My favourite subject is Team 4! Takashima Yurina arrived as a member of Minegishi Team 4 in 2013 at Tokyo Dome, joining Aigasa Moe, Kitazawa Saki, Shinozaki Ayana, Murayama Yuiri, Mogi Shinobu, Okada Ayaka, Kojima Mako, Okada Nana, Nishino Miki, Hashimoto Hikari, and others in the lineup of the new team. Having auditioned in 2011, Yuurin had slowly been working up support as a member of the kenkyuusei and a member of the thirteenth generation alongside many of her new Team 4 peers and at last it had started to pay off!



Yuurin's first performance in the theatre was during a revival of Aitakatta alongside the other members of her generation in 2011. A year later, after she had passed the selection exam then mandatory to fully enter the group, and became an established presence, those early performances resulting in an increased attention that led to her being promoted to Minegishi's new team. Having long been a fan of AKB48, Yuurin had initially tried out for the twelfth generation alongside Hirata Rina, Saeed Yokota Erena, Muto Tomu, Tano Yuka, and Sasaki Yukari, but had failed to pass the test. By the time the next auditions came around, she had apparently doubled down and whatever it was that had been wanting in her earlier was nowhere to be seen when it came time to decide on those selected.

With all this and a year in Team 4 under her belt, when 2014's next big concert took place, it was announced that she was being shuffled into SKE48's Team KII... only it never happened. Following a cancellation announcement, Yuurin informed us in a Google+ post that she had protested, offering the rationale that such a big move would have interfered with her studies. I think it would have been nice to believe that it was her loyalty to Team 4 that motivated her, but sadly less than a year after the abortive transfer, she announced her graduation, suggesting, maybe rightly so, that whilst being on that stage was important to her, graduating well from high school was maybe more so.

During her time in AKB48, Yuurin never managed to rank in the elections or appear in the senbatsu, but she was present on a number of B sides from Gingham Check onwards. Although she described herself as both timid and weak, it is clear that her time in AKB meant a lot to her and that those three years were an important part of her childhood. Our last news of Yuurin comes from 2024, when she posted about her work at an advertising agency, and whether she is still doing that or not, it only remains for us to wish her luck and hope that whatever is happening now, she still finds time to look back on those days between 2011-2014 fondly.

Title: CaseX: Nail
Universe: Kamen Rider Zeztz, Kamen Rider Black
Character(s): Yozoru Baku, Minami Kotaro, Zero, Yozoru Minami, Nem, Fujimi Tetsuya, Nagumo Nasuka, Akizuki Kyoko
Rating: U
Warnings: N/A
Summary: Out of the corner of his eye, he kept seeing the man in black. Not whilst awake, that would have unsettled him greatly, yet always in his dreams, just around the corner of a long, dark corridor, there was a presence watching each moment unfold, the terrible speed with which each conflict with each new Nightmare escalated.
Length: 8215 words
Author's Notes: I kept making the same joke about how Black was going to be the second Rider in Zeztz, and then, because I am an idiot, I committed hard. I tried to write this as a normal episode of the show in order to make the joke work, the story diverging just after episode #5, so there is none of my typical nonsense, and hopefully I will proved to you all now that I have scope and now you will leave me alone to just write weird stuff. So dedicated was I to making this happen, that I even bugged Rei until he did mockups of the armour Baku uses in this just to shut me up. Please see the end for details. also: external link.



( CaseX: Nail )

Title: Stephen King's 5 Nen 3 Kumi Mahogumi
Universe: 5 Nen 3 Kumi Mahogumi, Kamen Rider Zi-o, Akumaizer 3
Character(s): Ohara Asako, Iwadate Mosuke, Hanako, MJ-kun, Tokiwa Junichiro (Takeda Rinichi), Munakata Masaki, Chibibara, Yuko
Rating: U
Warnings: N/A
Summary: To the children, the town was their whole world. Ohara Asako, once the daughter of a local neighbourhood barber, now a member of the Alchemys Union's Investigation Department is chasing the trail of counterfeit Chemy cards, yet as she uncovers a plot that overshadows her future she is forced more and more to confront the secrets of her past. "Stephen King's 5 Nen 3 Kumi Mahogumi will overwhelm you... Characters so real you feel you are reading about yourself... scenes to be read in a well-lit room only." - Los Angeles Times. "A great book... a landmark in American literature." - Chicago Sun-Times. "The Moby-Dick of horror novels." - Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
Length: 1209, 1099, & 865 words
Author's Notes: Like doubling down on a joke you've told yourself that no one else finds funny. also: external links 1, 2, 3



( 5 Nen 3 Kumi Mahogumi )

( 5 Nen 3 Kumi Mahogumi, Kamen Rider Zi-o )

( 5 Nen 3 Kumi Mahogumi, Akumaizer 3 )

I promise these are the last two little fics I will post about this for now. As an indication of how on it I am right now, I've literally put in the dates for every big skating competition in my calendar and I very excited about the ISU Junior World Championships this week, and I have been quietly listening to the streams with one ear throughout these past two days. Again, I don't know anything about figure skating really, but I looked through the roster and realised that Hong Kong and Japan are both sending athletes to this competition and I started thinking... one day these kids might actually be at the Olympics, and wouldn't it be really great to be able to look back at that and think "Oh, I remember when they competed in 2026." So far, from the men's short programme, my favourite has been Nikita Sheiko of Israel, and from the women's programme, I thought New Zealand's Renee Tsai should have ranked higher, but I was obviously supporting Hong Kong's Ariel Guo. I felt like I was suddenly seeing behind the curtain seeing the lady who makes the flower crowns for athletes at almost every one of these big events, and learning that Thailand's Phattaratida Kaneshiga now trained in Niigata, and Japan's Oka Mayuko came from the same clique as Chiba Mone. It's kind of scary for me to reflect on how young some of these kids are, it's kind of crazy seeing Italain pair skaters gliding across the ice to Ghibli music also. I feel like I'm learning a lot about how pop culture bakes into people's lives lately; the people who chose these pieces for the free skates, I'm sitting here watching and listening and trying to understand how these songs informed those choices, what they mean to them, what they're trying to tell me.

Everyone has been very kind to me whilst I'm going through this and beating myself up for no reason about simply liking something that my friends like. I feel very self-conscious in "sports circles," having been a deeply unatheletic child, but I really fell in love here and it was only when a wiser, kinder friend phrased their own enjoyment of sports as being about narratives, as being about the hope that "your guy can win against the other guy"—I'm paraphrasing here—that I began to forgive myself a little for being here. The clarity of that statement just really resonated with me, it made sense to me. Through dance and movement, I felt like I understood the stories that skaters during the Olympics were trying to tell and that really hit me heard. I love storytelling, guys, I love exploring different ways of telling stories and... well, the Olympics felt like a masterclass in telling stories for me. I also love the fact that the pairs skating has moves with names like "death spiral" because instantly that makes me feel right at home. I do, however, promise to post something else soon, I again have a bunch of things that I've just stockpiled, and I recently watched all of 5 Nen 3 Kumi Mahogumi, a Toei tokusatsu show from 1976, and I really, really liked it, it stayed in my head for a long longer than I thought it would, becoming a quiet favourite of late.

On Monday, I stumbled across the collaboration between KATE Tokyo's lipstick brand, Lip Monster, and Kamen Rider for an advert featuring Amane Tensho as Mikazuki Nayuta, previously from the Girls Remix specials, and I was really blown away by it. It felt like Kamen Rider and I felt it did not compromise on the idea of Nayuta being both feminine and really, really mad with her lot in life. I feel these brief ten minutes recontextualised the character and ignored certain aspects of Girls Remix in order to allow her to stand on her own, and I'm really okay with this. I think everyone knows that I didn't enjoy the Girls Remix specials and I'm really, really over director Sakamoto Koichi's "quirks," so... yeah, I'm good with this, there's a specific moment in which I feel Amane Tensho's real life family connexions influence how you are supposed to interpret her character and I'm absolutely fine with that too. I never thought Kamen Rider would try and sell me lipstick, but here we are.

STU48's brand new single is released to-day! What do you mean you didn't realise STU48 were still releasing singles? As established, I have spent a lot of money this week, but I still ordered both copies of Sukisugite Naku because last year's single, Kizutsuku Koto ga Seishun da really made an impact on me. The centre of this new single is not, however, Takao Sayaka, but rather the third draft's Nakamura Mai.



Arriving in 2017 alongside NMB48's Abe Wakana and AKB48's Omori Maho, the third draft went into effect in 2018 and MaiQ made her first appearance with the relatively new group. She is there in the senbatsu for STU's second single, the delightful Kaze wo Matsu, and since that moment, despite not even being in the group's first generation, she has been a regular feature in every release since, acting as one of three centres in 2022 for Hana wa Dare no Mono? alongside Takino Yumiko and Ishida Chiho; outside of B sides and stage performances, however, this is MaiQ's first time as the centre of a new single, and whenever this happens in one of the smaller 48 groups, the provincial 48 groups, I immediately look to see if it is a consolation prize for that particular member's graduation. Good news, everyone! It doesn't look like that's the case here!

For the longest time, it has felt like MaiQ's apotheosis to centre has been on the cards. From as early as 2018, with the release of AKB48's NO WAY MAN, she appeared with other members of the sister groups aged under 19—including former NGT darlings Kato Minami and Takakura Moeka—on B side Ohayo Kara Hajimaru Sekai, a song which to, my mind, has more heart than the A side it accompanies, offering more of a glimpse of the flavour of what the provincial groups might become.

Despite being in the draft pool together, MaiQ and Oki Yuka did not become friends until they both joined STU, a missed opportunity that they soon made up for, the two of them often referred to as OkiMai by fans, both of them setting the tone for what STU would be as Okada Nana returned to her main activities and the group was left to stand on its own. Against all odds, the girl who inherited her nickname from school due to her lips, making her apparently like the titular Obake no Q-Taro, has become one of the most familiar faces in the group, and this centre position for the new single feels long, long overdue. Congratulations, MaiQ! 🎉💖