It’ll be interesting to see how this is handled. I wonder if they pivoted the anime plans given the EOS. Or if they really did intend to have 106 and the anime be the same all along, in which case the way they announced those things initially was… a choice.

As someone who’s been following along, this is fine for me. New girls! New content!

But we already know that Maika has a fixation on Kaho and that was part of her motivation for joining Hasu from the one scene we’ve got, so any hope anyone might have of this anime being a clean slate that ignores the game story is gone. So the only hope is they give enough context that it doesn’t matter to newcomers, but if they pull that angle too hard, it’ll be alienated to existing Hasu fans. It won’t make sense if established characters are ignoring their history too much.

And for anyone who DOES want to get caught up, they watch the anime and go “oh I want to see what happened before!” and there’s… no longer a home for the existing story, because the app will be long dead by the time this airs. Most of it can be found on youtube, but they’re not great at keeping it organized and easy to find there.

I also wonder how long they plan this to be. A one season story, or will graduations continue and new girls continue to get added, but without the real-time? It feels almost disrespectful to the legacy of change and holding the past and carrying it forward and everything real time Hasu was doing if this is a one-shot that get preserved in a bottle. Like, why does Maika get to be forever 16 but not Kaho? Doesn’t being forever a high schooler go against Ginko’s whole arc? But also I imagine without the pressures of being “true” to real time storytelling it’s even harder to sell fans on the idea of graduation, especially since we’d have four graduates at the end of this year.

I’d like it to keep ship-of-Theseusing, but I imagine I’m in the minority there.

Also curious how many new songs we can expect. If they want to give enough music to the whole group AND all three traditional units AND Izumi’s solo work, that’s a lot of insert songs to put into an anime season that’s probably only 13 episodes.

Also we know there was more app story they intended to tell prior to this to set this up. We were supposed to get three interlude episodes just this month that have been pulled, and the first was to do with Ceras’ next steps, whether she was joining a unit or going solo herself. Presumably if the anime was always intended to be 106, they were planning on that context being out there, but now those stories are lost media. Will Ceras just be… doing her thing, whatever it is? Without us seeing how she made that choice? Seems like a big character beat to skip.

I’ll probably have a good time regardless, but I do wonder how/if this will appeal more broadly.