<aside> 🕊️ Happy (slightly belated) birthday, Sakiko! Here is an abridged translation of this interview (1,2) of Kodai Kakimoto. These are all specifically about Ave Mujica’s members. I will update when I am done with the whole thing… I just wanted to get this out for my dear fave!!

</aside>

—Thank you for coming. Now that the initial run of Bang Dream! It's MyGO!!!!! is over, we're hoping the director himself could give us his thoughts looking back on each episode.

I'll do my best.

—Let's start off with Episode 1. Without warning, it starts with the appalling scene of CRYCHIC's sudden collapse.

Compared to the rest of BanG Dream!'s anime catalogue, this show has a more grounded core; it's filled with darker emotions, drearier conflicts, and messier relationships between its characters. In a narrative sense, we wanted to convey that CRYCHIC's end is the beginning of everything. That's why it starts the way it did, basically saying: This is how it all starts.

In my mind, I always pictured Chopin's Raindrops Prelude accompanying this scene. At the point it was actually added, the timing and the music interlocked perfectly, so my hunch turned out to be exactly right.

[...]

—Flashbacks are scattered all throughout the season, not just Episode 1. What went into the decision to implement these?

One's birth, their environment, their past and present are crucial influences on the foundation of one's personality.

We want the present narrative to be paced rather swiftly. However, if a character's personality doesn't come across well, then their motivations and inner feelings won't come across well either.

So if we were to show a character's rather farfetched thoughts and reactions, we'd also have to show bits of the past relevant to understanding "why they did that" and "why'd they think that way". It resulted in the amount of flashbacks being a little much, but we didn't shy away from including them at all — they function as shorthand to help the audience understand the characters.

[...]

—Next up is Episode 6... I was personally amazed at the conversation between Soyo and Mutsumi. Soyo's sense of pressure was just so intense (laughs)

Crushing, right? (laughs) To take a gentler point of view, she's just haunted by the reasoning for why CRYCHIC collapsed. What follows next is the search for a potential culprit. In the first episode's disbandment scene, she was notably rendered speechless hearing Mutsumi's answer. In her mind, if Mutsumi hadn't said it, maybe they could've avoided the tragedy that struck.

See, Mutsumi isn't that good with words in general, and there's lots of times where she ends up saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. She's the daughter of two celebrities, so even before she can remember, she's been attracting the attention of those around her. Her private life does not escape this. Compound that with her timidity when it comes to communication, and you have a recipe for disaster.

—Oh...

So in Soyo's search, she ended up deducing Mutsumi as the culprit for CRYCHIC's murder. That's Soyo's view on things. Now that she's internally staked the blame on Mutsumi, she tries guilting her back under the logic of "Since you destroyed CRYCHIC, I assume you'll help me revive it?"

Usually, Soyo would rather blame nobody than hold someone to task, but she simply cannot forgive Mutsumi for the sin she sees was committed against CRYCHIC. She wants this culprit to "pay the price" and "take responsibility".

—In the same vein of character relationships, Episode 6 also reveals to us that Taki, Umiri, and Uika are classmates.

We distributed the characters across existing schools once it was decided they're coming to Girls Band Party!

For Sakiko, we were deliberate in the downgrade from attending Rich Girl Academy to being a scholarship student at Haneoka Girls' School. Other than her, however, our choices for who goes where was fairly random, and we decided on the dynamics between the characters afterwards. It felt like we were just haphazardly throwing them in there, on the off-chance there'd be a chemical reaction, sparks flying as a result.

We didn't really plan any significance to which school Uika would've attended, but our logic was that if she went to Hanasakigawa Girls' School, something interesting might happen between her, Taki, and Umiri. So we put them in the same class.

The result turned out to be quite interesting. Umiri's presence in relevance to the two became significant, and it opened up the possibilities for the narrative going forward.

[...]

—Episode 7's ending left quite the impact. Was it established from the start?