天下制覇

  

Because we could only afford the one.

Impressions:

The little I watched of the original Im@s was “starlets have shenanigans!” which made it pretty much the exact same as the eighty nine billion other “girls in a club have shenanigans” shows, and yet, this manages to take things a significant step downward somehow by borrowing from Light Novel Protagonist Version #2; guy who looks supposedly looks scary but is just socially awkward. And I hope you like that joke, because it’s the only one in the episode. Perhaps this is an experiment to see how much blood they can wring from a stone that has already been wrung dry. This seems to have thrown away the ensemble approach to focus on fewer characters at a time. That confuses me because the show doesn’t have any, just squealing chewtoys.

But that’s okay, because it also continues Japan’s nonstop tradition of slobbering all over mass-produced pop starlets. At least in the states, that’s the realm of Disney’s endless stream of Hannah Montanas, Lindsay Lohans, Jonas Brothers, etc, and we can enjoy them inevitably flaming out in a cloud of cocaine and male prostitutes thanks to our media being shoved up their hootches. Japan has that crap locked down so much tighter and spends so very, very much more on marketing the hell out of them. Because make no mistake, this is just another shallow piece of vapid marketing for how hard working and amazing and innocent and awesome idols are, with nary a thought in the world of making a decent show, because a character having a personality or doing anything might scare away one of the potential cows sucking at their teats, metaphor be damned. Also, it’d be really nice if you also picked up our Be a Friend of an Idol and Make Micropayments for Extra Hats which this is directly based on too. Also all the CDs, because Japan can make a toilet that can process a brick, but still doesn’t understand how to use an iPod. We are so overdue for Japan’s idol obsession to flame out and die, hopefully in a gigantic orgy of cocaine and male prostitutes.