I’ve added a new “Diary” page called “From the Creator”.  I’ve lately felt the need to post things in my voice, and this seems the best way.  Don’t worry, I’ll keep this story related.  But I think it’s time I talk about some things that I’ve had to be careful about putting on the “diary”.  See, the diary is supposed to be in Lily’s voice.  I did add that “footer” where I write comments, but I didn’t really like doing that, even when I did it.  So this seemed like a good compromise.

Anyway, I really wanted to talk about idols.

About halfway through the story, I started introducing some Japanese idol characters.  It started with Yuki (whose real name is Rika, but Lily will never reveal that in-story).  This happened because I listened to the song “Idol” by “Yoasobi”, who wrote the OP for “Oshi no ko”, an anime about, well, the idol industry.  And there’s something about that whole thing that really struck a nerve with me.  It’s an industry full of girls and young women (well, some men too, but…) who basically are required to form parasocial relationships with their fans.  It really made me sad, and I knew that I needed to add some into my story.  And, well, I did.

It started with Yuki, but I then added the After-School Friends Idol Light Music Club (which I deliberately named to mush together pretty much every trope that idols like to put forth) and then Minami joined, Lily made close friends with Miki, and Yuki’s friends Suzuka and Haruka came to visit as well.  Basically, Lily found herself quite enmeshed in the idol world, without actually becoming one herself.  That was a conscious decision on my part, her not becoming one, because I always wanted to be examining that world from the outside.

But what you may not know is that I know quite a bit about that world, and many of the events that occurred are taken directly from actual events that happened in the idol world.

A few examples:

• Yuki said that she had a concert in front of twenty thousand people where she wore a beautiful dress and couldn’t stop crying.  This was taken directly from the last eight minutes of Watanabe Mayu’s (an AKB48 idol) graduation.  It’s on Youtube.  It might make you cry.  Poor girl.
• Yuki also said that they put her in a bride’s outfit as a part of a variety show and had her fellow idols write her letters.  This was an episode of AKBingo.  I don’t know if the tears stopped when the cameras turned off, but it really wouldn’t surprise me at all.
• Minami sang her heart out on the live house’s stage and then ran to the back office where she sobbed her heart out.  This also happened on an episode of AKBingo, where a girl had to do a competition to star in “Wiz”.  She sang a song about going home, and put so much of herself into it that she ran out of the room and was sobbing her heart out.  I actually felt rather bad that the cameras followed her out and were being shoved in her face, but I guess that’s the nature of the business.

There were a few other situations that Lily and her idol friends found themselves in that closely tracked a lot of real life idol events.  Like, for example, when the idol group went to Houston, and they went around town getting footage of them having fun.  This was inspired heavily by Morning Musume’s trip to Houston in 2016 – the bonus DVD.

So I took a lot of inspiration from actual idol culture.  I’m not an idol and I’ve never even been to Japan, but I know enough about it that the inspiration was real and not just making stuff up.

The thing is, I actually feel really bad for idols.  I mean, I took great pains to not be too preachy about it in-story.  Yuki was always careful to say how she loved it as much as it hurt her, and all the other idols also had some really good memories and experiences of their time as an idol.  The point was never to be preachy about it.  I think ultimately, secondary to writing a good story, my hope was that an actual idol might read this and feel seen.  Like someone out there understand, even if a little bit, how terribly lonely they might feel.

I remember seeing a Youtube video of a Japanese idol, an AKB48 idol, who was sitting in her home in front of the computer crying about how she couldn’t afford chicken nuggets and matcha cookies.  She really wanted chicken nuggets and matcha cookies, and didn’t even have enough money for that.  I seem to remember that Lily even made an oblique reference to that at one point.  She was back to normal a couple of days later, but that’s always stuck with me.  Sometimes you just want chicken nuggets and matcha cookies, and it must feel awful to be such a beloved idol and not even have those basic, well, needs isn’t the right word, fulfilled.  It’s kind of a luxury, but such a small luxury that I feel so bad that she was so torn up about it.

Why do I feel so deeply and strongly about this?  I don’t know.  Maybe because I kind of understand, a little bit.  I know how it feels to have people claim to know you, but not be seen.  And that kind of thing – deep relationships – is not as common in Japanese culture as maybe it should be.

Everyone deserves to be seen… truly seen, I think.

Okay, now for some site news.

I have been working on this site.  Unfortunately, with 520,000 words spread across over a thousand diary posts, it is particularly difficult to manage, particularly because I need to go through and do some significant edits to it.  Not only are there spelling and grammar errors sprinkled throughout that probably significantly interfere with the Japanese translation, but there are times when I could have shown, not told.  Sometimes Lily talks about conversations she had with people, and it might be better if those conversations were recounted “verbatim” rather than recounted as a story after the fact.  I’m writing a wordpress plugin or two to help me with some of this, like the spelling errors, but the other things are systemic and will take me a long time to fix.  I have a vacation coming up and am blocking out a significant amount of time (amongst other projects and naps) to work on that.

As I mentioned in other places, too, I also removed all of the subscription stuff, and will be removing all references to it, probably this weekend.  Even when I started adding it, I was a bit torn, and I still am.  But at the end of the day, I decided that if it’s something I need to hide away, it’s not something that needs to be in the story, and it’s just not worth all the trouble.  It’s not so much that I’m ashamed of it, I’m not, but more that it just doesn’t fit what I want this story to be.  Lily’s human and never intended to be a virginal or Mary Sue character, but some things, I think, are best left to the imagination.

Anyway, I guess that’s enough of that for now.  As flawed as this story is, I think I will always consider it one of my greatest achievements, and I think I can make it even better.