This Week in Anime

The Supersized Laughs of Love Live! Superstar!!

Nick
Steve, I'm glad you're here. They say loneliness is such a sad affair, and I could hardly wait to talk about this franchise with you again. So please come back with me again, and play your sad guitar.

Don't you remember you told me you Love Live, baby?

But, long ago and so far away, we fell in Love Live together, covering the second show and your uh, guitar sounds so, uh...okay yeah this bit is over. But you know what never ends? School Idols, baby!

The day that happens is the day I crash the moon into the Earth because it will be the day humanity has lost any hope of redemption. I fully understand there are folks who aren't into Love Live, and I'm far from an Idol aficionado myself, but if society at large shuns a face game this good, there's no saving the human experiment.

I have and will continue to assert that the 2nd season of OG Love Live is one of the best seasons of anime comedy ever, as long as you ignore the diet episode. So having Kyogoku back behind the wheel was fantastic news. He has an incredibly deft hand when it comes to handling this material, and it manages to make Superstar feel distinct despite being less than a year removed from the last iteration. This thing's got god damn integrated episode titles!

It's no secret I think this season of anime is a sparse one. There's some good shows and some fun oddities, but Superstar has been my rock for the past few months, despite the Olympics' best effort to keep it away from me. But you cannot keep these girls down for long, even if you're an international century-old event.

Thankfully they compensated for quantity with quality. Like I'm used to the central orange girl of these shows being a solid 5/10 character, but Kanon legit has a great shot at being my favorite this season. She's a great foil to the rest of the cast, has a genuinely compelling central motivation, and her pet owl has the same hair swoosh as her.

What more could you want?

Really though, Kanon was what made me think Superstar has the potential to concretely improve upon its predecessors. Much of this show is running on the established LL formula, but Kanon being the central heart of the group AND a recovering cynic who can't quite give up on her dreams is a strong twist. Plus she plays an instrument that isn't piano for once.

Can't wait to hear her The Wonder Years cover band perform. Bet they have a sick rendition of "Came Out Swinging."

Kanon has a lot of complicated feelings on La Dispute's Rooms of the House that nobody will listen to.

Oh fuck we're spiraling into dunking on our college CD collections. Pull up! Pull up! The power of Kanon's casual design is too much for us!

Keke marks the second character in the anime franchise to actively move overseas to become a School Idol, which either means immigration is much more reasonable in the Love Liverse, or or customs is intensely irresponsible. Either way I'm glad she's here to wreak havoc.

The spirit, she is willing. But the flesh is is specialized for coordinated cheering sections and nothing else. Even in the big "everyone running" parts of the OP she's fighting for her life

Kyogoku is just so committed to this kind of animated comedy, and I love it. It feels like damn near every comedic scene will take every opportunity possible to fit in an extra couple of gags or punchlines, sometimes entirely in the background. Did we need an incidental bit joking on these girls' big ol anime heads? No, but we're better for it anyway.

And through the whole thing Keke is mugging it up in the background every which way and they never explain where she got that hat. It's like three gags all packed into 20 seconds.

Also there's just a surprising enthusiasm for unusual or complex storyboards to really sell jokes. I'm used to comedy anime kinda getting by on timing and delivery, but here's there's real effort to keep things visually fresh every episode.

Can't believe we can call a Love Live season Kafkaesque now.

Please Steve, the technical term is Idol Gremlin, and Sumire is part of a proud lineage of jerkbag school idols. And she's very good at it too, since her first major act of characterization is accidentally sabotaging Kanon and Keke's debut.

She's great, and outside of the tried-and-true gremlin aspects she actually hits on something the original Nico Yazawa really highlighted. Even in the idyllic utopia of Love Live, being an idol is still performative as hell, and Sumire is just the one willing to say the quiet parts loud.

Well she better hope nobody finds out about her outstanding kidnapping indictment, or she'll get cancelled faster than you can say "Isopod."

Besides that it's what got Yohane banned from Instagram?

Their dynamic is an absolute 3-point swish of an idea. Pure idol mania vs a Private Idolatry Contractor, and in the center is a white hot ball of Ship Teasing energy.

Just normal friend things like blowing "Wait (The Whisper Song)" in her ear to win at thumb wrestling.

Chi-chan was just biding her time until Keke was distracted to wedge herself back in next to Kanon, I guess.

Every idol group needs at least one responsible character, and since they haven't snagged the student council president in a 10-pull yet, Chisato's the best they've got. She's consequently not gotten a lot of time to shine comedy-wise, but I do like the way her relationship with Kanon is characterized.


I know we joke about characters being married but that's just straight up romantic in a classical sense.

Also it's just tradition for orange girls in this series to change the weather. It's a fact of life and everyone has to accept it.

But again, it's those little extra touches that just make this all work. Even incidental dialogue scenes have added details to keep things engaging and communicate character, like Yuna from Sunny Passion mimicking Kanon's stretching while they talk.

It's fitting then that they look like they just stopped over from a season of Aikatsu with that hair.

Is that a staple of Aikatsu? I don't actually know anything about that series besides the memes my friends retweet.

Anyway, the best part of Chisato's episodes is that they end with another musical number from the cast, and I get to gawk at how good the CG animation has gotten in the last couple years.

I'll be honest, idol anime music is typically not my bag. There's occasionally a track that'll stick with me but unless your girls are soundtracking a transforming plane-robot dogfight in space I'm likely to tune out during the music sections. But I've actually rewatched that concert like five times already.

Also the song lyrics are especially great remembering Kanon kanonically wrote them about her and Chisato. Even the seraphs in heaven above covet what they have.

Or just hide behind the plausible deniability of that conveniently placed "i" in the last word.

Pretty much! I don't know if or how well this entry might play to people not already inoculated to Love Live's particular style, but as an established zealot this has been everything I could have wanted so far. And we haven't even gotten our fifth member yet!