The Last Original Monkey Is Escaping, God Help Us All

/ Kerrie

Maybe it’s a cliche to say, but this is truly the end of an era.

Tenka no Chanyuki, the last original member of THE BANANA MONKEYS, their lyricist, and twitter shitposting champion, is graduating next month.

I wish I could say I was surprised by this, but, she had already attempted to escape last year. The tweets appear to have been deleted now, and frankly, as the situation was occuring I was too confused to write an article about it, but, long story short, she tweeted “I quit” and the next day management l̶o̶c̶k̶e̶d̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶k̶e̶y̶ ̶c̶a̶g̶e̶ talked her out of it. The only evidence left I could find was this post from management talking about the situation.

Rather than look at this impending loss with sadness, Tenka would like us to see her incoming departure with optimism. In fact, her own blog post announcing her graduation opens with:

ついにこの日がやってきてしまった！！！！！
このクソグループから足を洗うことができると思うと本当に嬉しいです！！！！！！地球の皆さんありがとう！！！

Which can be roughly translated as

Still, as their last original member and lyricist, it’s hard to imagine a Banamon without the founding monkey. Granted, she’s made very little presence on their YouTube channel recently (despite a past video announcing she’d appear more often, which, never really happened) and they’re already announcing auditions for new members, so management, at face value, appear to be taking the loss in their stride.

But they also haven’t released any new music (except for a few re-recordings released for free for a limited time) since Tenka’s first escape attempt. Although that could also be because of the current plague situation.

One final upside to all this is, according to her announcement, Tenka may well be the first monkey to be able to keep her twitter after graduation, which means we should still get to see gems such as:

God speed, you true Homicidol Legend.