YMMV / Hypnosis Mic

• Crossover Ship: Saburo/Hatsune Miku is a moderately popular ship in the Western fandom.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Of the six divisions, Matenro and Fling Posse appear to be the most popular, with Matenro being the most popular. Tellingly, Hypnosis Mic's popularity spiked around the time the Fling Posse vs Matenro rap battle began.
    • Additionally, Fling Posse won the official Pixiv contest hosted after the FP vs MTR battle concluded.
  • Divisions aside, Doppo is most likely the most popular and recognized character of the franchise, with him ranking highest in an unofficial fan popularity poll. He even outranked the other members of Matenro.
  • Gentaro and Ramuda, as well, if them coming second and third place respectively in the popularity poll is any indication, as well as the amount of fan art they get. In Gentaro’s case, the Japanese fandom and even the creators seem to hold him in high regard.
  • Of the two later additions, Bad Ass Temple instantly exploded into popularity among the fandom, with its popularity rising to Fling Posse's popularity, and Jyushi Aimono specifically gained an instant large individual following.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • With Paradox Live, which is similarly about a selection of quirky Japanese groups who perform hip hop and RnB music in a semi-fantastical setting. Paradox also debuted a little after HipMic, causing fans of the latter to decry it as a ripoff.
  • As an April Fools joke in 2019, the franchise tried to invoke this by having Buster Bros!!! release a diss track against King of Prism out of all things, through the song "EZ DO RAP" (a parody of "EZ DO DANCE" in Pretty Rhythm: Rainbow Live).
• Epileptic Trees: Since it was first previewed, many fans believed that the names of the composers of Pink-colored Love are actually made-up names, as information on both of them (Amy Ray, ILLCAMP) are sparse and phonetically similar to "Ramuda" and "ill-DOC" respectively, which fits the song's disjointed theme and it being about Ramuda's true nature. Later, it turned out that both of them are real composers.
• Friendly Fandoms: In the west, at least, Hypnosis Mic's fanbase spilled over with other music related mobage fanbases such as Ensemble Stars! and Idolish 7, even before the game was announced.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Ramuda/Jakurai and Ichiro/Samatoki are the most obvious examples, as both pairs blame each other for The Dirty Dawg's breakup. Gentaro/Hifumi and Doppo/Dice could also count, based on their interactions in the "Just a Friend" drama track.
• Gateway Series: Opinions about the series' compositions notwithstanding, HypMic has surprisingly gotten a lot of overseas fans looking into the J-Rap scene.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While in Japan, Buster Bros!!! and Mad Trigger Crew have their own claims to popularity, there's far more outcry for how "under-appreciated" they are (at least in comparison to Matenrou and Fling Posse) by western fans, with fans urging the rest of the fanbase and those outside of it to look into their music and appreciate them more.
• Ho Yay: Comes as a result of there being so few prominent female characters in the cast.
  • Gentaro/Dice:
    • Gentaro teases Dice by saying they were once a princess and a knight stuck in a star-crossed romance in a past life. Which was a lie. When Dice expresses disdain at the thought of having a weirdo like Gentaro as his lover, Gentaro agrees, before saying that he was lying. And that was also a lie!
    • Gentaro wakes Dice up in the Me Against The World drama track by speaking like a courtesan into his ear. In the portrayal of this scene in the manga, Gentaro is twirling Dice's hair at the same time.
    • In Stella, whose lyrics are a story written by Gentaro in-canon, Dice is the king of a fallen kingdom who boards a spaceship and lands in an impoverished world, meeting Gentaro, a thief. Then, at the end of Gentaro's verse, he asks Dice, his "messiah", to "steal him away".
    • In Hoodstar, after Gentaro light-heartedly calls Dice an idiot, he assures Dice that he was "Just kidding♡", heart and all. While not visible in the official video, this can be seen in the official lyrics presented by the Japanese karaoke system Joysound.
  • Doppo/Hifumi:
    • Doppo and Hifumi have been friends since elementary school, and they currently live together. Hifumi cooks for the both of them, and his profile states that he frequently fixes Doppo's suits for him. On Doppo's side, he seems to take care of Hifumi when the latter gets freaked out by women.
    • In one of the manga drama tracks, Doppo and Hifumi duet to a love song and when Doppo sings a line calling the other singer adorable, Hifumi reacts very strongly.
      Doppo: [singing] But oh, the way you act tough is adorable
      Hifumi: You said I'm adorable! You did, didn't you! Hey! Heeeyy!
  • Sasara/Rosho:
    • In his solo song Own Stage, Rosho likens (someone who is heavily implied to be) Sasara to the sun, and himself as the moon who wanted to shine as brightly as the sun, says he won't look back to the past but heavily reminisces about his past with Sasara anyway, and even sings "...doesn't the moon look beautiful tonight?". The lyric, while not 100% the same, is extremely similar to the way famous Japanese author Natsume Soseki translated "I love you" ("Isn't the moon beautiful?").
    • Sasara declares that Rosho is the only partner (in both comedy and rapping) for him.
    • Sasara has many spare keys to Rosho's home "from before", and acts very much like a jealous lover in the aikata back again drama track:
      Sasara: [in the middle of discussing the next division battle] Who's this person you're meeting that's more important than the topic at hand?! I have a right to know, and unless you tell me I'm not going to let you through!
  • Hitoya/Jakurai:
    • Although Hitoya resents Jakurai for being better than him at everything since they were kids, Hitoya still seems to be fond of Jakurai, even inviting him for a drink when he was in Shinjuku on work-related matters.
• I Am Not Shazam: None of the divisions are named Hypnosis Mic. Those are the weapons they're fighting with.
• I Knew It!:
  • The minute he officially joined the main cast after appearing in the manga, many fans theorized that Rei Amayado was the Buster Bros' father. Fast forward to the "Helter Skelter" drama track, and that theory would turn out to be correct.
  • Similarly, the moment that her visual was released, a popular fan theory that Otome was Dice's mother quickly went popular. Come to the release of the Official Guidebook and its drama track, this theory was proven to be correct.
• Incest Yay Shipping: The Buster Bros!!! are full of it. Jiro and Saburo worship the ground on which Ichiro walks, and thanks to being their Parental Substitute, see him as the pinnacle of what to be as a man and as marriage material. Unsurprisingly, some of their biggest ships are with each other.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!:
  • To some fans, Matenro can be considered this due to their popularity and how they practically overshadow the other divisions, save for Fling Posse in some cases. Many detractors and even some fans of them cry they're only popular because of Doppo/Hifumi, a widely-shipped pairing in the fandom, or because of Doppo alone. Some also cry that it's unfair that any division set to go up against Matenrou in a rap battle will inevitably lose.
  • On a meta-standpoint, there are some Japanese artists who are actually split on anime industries commercializing hip hop. For example, in an interview, Sky-Hi from AAA says that while he has no opinion on Hypnosis Mic, he doesn't believe that the franchise best represents what Japanese hip hop has to offer.
• LGBT Fanbase: Lesbian and bi women throw themselves at Ichijiku's feet.
  • Notably, during one niconama live, a rap was submitted by someone with a pen name of "woman who wants to go to an onsen with Ichijiku".
  • Gay and bi men have also taken an interest in the franchise, predictably due to the attractive male cast and their interactions, despite the work being mostly aimed at women.
• Misaimed Fandom: There are a number of “fans” (at least in the west) that believe that the setting and the division of men and women is justified due to how “violent and dangerous” men are, whilst completely ignoring the fact that the work itself treats the system as a bad thing that the main characters want to dismantle.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • People confusing Ramuda for Tori Himemiya is practically a meme at this point and a running joke primarily in the western Hypnosis Mic fandom.
  • It's also common to confuse and/or compare Gentaro for Goro Akechi due to their uncanny resemblance.
  • Depicting Dice in increasingly destitute scenarios due to his canon gambling habits has become a popular meme in the Eastern fanbase.
  • Referring to Jyuto as horny. His "masturbation" line in DEATH RESPECT didn't help his case.
  • Hypmic lore? What's that?^note  In reference to the dearth of actual released lore for Hypnosis Mic. Often used in conjecture with references to the sheer amount of official merch already available for the series, including...
    • Also used in relation to the fans who ignore the little canon lore there is due to how convoluted it seems to some people.
  • Hypnosis Mic official couch.^note  It was actually a tissue holder shaped like a couch, but either way, the entire concept was enough to baffle people's minds for a while. "Couch" can also be substituted with any of the other eyebrow-raising pieces of official merchandise, such as the official ice cream spoons or face masks◊.
  • "Jokingly" hating Ramuda is a meme in the Western Fandom. Even Ramuda fans are in on it.
  • When the Osaka Division was first unveiled, the fandom had a field day with Sasara Nurude being a comedian, with the fandom instantly dubbing Sasara "the John Mulaney of Hypmic" and making edits of Sasara in John Mulaney stand-ups.
  • Misspellings and plays on "hypmic", such as "hip mike", "hip michael", "hypothetical microorganism", etc.
  • This is what Dice would do with Coke and Mentos.
• Moe:
  • Ramuda, if only on the surface...
  • Doppo counts in the classical "want to protect" sense of the word, as does Hifumi. Jyushi too, once you get to learn about his bullying.
  • Saburo tries to be this, putting on a cutesy voice in Ohayo Ikebukuro when discussing his ideal girlfriend and doing something similar in RUN THIS CITY. However, as fans will know, Saburo is usually a Deadpan Snarker.
• No Yay: Any pairing that includes Saburo, as he is the youngest character, being fourteen among a cast that primarily consists of adults aged 20 and above. Jiro (seventeen) has it as well, to slightly lesser extent. However, this is mostly a Western phenomenon, as a few of his more popular ships in Japan involve Saburo and his big brothers.
• One-Scene Wonder: One particular Villain of the Week from Rhyme Anima, a burglar who threatened to bomb a cafe with Hypnosis Microphones strapped across his chest like a suicide bomber, gained a lot of popularity for how over-the-top he was. He was so popular, the anime brought him back for season 2!
• One True Pairing: Doppo/Hifumi, which is the most popular ship for several reasons. The only other combo that could possibly be more popular is adding Jakurai into the mix.
• Questionable Casting: One of the main problems onlookers have with the franchise is that, despite the music being heavily focused on rapping, nearly all of the main seiyuu lack a background in that musical genre (Subaru Kimura as Ichiro being the sole exception).
  • Curiously, they did manage to find people with experience in hip-hop and rap to compose the music and lyrics, including Zeebra, one of the most popular rappers in Japan. The series continues to add more hip-hop and rap artists to its repertoire, such as nobodyknows+ and Creepy Nuts, and Visual Kei artists like Leetspeak monsters and Sho Kiryuin of Golden Bomber fame.
• Shipping: Popular pair-ups include Gentaro/Dice, Samatoki/Ichiro, and Ramuda/Jakurai. On the girls' side, the most popular ship is Tohoten/Ichijiku.
• Values Dissonance: Due to the differing relationship in regards to black culture in Japan compared to North America, many things in the series and from staff can turn off western viewers (especially considering Rap's relationship with the black community). Infamously, Subaru Kimura created a set of bromides, with one of them depicting his face painted brown, which caused a lot of backlash in the west, but not so much in Japan due them not having a full view of the issue until the 2010s.
• Vanilla Protagonist: The Buster Bros!!! often get treated this way. While they still have plenty of fans, their dynamic is often thought of as less interesting than that of their contemporaries, with Jiro and Saburo's Big Brother Worship of Ichiro and Sibling Rivalry with each other seemingly taking precedence over interactions with other divisions' members. Their standing over the years has improved as interactions with other characters became more available for them.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls?: This series being a female-oriented creation of Otomate, with the copious amount of good-looking men with heavy emphasis on music can give off the impression that Hypmic is similar to other relatively PG-13 female-oriented idol franchises, but majority of the spinoff manga are notably serialised as Shōnen. The exception, Side F.P. & M, is Josei.

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