English Dub Review: If My Favorite Pop Idol Made It to the Budokan, I Would Die “But I Love That Maina”
Based on the Serialized Manga series by Auri Hirao, The story follows the misadventures of an obsessed female Idol fan named “Eripiyo” who is one of the original fans of underground idol group Cham Jam, and her favorite within said group is the shy “Maina”. Eripiyo worries that she might be scaring her off by coming on too strong, but Maina is tongue-tied for another reason entirely…
Our Take
Aside from the on-the-nose meta-commentary on the relationships between fan & celebrity,(or in this case, best and worst of the Japanese Idol pop-scene and their rabid fandoms) In a nutshell, this is an Idol story told from the perspective of an obsessed female fan which could make or break the storyline of this show in later episodes. Some jokes were a bit on the cringy side. Eripiyo looks too pretty for such a moronically obsessed character. She could easily be one of the idols instead of working in a food factory and wasting all her money for multiple copies of useless idol merchandise just to get a stupid handshake from that poor woman.
I know it’s supposed to be funny and all… but I couldn’t help but cringe throughout the entire episode. I know it’s also a requirement for these ladies jobs to interact with certain fans, but you can’t help but feel bad for the indignities of these poor girls, having to sing to these greasy creepy hygienically challenged male otaku stereotypes let alone be touched by them, as their scenes made me feel unclean in places.
If I can find any positives, it at least more than makes up for the bland plot with good animation, art style and a colorful atmosphere which is to be expected in an anime that caters to the J-Pop scene. I thought they cell-shaded CGI for the dances scenes at first, but I at least give them points for going the extra mile in that regard, if only the writing and humor of this episode didn’t leave a bad taste in my mouth much in the same way Akiba’s Trip did…
Hopefully, the later episodes will do better…
Hi Ashley, thank you so much for reading and we love the feedback. Note that on that day we had 14th posts go up and only ten posts show on the front page, so it's possible the preview had already been archived by the time you got to it. One recommendation would be to add our RSS feed to your favorite news aggregator service like Feedly, this way you get all of the latest posts!