Love Live! S2 – 08

Honoka just has to open her big mouth

Did Love Live! recover from being one I didn’t like last week? We’re looking more at Nozomi this week, so that’s probably a good start.

 

Does Nozomi Have a Boyfriend?

Just badger the poor girl, why don’t you!

I gotta say that’s the first thing I thought when Eri was pushing for a love song, with all those knowing looks at Nozomi. But first things first: now that they’re in the Regional Finals (that’s a good enough name for it), the participating groups are allowed to bring back older songs that they’d released before. That’s what starts the debate between performing one of the songs they’ve done before and creating a new song and routine. Remember that this is in the show, so that would be songs from the first season and up through now, including Bokura no Live, Korekara Someday, No Brand Girls, Start:Dash, Wonderzone (personal comment: “ick”), and the songs from this season, Yume no Tobira and Dancing Stars on Me. It’d be easier to bring back an old song, especially one that was well-received, since they haven’t had a lot of exposure so far and performing a known good song for more people would be a safer bet.

This is a typical µ’s reaction to, well, pretty much any activity

But there’s also promise in bringing a new song. People like new songs, they give them a little bit of credit for being fresh, and there’s the potential that it’ll be a great song. And more than that, there’s a type of song they haven’t done yet: a love song. Why is that? Because Umi is totally straight-laced and has never fallen in love! Not like anyone else in the group has (and they do go to a girls’ school), but as the primary lyric writer, Umi never made a love song. And it’s not that she’s just hasn’t experienced love, it’s more that the whole idea embarrasses the heck out of her. She can’t even watch a romantic movie without thinking it’s shameless! So maybe they can write the song with everyone contributing part of it. It’s kind of surprising to see Eri push the idea so much, even when the rest of the group is waffling and having a difficult time understanding why.

Can They Really Make a Love Song?

On the other hand, nobody is impressed with Nico’s presentation

It certainly doesn’t seem like it, since everything they’re trying ends in failure. When they started recording individual members offering packages to the camera, plus they’re talking about love songs, my mind went to Mogyuutto “Love” De Sekkin Chu, the third single that was released by the project. Hanayo’s was close to her presentation in the video, although Maki’s “perfect” tsun presentation was completely different. But when the whole process just isn’t coming together, even Nozomi advocates for dropping it and going with a song they already have (after Maki shines the bright light on their failure and time wasting so far). That doesn’t satisfy Maki’s curiosity, tho, so she ends up badgering the truth out of Nozomi and Eri.

Finding out more about Nozomi

It was interesting to see more of Nozomi’s perspective on the creation of µ’s, since she’s the meddler who kind of pushed everyone together, suggested the name, and was the last person to join up, the finishing touch, as it were. It was kind of moving to me to hear her describing Honoka and her passion along with the heart-stirring power of music as “something capable of connecting us with its immense power” because that really is a good description for Honoka in starting up the group, even if it’s grown past what Honoka started it with. And that Nozomi’s hope / dream / wish, whatever you want to call it, is that they all create a song together, after they all came together to make this group. And with that kind of reasoning, of course everyone is going to pitch in to make a song like that. And then in my head, the penny really dropped…

Nozomi and Eri, wonderful friends

Maybe I’m getting my hopes up too high, but when Eri described it as “a little Christmas present” my thoughts immediately changed on what song they were talking about. And then they went outside into the snow, it just made it worse. I’m probably all set up for disappointment, but ohmanohmanohman if they do a remake of Snow Halation I will die happy. It would have been ok to see Mogyuutto, but that just wouldn’t hold a candle to Snow Halation. Fingers crossed for next time!

Bonus Continuity Errors!

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This was back to the kind of messages I love to see from this show. I was probably just a little too rough on the show last week (I can imagine a bit of the cultural divide played a part in that, with the more Japanese idea of your failure letting down the team being the worst failure of all), but there was nothing to complain about this week. Lots of movement on the competition front, from Honoka’s bold prediction of victory in the Love Live! competition to A-Rise acknowledging that the coming final round of the preliminaries will be every bit as difficult as the actual finals, meaning that the other groups from the Tokyo region, including µ’s, are as strong or stronger than the rest of the country. I just hope they do the song I want to see next week! And the other question is “which is Nozomi’s real manner of speaking?” 😀