cords, the depth of breath, the manner in which the oral and nasal cavities are made to resonate—the material mobilization of bodily organs. A conscious choice is realized only through the material movement of those organs. The symbolic act of performance and the material mobilization of the body occur simultaneously.

Within a symbolic act, the body sustains that act. Julia Kristeva named such a state le sémiotique. A state in which, within the symbolic order, yet on a layer distinct from it, the rhythms and pulsations of the body are at work. Kristeva described this layer as the operation of pre-significative resonance in poetry and music. The handling of voice in Ave Mujica can be read as one cinematic implementation of le sémiotique. What produces the differences between voices is the symbolic difference of roles (Mutsumi, Mortis, the chicken, the mother, the father, the narrator… all distinct figures), but what materially sustains those differences is one and the same set of bodily organs.[2]

There is corroboration for this reading on the side of the viewer. When the ED credits of episode 3 reveal that all thirteen roles are performed by Watase Yuzuki alone, most viewers are astonished. The author was astonished. Through the body of the episode, each voice had been received as the voice of a separate being. Yet the ED reveals their identity at a single source. This astonishment means that the differences between voices had been received at the symbolic level, as “voices of separate beings,” and that, retroactively, the material level—”voices issuing from a single body”—is brought to the foreground. The symbolic difference and the bodily identity coexist, layered, within the viewer’s experience. The structure that partitions thirteen voices is rightly inscribed in the viewer as something approaching madness.

Then, from the fourth episode onward, an important change occurs. After the humanoid Mortis takes over Mutsumi, that vocal coloring grows ever more unnaturally bright. The puppet’s fictionality is foregrounded with greater force. This is not a movement in which the puppet acquires human corporeality. Rather, the reverse. A human body comes to emit the voice of a puppet’s fiction. The body remains the same—the vocal cords of Watase Yuzuki—yet the voice issuing from that body departs from the human voice. The relation between body and symbol is implemented not merely as “body sustaining symbol,” but as a process in which the body itself is transfigured into symbolic fiction.

By way of the voice actor’s body, the work destabilizes the contour of the individual. Within the symbolic order, the body is at work; voices received as differences of role resound at the same time as emanations from a single body. And that body itself transfigures into the voice of fiction. We turn next to how this destabilization is implemented in space. Just as the voice was mediated through the organ of the body, space too must be mediated through something, becoming a device that unsettles the contour of the individual.

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Chapter 3: The Continuity of the Floor and the Distance of the Camera

From the collision with Sakiko; the quarrel between Nyamu and Sakiko; Mutsumi’s downcast gaze as she is cornered; the horizontal line of the guitar strings, and along its extension, the stage flooding with water; the humanoid puppet Mortis holding out an umbrella—. The floor is not cut. For Mutsumi’s lived sense of reality, the floor is uninterrupted. Her gaze tends downward, but neither reality nor even the inner world offers escape; both close in on her as one unbroken ground.

Into the inner world thus arrived at, the various Mortises intrude. The humanoid puppet Mortis, the penguin puppet Mortis, the chicken puppet Mortis, the rabbit puppet Mortis, the bear puppet Mortis. And further still, a father puppet, a mother puppet—appearing one after another upon the same floor. There is a strange nesting here. What the viewer watches is the work Ave Mujica; within that work there is a reality in which Mutsumi lives; and into that reality, Mutsumi’s inner world penetrates. Yet because the floor is not cut, the boundaries between these three layers grow ambiguous. The work-world the viewer watches, Mutsumi’s reality, and Mutsumi’s inner landscape overlap upon a single floor. Where the inner world begins, where reality ends, becomes a question that resists clear answer.

Even so, there is something to observe carefully here. The camera, having entered the inner world, does not move closer to Mutsumi. Nor does it move away. Whether shooting Mutsumi cornered by Sakiko in the real-world scene, or shooting Mutsumi regressed to childhood in the inner world, the camera’s distance does not change. This is an important treatment. In anime criticism, the “inner world of the protagonist” is often privileged through close-ups or special compositions. By drawing close, or by drawing away, the camera affixes the mark: this is the interior. Ave Mujica does not affix that mark. The inner world is not privileged as “a more intimate, more authentic space.” It is handled as a space with the same camera distance as reality, on the same floor, where only the phase has been transformed.

Le sémiotique was observed as voice. When the same structure is grasped as space, Kristeva calls this chora. A term originating in Plato’s Timaeus, designating that which receives the forms—the receptacle, or place.[3] What Plato presented in the Timaeus as that which receives the forms, Kristeva theorizes as a pre-Oedipal affective and bodily dimension. Kristeva’s chora is maternal, bodily, affective; it precedes the symbolic order, yet can be grasped only retroactively, through the symbolic. Chora operates not as “place” but as “process,” and intrudes not from “outside” but from “within” the symbolic order.

The handling of the inner world in Ave Mujica can be read as one cinematic implementation of this chora. The floor is not cut—the material ground of the symbolic order is sustained. Yet upon that floor, things moving by another law intrude. Clouds, umbrellas, Mortis puppets—objects that ought to exist physically appear with movements that depart from physical law, unnaturally.

Stratus clouds curl into vortices. The coloring of the sky resonates with Mutsumi’s expression. The cloud-mass is laid over the real sky: something moving by laws other than those of the real sky has been overlaid upon it. This is a direct cinematic implementation of chora‘s “intrusion from within.” Clouds, by their nature, transition and move according to their own specific forms and dynamics, in their own specific ways. Yet in Mutsumi’s inner world, as if responding to her inner movement, they appear as chaos itself, leaving the viewer with an unsettling impression.

Here the meaning of the observation of floor-continuity becomes clear. Were the inner world depicted as a separate place—were the floor cut, the jump-cut leaping to another space, the ground of another world appearing—it would not be chora but merely “outside.” The inner world is not an outside; it is another phase laid over the extension of reality. The floor of the stage is kept as continuous, unbroken ground. The material ground of the symbolic order is not severed. Instead, only the phase upon it transforms. Colors shift abruptly; clouds curl into spirals; the puppets appear. Yet the floor does not change. This is what it means, cinematically, for chora to be implemented as “intrusion from within.”

The floor is not cut. The camera’s distance does not change. But time—what of time? Mutsumi’s regression to childhood. The recurring swarms of Mortis puppets. And further, Mutsumi’s father and mother themselves intruding as Mortis puppets. Does the temporal axis advance irreversibly? Or, like the masks, does it drift as a fluctuation that returns once more to its beginning?

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Chapter 4: The Paradox of Dissolve and Cut

The floor was not cut. The camera’s distance did not change. But what comes into view when the focus narrows to transition as an editorial procedure?

The point of departure here is the quarrel between Nyamu and Sakiko on stage. Mutsumi, placed at the root of the quarrel, is depicted as moving—through self-reproach and recrimination—toward the onset of the rupture among Mutsumi and her companions in flashback, and from there into the inner world. Visual continuity along sightlines is mobilized. Mutsumi’s gaze tends downward, and shifts to Mutsumi in flashback watching as Sakiko grieves under the rain. The next cut connects rain falling on the strings of the guitar, and along that string-like horizontal arrangement, to the humanoid puppet Mortis emerging upon a flooding floor. Alongside the image, a doubling of sound occurs. The recession of external sound; the reverberant world of the inner space; yet because the rainfall belongs to both, a continuous viewing experience is produced. At the same time, the viewer detects a rupture from reality through the insertion of a severing sound.[4] The sharp severing sound dropped into Sakiko’s grief in the rain functions as a mark of Mutsumi’s psychic trauma. On first viewing, the author received these as dissolves; on later viewings, in analysis, the elements of cut became visible.

Let us decompose what is happening here a little further. What the viewer first receives is the sense of continuity; what is later discovered is the structure of the cut. Visually, the horizontal line from the strings of the guitar to the flooding floor is joined without seam, and the viewer feels: this is continuous. Acoustically, the sounds of the external world do not entirely vanish; they overlap and resonate with the world of reverberation. Both jointly produce continuity-as-feeling. Yet at the same time, something is being cut. From the real-world dressing room to the floor of the inner world is not, physically, the same place. The camera has cut once and leapt to another space. And the sharp severing sound dropped into Sakiko’s grief in the rain—this is a discontinuity-as-structure that the viewer’s ear receives clearly. Continuity-as-feeling and discontinuity-as-structure coexist without being resolved. This coexistence is the subject of the present chapter.

To describe such a state, the vocabulary of Gilbert Simondon is useful. Simondon thought of the process of individuation not as the attainment of a stable state, but as the maintenance of métastabilité. The metastable is a third state, neither stable nor unstable, that contains both. Energetically it lies outside equilibrium, yet it does not collapse. It does not collapse, but neither does it stabilize. Rather, the very preservation of this disequilibrium is the condition of individuation. Supercooled water in thermodynamics is a near analogy: water that remains liquid below zero degrees without crystallizing undergoes, at the slightest disturbance, a phase transition into ice all at once. It lies outside equilibrium, yet does not collapse—persisting with potential change held in reserve.[5]

The transition from reality to the inner world in Ave Mujica can be read as a viewer-experiential implementation of this métastabilité. The continuity of feeling and the discontinuity of structure both reach the viewer’s body simultaneously. Vision conveys continuity, sound conveys continuity, yet the spatial cut and the severing sound convey discontinuity. The two are not resolved. The viewer receives the transition as continuity on first viewing, and discovers the cut after several viewings. Yet even after the discovery, the feeling of continuity does not vanish. Feeling and structure overlap and coexist within one and the same viewing experience. What matters here is that this coexistence is not resolved. It does not converge upon either side. Within the viewer’s experience, the phase of individuation continues to oscillate. If the floor-continuity examined in the previous chapter implemented the oscillation of individuation as “the persistence of space,” then the editing in this chapter implements the same oscillation in another phase, as “the cutting of time.” The two work in different phases, yet they record one and the same thing—the metastability of individuation.

Here the subject of this essay comes clearly into view. The bipolarity of the mouth observed in the first layer; the mediation of the voice actor’s body in the second; the continuity of the floor in the third; and the editing in the present chapter. What these four observations record is the oscillation of individuation—the instability of the process by which a subject is established as one stable being. Ave Mujica does not depict a process by which the girls become stable individuals. Rather, it records, in the material of image and sound, the very process whereby individuation continues, all the way through, to oscillate in metastability.

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Chapter 5: Completing the Visual Layer—The Differential Use of 2D/3D and Its Convergence

We have examined four layers in turn. In the first layer, the bipolarity of the mouth was observed as the coexistence of suppression and release. In the second, the voice actor’s body was seen to generate thirteen voices from a single set of vocal cords, and was read as a cinematic implementation of le sémiotique. In the third, the continuity of the floor was read as the intrusion of chora from within. In the fourth, the editorial procedure was read as a viewer-experiential implementation of métastabilité.

Yet the four observations call for one further observation—another implementation in the visual layer that this essay has so far left untouched. The visual composition of Ave Mujica is built through the differential use of 2D hand-drawn animation and 3DCG.[6] Whereas the continuity of the floor and the camera’s distance addressed the spatial mediation of the visual layer, the differential use of 2D/3D addresses its material mediation. Together, they complete the mediation of the visual layer.

In Ave Mujica, the depiction of fiction and reality is laid out along the axis of 2D versus 3D. In ordinary anime expression, 2D (hand-drawn) is used for the fictional, while 3D (with its sense of physical presence) is used for the real. The handling in BanG Dream! prior to MyGO!!!!! is one such example. Recent examples in robot anime—Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury—follow the same convention. Yet in Ave Mujica, a strange inversion occurs. 3D is shown as fiction (the play-within-the-play, the live performance, the inner world, puppet-ness); 2D as reality, or as the collapsing self-consciousness, the body that implements the psyche. More importantly still, in Mutsumi’s case there is the paradoxical configuration of “static 2D / dynamic 3D.” This becomes clear in episode 3, in the scene where Mortis devours Mutsumi. Before the devouring: static 2D as release (blanked-out fields, dilated pupils, exhaustive drawing detail); dynamic 3D as suppression (Mutsumi’s body held rigid, compositional oscillation within the frame). After the devouring: static 2D as suppression; dynamic 3D as release (a turn toward depiction equivalent to that of the other members). The “coexistence of suppression and release” argued in the first chapter of this essay is, through the differential use of 3DCG, inverted at the final stage of individuation.

The decisive moment is the fact of Mutsumi rendered as a blank-outlined line drawing in the inner-world depiction of episode 3. “Mortis, holding out the umbrella, is uncannily 3D; by contrast, Mutsumi, rendered as a blank-outlined line drawing, returns to 3D just before reaching out for the umbrella”—this is the most vivid visual moment of the metastability of individuation. The transition from blank (the limit-pole of 2D) to presence (3D) occurs at the very instant when the contour of the individual is oscillating most strongly—the moment just before being devoured by Mortis.

Let us now make explicit why the five layers converge upon a single phase. The mediation of the auditory layer (the voice actor’s body) and the mediation of the visual layer (the continuity of the floor; the differential use of 2D/3D) work independently while implementing the same phase. Why? Because both function as material grounds that implement differences within the symbolic order. Voice differences are generated from the same body; visual differences are generated within the frame of the same work. The structure in which difference rests upon material identity is common to both layers. This common structure is why the observations across the five layers converge upon a single proposition: the metastability of individuation.

What Ave Mujica depicts is not the stable individual. It is individuation as a phase that continues to oscillate—neither stable nor unstable. And this phase is not narrated at the level of plot. The material details of image and sound—the movement of the mouth, the quality of the voice, the continuity of the floor, the editorial procedure, the differential use of 2D and 3D—directly support the theoretical proposition. Plot describes the relationships and psychology of the girls; what criticism must describe is the material layer that implements those relationships and that psychology. What this essay has attempted is a path that, by observing this material layer, arrives at the metastability of individuation that Ave Mujica records.

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Chapter 6: In Closing—An Open Question

Let us confirm once more what we have seen of Ave Mujica. The bipolarity of the mouth, the voice actor’s body, the continuity of the floor, the editorial procedure—these four observations implemented one and the same phase, by way of two mediations: the voice actor’s body in the auditory layer; and the two elements of the visual layer (the continuity of the floor; the differential use of 2D/3D). The metastability of individuation, a phase that continues to oscillate. What Ave Mujica records is not the process by which the girls become stable individuals, but the very process whereby individuation continues to oscillate in metastability. What this essay has attempted is to observe that material layer, and to reflect that observation in the very form of its criticism.

Here let us return to the first chapter’s observation. The bipolarity of the mouth contained not only spatial coexistence but a temporal inversion—present = suppression, past = release. This temporal dimension is the bridge to a contrast with MyGO!!!!!.

In Ave Mujica‘s precursor work, BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!, a different individuation was depicted. Tomori in MyGO!!!!! moves through the recriminations of the past, and actively makes use of the inborn slippage between her language and her feeling. She does not lose her way over the act of losing her way—rather, she constructs an ethics of being lost, in which the very state of being lost itself opens the way forward. The sharing of affect at the dimension of poetic language, and the possibility of empathy that rises up, for an instant, by way of that sharing. This is an individuation depicted as a temporal process, mediated by the Aufhebung of separation and integration in human relations. It surfaces in the lyrics of the in-fiction song “Melody” (迷路日々)[7] — chiisana isshun atsumetai (literally, “I want to gather up the small instants”) — and in Tomori’s line, isshun isshun wo kasanetara, eien ni naru n da to omou (“if you layer instant upon instant, I think it becomes eternity”). MyGO!!!!! depicts the temporal process of individuation; Ave Mujica depicts its structural phase.[8] The relation between the two works is contrasted along the single axis of temporality versus structurality.

Here this essay closes. Yet one question remains. Individuation depicted as temporal process by MyGO!!!!!, and individuation depicted as structural phase by Ave Mujica—do these two implementations complement each other, or oppose each other, or arrive at the same place along separate paths? This essay has not stepped into that answer. It is left as the task of a separate piece. Let one question remain open at the end. Why has the oscillation of individuation called for two different cinematic forms?

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Notes

[1]: In the third episode, in the scene where Mutsumi is cornered by Sakiko, a faint lip-biting of regret is visible at her mouth. Against the primary observation of “the downcast gaze,” it functions as a sign of tension within the pole of suppression itself.

[2]: Le sémiotique has resonances with Yoshimoto Takaaki’s notion of “self-expression” (jiko hyōshutsu), but their theoretical groundings are distinct. Yoshimoto develops his concept in the context of pre-linguistic consciousness as self-expression; Kristeva develops hers in the context of the drives of the pre-Oedipal body. Each is articulated within its own theoretical milieu. We do not focus on the isomorphism between the two here; we borrow Kristeva’s concept as a tool for describing the handling of voice in Ave Mujica. For le sémiotique and chora, see Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique; English translation, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller.

[3]: For Plato’s exposition of chora, see Timaeus 48e–52d, where it is introduced as a “third kind” (triton genos) alongside being and becoming, and characterized as the receptacle (hypodochē) of all generation. English translation consulted: Timaeus, trans. Donald J. Zeyl, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper.

[4]: The term “severing sound” is the author’s working translation of setsudan-on, which functions in the present discussion as a descriptive term rather than an established technical vocabulary. In film-sound terminology, the closest established analogues are stinger (a sharp, percussive sonic accent that punctuates a dramatic moment), sharp percussive cut, and cutting sound. “Severing sound” has been retained here in order to preserve the metaphor of the cut, which is structurally bound to the chapter’s theme.

[5]: Simondon’s concepts of individuation and métastabilité draw on L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information; English translation, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins. In this essay, the concept of métastabilité is borrowed as a tool for describing the transitional treatment in Ave Mujica.

[6]: As corroborating evidence that the differential use of 3DCG examined in this chapter constitutes a “directorial choice,” see the following: Sanzigen—the studio behind Ave Mujica‘s animation production, founded in 2006 and known for its specialization in 3DCG-driven character animation, including the entire BanG Dream! anime series—states as its stylistic policy the combination of highly faithful character rendering through 3DCG with the exaggerated expression of hand-drawing, aimed at producing a sense of physical presence in camera angles and character depiction (https://www.sanzigen.co.jp/, in Japanese); see also the official interview with director Kakimoto Kodai and Sanzigen president Matsuura Hiroaki, “Behind the Scenes of Ave Mujica: The Director and Studio Head on What ‘Overwhelming In-House Production’ Made Possible,” ITmedia, April 18, 2025 (https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/2504/18/news111.html, in Japanese); and Anime Feminist’s tonal reversal—the argument by which the initial sense of alienation produced by the puppet-like rigidity comes to function as expression bound to the work’s themes (https://www.animefeminist.com/bang-dream-its-mygo-ave-mujica-and-the-doll-in-asian-feminism/). Ave Mujica and MyGO!!!!! are part of the BanG Dream! multimedia franchise produced by Bushiroad, which has overseen the project’s anime, music releases, mobile game, and live performances since 2015.

[8]: Another in-fiction song, “Utakotoba” (詩超絆), is likewise a wedge that sustains MyGO!!!!!‘s temporal-processual individuation. Its lyric — kokoro wo sakebu / kotoba wo koeru tame / tatta hitotsu no yarikata dakara (“to cry out from the heart / in order to surpass words / for it is the only way”) — directly enunciates the dimension of poetic language as the sharing of pre-linguistic affect. “Utakotoba” stands at the core of MyGO!!!!!‘s thematic vision, and as the integration point of script, storyboard, 3DCG, sound, play-within-the-play, and character design, marks one of the achievements of the BanG Dream! series. Since the present essay’s subject is the structural phase in Ave Mujica, a fuller treatment is set aside; we note here only that no argument about MyGO!!!!! can be sustained without passing through “Utakotoba.”

[7]: Most of MyGO!!!!!’s song titles employ gikun (also called jukujikun), a long-established Japanese practice in which kanji bear one literal meaning while being read aloud as another word. The two songs cited here both follow this pattern. 迷路日々 is read as “Melody” (メロディー), while the kanji literally signify “labyrinth-days” or “days of the maze.” 詩超絆 is read as “Utakotoba” (うたことば, “song-words” or “poetic words”), while the kanji literally signify “poetry surpassing bonds.” This structural split between graphic sign and phonetic reading is itself a textual implementation of the slippage between language and feeling that this essay attributes to MyGO!!!!!. The visible and the audible carry different meanings while occupying the same site—a configuration that may be read as a typographic counterpart to the le sémiotique described in Chapter 2.

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References

Kristeva, Julia. La Révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Seuil, 1974. English translation: Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

Plato. Timaeus. Translated by Donald J. Zeyl. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

Simondon, Gilbert. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1958/2005. English translation: Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Online Sources

Anime Feminist. “BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!, Ave Mujica, and the Doll in Asian Feminism.” https://www.animefeminist.com/bang-dream-its-mygo-ave-mujica-and-the-doll-in-asian-feminism/.

ITmedia. “Behind the Scenes of Ave Mujica: The Director and Studio Head on What ‘Overwhelming In-House Production’ Made Possible.” Interview with Kakimoto Kodai and Matsuura Hiroaki. April 18, 2025. https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/2504/18/news111.html.

Sanzigen Inc. Official website. https://www.sanzigen.co.jp/.

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Translated from Japanese. Original title:『Ave Mujica』論――仮面、鏡、床の連続性. Translation completed April 27, 2026.