All Things Small Web

The seventeenth generation feels really recent to me, but I realise that we've been talking about them since Doushitemo Kimi ga Suki da and Idol Nanka Janakattara arrived in 2022 and 2023 and featured prominent members of their generation amongst the senbatsu. Joining Yamazaki Sora, who has really come into her own as of late, Sato Airi, Hirata Yuki, and my fave, Hashimoto Eriko, Ota Yuki debuted in 2022 as a member of the kenkyuusei!



Promoted to the regular members in 2024, we have yet to see Yukitan in the senbatsu, however, it is the opinion of this girl that this is long overdue if only because she shares the same favourite Detective Conan character as me, Haibara Ai, so perhaps it was not just me who was disappointed not to see her appear in last week's Meitantei Pretty Cure! That aside, Yukitan first appeared in the theatre as part of the opening act for the 2022 revival of Boku no Taiyou before going on to be part of the seventeenth generation's revival of Tadaima Renaichuu, Team A's fourth stage, where she appeared as centre for the song Faint.

In Yukichan, there's perhaps the first suggestion of how Team 8 have impacted younger girls auditioning. From the get go, she has declared her ambitions to tour with AKB48 across different prefectures, eagerly awaiting the revival of something that the former team were famous for. Yukichan might also not be the first member we've highlighted in our Wednesday columns to have had this experience, but she's the first I've noticed: having spent a year or so in the kenkyuusei, come 2023, she went directly to the "regular members," having never been assigned to a team. Perhaps there's a sense of longing that comes from that, a sense of achievement in having made it to AKB, but also a sense of forlornness that comes from knowing how AKB has changed. Yet, at the same time, this moment is a chance for girls like Yukichan to make AKB48 their own, so I'm really excited for that! With her role models being Kashiwagi Yuki and Murayama Yuiri, with her aspiration to be like Shinoda Mariko, I definitely think she can do it!

A tiny little story to sign off on: when Yukichan realised that eighteenth generation member, Kudo Kasumi, had caught her cold, she personally went to her house to deliver cold medicine. I think that's adorable!

AKB may be different from how it was before, but it's still no less important to me. Girls like Yukichan really do make all the difference.

I finished watching the adaptation of Nikumaru's Bad Girl over the week-end and I loved every moment of it, having first encountered it during late autumn whilst it was still airing thanks to a pop-up shop promoting it in Onoden. Up the staircase from the first floor towards the Cospla store, the maid café I have never visited, and a handful of other concessions, there were numerous pictures of the characters and highlights from each episode; I bought a little acrylic stand of Ruru-senpai and went to Comic ZIN to buy the first volume of the manga. I find four koma manga a little difficult to read, but adaptations of such material always seem to win me over, she said, thinking specifically of Asobi Asobase. I was surprised to discover Bad Girl's adaptation was handled by Yonemura Shoji, possibly most famous for writing a lot of your least favourite Heisei Kamen Rider episodes but also Sh15uya, which was good. I was also surprised at how easily the show gets romantic. Despite main character Yuutani Yuu's obliviousness regarding the feelings of others around her, her admiration and adoration of her senpai, Mizutori Atori, is never not displayed as anything other than romantic. I wasn't expecting that. I thought this show was going to make me work, but instead it's incredibly open about the way it depicts its relationships. I'm kind of surprised at how often we're seeing this kind of thing, if I'm honest.

A month ago, I was caught unawares by the opening of Kamiina Botan, Yoeru Sugata wa Yuri no Hana on youtube and it really had an impact on me. I tried to resist it because I thought it was trying to lead me astray, so I bullied Rei into watching it for me, and then I felt left out, so I started watching it too, and, like Bad Girl it really doesn't shy away from framing its relationships as more than friendships without forcing the issue, and again, I'm surprised. Previously, there's always been the accusation that introducing elements from yuri was solely to the benefit of a male audience. Relationships between women were oft referred to as "softer" or "gentler" during the '00s when we began to see a certain type of service in anime aimed at young males. I really am not a fan of "the yuri subplot," I think its dismissive of what the genre has to offer to reduce it to fanservice in shonen manga, but at the same time a lot of those depictions hit me in the heart when I didn't have anything else so I don't want to criticise them even if I believe we can do better now; what we're seeing in 2026, though... is this the year that yuri breaks fully into the mainstream? Despite the reality of being gay in Japan, it feels like more and more we're seeing shows that frame its relationships between women in a romantic fashion. In many ways, like the service of the moè boom, I benefit from these casual depictions, but I don't always feel good about that. Having said that, both Bad Girl and Kamiina Botan are pretty amazing, you guys.

Having reached the point where I am current with fansubbed releases of Wingman and having also watched all of the live action show—and surprisingly really enjoyed it!—I thought I'd return to another Katsura Masakazu adaptation, and whilst I didn't intend to, regardless, I found that I watched all six episodes of Video Girl Ai over the week-end.

There's a thread between Ai and Wingman. If anything, it could be said that the former is essentially the plot of the latter if you strip away all of the homages and references to tokusatsu; a boy with feelings for a girl is interrupted by the surprise introduction of a second girl intent on meddling in his love life. The situation is a little more complex in Video Girl Ai though, and there's a sense of realism that is leant into by Production IG's approach to the setting and surroundings of these moments between Ai, the heartbroken Moteuchi Yota, Hayakawa Moemi, the object of his affections, and Niimai Takashi, Yota's best friend and the boy whom Moemi is in love with—there's no threesoming their way out of this one as Wingman often seems to imply with its story. Video Girl Ai has a sort of sadness that feels real even in its more dream-like moments, and despite how forward and often crass Ai is, there is a genuine emotional root at the heart of the depictions of Yota, Moemi, and Takashi that reads far more like shoujo manga. I think this is testament to Katsura's versatility in telling stories.



Between Monday and now, I also read the first volume of the long out-of-print Tokyopop release of the FLCL novels by Enokido Yoji and was really hit by the things it makes explicit. The book covers the first two episodes, if I remember rightly, and it goes all in on the relationship between Naota and Mamimi in a way that is both tender and hurtful and real. I don't feel I need the subtext to be made explicit as to this, but at the same time, I'm also grateful for it. I think Enokido's prose handles the subject with sensitivity and delicacy, but also with honesty, which makes all the difference. "At times like this, young men glimpse, if dimly, how big the love they seal inside themselves can be," reads the narrative at one point, and I felt that, I could see myself in both these roles in the way Naota and Mamimi are trying to navigate adolescence and it really hammered home how FLCL is such a beautiful testament to the pain and the joy of being young. In the afterword, producer Sato Hiroki says that they were responding to the demands of otaku who wanted something "the old men who follow subcultures, all the Shibuya teen-agers, and the girls who read cute comics won't get." Instead, what FLCL is is a near universal experience. In its obtuseness, in its obliqueness, it is so emotionally honest that the surface details just wash over you and what you are left with is the impression of being young, of wanting to get out, wherever you, of falling in love for the first time.

Unsurprisingly, this is what to-day's entry seems to be about. This morning, around the corner from Earl's Court, I saw a brightly coloured Vespa parked in the dull sunlight of early morning.