Just as my second year of high school started, I was told my school was shutting down.
“What will happen to my glittering school life!?”
The only way to stop it shutting down was to increase the number of students coming in. So I decided to join the current wave of school idols, and help sell my school to the world! But...
“You can’t be an idol!” “You have to think carefully about what’s best for you.”
But I still want to do something for my school! I won’t give up! I’m gonna make this happen!
From Love Live: Episode 2: Let’s Start Being Idols!
This story was a fanfiction rewrite of a famous and popular idol anime, Love Live! (from which the above summary is taken). Which made it the most problematic submission in the history of the contest. The original title was Last and First Yazawa. It first appeared at a Love Live only event (Bokura no Love Live! 7) held on March 15th, 2015, in a doujinshi (School Idol Fictionally) published by a group calling themselves the Otonokizaka High School Sci-Fi Club.
“A story that started as idol anime fanfiction received a special award at the prestigious and storied Hawakawa Sci-fi Awards!” That news tore through the internet. When the winning entry was published as an ebook on November 22nd, 2016, the reaction was even bigger. After all, the content was nothing like what you’d expect from the words ‘idol anime fanfiction.’
An aspiring idol who meets an untimely death and is brought back by her med-student friend as a bizarre monster, and to adapt to the destructive changes in the Earth’s environment she must alter herself, evolving, and eventually setting off for outer space... Gengen Kusano himself described it as, “A work about the universe, consciousness, and the solution to the mystery of idols, inspired by Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Star Maker” and “An existential widescreen yuri baroque proletariat hard sci-fi idol story.” What, at a glance, appears to be strings of meaningless sentences turned out to be entirely purposeful. (Incidentally, the original version’s opening is available on the art sharing site pixiv: https://www.pixiv.net/novel/show.php?id=4992326. The story plays out much the same as the revised edition, only with the Love Live! Characters Nico Yazawa and Maki Nishikino — or Nicomaki — only when Nico-nii is hit by a truck, Maki-chan removes her brain and spinal column from the body.)
Despite this shocking content, or perhaps because of it, the work hit number one on Amazon’s ebook rankings. Not only that, it walked away with the 48th Seiun Award (Japanese short story division), as voted on by sci-fi fans who participate in the Japanese SF Convention. This placed it at the pinnacle of all sci-fi short stories written in Japanese and published in 2016. For a new author’s debut work to score a Seiun Award hasn’t happened in 42 years, since Masaki Yamada’s Kamigari.
While this work provoked some harsh responses from the Sci-fi Contest jury, how did it end up with such widespread support?
...let me go on a tangent, here.
Since the start of the 21st century, otaku culture has suddenly been mainstreamed. It’s totally normal for high school students, college students, and grown-ups alike to watch anime. Despite the permeation and spread of otaku culture, among its supporters are some ‘bad’ otaku. These men (and women) obviously love cute girls, and adore 2D characters and voice actors and idols, but they have equal love for other genres like sci-fi, mysteries, or horror, and it is not unusual for them to have specialized education in history, military, information technology, biology, etc. This, in and of itself, is perfectly normal. People are multifaceted and have varied interests. What makes the ‘bad’ otaku ‘bad’ is that rather than love each genre on its own, they plot to combine them at the slightest opportunity. If an anime full of cute girls gives them the smallest excuse, they’ll instantly latch onto it. The second they sense that potential, they pounce, dragging things into their own specialties, coming up with all sorts of logic to back it, and twisting it into something tasteless and grotesque. For example, “There are no men in that anime because all mankind was wiped out in a nuclear war, and the school is an AI utopia replicated within a nuclear shelter...” or “The reason the male commander leading the fighting bishojo never shows himself is because he’s actually already dead and the girls carry on their pointless war because they just can’t admit it...” or “XXX doesn’t actually exist! Reality and fiction are blurred! Soba eaten standing! Dogs!” etc. Even now, the bad otaku are among us, posting their dread missives to social media.
An adorable story about cute girls singing, dancing, following their dreams, working hard... An idol anime like that was fused with a hard sci-fi story about unnatural human evolution. This is what Gengen Kusano has done, and the readers gleefully yelling, “Why would you combine THOSE!?” are really birds of a feather. Most likely, his creation lies at the end of the road lined by the bad otaku’s dread missives. But Gengen Kusano’s ‘bad’ is beyond the pale. Where your ordinary bad otaku would limit their dreck to 140 characters, allowing it to amount to little more than a joke, a harmless prank, this dastardly villain actually followed through.
Depicting a world in which a solar flare of unknown cause brings the Earth to the brink of destruction, leading to the birth of a new ecosystem of man-made creatures, and the unnatural idol who evolves to adapt to it, the story is based on serious scientific research. As bizarre as it is, it isn’t ‘anything goes.’ What appears to be unfettered evolution is connected by the question of where consciousness comes from, and that in turn goes from the macro level of the Earth’s consciousness, of the universe’s consciousness, down to the micro level with the reader’s own (my own) consciousness, explaining clearly the Monopole Super Flare that started everything, and bringing things to a striking close. The gap between ‘just a joke’ and reality, bridged with careful logic and research, makes it a true work of science fiction. The intersection of that logic and research takes this ‘joke’ to the furthest reaches of the galaxy and makes this story a masterpiece. A joke carried to violent extremes. A realm reached at the limits of one’s passions. Last and First Idol is a work that pulls all of that off.