I summarized the School Star Dream Change!! manga to a good friend last night. for those just tuning in, School Star Dream is an idol mobage where the selling point is you grow up alongside the game's idols going from elementary to middle to high school. in fact the game did not sell very much at all and closed after 3 months of poor patronage, followed by 9 months of maintenance, followed by 3 months of complete disaster.
the story is very generic pro-idol school life content, and Change!! is an original adaptation based on it that ran for 6 chapters (entirely during those 9 maintenance months). it's mostly normal but has one chapter that absolutely broke me while I was on an hour long train ride with no phone battery. so let's get to the summary
so kumi is your standard main-character school idol, right. she likes sentai and she's super cheerful. so far, the first two chapters have been about her (with the help of her manager/classmate maki) getting her first big break, a small stage performance at a shopping mall. this is basically an extended gag/arc of "what if you could achieve your greatest ambition, but you had to eat the food you hated the most in the entire world and say it's delicious". weird flex but ok
skipping chapter 3, chapters 4-6 are something that feel out of an idol anime playbook. our idol group (kumi plus two more from chapter 3) get a huge chance to enter an idol competition, only to find out that it's rigged to make the big name win and they're just the cannon fodder. they lose hope, gain resolve, and prove their superior talent in the end by hosting a live the same day as Big Idol's live and stealing all of their fans by force. sure whatever
so chapter 3...
(read more)
chapter 3 begins with maki being told that she's now in charge of a second idol, kusonoki. kusonoki is a blonde tomboy-looking idol who is actually a childhood friend of kumi's, and while maki shows kusonoki around school, they stumble upon the drama club and its director kotomi, who sees kusonoki and immediately casts her as romeo in an upcoming performance of r&j.
during practice, kotomi becomes increasingly frustrated by kusonoki, whose romeo performance she judges to be technically proficient but lacking heart. this leads to kusonoki and maki having an evening heart-to-heart on the school rooftop where (breathes)
kusonoki reveals that she transferred into the idol program because she wanted to be like kumi. since they were young, she had always adored kumi's cheerfulness and spirit, but was always stuck being cast as the romeos to her juliets in class plays.
she adored kumi and wished she could make others smile the same way she did, but this feeling made her feel more and more twisted and jealous, until she decided to join the sports program to get as far away from these feelings as possible.
but it turns out fate had a different hand for her, because kusonoki ended up running into kumi's performance in chapter 2 and being awed again by her presence and how she could make others smile. she felt her heart that she locked away start to move again, and thought, maybe she could allow herself to dream.
maki interrupts her. "you of all people can definitely do it!"
kusonoki sadly laughs and refuses. she's played romeo countless times, yet kotomi saw through her like she was a piece of paper, saw her for how shallow she was. she's nothing but a fake romeo who can't stop yearning after princesses. who was she to think she could make people smile? maybe some dreams are best being left as dreams...
anyway the resolution basically gets shoved into four pages after this; maki pulls some strings and gets kusonoki switched into juliet's role. kusonoki tries to resist but maki says "it's a manager's job to make idols into who they want to be" and gives her a friendly push. it goes really well, etc etc, they all live happily ever after
but yeah?????????????