If you click on this expecting anything profound from the title, I’m sorry ahead of time, this will be a very silly post.
A lot of people have stories they can point to that they experienced at the perfect moment to change the course of their life. I don’t know if I have anything like that. I’m sure I’ve been influenced by my favorite media in many ways I don’t notice. Whenever I watch or read something with just the right message for me, though, I think I’ve lacked the drive to act on it right away.
There’s a chance that watching The Tatami Galaxy could have done it, but ironically, I arrived at the show’s lesson on my own shortly before watching it, and had already started putting it into practice by then. I did love the show, and I liked how it reinforced a great moral. I think about if I start slipping into old habits and remember it as motivation not to. But it didn’t change my life.
I’m not immune to product placement. In fact, I might be very susceptible to it. In my favorite franchise, the Science Adventure series, each entry’s protagonist has a different favorite soda. Okabe from Steins;Gate loves Dr Pepper, Akiho from Robotics;Notes loves Skal, Takuru from Chaos;Child loves Mountain Dew. The only reason I don’t drink those sodas all the time, to be just like them for real, is that they don’t sell them at all in my country. Takumi from Chaos;Head loves Coca-Cola, but all that means to me is that, unlike the rest of them, he has awful taste. Why is this relevant?
Revue Starlight Re LIVE, also known as Starira for short, was the gacha game tie-in to one of my favorite anime. It launched in 2018 and was eventually shut down in 2024. Aside from the Seisho Music Academy girls from the anime, the game also featured original girls from three other schools unique to the game. All the characters in the game are great in their own right and expand the world of Revue Starlight really well.
When Starira announced its End of Service, I locked in and read the full main story before the game went down, and I’m very glad I did. The third and final arc, Arcana Arcadia, is absolutely amazing. A massive epic written by the anime’s original writer that goes toe to toe with the show, movie and visual novel in how good of a story it is.
While I had casually played the game before then and had some passing familiarity with the extended cast, it was then that I got to truly know all of them fully. Among them was the Stage Girl this post is about: Yumeoji Fumi.
Yumeoji Fumi is a second-year student from the Rinmeikan Girls School but she transferred there from the Siegfeld Institute of Music, where her little sister—Yumeoji Shiori—still studies. Siegfeld is an elite school with cutthroat competition. When Fumi failed to reach the rank of Frau Platin, the highest position at the school, she leaves and becomes estranged with Shiori, breaking her promise to perform together.
Rinmeikan is a storied school that’s past its prime, with its Performance Department risking closure. At first, Fumi had sworn off acting and only joined the General Education Department but the other four members manage to recruit her. Her experience becomes crucial in the fight to save the department and her new friends become crucial in reigniting the passion within her.
Fumi’s defining quirk is her love for ponzu. She lives for that sauce. Puts it on absolutely everything. It even played a role in getting her to join Rinmeikan’s Performance Department.
Until then, I’d never heard of ponzu, or maybe I hadn’t heard of it enough times to look it up and learn about it. I love soy sauce so when I saw it was a mixture of that with citrus I was interested right away. However, my hopes were dashed when it turned out that bonito flakes were one of the ingredients, as I don’t eat fish.
One day I was buying groceries when I noticed for the first time that ponzu was sold in my local grocery store, and it was on sale. Without much hope I decided to check the ingredients and… it contained no fish! So I bought it, and tried it, and loved it.
Ever since then, I have eaten it almost every single day.
I already used to put soy sauce on everything, particularly on my pasta (yeah). After trying ponzu, I’ve basically switched to putting ponzu on everything instead.
I don’t know if Fumi would approve of the ponzu they sell here as real ponzu considering how much of a connoisseur she is. I’d like to believe that she’s the kind of aficionado who would be happy to see it modified a bit so others can enjoy it as well, though. Considering that, when she was a castaway, she made island ponzu by replacing the soy sauce entirely, it’s plausible.
With how often I have ponzu, I’m often reminded of her. I felt like she deserved this post thanking her for introducing me to it. Thank you, Fumi!
So yeah. That’s the story of how Yumeoji Fumi preached the word of ponzu so much that it led to me becoming obsessed with it myself. I warned you it was gonna be silly!
