Oshi no Ko – A Journey in Idol’s World!
Under the sparkling lights of the show business, the shadows are darker!
This is especially true in the world of Japanese Idols where through a non-stopping exchange of ideas and desires between fans and agencies; thousands of aspiring stars lose their identities to fulfill the will of the audience representing specific styles, cultures, and historical periods.
Nowadays the idol universe is divided into many different worlds able to make happy a vast number of people… Net idols, Virtual idols, Akiba-kei idols, Junior idols, the list is actually endless. Through the decades, these girls – normally portrayed as cute, pure, modest, and full of promise – captured the imagination of a whole country driving its musical tastes and its standards of beauty into a continuous search that can be satisfied only for a fixed amount of time (normally few years).
As a sort of “sacred symbol”; in Japan, these young superstars are seen not as real people, but as a means to create new trends to earn even more commercial profits; idols started to become popular during the second half of the 60s, while all the singer of the past have adults as the main target, thanks to this actual generational revolution both for appearance and lyrics the target was young people (especially the mid/high school students). Exploiting an innovative appliance, the television, millions of teenagers make this artistic revolution a very important phenomenon; capturing the attention of dozens of big companies that competing to sponsor the most shining stars of this new universe. Soon after their appearance, through the years, idols participated in thousands of movies, advertisements, fashion shows, and much more to become real idols (in a religious means).
There are two sides to every success!
The people that worship their favorite idols have the opportunity to follow them using many different channels: magazines, websites, blogs, TV, and obviously live shows; all of them are essential for fans to express their love, and for the agencies to exploit an actual “golden goose” that if managed savvily can become a global superstar. Unfortunately, some of them are victims of stalking by a very little number of fans that can get to hurt their idol; we clearly have seen this in the anime masterpiece Perfect Blue, and in the new wonderful series Oshi no Ko!
Appeared on the pages of Young Jump, the manga created by Aka Akasaka & Mengo Yokoyari explores the dark side of the idol world following a non-linear mature story of success, reincarnation, ambitions, lies, and dreams. In the 116 episodes, we can easily understand how being a superstar could be hard, especially in the case of being stalked by fans. In this series, entertainment is not the main focus, the main focus is business, and we can clearly see that idols are not people, but puppets that must be sold to the audience to earn much money as possible.
Stardust hit the fans!
Despite the many controversial aspects of show business, Oshi no Ko is a lucid analysis of all that’s good and bad in this field. This brand-new masterpiece deserves a lot of attention and fame, and luckily its quality has not gone unnoticed being nominated for many prestigious awards such as the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, the Shogakukan Manga Award, and the Kodansha Manga Award.
Don’t miss the opportunity to enjoy Oshi no Ko; this series is a real sociological journey in contemporary Japan, and it can help each of us to better understand the dynamics that move the world of the idol business and culture!
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