BanG Dream! Ave Mujica

The day Sakiko Togawa's privileged life crumbled, she painfully broke her vow to CRYCHIC and left the band behind—an act that tore her heart in two. As days fade into nights, she struggles to make ends meet until a certain cherished memory is tainted, pushing her to the edge.

Driven by a fractured sense of purpose and the need to reclaim what she lost, Sakiko forms Ave Mujica, a masked symphonic metal band. Its members are bound not by a shared goal but by the fragile threads of their divergent desires. Together, they weave a haunting masquerade of loss and rebirth, captivating audiences with a gothic musical stage play. But as the girls' ideals collide, the scars of their pasts rear their ugly heads. The brittle facade the girls have built threatens to collapse beneath them, bringing Sakiko to the verge of falling apart.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Togawa, Sakiko Main

Takao, Kanon Japanese

Wakaba, Mutsumi Main

Watase, Yuzuki Japanese

Misumi, Uika Main

Sasaki, Rico Japanese

Yahata, Umiri Main

Okada, Mei Japanese

Yuutenji, Nyamu Main

Yonezawa, Akane Japanese

Takamatsu, Tomori Supporting

Youmiya, Hina Japanese

Chihaya, Anon Supporting

Tateishi, Rin Japanese

Nagasaki, Soyo Supporting

Kohinata, Mika Japanese

Kaname, Raana Supporting

Aoki, Hina Japanese

Kurata, Mashiro Supporting

Shindou, Amane Japanese

Matsuura, Hiroaki Producer

Hozumi, Shouta Producer

Manabe, Yoshirou Producer

Kakimoto, Koudai Director, Sound Director

Reviews

Mar 27, 2025

SanaeK10

Recommended

Well-written

I find myself grappling with how much I ended up enjoying Ave Mujica even after the final episode. Throughout the weeks as this show was airing, I often found myself second guessing at the creative choices in its story, as well as coming to terms that the story I came up with in my head will never be the same story put to TV.

There had been tremendous amounts of hype going into Ave Mujica, in part due to its very unconventional (especially by Bandori standards) ARG, portraying Ave Mujica as being this dark, cult-like underground band that kidnaps unsuspecting young girls. Not helping are all ... the interviews and advertisements depicting the show as “The craziest band anime ever”. I had been through Revue Starlight and how that turned a wild premise into a boring conclusion, surely, I’d have learnt my lesson going into this, right?

Well, I’d be lying if I said I was completely satisfied with the final package. The ARG and Live Intermissions painted a very different picture of the show for me, not helped by the exaggerated hype from the many interviews. Still, if Ave Mujica had aired immediately after MYGO, I’d have enjoyed it a lot more, although that still doesn’t discount the show from some questionable decisions when it came to its storytelling.

Episode 12 was tipping point for me, as I was initially disappointed at how fast and rushed it all wrapped up with the main characters effectively telling the viewer to forget about it. It took me a long time to mull it over, but over time, I’ve came to accept the ending for what it is, and how it thematically connects to the overarching theme in Ave Mujica. That is to say, everything sucks and there is nothing you can really do about it, so forget about things and live happily. It’s surprisingly nihilistic especially for Bandori, it’s just wrapped up so cleanly and neatly that you really just wouldn’t notice on the first go around. Effectively nothing has been resolved, and there’s the sense that nothing really will be. The execution however, was lacking in almost every way.

Interviews have described this as being a “horror” anime, and that’s just really not the case even in the most charitable definitions of the genre. Occasionally Ave Mujica does use the language of horror to construct some scenes, but horror is almost never the intent, and if it was, there is no scene in the entire show that comes across as even remotely frightening. Not to say that “Band” and “Horror” are mutually incompatible, look at Alan Wake for an example of something that manages to combine those two genres well for instance, it’s just that by calling Ave Mujica a “horror” or even “psychological” series, you’re setting up a series of expectations that the show can never quite reach.

Credit where it’s due, Ave Mujica does go further than most similar shows in some aspects, I just hoped that they went a bit further than what we have in the show. There’s an underlying sense that the producers are too afraid to take just that little extra step in fear of losing revenue in regions with heavier censorship regulations. We have explorations of mental health, domestic violence, and lesbian romantic relationships that would make SayoHina look tame by comparison. Yet nothing too far out, punches get pulled at the last minute, there is no kiss, and most other things just get brushed off without much care or thought.

Which brings us back to execution, which is where I find the show most flawed. The show is incredibly rushed. With MYGO, it was a simple story told very well, with the show paced so well it had room for an extended epilogue and even extra time to set up Ave Mujica. Ave Mujica on the other hand is juggling at least 3 different plot arcs which don’t mesh together well. You have: Mutsumi suffering from DID, Saki working out her issues with CRYCHIC, and Uika’s mad obsession over Saki. There are only the loosest plot threads connecting these three arcs together, and they all come at the cost of essentially ignoring the other two main characters, Nyamu, and especially Umiri. And not all arcs are created equal. Mutsumi’s arc got the most attention at about 8 episodes, CRYCHIC’s fallout took about 5 (5 times longer than it needed to be), and barely 3 episodes for Uika’s arc, which was hyped up to be the craziest thing ever, and it kind of is, but resolved in the most disappointing way imaginable.

Sakiko is just not very likeable as a main protagonist. The show does occasionally (and correctly) call her out for being a spoiled rich girl callously toying with other people’s lives while pretending that she isn’t, but she never takes charge or responsibility for her actions until the very end. And even then, it’s less character growth and more “We’ve got to wrap everything up in one episode so let’s call back to the original themes in a rushed and haphazard manner”. Two of the three arcs just have her in an antagonistic position as Mutsumi or Tomori drive their arcs forward as Saki just reacts to the world around her passively.

In spite of all this, I still thoroughly enjoyed Ave Mujica. For what it is, it has never been boring. Look no further to Bandori’s own S1-S3, which are the very definitions of safe, stale, and mediocre idol/idol-adjacent shows, being only slightly better than something like Cue or World Dai Star, yet completely outclassed by shows like Love Live or even Show By Rock. The reverence for the status quo is what kept Bandori in its rut, unwilling to explore any possibilities in its storytelling. MYGO was Bushiroad being willing to test the waters, even a little, and Ave Mujica is them diving head first into the Mariana. It’s strange, mesmerizing, and even a little uncomfortable at times. Sure it’s not as polished as it could have been, but the ambition is admirable, even if it fumbles along the way. What I can’t fault Bushiroad at the end of the day, is that they’ve tried doing something different.

At the end, I suppose that may explain the final score you see in this review. Ultimately, I’ve enjoyed the show, but it is a very personal enjoyment and most of the enjoyment came from extrinsic factors unrelated to the show. I love the music, I love thinking about the show, and I certainly love the fanart and memes sprouted from this show. It’s better than Bushiroad’s previous attempts at something different, ie Revue Starlight. It’s just that I wish it could have been so much more. And maybe at the end of the day something simpler like MYGO may just be the peak of what’s possible within the confines of this genre and the 13-episode format.

9/10

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Apr 4, 2025

Belts

Mixed Feelings

Creative

It's 2008, and Doug Walker is confused.

The famous film critic is doing a ten-year retrospective on Pokémon: The First Movie (1998). While watching the opening scene, in which a group of scientists explore a jungle, he poses a series of questions: "What are those things? Who are you? Where are we? What's that thing? Where am I? Is this Earth? Are we in another dimension? Is this the past? The future? The present? What's going on?! Where does this even take place?! Oh, my God, I'm, like, one minute into this movie, already I'm totally lost!"

To Walker's credit, Pokémon is a notoriously impenetrable narrative, known ... for its high complexity and thematic depth. As he explains: "For those of you who don't know what [Pokémon]'s about, I can't help you because nobody knew what the hell it was about. [...] Nobody could follow it. The only people who understood it at all were the kids."

A similar confusion descended upon me as, on the recommendation of several people in my orbit who called it the criminally underrated sleeper hit of the season, I watched the first episode of BanG Dream! Ave Mujica. They compared it to Umineko, Madoka Magica. None of them told me the show is a sequel (to 2023's BanG Dream! It's MyGO!!!!!), nor any other crucial bits of context: that plot details and twists have been foreshadowed via ARG; that there are music videos for the songs the show's band plays, themselves containing oblique hints to the narrative; that the band itself is real, not in the vtuber sense where rigged anime girls bob their heads on stream but in the sense that each character is voice acted by the members of a real five-person band called Ave Mujica that plays live shows in goth costumes.

Oh no, I thought. I've stepped into a bear trap!(!!!!)

My initial confusion mostly stemmed from the show expecting the audience to already know all the characters, not simply the five members of the band Ave Mujica but also the five members of the band MyGO!!!!!, who are the main focus of the predecessor series. There are few establishing shots, few immediate character beats that cause one character to stand out from the rest, and the character designs have the traditional sameface of idol anime, so hair and eye color are often the only notable aesthetic differences between them. I watch a lot of anime, and sameface doesn't usually throw me, but here it was a struggle to tell some characters apart (particularly Ave Mujica's two blonde guitarists, Uika and Mutsumi).

Disorientation can cause one to stop thinking at all, though, even to understand things that are perfectly understandable. The irony of Walker's baffled series of questions about the opening scene of the Pokémon movie is how most of them pertain to the setting, when the scene's setting (the real-world nation of Guyana) never appeared before or since in the franchise; even the most dedicated six-year-old had as much ability to answer questions about it as Walker himself. It's not even important, really, in the scope of the plot. It's a jungle somewhere, some distant land. It's in one scene and disappears forever. But Walker, like most parents of 1998, encountered a few details he couldn't understand (the franchise's foreign-sounding name, the endless array of unique monsters) and gave up trying to understand anything at all.

In Walker's defense, the most insidious aspect of confusion is not knowing what you don't know. A Pokémon fan watches that opening scene, well aware of the typical setting of Pokémon, and thus knows that this jungle setting is someplace new, some foreign locale, something they're not supposed to know. Walker cannot, at a glance, discern that. To him, maybe this jungle is the primary location where the action is set. Maybe he really is at a disadvantage for not being aware of it already.

The trick to understanding Ave Mujica is that the five members of MyGO!!!!! do not matter nearly as much as their screentime suggests. There is some connection, as two members of Ave Mujica (Sakiko and Mutsumi) were previously in a band (CRYCHIC) with three members of MyGO!!!!!, and Sakiko's abrupt and unexplained departure from CRYCHIC is the root of the interpersonal drama between Sakiko and Mutsumi. Otherwise, the MyGO!!!!!ites serve as outsiders to the main drama who look in and occasionally comment on it; not knowing anything about them is fine. Once I figured that out around Episode 3 or 4, the show became generally comprehensible.

I think.

It's 2019, and Doug Walker is confused.

Everyone is. A collective confusion as, during the climax of his avant garde musical reassessment of Pink Floyd The Wall (1982), an anthropomorphic mustelid slithers onto his shoulder while singing a Cockney rendition of "The Trial". Across a series of discombobulated fantasy landscapes, Walker has been regaled by this and several other digital creatures designed with an almost obscene attention to detail, lavish fur and fabric textures far beyond the pale of Walker's more workman-like VFX flair. If there was context, it has been lost in the characters' impenetrable accents and vocal layering. All anyone watching can do is ask:

What are those things? Who are you? Where are we? What's that thing? Where am I? Is this Earth? Are we in another dimension? Is this the past? The future? The present? What's going on?! Where does this even take place?!

Nobody can follow it...

Except Doug Walker. This isn't the reason he's confused. If anything, he is oddly, uncharacteristically accepting of the situation. He is a critic best known for animated facial expressions and wild gesticulations, but here he stands perfectly still almost the entire length of the song, even as the CGI creatures pluck his hat off his head or lift him bodily into the air or toss him into a little spike-studded Doug Cage. His face is stone.

No, this is a Walker who exhibits, at last, mastery over the raw facts of narrative. It is not plot, character, or setting that confuse Walker about The Wall. When he criticizes the song "Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2", he correctly assesses that the song is about the cruelty of the education system. What he's confused about, lacking the cultural context of British grammar schools in the 1950s, is what this means, how to interpret it. He can only do so in the frame of the suburban American education system he remembers, and so ascribes to the song meaning relevant to that context; namely, that school isn't that bad, that teachers can be nice, and that anti-school youth sentiment is meaningless counterculture. It's a misunderstanding, not of fact, but of heart. "Pretentious," Walker calls it, a word he repeats across the video. Pretentiousness is a fixation of Walker's. He loves the word; he uses it often. It's perhaps the perfect word for a workman-like man like Doug Walker, one of the first true outsiders to achieve success in the democratized media landscape of the internet.

"Pretentious" means the author believes their work possesses more meaning and importance than the critic can derive from it.

This confusion of interpretation struck me too as I watched Ave Mujica, even when I understood on a summary level the plot and characters. In the first episode, one of the few characters to distinctively establish herself is Ave Mujica's drummer, Nyamu, who starts a catty argument with the band's keyboardist and founder, Sakiko. The crux of the argument is simple. Part of Ave Mujica's gimmick as an avant garde act that blends live music with acted skit segments is that its five members wear masks on stage, concealing their identities. Nyamu, in Walkeresque fashion, wants to dispense with this "pretension," claiming to be bored of it. Her true goal is mercenary; she believes, as the only band member who is not already established in the entertainment industry, that publicly associating herself with her more famous bandmates will elevate her personal profile.

Sakiko, for whom this project is an artistic venture of deep psychological importance, rejects her proposal. But Nyamu disregards her bandmates' wishes and forcibly unmasks them at the next concert anyway.

I understood the argument. What I didn't understand was how to feel about it, how interpret Nyamu's role in the story. In a vacuum, I could only imagine she was intended as the show's villain. She is vain, petty, a shameless social climber, self-absorbed, a YouTuber, and also the driver of the initial conflict that causes the other bandmates to spiral psychologically out of control. Beyond that, she is commercial. In my preconceived cultural understanding of "fiction about art," the sellout is the villain, and the person with legitimate artistic vision (in this case, Sakiko) is the hero. The rest of the first episode supports this reading: it focuses on Sakiko's perspective and home life in a way that lends her significant pathos, while Nyamu exists solely to cause her grief.

Yet the rest of the show does not support this reading. When a band member has a schizophrenic break a few episodes later, Sakiko is framed as the core cause, due to her demanding auteurism. Nyamu, who sparked the inciting incident, is never blamed, either by the other characters or by the narrative as she slips away, unregenerate, into a minor and isolated subplot. She never abandons or even interrogates her crass commercialism, and despite being the most replaceable member of the band and the least interconnected to the others' social circle (she appears, actually, to be a college-aged adult while everyone else is a high schooler), nobody suggests she be replaced when the band breaks up and reforms. Nobody demands anything of her at all. Nobody even really seems to see her as a problem.

I love it. I love it when shameless little shits don't get any comeuppance at all. I love Nyamu. (Honestly!)

But how am I supposed to interpret her argument, within the framework of Ave Mujica as a story?

The obvious interpretation is that Nyamu is correct, or at least in wake of the show's ambivalence toward her, not wrong. Cynical commercialism has value, is at least an important consideration for artistic decisions. This interpretation makes sense considering it's the artiste Sakiko who winds up shouldering the blame for the band's internal collapse, but at the same time it's a bizarre proclamation to make in a show that is otherwise so concerned with rendering Sakiko empathically, with exploring her psyche and motivations, and with -- ultimately -- selling the audience her artistry. Ave Mujica, as I explained, is a real band. All the goth flair, the arcane skits, the oblique narrative hints, and the doll symbolism that are core to Sakiko the character's artistic vision are also core to the real-life Ave Mujica the band. It's inconceivable to me that the show is actually dismissing its own aesthetic as "pretentious." Why, then, does its own in-universe Nyastalgia Critic go unchallenged, escape unscathed? What does it mean that these criticisms emerge not from unconnected outsiders (even with five members of MyGO!!!!! right there, with their significantly more down-to-earth, more workman-like band) but from one-fifth of Ave Mujica itself?

What, exactly, is Ave Mujica's identity?

It's 2013, and Doug Walker is confused.

Existentially.

The video is titled "The Review Must Go On," with an ominous subtitle in the vein of End of Evangelion: "Demo Reel Finale." Something, indeed, is coming to an end here, and it isn't just Doug Walker's lifelong passion project.

In this postmodern künstlerroman, Doug Walker stares into a mirror, but what he sees is not Doug Walker. It is his past and it will be his future. (Is this the past? The future? The present? What's going on?!) It is the fixed and unchanging edifice of 18 long years and counting, an entity unstuck from time, who, despite changes to format, site, contemporary taste, and the internet itself, remains immutable. It cannot be denied, cannot be destroyed, can only -- briefly -- be bargained with.

And Doug Walker bargains. "Not every week," he says, staring his down his creation. "Once every two weeks." His creation, only somewhat put off, accedes. (Now, in 2025, it's once a week once more.) A single word: "Done," and the deal is made.

"Alright then," Walker says, with a beleaguered sigh. "What's next?"

The cold voice replies: "I think you know what's next."

Walker does know. He returns to his desk, where he had been typing the script to the Demo Reel Finale, and dutifully writes what he has known all along. Donnie DuPre, the main character of Demo Reel, that lifelong passion project, that original creative work, was always him.

The Nostalgia Critic.

It's a final surrender. There will be no more passion projects. No delusions of artistic accomplishment. None, at least, that don't involve this thing that Doug Walker has become, this thing to which he has given the rest of his life.

This moment mirrors the argument between Nyamu and Sakiko. Though Walker claims otherwise in the video, the decision to revive the Nostalgia Critic is clearly commercial; the Nostalgia Critic is popular, Demo Reel is not. Walker has abandoned his artistic vision in favor of what sells. Nyamu has won.

Except it's Sakiko, not Nyamu, who makes the demands that the Nostalgia Critic makes of Doug Walker. "I am not going to let this band be just a passing fad," Sakiko says. "I told you. Give me the rest of your life."

Doug Walker is giving the rest of his life to the Nostalgia Critic. Is trapped by it. As Ave Mujica progresses, its members become similarly ensnared. I claimed previously that Nyamu is never punished by the narrative, never challenged by the other band members or blamed for her actions, nobody ever attempts to get her replaced, but the opposite side of that coin is that she is incapable of getting herself replaced despite her desire to use the band as a stepping stone for a personal career. Though she gains industry connections via a bandmate's actress mother, she is crippled by the memory of one of Ave Mujica's most perplexing images, an image that similarly left me at an utter loss: the guitarist Mutsumi, collapsed in a disassociating stupor, on stage before an audience of thousands.

This moment is the beginning of Mutsumi's character arc, in which she is consumed by her band persona, Mortis, in a literalized split-personality storyline that itself has obvious parallels to Doug Walker's relationship with the Nostalgia Critic in The Review Must Go On. What fascinates me about this moment, though, is the reaction of everyone watching. The moment Mutsumi unexpectedly collapses, Sakiko deftly weaves it into the band's narrative, concocting a story about how the song they were playing lulls the "dolls" (Ave Mujica's band members) into eternal slumber, before abruptly ending the entire concert. The other four members step off the stage, leaving only the collapsed Mutsumi in the spotlight, motionless and silent.

The audience loves it. The band explodes in popularity. It's such a memetic event that the fans become disappointed when it isn't repeated at the next concert; Nyamu suggests that they repeat it, even to the point of showing up to concerts and not playing music at all. "Ignoring the audience's expectations -- what's the point of that?"

Nobody, in or out of the band, reads Mutsumi's collapse as a cry for help.

She can't cry for help. No matter what she does. When the band announces their breakup, she screams hysterically on the stage, even as the other four members are quiet. "Mutsumi was cooking until the end," a social media post later remarks. She has a breakdown on the street, arguing with her split personality in Gollum/Smeagol fashion (complete with camera angles swapping back and forth to indicate her two selves), and though people gather around and film it, the audience's only possible interpretation of the event is that it is a promotional stunt for the band. Even Nyamu, haunted by that image of Mutsumi collapsed in the chair, isn't haunted because of the psychological toll her actions inflicted on her bandmate (and, eventually, primary yuri shipmate), but because she believes Mutsumi was acting, acting so ingeniously that it torments Nyamu she cannot achieve that same level of skill.

Mutsumi is entrapped within the narrative ambiguity of Ave Mujica. Like Doug Walker, everyone watching her is confidently confused, only able to interpret her actions within their own contextual framework.

What is the contextual framework of Ave Mujica, though? It is a Babushka doll of meaning, an anime based on a real band that contains within it contradictory proponents of artistic vision and common-denominator commercialism, that is itself contradictorily artistic -- if my struggle to interpret it is enough to suggest -- and commercial, the way its poetic symbolism about dolls and control is draped on samefaced 3D anime girl models that move stiffly and unconvincingly. But the show is willing to make those 3D models contort their faces into distinctively un-idol-like (distinctively Doug Walker-like) maniacal expressions, to throw them on the ground and scrape open their knees with blood streaming out, to have them hurl each other down the stairs in fits of rage, to pair them in incestuous yuri couplings. The story both gesticulates toward a cynical, darker take on the idol industry like Perfect Blue or Oshi no Ko, yet is part of an established idol franchise selling these characters as actual idols. Even in the narrative, the depiction of the idol industry is confused; the band seems to have no managers, no agents, nobody telling them what to do. They don't even have secretaries; bassist Umiri handles scheduling and itineraries. Men only exist in the world of BanG Dream! as fathers or grandfathers; every behind-the-scenes staffer at the concerts, in fact every concertgoer, is female.

Nyamu is not Akane Yonezawa, Ave Mujica's real life drummer. But both are industry outsiders in their first real role, compared to their four bandmates who are already established. Rich girl keyboardist Sakiko is not Kanon Takao, but Kanon Takao was winning international piano tournaments in Milan at age 10. Where is the line between fiction and reality? How real is this anime, and how fake is this band? How much is the Nostalgia Critic a character, and how much is he Doug Walker with a hat?

And isn't it within this endless array of ambiguity, of questions, of confusion, that Ave Mujica ensnares? "Give me the rest of your life," Sakiko says, but with these ARGs and multimedia comb-over-it-with-a-magnifying-glass details and crossovers with other bands, whose life is she demanding? To the incurious, the Doug Walkers, confusion is enough to dismiss out of hand. But for those who want to know more, there are an endless amount of dolls to open...

Perhaps Walker was right, all those years ago in 2008, to not gaze too deeply into the world of Pokémon. It is a franchise, after all, that has exploited the human instinct toward curiosity to become the highest-selling media property of all time.

("Ignoring the audience's expectations -- what's the point of that?" Nyamu says.)

It's 2021, and Dan Olson is confused.

He is a critic criticizing a critic. In this case, he is criticizing Doug Walker's review of The Wall. Unbelievably, this criticism has over 2 million more views than Doug Walker's The Wall video does. Over twice as many people have seen this criticism than the thing being criticized.

Olson asks:

"What is this? Why does this exist?"

He doesn't know why Doug Walker would do this. Why would he put such elaborate effort into a musical review of The Wall, something Walker barely seems to understand or care about at all, something he only seems to have watched for the first time in preparation for creating the review. Walker's lack of curiosity baffles Olson, particularly because it is balanced against the effort on display in the review itself. How can someone spend months on costumes, visuals, parody lyrics, and celebrity guests, all to call something pretentious?

What Olson doesn't realize is that there is a Doug Walker, wannabe filmmaker, involved in this production, a Doug Walker with -- for better or for worse -- an artistic vision, who is willing to go to great lengths to apply that vision.

But someone else is running the show. Someone to whom Doug Walker has given the rest of his life. He's called the Nostalgia Critic, but, as in Ave Mujica, this avatar of commercial greed is only an abstraction, isn't it? A figment of ambiguity in which all cries for help, no matter how loudly they are screamed, can be extinguished. There's someone else, unseen and unacknowledged, with real control over these dolls, the one who forces them to perform as perfect time capsules, ageless and eternal. I'm not sure what they're called for Ave Mujica, but for Doug Walker, their name can be found with a bit of searching: Mike Michaud.

"Let me show you," says that anthropomorphic mustelid, Lucy Lacemaker, as the first notes of The Trial begin. "Let me show you what happens when your dreams no longer need you."

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Mar 27, 2025

Quof

Not Recommended

Well-written

There's a lot to like about Ave Mujica: it's rather cool to see an anime sequel in this style coming off of MyGO, the aesthetics of the band have as much mass appeal as they are purported to have in-universe, and the whole concept of a 'darker' girl band has immediate appeal through the power of antithesis. I even came to like the 3DCG style quite a bit. So why do I rate the show so lowly?

Well, the problem we face here is that Ave Mujica has one glaring problem: the writing. As is currently well-known, the scriptwriter for MyGO was removed from Ave Mujica ... after creative differences arose, and then their existing plot for Ave Mujica faced a series of rewrites and revisions that morphed it far from what it was originally conceived to be; I would not be one to criticize a work purely for external elements of that nature, but it's important to understand there is a real-life context when I say the writing of Ave Mujica feels misshapen and all over the place. The start of the show derails itself by bluntly infodumping to explain a key mystery behind arguably the most important character in both shows, rather than developing the narrative over time, and from there Ave Mujica feels like it never manages to get back on track.

We know, factually, that the original conception of the show was going to center around Sakiko in what the seiyuu described as a sort of 'murder mystery' style to the show; however, due to the new scriptwriters (or production staff in general) wanting to introduce a totally new character that disrupted the intended flow of the story (simply due to the space a new character will need), there was no time for who was previously the main character. Their story is ingloriously shoved into the first episode, as mentioned, and then the bulk of the show starts almost schizophrenically focusing on one other character at a time almost as if there was no longer a cohesive story of the band Ave Mujica to tell, but rather the independent stories of the band members one at a time.

I'm trying to focus so much on 'the facts' when criticizing Ave Mujica because online I frequently see more personal criticism ending up inspiring vicious arguments. It is a show that has an immense amount of "forced drama," bad-feeling arcs, unresolved tension, etc, but at the same time, as a "darker" anime it positions itself in such a way one can say 'and that was the point!" So normal criticism just leads to an endless back of forth of "I didn't enjoy this / I thought this felt bad" -> "You weren't meant to enjoy it / It's supposed to feel bad" etc. I don't want to inspire that kind of argument, or upset Ave Mujica fans.

Instead, I just want to express: be warned, ye fan of band girl anime, Ave Mujica's script is all over the place. There's still a lot to like in the show: toxic yuri fans rejoice, grimdark girl band fans rejoice, drama fans rejoice, etc. The plot gets so insane at points it was regularly compared to being akin to watching Code Geass back in the day. I wouldn't deny that for the world, and I think at the end of the day, I may even call myself a fan of Ave Mujica overall. But in terms of the show... the script, the story, is just explosive, and I would say not in a good way. It is so explosive that for me, it's hard to overlook the damage it does to both its characters and MyGO. There were real-life problems going into the development of the show that lead directly into the original story and plan for the characters flipping completely around. For me, that's a dealbreaker, and I wouldn't like unsuspecting anime fans to hear the praise heaped onto the show then be surprised when the story is insane in a different way than they expected. This kitchen had too many cooks and some of them were particularly bad. That is all. Godspeed, girl band anime fans.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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5ch's List of Best Anime of 2025 (1-50)

by thewiru

50 Entries · 3 Restacks

'BanG Dream! Ave Mujica' Movie Announced

The Bandori! Summer Presentation 2025 announced a new anime movie for BanG Dream! Ave Mujica (Ave Mujica: The Die is Cast) on Thursday. The livestream event also co...read more

Aug 15, 2025 6:25 PM by Vindstot | Discuss (1 comment)

'BanG Dream! It's MyGO!!!!!' & 'Ave Mujica' Anime Sequel Announced

Following the broadcast of the 13th and final episode of BanG Dream! Ave Mujica (Ave Mujica: The Die is Cast) on Thursday, a sequel to both the anime and its preque...read more

Mar 27, 2025 10:06 PM by Vindstot | Discuss (7 comments)

	Poll: BanG Dream! Ave Mujica Episode 13 Discussion ( 1 2 3 ) AkeZZZ - Mar 27, 2025	143 replies	by RobertBobert »» Jan 16, 12:32 PM
	Poll: BanG Dream! Ave Mujica Episode 10 Discussion ( 1 2 ) AkeZZZ - Mar 6, 2025	85 replies	by CarbonMD »» Jan 10, 8:00 PM
	Do I need to have watched previous Bang dream shows to fully understand this one? redpanda_42 - Jan 7	15 replies	by RichRinJin »» Jan 10, 1:02 AM
	Poll: BanG Dream! Ave Mujica Episode 12 Discussion ( 1 2 ) AkeZZZ - Mar 20, 2025	93 replies	by Ronnlaxo »» Dec 26, 2025 9:35 AM
	Poll: BanG Dream! Ave Mujica Episode 11 Discussion ( 1 2 ) AkeZZZ - Mar 13, 2025	82 replies	by Ronnlaxo »» Dec 26, 2025 9:06 AM

Behind the Masks: Unveiling the mystery gothic anime Ave Mujica

Ave Mujica - The Die is Cast - Exclusive interview with Director Kodai Kakimoto and Band Producer Hiroki Matsumoto. Explore the symphonic metal band’s gothic beauty, psychological drama, and haunting themes. Step into a dark, exquisite world of duality and tragedy in this gripping series.

by MAL_editing_team

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