[GENERAL] The AKB48 Thread

Only two shows are broadcast which is "Nemousu TV" and "AKB48 Team 8 no Kanto Hakusho".

It's great to meet the YT but this is not enough to promote and get to know the members.

 

It's their loss..

 

Can you think of a bigger push than performing with Team A in Niigata? And she blew it.

 

or she didn't

 

Wasn't Team B originally meant to be kinda the cute, young and fresh team? They have 6 members in the first gen and only 2 in the second gen line-up. I'm also surprised to see Orin is the Muto sister that got picked for these special line-ups and Tomu is left out.

 

Yeah, I'd think there has to be some kind of scheduling conflict that's made them pick Orin over Tomu.

 

Tomu is considered old gen, so they wouldn't be part of the same line-up anyway but I am still surprised she's not part of the first generation line-up.

 

I think it's really time for a mass graduation for most of these "old gen" girls, at least all the ones from 1st to 9th-10th gen, they're here for 10+ years at least and most of them are really doing nothing for most of the times, they're now just using the "AKB" name to get a minimum salary and promote their youtube channels. This group is just full of leeches and really needs to push strong new gen girls if it wants to have a chance to still be a rival of "46 groups" again, now Sakamichi groups are on their own competitions, they're media favourites, and every girl who wants to be an idol would choose between Nogizaka, Sakurazaka and Hinatazaka, not the AKB group where you even have more girls to compete with in order to shine, and there's lot of oldies who don't wanna move on and graduate. More members, less popular, less job opportunities... why a new girl would choose to be an idol for the 48 group nowadays? Only if she knows she's not good enough to be chosen for the sakamichi ones.

 

All draft members are in the 2nd generation, including the first draft. Technically most of 15th gen debuted before the 1st draft, so this makes some sense. Megu though...

They're still the cute team, but I think "young and fresh" has been taken over by Team 4 for a while now.

 

Can you blame them? I'd love to get a stipend just to stay home and do nothing.

If the numbers are a problem, blame the management. They're the ones that keep adding these 19-nin generations to the group

 

Have you forgotten the entire gimmick of D3?

And back when 16th gen joined it looked like AKB *needed* that many new members. Except that still wasn't enough, so management decided to patch the holes using the ever-renewing numbers of Team 8. If you really want to find someone to blame...

 

Toyota? But my car is so good!

I think it also has to do with the way the group is set up.
The Sakamichi groups don't really care about their numbers because they basically just use the Senbatsu/Under system, with a few units and solos here and there.

The 48G had to go and make it about teams and every team is supposed to have 16 members. That means that, according to their original plan, A, K, B and 4 should have 16 members each (64 girls) + the 47 from Team 8 (111 girls) and... a healthy crop of 16 KKS just in case? That's 127 girls the group should need in theory. We're at 91 and people are complaining about having too many.

So... what now?

I don't think the problem is in the numbers, but the lack of chances given to the girls. And I'm not talking about finding them jobs on TV or magazine shoots or whatever, but within AKB.
Team songs and new stages would be nice, for a start. And with the lack of releases in the past 2 years... they should have enough songs in that hard drive for a couple of those.

 

True. The fans pretty much subverted the D3 event by choosing loads of girls.

The number of members was right for when AKB had loads of gravure shoots and tv spots and senbatsu members were barely ever available for theater. But now even yukirin is available for stages whenever so they have more members than they know what to do with and the newer members consequently take longer to come good (Honma Mai et al).

Covid has thrown a spanner in the works, so after the vaccines and all that maybe they'll transition to fewer members on the stage, maybe 8 member stages or something?

Remember TD2013 when we were promised stages for every team? Then in 2014 the Pachinko lady took over AKS and we only ended up with N3 and A7. Everyone always blames Aki-p for being lazy or having too much other work but I think that it's more likely that Pachinko lady doesn't see new stages as a priority and isn't willing to pay for new songs and costumes just for the theater (which already loses money just by existing). They just want to milk existing songs for all their worth without investing in new stuff

 

Some news about FNS today - according to ModelPress, as a replacement for their cancelled performance there was a 5-minute VTR with a short presentation from Miion, a clip of the original theater stage on 2005/12/08 and then a compilation of excerpts from past FNS shows:
https://mdpr.jp/music/detail/2342387

And here is that VTR from FNS today (credit to uploader):
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1CV41187t1

 

Look at that adorable little Mion-chkin in the middle.

 

Good old times... Sometimes I wish AKB would be like this today... Feeling they relied to long on their "big impact" and didn't move forward I hope they forget about the Million thing and go back to good old idol stuff... Releasing new stages, idol music (f++k these sales, even digital release are fine but waiting till cover etc is over is just mehhhhh!) and new interesting things to get new fans and entertain the old ones

 

Well, the "original" plan only had teams A, K, and B, with 16-20 girls each. If they want to keep the team structure I think they'll eventually need to go back to that, but there's a lot of things preventing them from doing so at the moment. Instead there seems to have been a half-hearted attempt to copy STU48 with the units, except every STU48 member is in at least one, and we have tons of members in AKB48 without a unit. I wouldn't mind seeing more unit-based stuff (NGT and I think HKT are doing it now too, at least in the theater), but we need more than just the handful that are active now.

Really I think AKB48's biggest weakness for a long time now has been a lack of creative direction, a lack of vision for the group's future in the upper levels of management.

 

Team 4 has been useless for quite some time already and should be dispersed asap

and that is connected with the messy team structure after all, they actually don't have any vision for how it should look like - and that's for 2 years already!

Pretty much the only vision they had in the last two or so years was to make Moeka the chosen one (but please no Moeka discussion again). If I imagine 2020 without corona, I'm still not sure they would have brought something groundbreakingly interesting. I mean, it's ironical that without yet knowing what 2020 was to turn like, the thing they began the year with was YT channels - in the year of booming internet content, we still haven't seen two of the announced even started.