Sailor Moon Fans

I am going to lay it out on the table so there can be no misunderstanding: I’m not going to write about every member of the overseas sister groups. I just don’t know enough about these groups, and, several years in, I think they are big enough to have their own fans, their own followings, and I don’t think I could really justice when talking about that, however, AKB48’s sixty-sixth single is going to be with us in a few months, and with that comes the long overdue inclusion of members from the further afield overseas groups in the senbatsu as part of the anniversary celebrations so it would be remise of me not to talk about those members. tl;dr Shania Gracia.



JKT48’s third generation debuted in 2014 about a month after my favourite member of the group, Cindy, left the group under a cloud. Arriving as a trainee, Gracia was promoted alongside her peers to Team T when the group was formed in January a year later, Harugon being appointed as captain of the team as the group’s longest serving member at that time. In mid-2016, Gracia appeared in the senbatsu for Mae Shika Mukanee (Hanya Lihat Ke Depan) before the group’s shuffle event in September that saw her join Team KIII.

JKT’s teams have a history of being disbanded and reformed, a practice that feels a little unsettling to me as Team T presently has no members at all in 2025. I don’t think this suggests that we’re going to see AKB move away from the generation system any time soon, yet I could also see management changing course for this kind of thing after the anniversary.

This speedrunning of JKT history and of Gracia’s time thus far in the group possibly fails to take in the extent of her popularity as it feels like she is a big deal in Jakarta with notable celebrities amongst the coterie of her fans and birthday wishes from former politicians. Although the former third generation is presently down to just two members—Gracia and Feni Fitriyanti, who is on hiatus as of August, and whom we probably should talk about at some point due to QUADLIPS, a sort of international UNLAME that AKS rolled out last year—it feels very much like their introduction was the beginning of JKT48 gaining their own identity with Gracia’s being very much an important factor in that process.

Having gone from captain of KIII in 2020 to presently acting as the captain of the group as a whole, it feels like AKS are banking on both Gracia and Feni in the hopes that their popularity in Indonesia will translate into popularity in Japan.

I don’t know, friends! At the time of writing this, I am literally second-guessing what will happen with the sixty-sixth single and how that release will set the stage for AKB in the future. Gracia continues to rank in the senbatsu during JKT’s general elections, and she has continued to appear with regularity on releases since 2016. Like Feni, in terms of where Gracia is as an idol, it feels like the only options left for her in future are either graduation or international success, whichever comes first.