[ExodusUK]

Also the way Ayu is portrayed in this show is really annoying..I remember Ayu saying she listened to what felt like 100 demos in order to put ASFXX together but the drama would leave you to believe that it was Max handpicking everything for dummy Ayu.

This part is interesting from Masa's analysis of ASFXX in hindsight of the book's release
On January 1 1999, she released her first album "A Song for XX" with expectation and uneasiness, which ranked first for five consecutive weeks in Oricon Chart and recorded sales of more than one million copies. Quite a remarkable starting that she herself never had expected. I wrote "for once" a little time ago, but if her life had not changed a lot after that, her next album would have been the continuation of "A Song for XX". (I call it the second album not created.) But things went differently. The single song "WHATEVER" released in February that year was filled with suffering, as had never been before, and the second album released in November became much different from the first album in feature. Did something happened? -- I suppose that she lost love around this time, just before or after the release of her first album, and that the experience ended her adolescence unexpectedly and made her impossible to write such lyrics as she had written before.