I’ve heard a lot of weird premises in my time with Anime. It’s a topic I’ve gone over before, but I will spare you and just skip to the part where, though I’ve become somewhat used to it, the idea of the legendary tactician of the Three Kingdoms Zhuge Liang (better known by his courtesy name of Kongming) manifesting in modern Tokyo to use his ancient strategic mastery towards making a singer girl into a star… you still kind of notice that.
The show starts with exactly that setup. After his death wishing for a next life in a world not overcome by war, Kongming wakes up in an alley in Shibuya on Halloween night. Initially, youthful version of himself aside, he takes his new habitation to be Hell. Some buys take his getup to be a cool costume and drag him to a club where a girl, Eiko, sings, and despite the din of modern life that had previously seemed a torment to Kongming, he finds her music deeply touches his heart.
After a few misunderstandings, Eiko ends up taking him home (since he was passed out in an alley, which is no way to stay alive) and the next day helps him start to come to terms with modernity (Kongming is, fortunately, a quick study) as well as ending up singing once more. He gets a job at the club since the owner is a huge fan of three kingdoms lore and thus wants him to bartend in his costume (he’s good at it), but more importantly, when he talks to Eiko who is at her breaking point with meeting no success in music, Kongming decides to help out, getting us our premise.
And if you think that ancient battle strategies would be generally inapplicable to music promotion, apparently you’d be wrong… at least if one is willing to play a little dirty.
The first case involves Eiko meeting a singer who gives her an opportunity to perform… except Eiko is being set up as a sacrificial lamb since it’s at an event where multiple stages are going at once. Kongming’s plan involves fog machines and misdirection to make it impossible for people to leave Eiko’s room, free booze to lure them in, and it helps that Eiko’s singing is incredibly good so once she’s really gotten into it, most of the crowd isn’t even trying to leave. This results in the woman who tried to set Eiko up for a fall getting a taste of her own medicine, and as for Eiko, she goes a little viral and has a bit of trouble processing the leap forward
This is, honestly, the flimsiest of the “Strategems” in that it’s based on one of the more mystical accounts of the Three Kingdoms, but it still adroitly recontextualizes something from said lore in order to help Eiko.
The next strategem follows the aphorism to “Make something from nothing”, which is essentially presented as the art of deceiving one’s opponent into thinking there’s nothing where there’s actually something, until it’s too late. This time, there’s no Feng Shui necessary. Eiko is signed up to perform at a music festival, but of course as a newcomer nobody she’s given the worst stage and placed opposite more famous bands.
Kongming’s plan? Fake technical difficulties to get the band on the nearest big stage off guard, then “resolve” them and hit the gas right when there’s a lull in their performance, which there is because the lead singer is dealing with throat issues and can’t go too hard for too long. This enables Eiko to basically steal away the whole crowd and become more of a star in her own right. In the wake of it, Kongming makes good on limiting hard feelings by giving the rival band a nice little home remedy for a sore throat. The festival manager, quite taken with Eiko’s performance, gives her the choice between two opportunities: a safe play at a festival at similar size or a much bigger, much more prestigious festival called Summer Sonia that she’ll have to compete in order to get into.
Confidence behind her, Eiko takes the hint and chooses the hard road. And this will take up the rest of the show – we don’t even get to Summer Sonia itself, we’re concerned with the task Eiko has to overcome just to get there: earning 100,000 social media likes before a deadline, or any rival band in the same program.
Step one? Recruit a rapper! Kongming doesn’t say what he needs a rapper for, seeing as Eiko is kind of a one-woman show and is more of an EDM performer than one into anything related to rap, but to get ahead of myself, he comes in handy.
The recruitment isn’t easy though, and in fact takes a few episodes that are kind of light on Eiko. Kongming’s mark is the undisputed king of rap battles, an unassuming-looking young man who goes by Kabetaijin. And who is, for his health and sanity, retired from rap battling. Essentially, it seems that the poor guy has a bad case of impostor syndrome and serious nerves at the best of times, which resulted in the stress of continuing to win giving him a stomach ulcer. Even though his foes want rematches and his friends want him back, he’s determined to leave the rap battle world behind… but Kongming has other plans.
Essentially, Kongming goads Kabe into a rap battle where Kongming actually raps (using his ancient poetry skills) back and forth with him. It takes a lot of doing, but in the wake, Kongming points out that Kabe choosing to return meant he didn’t suffer the stress and agony he formerly did, and between that and Kongming’s words in the battle, Kabe is a little more confident that maybe he can be something special, and reclaim his honor as well as the love he has for the art of Rap. Thus, he’s willing to join the party.
I feel like I’m doing this arc a bit of a disservice. The material with Eiko is good (even great, as we go forward), but Kabe gets a lot of time and respect dedicated to who he is, why he’s in this dead-end position, and what it means for him to get his groove back in (rap) battle against Kongming. This show doesn’t have a lot of characters who get strong arcs; it’s pretty much Eiko, Kongming to an extent, Kabe, and one character who hasn’t come up yet, but the ones they do, they do really well.
Speaking of that other character, the next step involves Eiko going to get a new song she wrote arranged by a professional who Kongming has come to know. But, that professional has an odd demeanor and very demanding standards, insisting that Eiko find her own unique voice before he’ll work with her. This leads Eiko to follow some nebulous gifts and instructions from Kongming that, intended by him or not, result in her making a friend with a street musician called Nanami. Nanami would be that fourth character I mentioned earlier.
We actually get a good deal of Eiko and Nanami bonding, and Eiko finding and improving herself by singing with Nanami. Again, it’s hard to emphasize enough in summary how good the character work is here, so that you feel like you know Nanami when we get the reveal.
You see, she’s actually the lead singer of Azalea, the band that Kongming singled out as the biggest threat to Eiko making the 100,000 in the appropriate time.
We get Nanami’s tragic story, though – how she and her friends became a band, how they couldn’t really make it, and how they were picked up by an effective but heartless producer, willing to make them stars provided they give up everything that meant something to them about the business: they’d sing his songs, wear fanservice costumes, and ultimately just lip sync and dance over recordings of those songs.
This was obviously tearing Nanami up inside already, hence why she ditched her identity to sing on the street, and the reveal hits Eiko pretty hard. Eiko, to her credit, instead decides to try to reach her friend’s heart, hoping that she can bridge the rift that’s come between them and get out the other side.
Before they can manage, though, the issue of the road to Summer Sonia is at hand. Kongming has a plan to get 100,000 likes, and so does Scummy Producer for Azalea. Scummy Producer’s plan is to essentially buy them, putting on a guerrilla concert with a QR code where providing a like enters a drawing for money. Kongming’s plan, of course, draws on the Three Kingdoms. If you know your lore, you might already guess which famous strategy this one is: Borrowing Arrows with Straw Boats; or, Borrowing 100,000 Arrows.
Essentially, the Three Kingdoms story goes as such: an allied commander who disliked Kongming tasked him with sourcing a hundred thousand arrows, under a timetable where that would be impossible with the resources they had. Kongming, instead, floated boats with straw soldiers along the Yangtzee in the fog, in front of the vastly superior Wei army. The enemy, having no shortage, shot wildly at the shapes moving in the fog, and when Kongming reeled in his boats, he had a hundred thousand perfectly usable arrows to deliver to his side.
In the context of the road to Summer Sonia, Kongming preempts the Azalea concert with one by Eiko, covering one of their songs. That gets them most of the way before the real Azalea shows up. Their gain, however, is cut off by Kabetaijin doing what rappers do best and dropping a freestyle diss-track that cuts Azalea to their core
Eiko then, after some tension (that Nanami quiets with a subtle word; she wants to know where this is going), performs her own new song, and earns her hundred thousand legitimately, tagging home before Azalea and their scummy manager could manage. The girls of Azalea are deeply touched by Eiko’s song and decide to ditch Manager’s way of doing things, drop their masks, and rock out with one of their own tracks right after… which, in part thanks to Kongming managing a good video of it, gets them all the likes they could possibly need to prove that, contrary to what their manager said, they could make it with the music they love.
Now, there’s some postscript to this: it turns out that the Scummy Manager was more hurt himself, as Kongming reveals he once had a band that went down in flames when he was younger, which allows him and the Azalea girls to mend fences so they can move forward with honest music and probably still some solid marketing. It’s also revealed that Kongming had another strategy in reserve, one that would have crushed Azalea as he once destroyed his enemies (I’d bet outing them for lip syncing would be involved), but he declined to use it, keeping true to his desire to see a kinder age, and protecting something Eiko cared about rather than going for the throat in pursuit of victory. It’s a nice note.
And… the show ends there. Eiko is going to Summer Sonia, she has friends, Kongming is helping her, and you believe that this weird crew is going to be alright.
So, how was Ya Boy Kongming?
Some time ago, I reviewed a show called Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night, which was also about a singer trying to become a star, and the odd crew she gathered along the way. That show was sort of the answer that “killed” another, more mediocre show about creative endeavor. Ya Boy Kongming blows past Jellyfish to the extent that Jellyfish blew past what I compared it to back then.
So, the premise is crazy. So what? The emotions and events are as down to earth as you would expect out of one of these quest for fame affairs. And they are good. I didn’t even get into some of them, like Eiko’s backstory with music. There’s both moving drama and relatable constructions. Kongming is also really well done as a character. It would be all too easy to write him as this Tzeentchian genie in a lamp. Sure, things usually go Just As Planned with him, but we’re let into enough variables and especially the inner workings of his plans once they fire that we can kind of see, ah, yes, this is how it would work. In telling us the intricacies, it really sells him as a strategic mastermind rather than a future-seeing jerk. This is part of why the first stratagem, which sort of relied on magic even if presented as stage magic, was the weakest – it didn’t feel quite as real as the others.
All in all, I debated myself quite a bit. Ya Boy Kongming certainly deserved a high grade, but did it deserve the absolute highest?
When you get down to it, though, there’s not much for me to complain about. One thing of note if you pay attention to credits is that Eiko has separate actresses for speaking and singing, which is clearly done because the production wants to sell the fact that her music is incredible. And it works. The music as a whole in this show is great, and unlike so many lesser shows, you really do feel the tracks, and get some character out of them. The emotional arcs are good. Not every character gets one, like the club owner who is around all the time and who supports Eiko is allowed to stay flat, but that’s fine in service to doing the ones they choose to do right. The ending is open, clearly unfinished in a main sense, but as a door closed on volume one, I can’t say I have it in me to deduct points just for that. The animation is good, and it revels in its theme in a way I didn’t really think was possible.
What is it up against? It blew Jellyfish out of the water, and while not my favorite by any means that wasn’t exactly a weak show. Can I compare this to Oshi no Ko? Not really, they’re doing different things at their hearts, even if their theme around the entertainment industry has some relation.
It was a battle, but in the end I decided that Ya Boy Kongming really did earn his A+ grade. Do yourself a favor and watch it, or at least the unreasonably catchy OP music.