Miss iD2020 Semifinals: Familiar Faces and New Favorites

/ DAEMON

Miss iD, the annual “not a beauty pageant or freak show”, recently announced their semifinal field of 158 girls-at-heart (age ranges from teens to 30s). Familiar faces currently competing for the Miss iD2020 Grand Prix title include chika idols:

  • YONEKO (current soloist, former Bellring Girls Heart and MIGMA SHELTER)
  • Komachi Fujinomiya (current GuGu-LuLu, former MIGMA SHELTER)
  • Yulian (XTEEN and Heisei Haka-Arashi)

YONEKO, who has made several overtures to Western fans in the past few months, has personally appealed for our assistance:

https://twitter.com/naniyaraYONEKO/status/1157524237986308096?s=20

To vote for a semifinalist you will need to download the Cheerz Fan Community app. The app is fairly intuitive to use and the search function works with Romaji so you can find who you are looking for pretty easily.

The Miss iD audition is publishing house Kondasha’s annual search outside the mainstream to “uncover a variety of role models for girls who are surviving a new era, regardless of looks and genre.” Scene godmother Oomori Seiko has served as a judge for the competition more than once.   “iD” represents a mash-up of “I”, “identity”, “idol”, and “diversity” and the competition especially encourages entrants who have hesitated to pursue traditional auditions or pageants: “Whether you have tattoos or dyed your hair blonde, or are withdrawn, it’s okay… If you’ve ever wanted to make this boring a world a more fun place, we want to meet the true ‘you’.”

Finalists from previous years include Uyu from Syuuengo Buppan (2018),  PassCode’s Nao (2016), both Rie and Rei from LADYBABY (2015) who that year beat out Maison Book Girl’s Aoi Yagawa.

Each year the competition draws an international field of 3,500 – 4,000 applicants from office ladies to AV actresses, painters to multi-media artists, and classical musicians to alternative idols across all mediums (one of 2018’s finalists was a CGI schoolgirl persona). 

Miss iD 2016 finalist (and one of the few cogent voices on Twitter) Amina du Jean has also endorsed her two favorites in this year’s competition:

I highly recommend taking the time to browse through this year’s incredibly diverse field of semifinalists. There are some remarkable women profiled, each with a talent to share, a story to tell or maybe just a unique charm or attitude. One of my personal favorites is 180ml, a violinist who loves The Velvet Underground, Herman Hesse’s Demian (my favorite novel in high school) and idolizes Boy George.

Plus she listens to Mott the Hoople.  She should be in the top rankings based on literary and musical taste alone.  If she plays T.Rex next, 180ml deserves to win the whole thing.