~The “Weak” Autonomy of a New Generation~
Content note: major spoilers for both series throughout; brief discussion of imagery depicting the dissolution of self and mental distress.
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Two bands, one broken heart. Before MyGO!!!!! and Ave Mujica were separate shows, they were the same band — CRYCHIC, which came apart when Sakiko Togawa walked away. Both series are built on that rubble, and both keep circling the same uncomfortable question: what do you do when you can’t hold yourself together? They answer in opposite directions. MyGO!!!!!‘s Tomori stops trying to be the girl everyone can read, and somehow doesn’t vanish. Ave Mujica‘s Mutsumi puts on a mask, then another, until there is no one left underneath.
Read side by side, the two shows form a matched pair — the same wound worked out at opposite poles. What I want to follow here is something the “power of friendship” framing tends to smooth over: how much these stories are about the cost of being required to be a legible self — a self the world can scan, sort, and approve — and how that cost falls hardest on the people the world has the most trouble reading. The girls who never caught on to “normal.” The ones whose attachments don’t fit the script. MyGO and Ave Mujica take that difficulty seriously enough to refuse the easy cure, even when they look, on the surface, like they’re handing one out.
A note on method before the spoilers thicken: I’m going to stay close to what is actually on screen — who is lit, who is in focus, where the camera goes — rather than to what the characters say about themselves or what interviews say the shows mean. These are works that hide their real arguments in their images, and the images don’t always agree with the dialogue.
The demand to be legible
MyGO begins with a girl who can’t read the room. Tomori doesn’t grasp the right answer, and she doesn’t grasp the ordinary either; she speaks a beat off, wants too much, and narrates her own bewilderment out loud. The show is gentle with her, but it never pretends this is easy for the people around her, or for her. Many viewers have recognized something autistic-coded in Tomori, and whether or not you reach for that word, the texture is unmistakable: here is someone for whom the basic social task — be a self other people can read at a glance — does not come for free.
That demand is the real subject under both shows. To be legible is to present a coherent, recognizable, approvable self — to be the right kind of girl, the right kind of friend, the right kind of daughter. It is a demand with a particularly heavy gendered charge: girls are asked, constantly and early, to be readable and likable, to keep the surface smooth. CRYCHIC fell apart, in part, around exactly this — around what you owe the people who need you to stay the same. Both MyGO and Ave Mujica take that single pressure and run it to its two endpoints.
Tomori, who stops performing and doesn’t disappear
https://youtu.be/B8k6JtF6WrU?list=RDB8k6JtF6WrU
The turn comes in the song the fan-subs render as “Mayoiuta” (迷星叫). On screen, the staging is doing the argument. In the second verse, the external markers — the things that told Tomori who she was supposed to be — sink away into the dark, and what’s set against them is simply the version of her that exists now, looking ahead. By the end she is not dissolved into the group; the camera pulls to her face in warm, full light, and she sings outward, to “you,” still recognizably herself. She has let go of being legible — of being the right answer — and she has not vanished. She is still there.
What I love is that the show refuses to make this a bootstraps triumph. The performance is framed, at its open, by a borrowed blessing — an older woman’s quiet sense that the kid has found where she belongs. Tomori doesn’t stand on her own by sheer will; she stands because someone, somewhere, made room. Being lost, here, is not a failure state to be cured. It’s a way of being in the world that the show is willing to let stand on its own two feet — wobbling, blessed, unfinished, but upright.
Mutsumi, who wears the mask until there’s no one left
Ave Mujica is the dark mirror. Its central image is, literally, a mirror — but a strange one. It doesn’t reflect Mutsumi; it generates a second self, Mortis, on its far side, and seals the real girl behind the glass. Crucially, the sealing-in is dressed up as care: Mortis keeps Mutsumi shut away while insisting she is protecting her. Anyone who has been managed “for their own good” will feel the chill of that.
From there the self comes apart in two ways. It multiplies — one body cycling through a parade of confident, fearless, furious faces that the actual Mutsumi never wears — and then it dissolves. In the show’s most devastating sequence, the figures thin from solid bodies into mere outlines and sink, embracing, into dark water; what’s left floating is the instrument, the guitar, the thing that performs. The lighting is cold, and it rhymes with the show’s imagery of expiry. Where Tomori lets go of legibility and remains, Mutsumi is dragged all the way down: the mask doesn’t liberate her, it stands in for her, and then there is no her. Same wound, opposite answer.
The bond that “saves” — and what it costs
https://youtu.be/QkG7tIGYgSw?list=RDQkG7tIGYgSw
MyGO‘s emotional climax, the song rendered “Utakotoba” (詩超絆), is where the “friendship heals everything” reading wants to take over. Be careful with it. The reconciliation does not begin with consent. Soyo has come to end the band; Tomori physically chases her down, grabs her by the arms, and hauls her back, and Anon clamps onto her hand. The recovery starts as a forced return — a refusal to let someone leave.
This is exactly where a feminist read has to stay awake, because there’s a familiar and ugly shape lurking nearby: the warm circle that won’t release you, the togetherness enforced as love, the maternal embrace that is really a refusal of separation. Ave Mujica shows you the nightmare version of that fusion outright. So when MyGO opens its big reunion with compulsion, it would be easy to conclude the show is simply reproducing the trap in a prettier key — dragging the runaway back into the fold and calling it healing.
Why it isn’t a sermon
Here is where the images dissent from the easy reading. At the song’s peak the camera does something show-offy and strange: it circles the five members for a long, unbroken twenty seconds, a full 360 degrees, and the brightest light pools at the dead center of the stage — where no one is standing. Everyone has drifted toward Soyo at the edge; the lit middle stays empty. And the sequence has been threading in memories of CRYCHIC as it goes, the friends who are no longer there — Sakiko, Mutsumi. That empty bright center reads as their absence.
This is the detail that keeps the scene from closing into a sermon — the kind of storytelling that serves up hardship precisely so it can be melted into a tidy uplift. If this were really the warm fusion it’s accused of being, the center would be full. It isn’t. The circle turns around a hole it can’t fill. The reunion is real, but it is structurally unfinished: a togetherness built around an absence it can’t suture shut. “Everyone is saved” turns out to be something the viewer has to supply by ignoring the empty middle the show deliberately keeps in frame. The work leans toward comfort — I won’t pretend the lights and the swelling cheers don’t push hard that way — but it stops short of sealing the comfort closed. It leaves the door open precisely where a sermon would lock it.
Who’s watching
None of this happened in a vacuum, and the shows have meant sharply different things to different audiences. In the Chinese-speaking world, and especially in Taiwan, viewers have read these daughters — breaking from the role a family assigned, refusing to stay legible to a parent’s plan — against Confucian-patriarchal scripts about duty and filial shape. In Anglophone fandom, the shows have been embraced through queer and neurodivergent lenses: Tomori read as autistic, the central attachments read as plainly queer, the whole problem of “being unreadable” recognized as something lived rather than abstract. I’d be cautious about claiming the shows set out to make any of these arguments. What’s truer, and more interesting, is that their central friction — the cost of an illegible self — turned out to be combustible in more than one symbolic order, and caught fire differently wherever it landed.
Coda: the cost of having to be someone
Strip away the bands and the concerts and what’s left is a question about the price of admission to selfhood: the demand that you be someone other people can read, and the bill that comes due when you can’t, or won’t. Ave Mujica shows you what it costs to pay that bill in full — to disappear into the mask until the self is gone. MyGO shows you the fragile alternative: to put the legible self down and still, somehow, remain — lost, blessed, held by a bond that had to drag you back and still can’t fill its own center.
The reason these shows are better than their merchandise suggests is that they won’t choose comfort over honesty. They give you the warm reunion and then keep the empty seat in the middle of the frame. They let a girl be lost without curing her. For a genre that so often exists to reassure, that refusal — to pretend the bond is a clean cure, to leave the wound legible — is the most generous thing they do.
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