Sayotsugu

Sayotsugu is the femslash ship between Sayo Hikawa and Tsugumi Hazawa from the BanG Dream! fandom.

Canon
Sayo is the guitarist of Roselia while Tsugumi is the keyboardist of Afterglow. They both come from rivalling bands. Sayo and Tsugumi are also associated with each other through Hina Hikawa, who happens to be Sayo's twin sister and the student council president of Tsugumi's high school. Although the two had never crossed paths prior to the "Cooking Class Craziness!" event, nor did they have a particular reason to further interact, Sayo and Tsugumi still ended up becoming good friends.

Sayo is a more serious and closed-off individual in terms of personality, while Tsugumi is optimistic and earnest. The differences in them are balanced by their shared hard-working and diligent nature.

Cooking Class Craziness!
This is the first event featuring Sayo and Tsugumi as the main focus. Sayo is informed from a poster outside Hazawa Coffee that the shop would be hosting a cookie-baking class. Because of the preconceived image Tsugumi had of Sayo, she is surprised to see that Sayo has showed up to the cooking class that day. Although nervous at first, Tsugumi persistently helps Sayo, who appeared to be struggling, to follow the instructions and successfully bake the cookies. The two unexpectedly discover their common characteristics through the cooking class.

Hopeful Spring Chocolate Roll Cake
Introduced in February 2022, Hopeful Spring Chocolate Roll Cake was an event curated in time for Valentine's Day. The story begins with Sayo and Tsugumi talking about their Valentine's Day plans. Tsugumi mentions feeling stuck on what to do for Afterglow. This prompted Sayo to bring up a novel about a special chocolate roll cake and 2 friends who would regularly hang out to eat desserts together. Tsugumi tells Sayo that she would like to visit the town referenced in the novel and go to its café to try the chocolate roll cake mentioned the book. Sayo asks Tsugumi if she would like to go there with her, to which Tsugumi agrees, feeling flustered due to the unexpected offer.

On the day of the meet-up, they decide to tour the town before going to the café, grabbing pamphlet maps by the station entrance. Nearing the end of their tour, Sayo notices how Tsugumi is looking intently at the pamphlet. Tsugumi brushes it off but Sayo is quick to figure out that she had her eyes on the town's park. Tsugumi admits she wants to go to the town's park, but is afraid the time restriction would not allow them to. Sayo reassures her that there was still time and that they should go there anyway since it was such a significant location in the novel. Upon their arrival to the park, they are amazed by the sight of the flower field, to which they reference a special scene in the novel where one of the protagonists gifts the other a bookmark that was pressed with her favourite flower. Tsugumi notices a tree where snowdrop flowers grew beneath. Tsugumi tells Sayo about the story of how snowdrops got its name. She mentions that the flower is traditionally exchanged on Valentine's Day in Northern Europe. After their detour, Tsugumi and Sayo finally leaves the park to visit the café. They are surprised to find out that it was closed for the day. Sayo apologises to Tsugumi for not being thorough in her research. Tsugumi suggests that they should make the chocolate roll cake together at Hazawa Coffee instead.

On the day of the baking session Kasumi, Misaki and Eve joins them. Sayo and Tsugumi work together to instruct the others on making the chocolate roll cake. Eve mentions that they are so coordinated, it is as if they can read each other's minds. Tsugumi replies, saying she and Sayo do make snacks together sometimes. Eve concludes that their coordination must be a result of "all the moments [they] have shared". Sayo and Tsugumi both flush at Eve's statement.

Cleaning up together after the baking session, the two reflects on their experience baking the chocolate roll cake. They talk about how they are now inspired on what to give Afterglow and Roselia on Valentine's Day. Sayo wonders how the experience will shape her "sound" in the next band practice, to which Tsugumi then asks Sayo about whether she has found it or not. The pair continues to discuss how they have grown as people. Approaching the end of the clean-up, Sayo gives Tsugumi a bookmark like the one in the novel, pressed with snowdrop flowers. This catches Tsugumi by surprise. She thanks Sayo for the gift and offers to make Sayo her favourite kind of tea in return.

Hazawa Tsugumi - Afternoon Coffee (Memorial Episode: A Day in Hazawa Coffee)
Sayo comes to Tsugumi's cafe to return a book she lent her and have a cup of coffee. During their exchange, it is apparent that both of them have become very good friends who even learned to understand each other's thinking and even tastes in literature. So much so that the girls coincidentally recommends each other the same book, thinking the other would be interested in reading it.

In one of the dialogues, Sayo also mentions that she thinks Tsugumi is the kind of person who can detect beauty even in people the rest of the world ignores. This is quite a significant detail, as in the past, Sayo had an inferiority complex due to her twin sister Hina's talents, becoming an obsessive perfectionist because of it.

Sayo Hikawa - Walk in Early Spring (Episode: Conclusions About The Trip)
Sayo and Tsugumi takes an unplanned trip to the ocean on their way back home from the town. They share their thoughts on the visit and thank each other for the time spent. Tsugumi notices that they did not take many pictures together during the town visit, so she suggests taking one at this ocean as a memorandum.

Additional Content
In 2019, Tsugumi was one of the few characters who received a separate congratulatory animation in the twins' birthday lounge. This is noteworthy, as lounge-room birthday interactions only occur between characters who are fairly close in the lore, or ones who have had significant events together within the past year.

According to one of the limited New Year's Eve interactions at the end of 2020, there was an exchange where Tsugumi invited Sayo to attend her New Year's Eve party, also promising her special coffee and cookies.

Quotes
"Whenever I got stuck, Sayo-senpai noticed immediately and helped me. And Hazawa-san gave me a lot of praise. Thanks to them, I was able to get the procedure down while also enjoying it all. And they also make a pretty mean duo... Whenever one of them needed a cooking utensil, the other would bring it as if on cue. To me, that seems only possible when you know each other crazy well. It's like... you could tell how much they respect each other."

- Misaki in "Since I Got to See Those Smiles"

Fanon
Despite not having much canon content outside of the "Cooking Class Craziness!" event, Sayotsugu is still one of the most popular ships among fans and especially in the Western fandom. This may be due to the fact that both characters come from 5-member bands where the other four are often paired up (those ships being MocaRan, Tomohima, Yukilisa, Rinako), so naturally, fans became curious about what their interactions would be like as the "odd-ones-out" of their groups. Fans were surprised by their unexpectedly warm and complementary dynamic that was first introduced in the "Cooking Class Craziness!" event, which is also a big contributing factor to the appeal of Sayotsugu - given that Sayo is not one to open up easily. It is the most written ship under both BanG Dream! tags on AO3.

Sayotsugu was teased on a live show episode where Sayo's seiyuu, Kudou Haruka, chose Tsugumi as the character she would like to marry amongst all other BanG Dream! characters. This ship has consistently received some minor in-game attention since 2019, either through the emphasis of Sayo and Tsugumi's casual interactions or positive mentions of each other in dialogues. So far, their biggest interaction outside of the aforementioned event is the release of the 2022 Valentine's Day event, "Hopeful Spring Chocolate Roll Cake".

Tsugumi also began to get more interactions with Sayo's sister, Hina. It is mentioned by Tsugumi's bandmates that she "has a special effect on the Hikawa twins" in one of the events. A love triangle between the twins and Tsugumi has become a running gag in the fandom since then.

The ship is often rivaled by other popular Sayo ships, such as Sayolisa, Yukisayo and SayoHina. The rivalry between Sayotsugu fans and Sayohina fans is especially infamous, as both ships are the most popular ships for Sayo (and two of the most popular ships in the fandom in general). Sayohina fans often accuse the latter of having a toxic fanbase, overestimating the potential of their ship and reducing Tsugumi's character and motivations to being nothing but Sayo's girlfriend, to which Sayotsugu fans respond by calling out Sayohina shippers for promoting incest and sexualizing the twins' relationship. However in some cases Sayotsugu shippers have also harassed Sayohina shippers to great a extent for said reasons, even to the point of sending them death threats, which has influenced many people's opinion of Sayotsugu, leading to some people admitting they started shipping SayoHina out of spite.

A particularly major case between Sayotsugu and SayoHina shippers happened in August 2020 when an user named "tsuugusayo" started spamming the comment sections for most, if not all Sayohina fanfics in AO3 with lyrics of certain BanG Dream! songs. The same user even went as far spamming 10 fanfictions in the same tag, with all of the fics being filled with nothing but death threats and insults, and name-calling and insulting everyone who expressed concern over the AO3 account's obsessive nature in their fanfictions' comment sections.

Fandom

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Trivia

 * The pair is often compared to mint chocolate because of their hair colors.
 * Sayo is 161 cm tall while Tsugumi is 156 cm, giving them a height difference of 5 cm.
 * Sayotsugu's alternate ship name "342g" is a play on words with their names (3 - "Sa", 4 - "Yo", 2 - "Tsu", g - "Gu").
 * Tsugumi is the second character after Hina who usually appears alongside Sayo when she is shown standing and/or talking to someone in the background in various additional content.
 * In Roselia's song "Proud of oneself," Sayo sings the word "Tsugu" (次ぐ, "then, next after") in the intro. Some fans have joked that she is actually calling out to Tsugumi.