No pick or link today.
Love Live is the title of multiple anime series about high school girls starting their own school idol groups along with the difficulties that come with that. It’s great fun, with solid character and interesting plots, specifically in terms of actually starting the clubs. Ultimately though, it’s a story about their rise to stardom, or failure to reach it. It’s not a complicated plot, but it has a lot of room for good material. Also, since it’s actually planned, doesn’t have the pitfall of Nameless Asterism, going round and round with no resolution.
Anyway, most of the time, the biggest obstacle to a school idol club is the student council president simply saying “no.” It’s weird how powerful Student council presidents in Japan are, if I’m honest. However, Japan is not America so I won’t question it too much.
Anyway, the trials and tribulations offer great plot fodder, never mind interweaving the characters and the plots. Love Live: Sunshine, for example, has so much fun with the reason the president,Dia, says no, that being that she hates idol clubs due to what happened with her mom. The hilarious thing is she’s revealed to be a giant idol geek to the whole school when she’s lecturing Chika, who accidentally turns on the PA while she talks about idols.
There are also all sorts of mini-arcs throughout the story, a lot of which come to a satisfying resolution, but a lot don’t. This is why I like to stick with a smaller cast, but more on character in next month’s post. Still my favorite moment is from the original School Idol Project. Nozomi is chasing Nico, along with the rest of the group. Nico, being very thin and having a small chest, slips between two narrowly parked vans. Nozomi, being very busty, which she normally likes to rub in everyone else’s face, cannot follow. All this to get Nico to explain why she told her siblings she was the leader of the group and the rest were backup dancers, something they did not take well. They do eventually corner her, though.