Manga Notes: Idol x Idol Story! 1-2
Aug. 25th, 2025 06:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerCasting around for new manga to start reading (even if not that many titles I’ve read have finished in recent months), I decided to take a chance on one called Idol x Idol Story! By the time I’d got around to reading its first volume, though, I also happened to have its second instalment waiting. Starting off with a bigger dose of the story, though, could have had something of an impact on me.
The back-cover blurb for the first volume sketched out a college graduate named Mimi, who used to be a small-time idol singer but is now a fan of an up-and-coming idol named Ibuki. She happens to have a casual meeting with Ibuki, and that turns into both of them working towards “the big time” together. It turned out their vehicle for that is a reality show competition with a “world-renowned solo artist” fronting it. That much might be simple enough, but I was conscious reading the manga that I found something about Shotaro Tokuno’s art appealing. The funny thing there was that I couldn’t say what it was about the art that appealed to me. I could suppose that from a perspective not that different from mine the character designs might be brushed off as “sort of generic,” even if, as Mimi and Ibuki’s fellow competitors accumulate, it becomes a little harder to deploy that standard putdown “it’s just different hairstyles on the same face!” Perhaps I was pushed back towards considering that simple statement I’ve sometimes told myself that the now-sheer length of my interest in manga and anime depends on some level on “liking the way it looks.”
Even at the end of the second volume competitors haven’t been cut from the show yet; I was intrigued by the number of colour plates offering capsule biographies at the other side of the volume from the one I expect plates on. It also got my attention that the author’s afterword there brought up “can an ‘idol story’ work in manga, given it involves characters singing and dancing?” That thought had already occurred to me. The story has split Mimi and Ibuki into different teams, which might have added on to a previous thought the number of competitors had got in the way of potential interpretations striving to “slash” the two main characters. I’d also come to contemplate how the “x” in the title could also be seen as the “shuffle” symbol in a music player. On the other hand, there was still one moment in the manga where, even if Mimi and Ibuki weren’t together, I could still imagine those who operate with “slash goggles” fixed in place taking notice...
The back-cover blurb for the first volume sketched out a college graduate named Mimi, who used to be a small-time idol singer but is now a fan of an up-and-coming idol named Ibuki. She happens to have a casual meeting with Ibuki, and that turns into both of them working towards “the big time” together. It turned out their vehicle for that is a reality show competition with a “world-renowned solo artist” fronting it. That much might be simple enough, but I was conscious reading the manga that I found something about Shotaro Tokuno’s art appealing. The funny thing there was that I couldn’t say what it was about the art that appealed to me. I could suppose that from a perspective not that different from mine the character designs might be brushed off as “sort of generic,” even if, as Mimi and Ibuki’s fellow competitors accumulate, it becomes a little harder to deploy that standard putdown “it’s just different hairstyles on the same face!” Perhaps I was pushed back towards considering that simple statement I’ve sometimes told myself that the now-sheer length of my interest in manga and anime depends on some level on “liking the way it looks.”
Even at the end of the second volume competitors haven’t been cut from the show yet; I was intrigued by the number of colour plates offering capsule biographies at the other side of the volume from the one I expect plates on. It also got my attention that the author’s afterword there brought up “can an ‘idol story’ work in manga, given it involves characters singing and dancing?” That thought had already occurred to me. The story has split Mimi and Ibuki into different teams, which might have added on to a previous thought the number of competitors had got in the way of potential interpretations striving to “slash” the two main characters. I’d also come to contemplate how the “x” in the title could also be seen as the “shuffle” symbol in a music player. On the other hand, there was still one moment in the manga where, even if Mimi and Ibuki weren’t together, I could still imagine those who operate with “slash goggles” fixed in place taking notice...