I know! You’d think it’d be easy. I can think of bad puns right now, but none of them are even oh-Maniac-chuckle-chuckle funny, and that’s the lowest level that I strive for. What’s the point of being a fancy idol blogger if you can’t make people acknowledge that they ought to awkwardly laugh for the sake of the wild-eyed madman screaming at them in HTML about things?

Anyway. Still, no idol news of note this morning, so let’s keep plumbing recent weeks’ unpublished drafts and see what happens. Like, for instance, a new-enough group that has notably been popping up in lots of photos with other idols but is yet to generate much of a following — NEAR!

Interesting! What else do you have?

I’ll take it! This isn’t actually a new unit, per se, given that they debuted like way back in the spring, but a 2018 debut is a 2018 debut, damn it, and I’m the boss here. They’re the “most confident idol,” is the angle, which probably means that they’re basically walking ganbare fists but would be way more fun if “confident” were more along the lines of “kept in confidence,” which would allow for all kinds of neat interpretations, including my preferred epithet of NEAR as human embodiments of the Keep of Secrets from OG Warhammer (remember Warhammer!).

But naw, let’s keep it sane-ish and just say that they remind me of 969 in good ways.

For a smaller, less-followed unit, NEAR produces a ton of media to take in, so make sure to follow them on Twitter and YouTube for the goods. For instance, of the girls just celebrated her birthday in a video that looks like it was produced by Lein on a day when she really wanted to keep the demons at bay but couldn’t quite hold them all the way back:

Fun!