Today is September 19th, the birthday of Anastasia! (AKA the only day of the year that I buy cake)
Anastasia
Anastasia, or more commonly called as “Anya” by most fans and her fellow idols since she thinks that her name is hard to pronounce for them, is a half-Russian (Father) and half-Japanese (Mother) girl. Because she lived in Russia for years before moving to Hokkaido, she struggles a bit with speaking Japanese so she tends to mix in Russian words in her sentences and translates them afterwards.
One of Anya’s hobbies is stargazing, she hopes to discover an asteroid someday and name it. Aside from astronomy, Anya is also fond of snow and winter (which is why most of her cards have a theme of stars and/or snow), this is likely influenced by the fact that she has lived in cool places such as Russia and Hokkaido. Anya has a pure and straightforward personality which comes off as naivety to some, and because she struggles with Japanese, she has been taught different and interesting stuff by Miku, Ranko, and Nana.
Having placed 1st in the 2nd Cinderella Girls General Election preliminaries despite not having an SR card at the time shows how well-loved Anya is. Ultimately, she lost to Ranko and got 2nd in the finals. Despite the loss, she was still the first ever idol to get voiced by placing high in the rankings which lead to her being featured in the unit CD Kagayaku Sekai no Mahou and then her very own Cinderella Master CD. Of course, she was going to be voiced by no other than Uesaka Sumire herself, who is a huge Russia otaku.
Anya belongs in a duo unit called LOVE LAIKA along with Minami (and Love Ranko with Ranko and Minami). She is also a part of Cinderella Project and Project Krone, and other units such as the Cool Jewelries 002 unit Caskets, the Starlight Stage unit NEX-US, and the mobamas unit Nyan Nyan Nyan.
First Encounter
I’ve mentioned it in a previous blog post that I had no interest in iM@S back then, so how in the world did I ever meet Anya?
It’s nothing really special, it’s not some fateful encounter. I just have a weird habit of looking into characters of different series that I’m not into, I happen to stumble upon CG and that is how Anya caught my interest. Out of the hundreds of idols in CG, her design caught my eye the most and I legitimately think that Anya is one of the most beautiful 2D girl ever in any series (no bias, maybe a little). I didn’t even know anything about Anya that time but I decided that if someone were to ask me who my favorite CG idol was, the answer would be her.
And so, fast forward to Starlight Stage, wherein my friend convinced me to play the game once again. I set a condition for myself though and that was to only play when I had an account with SSR Anya in it, so I got an account through desperate means ($$$) and it just so happened that the first ever Anya event was going to happen. During this time, I didn’t consider myself P and was just another casual fan though I did have a feeling that it was the beginning of my journey with Anya and becoming an AnyaP.
Being an AnyaP
And so, shortly after watching the anime and the CG lives, I started to really pursue the path of a Producer. Since then, I have experienced so many things that I never thought I would have and met so many people who shared the same love as I do for Anya and CG.
One of the best memories that I will always treasure was my recent trip to Japan for Serendipity Parade. This makes it my very first event outside of my country and my first iM@S event! I got to see Anya and Sumipe perform Takusan, I still remember how excited I got once I heard the intro being played. My mind went blank, I took UOs out even though the song didn’t call for it and just yelled every chance I get. It was such a surreal experience for me, thanks Anya and Sumipe for showing me such a wonderful performance.
Another fond memory was when I met up with a bunch of AnyaPs at SSA, I was nervous as hell to meet them but it turned out to be really fun. We exchanged cards and talked a bit, though due to my limited Japanese, I couldn’t hold a conversation that was more than 3 sentences. Despite the language barrier, I still had tons of fun and you can tell that the love for Anya really transcends all barriers.
I wasn’t the one who organized this but I feel that I did my part to spread the word out there and collect the thoughts of as many overseas AnyaP as possible. I will never forget the time when Aogou randomly messaged me on Twitter, I was actually going to turn her down but I’m so glad that I didn’t. It was hard for the both of us to communicate with each other because I barely knew Japanese and she barely knew English but ultimately, it all worked out. I definitely don’t regret helping her out, and as a result the outcome was wonderful!
One of the crazier memories I have as an AnyaP came from playing Starlight Stage, it’s always been a tradition of mine to rank as high as possible for my favorite girl’s events. When I started out during the Orgel no Kobako event, I thought T2 was already high and I was so proud of this achievement as a beginner. But when Nothing but You came, I knew I had to aim higher thus began my grind to get to rank 404 (I did wanna aim much higher, but I had very limited time cause I was also finishing my thesis at the time).
Final Thoughts
The past year and a half as an AnyaP has been extremely fun for me and it brought so much happiness into my life. It made me do things that I never thought I’d do and experience things that I never thought I would. With CG is slowly shifting its focus to the newer idols, I’m not so sure if Anya is going to get as much attention but I look forward to what the future holds. I will never stop producing Anya and I will always love CG. Let’s hope I get to see Anya again at CG6th.
Happy birthday Anya! From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you for being the brightest star in my dull and dim world.
Because of the lack of a better title, I’ll just call it Yes, Serendipity!
So it has been over a week since I was in Japan for Cinderella Girls 5th LIVE TOUR Serendipity Parade!!! and up until the moment of writing this, I am still gathering my thoughts about the whole experience. Honestly, somehow it still feels very surreal to me and I still can’t believe I was there, on such a big venue to watch the Cinderella Girls perform live.
I will (probably) have too much to say and I want to write out properly instead of spamming my twitter with all the ramblings, so I thought that I should just write it out on one big post in my dead tumblr blog. I also thought that it’d be a pretty funny memory to look back to one day. A fair warning that this post is long, rambly, and likely full of grammatical mistakes so I apologize to whoever reads it in advance.
Before anything else, I want to start with an introduction about myself. Since I gained a few followers this month, I feel like this is a good time to know me a little bit better, how I became a Producer and ended up in CG5th, etc. I go by the name “chun” on the internet, and that’s the only name I’ve used ever since aside from my real name. I started following anime religiously back in 2012 when I started this anime blog though my interest at the time was nowhere near idols, if some of my old tumblr friends read this then they know what I was into back then. I did have a bit of interest in seiyuu back then though I didn’t follow them as seriously, seiyuu like Kondou Takashi, Sawashiro Miyuki, and Tsuda Kenjirou to name a few but my interest have now shifted to more female seiyuus like Sumipe, Matsueri, and Shimayuki. Contrary to what most people think, I haven’t been a Producer for a long time like most of the Ps that I have encountered, I’ve only been a fan for a little over a year and a half though I’ve been aware of iDOLM@STER ever since my young anime days but didn’t care about idols at all.
To be honest, like most “how I got into x series/franchise” stories go, I also never really saw myself getting into iDOLM@STER or any idol stuff in general until I got into Love Live. And yes, I was a huge Love Liver way before I became a Producer, just to get that out there. I’m going to skip the whole Love Liver part, but basically I finally took notice of iDOLM@STER in 2015 though I still couldn’t get into it back then because I was a filthy Love Liver (see this tweet). I even tried Deresute when it released but I was too deep into SIF that time so I just shrugged it off since I had my hands full with different mobage. It wasn’t until my friend convinced me to play Deresute again cause an Anya event was coming which is what got me to play Deresute continuously up until now. I’ll talk about how I became an AnyaP in a separate post when her birthday comes around, but basically he knew I liked Anya despite not being into CG at the time. So I picked up the game again and eventually it led to my fall to Deresute then ultimately to CG, this was also around Final Live so I guess it somehow came off as me being “traitor” to the other series, but thinking about it now I don’t really regret it.
I did try to actively support both series but I knew it was impossible for me to like both equally, eventually I would have lesser time for one series while I dedicate all my time to the other. Since I got interested into CG by the time µ’s was ending, it was also around the time when they started pushing so much Aqours stuff, I had to pick between getting into Aqours or diving deeper into CG. Naturally, it was an easy decision for me (nothing against Aqours, they are good but I couldn’t bring myself to like them fully as much as I did with µ’s). I guess you can say everything fell into place at the right time? It’s kind of silly actually, one of the main reasons I’m so deep into CG right now is all thanks to Love Live. Now that I think about it, I would often get into friendly arguments with the same friend who got me interested into CG about the usual LL vs. iM@S debate and it’s funny how I moved over to the other side now and he became an Aqours fan instead, how the tables have turned as they say. This is just one of the silly reasons why I got into CG though, one of the main hook that got me was the anime which then eventually got me interested in all the idols (and seiyuu).
I know a lot of people dislike DereAni because of the emotional baggage and unnecessary drama it brings, but I personally really loved it and up until now I still rewatch it and get the same feelings like when I watched it for the first time. Through the anime, I feel like I got to see another part of the idols’ lives, personalities, and feelings that I didn’t get to see in the games or any other media. Because of the anime, I feel like I got a bit closer to Anya and I got to know her more since there is barely translated content for the CG games and it’s not only Anya, the same applies for all the other idols too.
I eventually found myself replacing my entire playlist full of Love Live! songs to all Cinderella Girls. I still remember the first song that got me hooked on their music was Rin’s version of S(mile)ING!, I couldn’t stop looping it for a couple of weeks until I found another song to listen to which was Yuubae Present (still remains to be one of my favorite songs until now). Shortly after that I got into more of the anime songs and the rest was history.
Which leads me to getting to know the seiyuu of Cinderella Girls, I genuinely want to get to know them better through whatever content is out there. Since I’m considerably a new fan, there is so much content to catch up on and I feel like I’ll never get tired about getting to know all of their unique and colorful personalities. I know it’s not humanly possible for me to actively support them all, but I still try what I can to appreciate the things they do (be it solo work or for CG) and do little things like watching anime they’re in or simply sending tweets of support to them. At the very least, I know a little bit of basic stuff about all the CGs from names/nicknames, the characters they voice, etc. so that’s something.
And now I’ve covered most stuff about myself and how I became a P, I’ll now talk about what really made me want to go to CG5th. To be honest, it was a far-fetched dream that I never knew would become a reality. My CG5th plans were already in the works as early as November 2016, nothing was announced back then but my desire to go to a CG live was so strong at the time that I didn’t care about the circumstances and just “yolo’d” it. I’ve read all of the writeups, tweets from the kaigai Ps who went to CG4th, I’ve seen the drawings from some Japanese Ps, and the seiyuu pictures and tweets from 4th which all the more fueled my desire to go. Before anything else was announced, I talked with Oxide about which places and dates that we could most likely go to and I told him that Osaka or Tokyo around July was the best possible scenario for me so I was planning somewhere around that. Fast forward to January 2017 (or was it February) when they announced the locations, dates, and performers for the first 3 stops which ruined all the planning that I had in mind. There was no ideal scenario for me, Anya was in the Sendai stop and it was happening as early as the 2nd week of May which I 100% couldn’t go to due to it being thesis period. The next one was the Ishikawa stop which had a lot of personal favorites in it but I wasn’t sure if it was something that I REALLY wanted to fly for so I decided to wait it out, the same goes for the Osaka stop. By the way, I was only limited to go to 1 stop of the whole tour so I really had to choose wisely on which stop did I want to fly for.
Ultimately, I wanted to have the best CG live experience so I decided to go in blindly for the SSA stop. I knew I couldn’t do this half-heartedly, that’s why as early as February (only the dates for SSA was announced this time), I already booked my flights in order to fully commit myself to it. It was a moment of no turning back, I figured that no matter what kind of crazy cast they put out, I would still like it. Honestly didn’t expect the cast to be so crazy that it had over 60 performers for a 2-day live, so even though there was no ideal scenario for me, I feel like this god-tier cast was enough to compensate for that. I could talk more about my “road to SSA” experience, but this post has already gotten crazy long so I will cut it off here.
To conclude this post, I hope that whoever is reading this got to know me a little bit better and how I ended up to where I am now. The next post, I will talk more about the “road to SSA”, CG5th buppan, and up until Day 1 of SSA maybe.
dededos
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