The other night, while chatting with various friends whose names end in Y sounds (and also John) during the WACK auditions, out came this rather ominous tweet from ICE CREAM SUICIDE:

【お詫び】各ご報告が遅れており申し訳ございません。メンバーの今後の活動詳細に関しまして、必ずひとりひとり個別にオフィシャルにご報告致します。また今後の「絶品恋々アイスクリーム」の出演者に関しても事前１周間前までに告知致します。

— ICE CREAM SUICIDE (@ICECRMS_) March 28, 2017

I wasn’t wild about this news, sharing it, posting it, whatever, but it does build on this earlier business about ANFORT, the company behind ICE CREAM SUICIDE and DEVIL GUN, neither of which has amounted to a hill of beans so far, and I’m chalking that up to This Is Not How It’s Done on the part of management.

Basically, the fate of each member in the post-Anna era (remember, she was lawyering up to get out of her contract) was/is going to have her fate decided separately (or has/will decide her fate, I can’t tell), and then the future of the project will come to pass.

The group’s official account hasn’t tweeted since then (or maybe they have since I scheduled this), and the only member to have tweeted at all (or to have tweeted and not deleted anything) since the middle of February is Mell. Kinaco hadn’t done anything since the beginning of January.

So read into it what you will, but it seems to me that all the bad stuff we heard about, about members crying after gigs and no happy feelings left at all, is probably true. I also think it’s effectively the end of ICS, unless management thinks there’s something to salvage and try again (unless they were making bank on buppan and ticket sales, probably not).

I also-also think that these stories are exhausting, and that I don’t understand how people (some of whom are quite well-respected) think that it’s okay to emotionally destroy young people for the sake a few dollars (or for any reason, for that matter). This stuff makes my head hurt.