Not just Symphogear
The Symphogear franchise has run for five seasons across roughly a decade, and across those five seasons it cast 27 voice actors into roles that range from week-one protagonists to single-arc antagonists to recurring elders. Some of those 27 are major idols with multi-album solo discographies; some are seasoned theater actors whose music output is structurally close to zero; most are somewhere in between, with rich but scattered character-song catalogs that don’t reduce to a single Spotify search.
This site profiles all 27 of them through their non-Symphogear music — what they made when they weren’t being Tsubasa, Maria, Saint-Germain, or Shem-Ha. Each artist gets:
- A representative playlist of their non-Symphogear work, picked editorially (not algorithmically). Major artists’ playlists run to 15 tracks; the thinnest catalog gets 3.
- A long-form essay explaining the playlist, the artist’s musical shape, and where their work intersects with the rest of the cast.
- A small Symphogear-songs sub-playlist (2-5 tracks) representing what they actually contributed to the franchise’s music.
Plus four cross-cast companion playlists that pool tracks across the cast on thematic axes — villains, in-fiction shared bands, unit-era careers, and multi-artist crossovers. More companions may follow as the catalog deepens.
How to use the site
Start anywhere. The landing page lists all 27 artists with their Symphogear character on the right and their real name on the left. Click any of them to read the essay + listen to the playlist.
Most pages have a Spotify embed at the top — playable in-page or openable in the Spotify app. The essay below the playlist is written to be readable as a piece of editorial criticism, not as a liner-note dump.
Languages
The site is bilingual — English and 中文. Every essay exists in both,
written in each language as a native artifact, not as a translation
of the other. The toggle in the top-right of every page (EN ↔
中文) switches between the two. Both versions are by the same
editorial hand; where one is shorter or longer than the other, that’s
because each language’s editorial purpose was answered on its own
terms, not because one is the “primary” and the other the “translation.”
Why this exists
There is no good single place to discover, say, Ayahi Takagaki’s non-Symphogear work as a curated set. There are Wikipedia discographies (exhaustive, undifferentiated), there are wiki character-song lists (per-character, not per-artist), and there are algorithmic Spotify playlists (popularity-weighted, often including the wrong songs). What’s missing is editorial — a curator who’s thought about each artist as an artist and picked the tracks that actually represent their musical identity.
This project tries to be that curator, for 27 artists, all at once.
What this isn’t
- It’s not a complete discography listing. Each playlist is curated; the goal is “if you listen to these 12 tracks you understand this artist,” not “here are everything they recorded.”
- It’s not algorithmic. No popularity-weighting, no “fans also liked” similarity. Every track is on the playlist because someone thought about it.
- It’s not a fan-rights aggregator. Where a track isn’t on Spotify, we say so and substitute honestly rather than pretend it doesn’t exist.
- It’s not English-only by ideology — the prose is in English because that’s the audience we can write for, but the music is what it is, in whatever language it was recorded.
Credits
The 27 essays were written across April 2026 as a curation project. The editorial process — how each playlist was assembled, how each artist’s playlist was scoped, how cross-cast threads were identified — is documented separately for anyone curious about how the project came together.