It starts off pretty slow, following the standard idol anime beats while introducing a cast of standard shoujo pretty boys as idols. And, oh my god, do they ever put them to use. There is a LOT of shameless yaoi bait throughout this anime.
In my opinion, yaoi bait (as with any other form of fanservice) is acceptable if it feels organic within the story and not thrown in haphazardly, or worse yet, create plot lines FOR the fan service. At that point it feels like the creators are insulting my intelligence by assuming that I’m just some horn-dog lapping up any image of anime titties or two pretty boys touching each other.
The anime suffers from this problem, which leads to a whole host of issues:
1. It would take me out of the show because I don’t believe this behavior to be realistic, especially in a country like Japan.
2. As a result of this unrealistic behavior, I would view the already trope-esque characters as being even more artificial, causing myself to become uninvested in the emotional parts.
3. Thus actually became part of my enjoyment with the anime because I couldn’t believe how out-there and desparate it was to get its audience to ship their characters.
Fan service aside, I also had problems with how the manager character was written. She is supposed to be the audience insert character, but ends up being a much weak cinnamon roll with no definining character traits. She is constantly shown to be inept at actually managing the group by herself and even relies upon a high schooler in the group to make the big decisions surrounding the group.
In addition to this, the pacing of the anime is all over the place. I legitimately could not tell you how much time has passed between episodes. I assume by the end of the season a year has passed, but if not for the final couple of episodes, it could have been 3 years in the future for all i knew.
Idolish 7 isn’t all bad though, there are some plot twists that I didn’t think were going to happen and I genuinely enjoyed some of the interactions beteen the idols, especially in the middle of the season.
Also, the art was pretty solid (except the CGI performances of course) and the first song that the group sings has grown on me by the end of the season. The rest of the songs were either ok or bad and the music not in performances was often overbearing or out-of-place in scenes.
All in all, while Idolish 7 was still better than I was expecting, it was still plagued by some weak writing, shameless yaoi bait, and poor pacing. But, because it isn’t trying to be a deep drama, I could forgive some of these shortcomings and enjoy it more for what it is trying to be.
It’s a solid 4.
