Welcome back ! It's my blog and it's been a minute so I'm gonna talk about more girls' band yuri. That BocchiAveMyGoBandCry blood runs hot in my veins and while I'm working on something more in depth about my thoughts on Bocchi the Rock I also had a lot to say about another show in that vein that I feel was unfairly overlooked. If I weren't mutuals with CC and hadn't heard her extolling the yuriful virtues of Rock Is A Lady's Modesty I honestly can't say that it would have stood out to me as a must-watch.
Even from the first episode I knew this show was something special. The main character designs alone have a certain aura about their eyes that I don't feel like you see too much in TV anime ? I classified it as "pixiv-core" in my mind at first. To me it evokes the detailed reflection and shading common to pieces on image boards and sites like that these days more than most anything I've ever seen airing, but it's not new to the medium at all. Risa Miyadani did an amazing job on the character designs here and has been designing characters since 2021's Aikatsu Planet, as well as for a Revue Starlight music video and one of the Precure movies among other things. But as far as character design work goes, four years is still not that much time in the game. Maybe this is just my comic-book-brain coming to the surface but I would count artists like them and Ann Nakai (who drew this standout cut from Onimai and whose work can also be seen in the currently-airing Ruri no Houseki) as part of an exciting new generation bringing a complex style from the cutting edge of the online art world to animation. Or maybe I've just looked away from anime for a second and am ascribing trend status to art I like. Regardless, I'm instantly hooked by character designs like these.
The hairstyles are really interesting, too; Lilisa's exaggerated ojou drills could very well be diegetic with how commited she is to the very-serious-bit of fitting in with her new peers and I really like how quickly Otoha's hime cut turns into kinda creepy blinding bangs when she gets intense. Both communicate each characters' personality very well and each look visually distinctive. It really reminds me of the vampire anime Shiki in that way, so strongly that I had to check who the character deisgner was, which was how I found out about Miyadani's portfolio more fully. And that makes the hairstyles make more sense too. If you want someone who's good at drawing colorful, appealing, distinctive girl characters it makes sense to look to the Aikatsu and Precure designers.
There are a lot of directing tricks that I haven't really seen done in other girl's band shows. I'm sure it pre-dates Utena, but the birdcage metaphor for an elite (girl's) academy is such a strong trope of this kind of yuri show that less confident writers would probably take shying away from it for granted. The way it's done here is interesting, though; it'll often cut away to a birdcage in some state relating to where the characters stand in relation to the social strata around them. It really reminded me of Shinichi Sakamoto's work on Innocent and DRCL, two much more serious manga about similarly prestigious social circles. It really works here as a dramatic flourish to tie the over-the-top reactions in the world of strict etiquette. There's another much less subtle visual metaphor, too: the flower vase. It's kept in the abandonded school building where Otoha practices drums, starting off with just a lonely rose when she's practicing by herself, and gaining a lily when Lilisa joins her. As they butt heads and interlock fingers the flower vase crashes to the floor, and the stems cross in pools of water like sweat.
I also feel really strongly about Tina's character; at first blush she appears to be the typical cool princely type and I already thought she was super neat from the word go. Of course I did. I mean, I'm always interested in that character type. That's me, or at least what I aim for, it's a reassuringly plausable expression of "I'm a girl.". It's what's in reach ! And that's the thing with Tina's arc too. From the word "go" the adults around her praise her elegant manners and handsome looks, so she leans into that. Ultimately society coerces a persona out of her that leaves her feeling empty and small with so much of her energy put to being percieved in a way that's at complete odds with what she wants to be seen as, boomeranging back around into obscuring the desire to be anything else until she sees Lilisa performing. That spark of inspiration pushes her to join the band as a keyboardist, despite never having played keyboard before and only barely knowing piano. This is a competitive, highly skilled instrumental rock band; she takes a chance that could be seen as a grave insult to all involved. It's only because of Lilisa's entirely irrational connection to Tina's sincerity and genuine effort that anyone in the band stays around to hear her out. These first few episodes really hit for me on a lot of levels.
Oh, and I love how she has her rabbit talk for her. Feels like the show took a chance making her potentially unpalatably weird there and it makes her choice to be genuine around her bandmates hit that much harder. It's genuinely vulnerable of her and of this show's writing–cannot stress enough how uch I appreciate it.
Like this kind of story is why I like bifauxnen girlprince characters so much in the first place, but this kind of diegetic deconstruction of the character the character plays is often either the entire meaning for the story (as in masterpieces like Revolutionary Girl Utena and Rose of Versailles) or a background element like with Bandori's Kaoru Seta flustering and breaking character at being called "Kao-chan". Don't get me wrong, Kaoru's one of my favorite characters of all time... at any rate, please don't take me praising Tina's arc here as a statement that it's a necessarily better approach, in any way. It's a new and inventive play on the tropes I've made myself familiar with and a specifically personal one at that. I appreciate the gravity the show gives to Tina's distress and how seriously it takes her feelings. It goes deep when talking about the empty feeling and loss of sense of self. Maybe I just latch onto that kind of talk in particular, but especially in the context of being a girl who's always treated like a boy and goes along with it to fit in, that's the kind of thing that's always going to resonate deeply with me.
And the flip side of that hits just as deeply the other way. Despite her lack of technical skill and experience on the keyboard, Tina still can stand out by giving her all. The show doesn't treat her as less important or a punching bag or anything for just starting out. It would be so, so easy to. She's really putting herself out there and being truly vulnerable. It cannot be stressed enough how glad I am this show locked in and met her earnest, positive effort with genuine warmth and space to grow. I really–and I mean really, tearfully–appreciate how Tina's effort makes her an off-limits target for the band's typical verbal abuse. When Tamaki tries to give her a tongue-lashing Lilisa jumps in to defend her, and we the audience are supposed to be on her side. In a series about breaking society's boundaries it stands out as a genuine intrusive thought-level taboo, breaking an unspoken personal boundary Lilisa's protectiveness in this instance is like an arrow aimed directly at my heart.
And like I said it also hits super personally. Not looking to turn this into a vent post but I'll just say it hit me in the right place at the right time, so hard that I just think I need to lie down for a bit. I've actually taken two naps rather than finish this show and blog post just because thinking about her takes so much out of me. Recency bias all the way to the side, she's 110% entering the pantheon of all time great CGDCT characters for me.
Ultimately I think my biggest disconnect here is with the music. It's something I've thought a lot about because I don't think it fails as music. In the context of the story its both perfectly listenable and conveys the emotions of the story well. But aside from the killer OP by Band-Maid I don't think its something I'd listen to on its own, and not because its instrumental–I think it's just a clashing sound for my image of these characters. Like from a certain point of view, it makes sense for these girls coming out of such a stuffy environment, that playing any sort of rock at all is a major act of rebellion. And I think it makes sense that being in that world the kind of rock they'd turn to to express that is so, comparatively, "classy". I don't mean that as a compliment or a dig, but the two bands I noticed name-dropped in the show are the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Led Zeppelin, two bands I never really got into as they always felt like "establishment" rock to me by the time I was forging my own music taste. I adknowledge this is probably super generational. My mom loves the Chili Peppers especially, as she saw them when they were coming up and definitely had more of that punk edge to them. And punk is something I wanna talk about a lot in this section.
I've been thinking about it a lot with this show because whether it's Tina's rebellion to exist within and apart from her princely image or the inherent rebellion of playing rock at this kind of school at all, there is a serious punk spirit in this show, but the music isn't really punk at all. That's sort of a problem for me. I think of the music of Togenashi Togeari or MyGO!!!!! as this anthemic wave in the same way I do Rise Against or Touche Amore, and Ave Mujica in the same way as a lot of post-punk and post-hardcore as a more musically complex expression of the same raw ideals, rebelling against the idea that rebelling has to sound messy. Honestly Kessoku Band has it too–starting off with "we'll play to high schoolers who don't know good music from bad" and ultimately ending up with some pretty moving tunes regardless. That's punk rock to me. As much as I like the performance scenes in RockLady as anime I feel like they're kind of a betrayal as performances. By that I mean, the show takes pains to establish Lily and Oto as very adamant that their music is not for the background, only for the show to throw narration over their first performance... It's tricky. Because again as anime, as filmmaking, it works completely. It's just as over-the-top and sexually charged as the rest of the show and it makes for another episode thats just as funny as it is genuinely interesting. Again I wouldn't say that it's worse, but I do have to note the first time a Girl's Band Yuri didn't make me rush to download the tie-in music albums.
Any show that gets me thinking this much about music this much is something I'm going to recommend, especially when it seems to have flown under so many people's radar. There may not be any room left in the fan abbreviation "BocchiAveMyGoBandCry" itself but I hope that there's room in the hearts of many fans of those shows for this one as well. It really does have interesting things to say and an interesting way of saying them, as well as contributions to the bigger sphere of "cute girls doing cute things" if you're as focused on the "meta" of the genre as I am. And it got me genuinely thinking about music. There's a lot to love with Rock is a Lady's Modesty–don't let this gem go hidden! Thank you for reading!