NMB48: NMB48 Team Betsu de Yattande! Team BII

I’m actually very bitter over the shuffle. Like, I wanna quit the group-level of bitterness. I’ll try to avoid that and keep my thoughts to a later post.

I was really curious when reading BII Members’ G+ about something they were doing, with BKB and on Idol Revue… whatever that is. But it seemed fun. And here it is!

… I hate you. Why would you bring that up now.

Ok, so in reality, they’re gonna do plays/live action.

Supposedly they did a horrible skit during the Osaka Jo concert (they certainly didn’t do it on the day I saw it) and we should remember the skit they did for New Year’s, which was laugh-at-able, not laugh-with-able… except for Yuuri, who was somehow the funniest without saying anything.

So they gathered up all of BII and had them “audition” to be separated into teams.

Either this rapping fellow’s team…

Or this guy’s team. He kinda looks like a character from Advance Wars.

The audition process consisted of some improv acting and some rapping.

The thought of Konomin rapping makes me giggle.

Sakipi’s voice and rapping is just… heh.

“They have nothing but cuteness.”

Hiphop-man makes a good point. It would be nice to actually develop their talent through things like this play, increasing their confidence and rhythm and dance skills and singing instead of, oh, I dunno, moving people around to other teams and/or cities for some unknown reason. Certainly, people would be even more attracted to talented and cute girls, right?

Shuu started tearing up because she felt that she half-assed the audition. Gotta love the “don’t wanna lose” mentality of BII.

Team split, with left side being the dramatic side and the right side being the hip hop side.

Then we see them get their scripts. Most surprising is Anchu’s reaction.

She starts crying after flipping through the script because she’s worried about memorizing her lines.

All of us who’ve seen Geinin 2 remember a lot of Anchu’s entertaining NG scenes, but man… she took it pretty hard when she looked at the script. In the NG scenes you could tell she felt really guilty too, even though everyone was trying to cheer her up (I believe Milky mentioned that she fell asleep because of the multiple takes though) and I guess she really felt it here. And she didn’t even attempt to act it out yet, she just flipped through the script.

Tough times for a TEAM to overcome. Sure would be nice if they all STUCK TOGETHER and helped each other through it.

Mako is our star for the drama.

They included footage of Mako’s graduation announcement. Curiously, in this segment, she mentioned that one of her dreams was to become an actress.

Could it be, that Mako graduated because NMB was taking time away from her to become an actress? It would be curious if that were the case, as she also announced she was going to high school, and in a stage show prior to the graduation announcement she also mentioned she got the highest score on a math exam. Is it school, or is it acting? She never really mentioned it.

Improv acting!

I took acting class twice, in high school and in university. Both teachers I had, had roots in improv acting. And let me say, it’s really fun. You play a bunch of games and loosen up in the beginning. Come to think of it, I really did enjoy acting. Maybe in some alternate world I became a starving actor in Hollywood doing low budget plays in janky theaters. But for now I’m some boring government employee with a title of engineer. Meh.

Anyway, this teacher looked pretty cool and fun.

On the other hand…

The rap group was centered with Murokana, and I dunno why but they made the coach look like a dick. Non-stop criticism and off-hand sarcastic comments. No one looked like they were having fun. It was pretty awful.

They had these funny looking guys do funny looking dances.

No reaction though.

Muro is struggling, so they decide to take her to the mean streets of America-Mura in Osaka to level up her rapping.

Oh jesus

They looked pretty salty, but this is Japan. I would not want to bump into people dressed like that in LA. They were actually pretty friendly. One of the guys had a “Neighborhood Watch” hoodie on, and I would’ve been super impressed if that was a Dilated Peoples reference. But alas, it was not.

After some initial coldness, she did pretty well, so then they suggested to go outside and try it.

That face though.

Have you tried freestyle rap? It’s pretty hard. I have pretty good rhythm and people are impressed when we go Karaoke and I can rap flawlessly, but freestyle is like… man, how do you even come up with that stuff so fast. A few years ago I bought the Rapstar game for 360 and my cousin and brother crushed the regular mode, so we were bored and just started messing around with the freestyle mode. For some reason I turn into Nate Dogg when I freestyle. Go figure.

She gains confidence when people are impressed by her terrible rhymes. And the guy in the car in the back was like “WTF”

The thing is, when you’re terrible, if you’re still having fun it’s all good and it loosens you up and your audience. That might be why we had so much fun with the freestyle mode of Rapstar, we were just messing around with rhymes and ended up terribly rapping for 3 hours. So good on Muro.

WTF we’re starting already?

He tells them that they still suck, 15 minutes before the performance.

Uh, not very inspiring, are we.

The crowd starts to gather.

Hey, I know that guy in the audience.

And I know that MC also!

The play was surprisingly well done.

Luckily, Anchu didn’t miss any of her lines, and they acted quite well. You’d have never known, compared to their prior skits that they did. As a Team of BII. Before they did their Team BII song. Almond Croissant.

The hip hop dance team thingy!

The other team really just needed more time to gel. They missed a lot of dance steps and it seemed like they didn’t have enough practice. Still, Uuka, Sakipi, and Konomin were awesome rapping. Actually, in general Uuka was just killing out there, time and time again she’s proven that she’s a stud performer. The Faint unit looks different when Konomin centers in Uuka’s absence, and even though Konomin’s more than technically proficient, Uuka adds so much soul to Faint and elevates everyone else too.

It would be nice if they were able to just get her more songs and performances to boost her stock instead of, oh, I dunno, putting in random people from AKB into the group to shove her out of senbatsu or something.

Konomin’s role was to play the clown and get people hype. That might be why I like Konomin so much, she reminds me a lot of me when I was in improv class and I was the clowny one. Which is funny, because I’m really an engineer. Or maybe I’m really a clown.

Mako’s team wins.

“It’s great that as Team BII we can pull off something as big as this.”

That’s great, ain’t it, Emichi. Ain’t it.

And in the only move that seems non-dickish, the guy gets Muro some spring rolls because she rapped about how she wanted to eat some in an improv session.

I think the hiphop team would’ve been way better if it didn’t seem like the guy was a douche all the time. He really didn’t need that and they didn’t really need that. Overall the performance was actually quite fun too, and the whole thing was really fantastic to watch for BII fans.