BanG Dream! It’s MyGo!!!!!, Ave Mujica, and the Doll in Asian Feminism

Mild spoilers for BanG Dream! It’s MyGo!!!!! and Ave Mujica

A chick that cannot crack the shell of its egg will die without being born”

—Revolutionary Girl Utena

[T]he perennial opposition between what is open and naked versus what is veiled and hidden has been as important to the racist imagination as it is to the critical intervention designed to decode it.”

–Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and Modern Surface

Bang Dream: It’s MyGo!!!!! and Ave Mujica: The Die is Cast would best be described as “camp.” This word is often thrown around to describe things that are over the top, melodramatic, or otherwise ridiculous–leading to people describing things as opposed as Death Note and RuPaul’s Drag Race as camp. Despite this looseness of meaning, looking at MyGo/Ave Mujica as camp better helps us grasp its sincerity and its style.

Camp is all about the tension between irony and sincerity–we watch the drama in these series with ironic detachment. We laugh as Soyo “turns into a worm” at Sakiko’s feet, or gasp approvingly as Nyamuchi reveals the identities of each of the members of Ave Mujica. It’s hilarious. But what keeps us watching is the utter sincerity of the show under the surface–how it strives for honesty in its depictions of adolescence. We are touched by how these things that are so ridiculous show us uglier parts of ourselves. The willingness to risk appearing false because of the absurdity or ugliness of the situations the shows depict is what makes them feel more true.

Femininity is often described as fake–a false surface. This is especially true of trans women’s femininity. Over and over again TERFs accuse trans women of embodying femininities that are designed to make women weak and vulnerable to patriarchy–a parody of femininity. All makeup, all surgery, no substance. The construction of femininity is an artifice, it is true, the same as masculinity—that does not however make it not real. This is perhaps why queer femmes are so often drawn to camp: it provides a language for understanding ridiculous and constructed things as utterly sincere. Camp disrupts the association of surface, artifice, and ostentatiousness with fraud.

What interests me about MyGo and Ave Mujica is the many surfaces within them. Some of the surfaces are put up by the girls themselves: Many of them are desperately trying to hide their true intentions, struggling to maintain their position within schools, struggling to save face, and putting up walls. Some of the surfaces are constructed by society–the image of a school for upper class girls, for example, or the assumptions people make about the autistic surface behaviors of a character like Tomori. Some of them are even constructed in our world–the 3D, doll-like surface of the characters, the way that multimedia franchises are constructed and perceived, and the stereotyping of the kinds of femininity that many of the MyGo characters embody.

As a queer performing artist obsessed with aesthetics, I’ve often wondered: Why does the “surface” always have to be presented as the false thing, and the interior as the truth? In MyGo!!!!! and Ave Mujica we can see the constant tension between our conscious desire to shape the surface narratives of our lives, the teeming interior that refuses to be shaped, and all the forces that would shape our surface and interior into what is convenient for them.

“Dolls,” Ornamentalism, and the Construction of Asian Feminine Surface

So much of the experience of watching MyGo/Ave Mujica is about the tension between the parodic, the constructed, and the sincere feminine–between surface and interior. Nowhere is this more apparent in the doll, V-tuber like character designs of the anime. The girls’ skin is smooth as porcelain, almost indistinguishable from the gems in Land of the Lustrous, their movements at first almost disturbingly alien and puppet-like. (This, of course, may be more of an unintentional artefact of the lack of resources the first few episodes were given than a purposeful choice on the part of the animators).

At first, I was put off by the designs and animation and found them alienating with the stiffness and the artificiality of it all. Something changed, however, around episode 6. In addition to the animation significantly improving, I remember gasping when I first saw Sakiko’s background for her phone, which is literally a doll. I began to connect the dots–putting this anime in the context of multi-national corporations, a multi-media franchise where Asian girls are literally bought and sold as gatcha commodities, there is a long history here. 

The resemblance to porcelain dolls not coincidentally makes it even easier to turn the girls of MyGo into commodities–these are the bodies that are easiest to animate in 3D, that are easiest to commodify into profit from those who pull the gacha lever over and over again. This is particularly true within the imperial context–Anne Anlin Cheng’s critique of surface in her magnum opus Ornamentalism emphasizes that the racist caricatures of Asian women as doll-like are not confined to any particular nationality or border, but drag Asian women into a very particular position in the imperial order: as ornaments to white power. In one of the most disturbing sequences of the book, she describes the exhibit at the World’s Fair at which Afong Moy, a Chinese woman, is put in a “China Room” full of porcelain, with her skin imagined white rubberneckers as a surface like that of a porcelain doll’s, blending in with the scenery; she became a “living decoration.”

Are the girls of MyGo like Afong Moy, created as they are in the structure of a gacha game, trapped as they are to lure people into an endless cycle of gambling to collect the cute Asian girls? It is hard not to see the parallels here between the girls that MyGo depicts and the women that are represented in Cheng’s oeuvre–one could even look at the concept of “shine,” dramatized most famously in the also gacha-based Revue Starlight, and how Cheng uses Freud to show the relationship between something “shining” and the person who observes it shining–one of fetishization.

Of course, I’m sure we’d like to think that Ave Mujica and It’s MyGo!!!!! are not merely an extended advertising campaign for gambling! Cheng’s work points to the possibility of looking at a different set of questions–about the uncertain lines between subject and object and whether surface and ornamentation should always be considered as a red flag for fakery. She declares that her intention in her book is “a willful encounter with yellow femininity as persistent, brutal, exquisite style…a fight song that wishes to take head on, not simply deny or decry, the object conditions on which yellow womanhood has been built.” If anything, this is the project I wish to take on in this essay–to understand the different surfaces within MyGo/Ave Mujica, and to challenge our assumptions about what is “false” and what is “true,” about what is surface and what is not. How do we critique the expectation that Asian femininity will be performed within this acceptable band of feminine expression that produces a specific surface, while not devaluing femininity as being a false surface?

Still Life with Girl: On Soyo’s Home Life

Freud describes the ego as a “projection of a surface.” Soyo’s ego, like the skin of a porcelain doll, is both smooth and fragile. She desperately does not want anybody to see beyond the front that she puts up. She performs kindness, puts on a voice that, even for the absolutely bizarre style of most anime voice acting, comes across as unbelievable and off putting in its “niceness” and “gentleness,” and she tries to position herself as the voice of reason holding the band together. Meanwhile, of course, she is the source of a huge amount of the drama. 

This front has a history. Saving face is one of the most important cultural aspects of East Asian culture. If you have a problem with somebody, you should keep it to yourself as much as possible, and let subtle social cues do the talking. The purpose of this is to preserve social harmony. White people often read onto saving face the same “false kind surface” vs “true cruel interior” divide that I have brought up earlier, but for Asian and Asian Americans like me, we see it as a kindness–the fewer times somebody is rejected out in the open in front of others, the less likely it is for a singular rejection to turn into a cascade of exclusion by the larger community. However, for Soyo, saving face is both deeply isolating and harmful to the people around her. She does not want anybody to know how much she is struggling to hold it together, how deeply she mourns the loss of Crychic, and, more than anything, how desperate she is for Sakiko’s approval. She’s perfectly aware of how hurtful her inner thoughts are, which is why she herself hides from them. The surface keeps everybody else out, arguably also shielding her ego from her subconscious motivations, which she thinks keeps everybody safe.

Is it any surprise that Soyo’s like this, given her circumstances? In one of the most powerful scenes of the show, we see Soyo first enter her new “home”–a luxury long-term-stay hotel. From her reaction to her new digs we can see that Soyo is likely upwardly mobile, not accustomed to a life of luxury–and her mother brings her to her new room, with gorgeous floor-to-ceiling windows, and no furniture. At first she wants to tell her mother what school she wants to go to when her mother asks her, reaching her hand to touch her mother to seek real intimacy, but she silences herself, pulls her hand away, and asks her mother: “what do you want?” Her mother quickly announces the school she will go to, “Tsukinomori, a school for girls from prominent families,” and when Soyo tries to voice her own thoughts, her mother interrupts, telling her it has a “cute uniform” she would “love to see her wearing.” She then walks out of the room to take a work call, closing the door and leaving Soyo in a completely empty hotel room.

Soyo’s motivations for hiding her opinions and going along are obvious to anybody who grew up with Confucian values: How could a child whose mother just gave them access through their hard work to a life of “luxury” possibly question their mother’s judgement? Soyo’s mother models the behavior that Soyo then embodies, shutting out her own child from a crucial decision about her life while pretending to care about that child’s feelings, then leaving Soyo in an empty hotel room with the door shut. What‘s Soyo supposed to do in her room while her mother takes the work call? Stare out the window? Bask in the happiness that allegedly comes from her new life of luxury, without even a bed to sleep on? The image of Soyo in the uniform that her mother conjures is the image of her child as a dress-up doll, symbolic of her rising in society–imagine: my child in the uniform of the most prestigious school in Tokyo. The fact that they are now living in a hotel is revealing, as how can anybody ever feel like a hotel is truly their home–something to be shaped, created into a true place of peace and comfort? The surface of luxury here belies a deep emptiness in Soyo’s home life, as even the scenes where Soyo entertains the rest of the band as guests give a sense that she’s a guest in her own home, that the images of her are “still life with girl,” akin to the Chinese Lady in Cheng’s Ornamentalism.

The framing of this scene is also fascinating. The music and direction seem to frame the scene as a sweet and wholesome moment between mother and daughter. However, many of Soyo’s face-saving scenes contrast happy music with the most striking manipulation, or even her pretending she doesn’t know somebody she’s been in a band with for months. The music always follows the face saving exterior, rather than the actual subtext of the scene. It is hard not to see it as purposefully alienating the viewer from Soyo’s perspective, calling attention to the ways that Soyo constructs her persona and attempts to construct a kinder narrative of her motivations. They follow how Soyo, in a sense, constructs her own ego—what her conscious mind believes about herself. Only when she fully sees her own deceitfulness, her own cruelty, does the music change.

Mutsumi and the Commodification of Doll-ness

Dolls are central to the symbolic language of Ave Mujica, both the band and the show. All of the band members in Ave Mujica’s highly theatrical performances are dolls brought to life by magic, each of whom represents a different confrontation they are not afraid of: with sorrow, with forgetting, with love, etc. Of this, the most notable is Mortis, the doll who is unafraid of death. 

Mortis, of course, is more than just a character that Mutsumi plays, or a doll in Mutsumi’s stuffie collection, but one of her alters, as Mutsumi is a plural system. And let me be clear: Ave Mujica is a complicated text, far more ambiguous in its representations of neurodivergence than MyGo is. Tomori from MyGo is probably one of the most positive representations I’ve ever seen of autistic girlhood, never, ever framed as broken, and always treated as a creative, kind, and deeply empathetic girl. Ave Mujica’s Mutsumi, by contrast, is a source of campy melodrama. Mutsumi and Mortis’s fights within the larger system known as Mutsumi are played in the language of a soap opera, with almost Gollum-style cutting between the different alters, and emphasis placed on the suffering that this battle causes. It is not a positive, happy representation by any means. 

In spite of the drama, I find Mutsumi’s arc to take the franchise’s disruption of the dichotomies between real vs unreal, doll vs human, fungible feminized Asian flesh vs human with interiority to its most literalized conclusion. In attempting to create a self that can play the roles that she’s often asked to play as the perfect daughter, perfect performer, and perfect student, Mitsumi paradoxically challenges the idea that these selves that we create socially are necessarily a mark of brokenness or falseness.

The show especially challenges this idea of socially constructed identities being inherently false when we meet Mutsumi’s mother, a famous actress in whose shadow Mutsumi grew up. Mutsumi’s own mother describes her as a “monster,” describing to Nyamuchi how the roles that Mutsumi had to play growing up as the daughter of an actress split her to an extent where there is no “real” Mutsumi–only the roles that she has learned how to play made manifest into different alters.

Mutsumi’s mother, by describing all of this to Nyamuchi, is demonstrating exactly why Mutsumi may have felt compelled to play all of these roles to be deserving of love–because clearly this is a mother who doesn’t love her daughter. But it’s hard not to wonder if there’s an element of projection here–where Mutsumi’s mother feels ashamed at her own inability to love her daughter, and so she projects that shame onto her daughter and declares her undeserving of love, sabotaging her relationships with the only people who are close to her and isolating her so that so she can tell herself that nobody is capable of loving this child.

Ironically, Nyamuchi responds to Mutsumi’s mother’s manipulation by falling in love with Mutsumi–falling in love with the exact things that her mother believed made her a fake and a monster. And Mutsumi herself is only able to heal by letting go of the mantle of “real” or “fake” Mutsumi, no longer fighting for the position of “primary personality” instead of an “alter” so she can actually experience a sense of fluidity between these identities, understanding each of them as providing a part of her she needs in certain times but all worthy of love. There is no part of her that must be eradicated or disappear. The show rejects entirely her mother’s view of her, and calls attention to the performative aspect of identity, both in its literal sense and its theoretical sense–in trying to navigate and care for those around her, even those who had so wildly neglected their duties as caregiver or friend (talking about you, Sakiko), she made these parts of herself real, called them into being and gave them life. What is “false” about that? What is monstrous?

Brutal, Exquisite Style

I’ve become frustrated with the concept of “breaking stereotypes,” to be honest. It is wildly constricting–any way of living that would determine that, for example, just because I as a gay Asian am seen as feminine by white heterosexual society I should reflexively be as masculine as possible is just white supremacy and heteronormativity by another name, as it is judging myself through white people’s eyes. However, that still leaves me with a question of what to do about people’s surface perceptions of me, if defiant opposition at all times is both exhausting and confining in its own way?

Ave Mujica and MyGo show us a different way forward–one that challenges the entire terms of ”realness.” What could it mean to embrace artifice, and understand these questions less in terms of moral purity, but simply: what would be fun, fruity, and stylish? Is there imagination in brutal, exquisite style?

It is no coincidence to me that trans women of color are often referred to as “dolls.” Within a world that views femininity as false, Jules Gill Peterson says that what we could learn from trans women is how one can be the “the most woman” one can be. And to paraphrase Andrea Long Chu in her seminal piece ”On Liking Women,” one insight that might be taken back from radical feminism is not that patriarchy is domineering, or that it is hurtful, but that it is boring. The “falseness” with which femininity, and especially Asian femininity, is often branded can be best understood as its creativity: its willingness to subvert, to imagine differently, and to create anew in difficult situations. Asian feminine surface challenges us, asking us to harness the fearlessness at being called “false” as an engine to build new ways of being, to make living an art. Until then: Protect the dolls.