Gotou Julia
FROM THE FIRST meet-and-greet up until this very moment, Impatiens had sung and danced on stage in full attendance, each of them doing their utmost to be the kind of idol they wanted to be. In actuality, there was originally going to be one more girl in the group, but she allegedly backed out before the project was fully formed. And since Julia would probably never get to meet her, she had no way to picture her.
But she could vividly remember the seven of them seemingly trapped in that big white conference room. All six faces were burned into her retinas in that circular seating position they’d been put in. One girl was grinning like she had nothing but hope in her heart, while another already had the unruffled expression of a professional. Another was shaking like a leaf with insurmountable trepidation, while yet another appeared rather stuck-up. Then there was the prettiest girl, who was averting her eyes, while the final girl slumped back in her chair like she was sick of this ordeal right out of the gate.
As they introduced themselves, Julia pledged to fight alongside them, while also realizing that they would have to fight each other, too. But in this group of girls hand-picked to be pop stars, how could she make herself special?
She thought about it, and then, chopped off her long hair the next day. That way, her appearance wouldn’t overlap with any of the others, and those who came to like her would be able to pick her out at a distance.
Once Impatiens got their start, Julia went out of her way to use masculine speech patterns that the other members would never choose, even in performances. As a result, her steadily growing fanbase shifted into a demographic that was different from the others. At their concerts, the voices who shouted her name were noticeably higher-pitched overall.
She had known herself to be a strong-willed person well before she ever became an idol, but after she joined Impatiens, she intentionally leaned into it. The old her never would have bristled at lazy whining from a coworker, and under no circumstances would she have grabbed the shirt collar of a younger girl. This series of small but purposeful decisions came together to form her concept of Gotou Julia the pop star, and she was proud of the ideal she had created.
To her, this was what being a professional looked like, and she wanted that devotion to communicate itself to her audience through her storylines. In every moment, she was always aiming higher, broader, deeper. Through her years of work as a performer, she believed without question that everything she strove for culminated in the brief moments she got to revel in her narrative alongside the fans.
“I wanted to talk about something, just to get it out of the way.”
“Oh, I bet I can guess.”
“Yeah. Although I don’t have too much to say about it.”
“I mean, it’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing, so like…”
“Exactly. It was just a phase of my life, and someone happened to record it. All I can really say is…I’m still Gotou Julia, and I always will be.”
“Was that back when you were…um…just getting your driver’s license?”
“If you’re trying to be vague, it’s not working. Anyway, uh, I think I’d had my license for quite a while at that point. But now that you’ve seen what I was like at that age, tell me, Towako: what was your life like back then?”
“Oh, I was a fairy back then. What about you, Maki?”
“Is that how we’re supposed to answer? Okay then, I was…oh! A merry-go-round.”
“Wh…what does that even mean?”
“You know, like at an amusement park?”
“No, I get that! But after I said fairy, I thought you’d pick something more…you know…alive! Well, you heard it here, folks. Maki used to be playground equipment.”
“I thought the theme was something whimsical!”
Maki’s crafted pseudo-anger made Towako laugh out loud, and Julia clapped. Then the program moved on to concert footage of a requested Impatiens song.
On the way to the music venue where today’s event would take place, Julia listened to the audio through her earbuds. This was the Impatiens video podcast, new episodes of which were uploaded every Sunday night. Each Wednesday or Thursday, two to four members would be chosen based on their schedules to take part in the recording—thirty minutes at the shortest and an hour at the longest.
About four minutes later, the audio went back to studio-quality.
“Anyway, I’m Katano Towako, here tonight with Gotou Julia and…pfft…a former merry-go-round.”
“Emukae Maki!”
Towako must have really enjoyed that joke, because her laughter lingered in the background. She kept teasing Maki with questions like “So were you one of the horses?” and “Were you the employee in charge of spinning it manually?” until eventually Maki got so genuinely annoyed that she snapped “Knock it off!” From there, Towako started trying very hard to kiss up to her, and then the forty-minute program came to an end without reading a single one of the emails their fans had taken the time to send.
The podcast listeners went crazy in the comments. “The chaos episode,” they called it. “My god, Otowa refused to let that go,” said one. “I feel like Jul’s most at fault for not stepping in,” said another. An hour after the episode went live, Maki and Towako made sure to post complementary Twitter banter:
“One of these days I’m gonna smack that fairy (; A ;) Everybody go listen to the podcast! ”
“Sure thing, Captain Merry-Go-Round (*^-^*)”
Julia had already listened to this episode the night it aired, but since there was a chance fans would bring it up at today’s VIP pre-show, she decided to refresh her memory on the walk there. Naturally, she understood that Towako had intentionally caused a stir in order to shift the topic away from that old video.
More than a week had passed since the day it leaked.
The video was taken before she was assigned to Impatiens, back in the days when she would perform solo at live music venues. And yet, her current fans already spoke about it as though it was common knowledge. It was filmed legally, and she knew full well that trying to have it taken down would only have a Streisand effect, so the management team hadn’t done much about it. They had, however, held a meeting to discuss how to avoid any negative impact to the current Gotou Julia narrative. One of their ideas was for Julia to bring it up herself on the podcast. Thus, she had spent the past week acting as though it was no big deal. But when she saw Towako’s shenanigans up close, she realized there was no fooling the other group members.
On the inside, Julia was miserable.
At 1 p.m., she contacted her manager outside the music venue, then walked inside, greeting the staff as they carried in their equipment. The show didn’t start until 7 p.m., but with rehearsals and meetings, those six hours would fly by. Large-scale venues always had dressing rooms big enough for practically a thousand people; when she stepped inside, she found Ran doing facial exercises alone in front of the mirror spanning an entire wall. This was part of her routine, as someone with exceptional beauty who had lived her life without needing to use her mimetic muscles.
“Hello, Jul. How are you?”
They made eye contact through the mirror, and Julia raised a hand in greeting. “Hey there. I’m good. What about you, Ran?”
“Oh, same as usual.”
That was the end of the conversation. Julia set her bag down on the long table, then took a seat in a chair. She knew Ran wasn’t actually worried about her health; that was just how she always greeted people. Once she got her answer, she would stop talking.
As the type of girl who was voted Most Beautiful in high school simply for existing, Ran had lived her whole life with her ego relegated to her physical traits. She wasn’t an eloquent speaker, nor praised for her communication skills, but she’d realized that if she stayed quiet, most people would extrapolate a positive impression from her appearance and education. Now that she was a pop star, she had committed even harder to presenting herself as beautiful, refined, and intelligent, preserving the façade even among fellow group members. And since Julia respected her chosen narrative, whenever the two of them ended up alone together, the end result was typically dead air.
So when it was Ran herself, not a more boisterous member, who broke the silence with a whisper, Julia was caught off-guard.
“Your face looks stiff.”
This time their eyes met not through the mirror, but in the real world. Julia put a hand to her cheek. She knew exactly what Ran was trying to say—both the literal meaning of her words and the unspoken concern afforded to her by the (just barely) eldest member of the group.
“Thanks.” She nodded. In response, Ran gave her a faint smile, then went back to her facial exercises, and by the time Ao waltzed in blaring music from her headphones, the conversation had fully ended.
In the silence, Julia contemplated the misery that plagued her.
Ever since Impatiens was first formed, though everything appeared to proceed smoothly on the surface, they had naturally tasted hardship now and then. But what lingered on Julia’s tongue right now was more bitter than anything she’d ever experienced. All she had to do was endure it, but her face and her vibes were starting to give it away. Worse, other people were misinterpreting it.
Once that video started going viral, Julia witnessed a marked increase in abuse and insults. Those who didn’t know about Impatiens criticized her then-amateur performance, costume, and singing as if it was a professional production, and those who did know about Impatiens attacked Julia for presenting a fictional character as if it was her real self. Sometimes her dedicated fans would attack the naysayers on her behalf, but even they had the wrong idea.
Thus far, Julia had crafted a version of herself that wasn’t afraid of her past being dragged out as a criticism. She would insult them in her mind, then let it go. Of course, she hadn’t accomplished this entirely on her own—she had written her storylines with the help of the people who stanned her, as well as general fans of the group who stanned other members. These things had produced the current Gotou Julia of Impatiens: a woman who stayed strong in the face of abuse.
What actually hurt was seeing the accomplices—the same people she considered co-creators—seemingly reject their own construction.
“Never seen Jul with long hair before! She looks more my type that way ”
“Jul may be embarrassed about it, since she’s such a professional, but I wish I could tell her it’s super cute and there’s nothing wrong with it.”
“I love butch Jul, but I’d totally go to a concert just to see femme Jul live on stage! #GotouJulia”
“Wow, her singing voice hasn’t changed at all!”