Feb 08, 2025: So I've been thinking about Bandori...

So I've been thinking about Bandori again. I'm not entirely sure what caused it or why it's happened. But I want to get some thoughts out of my head before I lose them. To sum things up, I'd love to write a whole blog article about why Bandori was important to me years ago, why it's okay that I'm not really hooked on it anymore, and why something that isn't the same as how I loved it is still important to me. I think it'd be a nice read and I had someone tell me a while ago that it was nice to read my personal experiences and thoughts about something.

Bandori, or BanG Dream! Girls Band Party is this multimedia franchise but most of my time has been playing the gacha mobile rhythm game for it years ago. I'd credit it as the big thing that really got me into things like J-Rock music, introduced me to a lot of the friends I still have today, and sorta turned my life around from a bad part that I was in for a while. It's a whole story, if I wrote that article I'd go into it and the details and all, but all that's important to say here is that it's an anime music mobile game that I got obsessed with for a few years. I'd play it daily, I'd try to get perfect combos on the hardest difficulty of every song, I'd save up my currency for the gacha and try to pull for the cards I really wanted, I loved reading the different stories in the game, and it's something that really pushed me out of my comfort zone to start talking with people on the internet more and make friends. It's a big deal for me, but after a while I just started to lose interest in it for a bunch of reasons. After I stopped really considering myself a fan of Bandori, I still remembered a lot of what I liked about the series, but it was more like those things I liked about it back then applied to the things that I like right now. Like I'd be like "I like this thing in Love Live in 2024 because I liked it in Bandori in 2019". I've still told people the story about how I got into Love Live because I was into Bandori first, things like that.

But I really love the idea that those things just kind of permanently stick with me even if I outgrow Bandori or I'm not interested in it. I'm not gonna watch the newer seasons of its anime, but it's still the reason I met a lot of friends that I still have. I still remember what it was like playing the Japanese version of the game for the first time and seeing all these songs I'd never seen that were missing from the English version at the time, songs like R or Discotheque or Sakura Skip. I still remember how cool it was to be able to go to a local theater to see a DV of two of the real-life bands from the franchise perform, since I mainly just considered everything to be fictional. I remember watching the first season of Bandori's anime multiple times, people said they didn't like the art style and that it looked bad, or that the characters weren't accurate, but I remember it all fondly. I can't really explain in words the emotions watching something like the actual full MV for Star Beat makes me feel, it's a song I heavily associate with Saaya's whole arc in the anime. Or how a song like Hachigatsu no if or Passionate Starmine are memorable to me because they're in the anime.

The "Uehara" in my username after I changed it isn't just because of Ayumu Uehara, my favourite character in Love Live, but it's also because of Himari Uehara, my favourite character in Bandori. I've always related to her heavily and it would be really cool talking about those feelings and stories now that it's not the massive thing I'm obsessed with anymore, I can look back it and go "Man I was stupid back then, but I had this thing I really loved, and it's really nice I had it.", I think overall that's just what I would want that piece of writing to be. I think it's easy for people to see what they used to do or talk about or look like and think "I was so cringe back then/I hate myself back then" but there's a really beautiful aspect of just loving something back then, and I think that if you don't like how you used to be, that's fantastic, because it means that you've grown into being something you like more than you were back then.

I've changed so much since the point I was obsessed with Bandori and because I've met so many new people I think it'd be really cool to tell the stories from back then in the way that I talk or think now, and for those people who I've known since all the way back then, I think it would be really cool to both give a kind of closure to why I'm not like that anymore, and give a unique experience of a kind of "memory lane" they can go down. I know people who have both never heard of Bandori and who have been a fan of Bandori even before I got into it. I think it'd be a really interesting thing to experience for any of those people, and the more I really think about it and just empty my thoughts out onto a page without thinking about it, I'm more in love with the idea.

If I do write this, I've got probably about a month and a half to really hammer it out and actually make it before things start going wild in my life, and I think doing this definitely helped. I still love Bandori, or the parts of what Bandori was back then that I fell in love with. Talking about it would be interesting.

I love getting really excited about ideas to write things. It feels like it happens so often.