I flew last weekend to attend the IDOLM@STER Producer Meeting event. It ran for two days and you can see the official page here for the exacts. This time the main draw is the full cast, even if at first the event seemed to be a part-life, part-talk sort of a deal. Leading up to it for over half a year was the release of IDOLM@STER Platinum Stars, as it was the first lottery round. Since we had plenty of time to prepare we did a flower stand again, and there’s more details about that I’ll post on HPT site sometime later.
Because this is a talk-and-sing sort of an event I won’t be able to give you a lot of the details on the talk part, since I don’t do Japanese. I can’t even walk the setlist, as you’d expect, so I’ll just keep it pretty brief and add the travelogue stuff too.
I landed in HND on one of ANA’s new JFK-HND routes that I now am taking advantage of. Dropping me into Tokyo by 9pm is early enough that I can easily buy my SIM or what not, since the Bic Camera in HND doesn’t close until 10. The late arrival was to save a PTO but also lets me leverage jetlag to wake up for buppan easier. Somehow I had the idea of getting a tarp and that actually kind of worked as we sat around in buppan.
I also did a set of presents very last minute, kind of in the moment idea struck me while I was at JFK terminal 7. This means after I landed I went shopping for stationary so I can write a few notes. I can already spot it in Haramii’s post, yay. I don’t think Hirorin does it, and I’m not sure if Azumin or Asapon do either.
Buppan was uneventful. I’ve never been to Tokyo Metro Gym so it’s new to me. At night you can see Tokyo Tower from the buppan lineup area, lit up like a needle.
While we “first trained” we arrived technically in the third train. Not that it matters, by the time the line started to move at 10am we were maybe at the halfway point of the full line. By the time I left buppan, nothing has sold out yet even.
During the 5 or so hours we were in line we did the usual socialize with other producers. The Japanese Ps are a lot more shy than the few oversea (well, more than just a few) producers that came in groups. Thai, SG, and KR are all in full power. China and TW has fewer than expected due to Chinese New Year, but I did run into a few (and had to play courier).
Not much else happened on the same day, besides I went to Lisani at Nippon Budokan for day 1 of 3. It was my first show at Budokan proper and it was a nice venue, especially I like how it sounded. I had 3rd level seats but you can see pretty well even from the back. The night only featured Lisa and Kalafina, but it is as good because I like them both, and it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Kalafina live. It was a great show especially because of the various Fate Stay Night covers, LOL.
Saturday morning was definitely a “omg let me recover” day, but I got some shopping in while at it. Soon enough I headed over to the venue (it’s at the Sendagaya JR station, so I traveled via the Chuo-Sobu mainly between there and Akiba) and took pictures of stuff. Some of our group went to Walkure day 1 (and a couple would go to day 2 as well) so it was mostly meeting up with people from Japan or other parts of Asia at the venue. I got a call book and it was nice to see calls to all the new songs, namely for Amaterasu and Happy. Kakumei de Show had calls but I felt that one was easy to follow. Turns out it wasn’t as easy as, say, Machiuke Prince but still pretty easy.
つい先ほど、完成したコールガイドが印刷屋さんから届きました！
月村さん(@tukimurr)に描いて頂いた表紙が映えます！
プロデューサーミーティング両日、沢山の方に受け取って頂けるよう
頑張りますので、よろしくお願いします！ pic.twitter.com/WwSnMS7w1i
— プロミ2017コールガイド (@imas_calls) January 26, 2017
Soon enough we went in. My seat day one was on the right side, 3rd level, about 7 rows up, and about half way back. It was far but it gave a full view of the place. In retrospect I should’ve brought binocs to spy on the kankeisha area, since I was right across from it.
For a more detail read of what happened on day 1, you can check Mycs’s writeup. I’ll focus on my impressions and observations.
The show started with the usual announcement from Kotori and Shacho. Then the girls entered singing Cherry. (See here on the voting.) They wore the training camp outfits, with white sneakers and various legwear? Azumin and Chiaking spotted thighhighs with their shorts. Cherry is a very feels-y song and it’s not a surprise some of us already lost it by then. It’s evident too in the intro MC that some of the cast also were getting too feely.
That quickly gave way to the intro of BaneP to MC the first talk corner, which various statistics collected for the live are displayed and people chatted over that. All the stats are also in the pamphlet for P-Meet, except the 11th to 20th place for songs. We started with a lot of percentages of how old the Ps are, how many years they’ve been Ps, how many lives they’ve been to, etc. I’m not sure what people were expected to say? I guess 17% of the survey participants were female is a big step up from the past (albeit not by much). Anyway, then we got some top 10 lists of favorite songs in different situations, such as when you feel down, when you want to get pumped, etc. While all of this data is present in the Pmeet pamphlet, for the live they also showed the top 20 and we got some interesting comments (and bullying?) when the casts were asked to demo different things. Like when we did calls to Pon de Beach (for the favorite calls song list), Nu even did a bit of the dance. I almost cried at the Ippai Ippai calls.
2日間本当にありがとうございました！ pic.twitter.com/uXmYWKYsfS
— 株式会社アル・シェア (@alsharecojp) January 29, 2017
And I think this is why Day 1 is tops for me. All these things meant for a time when everyone got together? It’s almost like I feel they’re wasting a great opportunity to do a full live with everyone, but maybe they’ll have something planned?
It didn’t click immediately–a lot of stuff didn’t click immediately–but I feel they were going out of their way a little to provide some long-needed IM@S service. It’s partly also because we won’t have a full live, so they did this. The girls who were put on the spot tried their best to do a line or two but not everyone was able to.
A few notes about BaneP. It’s been a rare occurrence to have him appear at an 765Pro All Stars event, and it’s the first time since the Kingblade Era. We didn’t settle on a color on day one until the end of the show, where the other cast members just dubbed him red. At first people used more orange than red, at least by my estimates. Also, he wasn’t even that good at MC, but did have some good zingers.
The second corner is a drama where audience can do a real time selection of choices by waving a glowstick. If more people waved than not, it would select the right-side option. Otherwise it will select the left-side option. This is oddly fun, but I think I would have had more fun if day 1’s script was more different than day 2’s script. Also this is arguably the most IM@S kind of thing.
As expected there were actually quite a bit of adlibbing at various points. At times it felt like a punishment game when the Ps select some embarrassing option, and one of the more, uh, amusing cast members would flip it on the people in play. Times like this I’m glad Asapon plays two characters, for twice the bullying power? LOL.
24万フォロワー記念リクエストにお答えして、久々にアイコン更新！そして、お祝いと感想メッセージまだ途中ですが読んでおります！幸せ！！！ #新しいプロフィール画像 pic.twitter.com/DVVltdPFjB
— 下田麻美 (@shimoda_asami) January 30, 2017
『THE IDOLM@STER PRODUCER MEETING 2017 765PRO ALLSTARS -Fun to the new vision!!-』
お越しいただいたPの皆様、本当にありがとうございました<img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.2.1/72x72/1f647.png" alt="