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Reflecting On The Journey So Far In BanG Dream! YUME∞MITA

Halfway through the season now, the girls of BanG Dream! YUME∞MITA have come a long way. They've reached milestones in their personalities and relationships, including adding a new member to their number in Ritsu. Now they find themselves having delivered a live performance that has resulted in a make-or-break moment for their career…unknowingly at the behest of chief series antagonist Viola. It's an intense lead-up to a major climax for MewType, and provides a good point to step back and reflect on everything that brought them here.

Throughout these articles on YUME∞MITA, we've discussed the distinct elements that make the anime stand out, both within the BanG Dream! franchise and in the broader world of music anime itself. The character connections and the orchestrations around them were a key element of the story, including Ritsu's connections to the characters and Viola's manipulations of them. The anime has proudly played the long game so far—Ritsu wasn't even included with the rest of the band in the opening until this week's seventh episode showed off her official performing debut. It's a reflection of the efforts of that journey and what a milestone that performance is.

Speaking of the live show, it provides an opportunity to talk about another element that YUME∞MITA has taken a distinctive, eschewing approach to: the music. Despite being a music- and band-based franchise, BanG Dream! has never been shy about preferring to build up the characters and their stories before allowing them to properly express themselves in song. The original BanG Dream! anime was like this, and YUME∞MITA has proceeded similarly. It's featured musical elements, showing moments of guitar-performing streams from the likes of Ritsu and Nonoka. But it was strategically built up. Even the preliminary performance that Arale steeled herself to pull off with the previously formed version of MewType was conspicuously skipped over to highlight the adorable positivity of her reaction instead. The personality—the feelings—that's where the appeal lay at the time.

It makes the double-song show-off at the beginning of the seventh episode that much more of a highlight the way the whole anime was leading up to it. It's important that the audience (both within the story and in real life) see the group in this state, with Ritsu in her avatar and the band fully formed, demonstrating the confidence they have in themselves despite the adversity they faced getting here. Arale's lyrics, "I'm not alone anymore," communicate how she really believes in herself and her new friends after not necessarily being there at the beginning of the story. She, and the others, had to work their way up and earn that, hence them confirming how they feel and the way they want to keep playing together by the end of the performance.

To that adversity though: YUME∞MITA has always excelled in highlighting the highs and lows of internet fame, as we've covered here before. Arale's psychological grappling with negative online comments and the aftermath of her cancellation have done much to infuse the anime with its unique atmosphere since the beginning. This also allowed the story to spread that out and add definition to other characters—particularly Nonoka getting caught up in comments about Miyako in the second episode. It showed how all the members of MewType personally reacted within this framework, the ways their previous experiences informed that, and how that helped them grow closer together. Some of the most memorable moments were Arale and Miyako bonding over their love of anime (and exclusive anime items!) as a way to mitigate their stress levels from work and the audience reactions. 

That working lead-up also reflects the placement of characters like Miyako in the anime atmosphere. Miyako's manga-ka hustle brings her closer to the otaku-culture elements that YUME∞MITA embodies, as we've covered previously. But it also simply gives her a unique texture as a character that BanG Dream! hasn't quite had before. As the latest episodes have shown, it's not simply a background element of her character, it's a key point that the story has come back again and again to engage with. Not only does it define the unique relationship between her and Arale (a fan of her work, who now works with her) it's become the keystone of her current relationship with Viola. The chief antagonist against MewType has picked up on Miyako's work and professed herself as a fan of it in order to capture the artist's heart, which informs the current conflict between the characters.

Viola herself has turned out to be one of the most memorable, memeable elements of YUME∞MITA so far. Her initial antagonism, being a full-fledged villain in a franchise like BanG Dream! that hasn't properly had one, naturally made both her and this anime stand out. Her earlier performance at playing this problematic person made incredible impressions in the previous episodes, and the way she's since moved on to new plans and different characters to manipulate (as opposed to her earlier focus on Ritsu) help confirm that she's got plenty of tricks up her sleeve. Everything about her engagements with Miyako over the most recent episodes have hit because of this. She shows that she's able to manipulate with affection as opposed to calculating cruelty.

The fandom reactions to Viola indicate how she's boosted the anime thus far, and amusingly enough, don't come only from outside fans of the series. Even Miyako herself, in streaming performances after anime episodes and her drawings on social media, has professed her character's affection for Viola and how it's affecting her. It's a delightful metatextual addition to YUME∞MITA's release, bringing the performers and the fans together to revel in the emotional rollercoaster of these characters and Viola's plans for them. And it's fueled so much of that all-important speculation and theorizing on where these characters might go and hopes for what could be in store for them.

That sort of arc has also made for some of the most defining points of playing along with the YUME∞MITA anime. There were plenty of preconceived presumptions that Ritsu would be joining MewType as the fifth member of the band, but seeing the story commit to how it played out made it engaging in spite of any early guesses—Arale's daring at-show rescue of her childhood friend and their running away together in the fifth episode naturally stands out as one of the best, most heartwarming moments in the show so far. It's a reconciliation that felt earned after so many near-misses. And now, as of the seventh episode, we're able to see further payoff from the two communicating again. Arale is fully aware of Viola's schemes and can call her out to her face, eschewing the naivete that defined their previous interactions. Even as Viola is seemingly also using this as part of another plan, it's intensely, immensely impressive to see Arale shed her cheerful accommodations and stand up to Viola as we've never seen her do before. She's come so far.

With half the season to go, there's still room for more speculation on the series as fans follow along, of course. Yuno, who is still backing the group up in her own way, has plenty of growth she can experience, including properly meeting the rest of the members in-person. The way those interactions could go are ripe for entertainment, as just her chance meeting with Ritsu in the second episode was another key moment for the series. The mysteries of Yuno's own past and what she's dealt with could also inform the next moves of MewType as they navigate their current crisis. Similarly, Nonoka's been more up-front as a person with her bandmates, but there are still key points to her past and personality that viewers have guessed at, which could similarly empower the story around her to bring everyone closer together. The anime has keyly focused on building out the characters and connections thus far, but as in forging that surprising new connection between Miyako and Viola, shows that the writing knows, strategically, when to expand things as the story and its complications grow grander.

Which brings us back to the dramatic debut of MewType's music performances as we wrap up these explorations of the anime at this point in the season. The streamed, virtual nature of the band's shows truly lets them explode out as a performance compared to the dramatized real-life stage performances that BanG Dream! has excelled at in previous anime. It feels not just like a turning point for the anime, but a showing-off shift for the series as a whole. It's in stark contrast to the social-media performance videos we saw Arale and Ritsu did in their previous group—no wonder their manager clarified that this "band" was different from a "group" early on in the anime. Another fun, definitional moment for the series, that.

YUME∞MITA is indeed, different, and it's still going places. Its arcs arcs are still in motion, showing that it's not done with points that have endeared itself to audiences like Arale and Ritsu's friendship (Ritsu having just transferred into Arale's school) or Viola's villainy and her current relationship with Miyako (not that Yako-sensei would have it any other way). And as shown by that big, debut live show, the virtual-world framing and focus on streaming performances provides a unique style of musical show-off that make Mugendai MewType come off like no other band before them in the franchise. They're part of a wider world on the internet and in the musical industry, but in this story, there's only one MewType.