Love Live! Sunshine!! 10-11

Love Live Sunshine - You know you wanted this pic

I know everyone wanted to see this picture

winter15-highw New friends can certainly upset the balance of old friends.

New Friends

Love Live Sunshine - Too much practice

The emoji is back to angry!

It’s getting to Love Live! Season, and because it’s such a big deal there are regional qualifiers. So the group has to decide what they’re going to do as far as training. But most of them aren’t really that interested in it, certainly not to the degree that Dia is. And it doesn’t seem like Dia’s interest in training is like Umi’s, where it’s a responsibility to make sure they don’t do badly and embarrass themselves. I think Dia is more interested in training because of training because they’re school idols and school idols train. And I don’t think that Ruby’s interested in training, I think she’s just enamored with her big sister being passionate about school idols again.

Love Live Sunshine - Reality check

Mari tells You “Don’t make the same mistakes I did!”

But not everyone’s on board with running 15 km and swimming 10 km (and even if Kanan thinks she can, she probably can’t). So that means it’s time to help out at the beach house instead! But instead of slacking at the obviously bad beach house, Dia takes over, because anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Even that doesn’t go too well, because it’s a crummy beach house. But it provides a nice time for the group’s shared dinner, if you don’t count Yohane’s Tears of the Fallen Angel. They even get some training in, although it doesn’t go very well after working so hard at the beach house.

Love Live Sunshine - Chika and Riko

Riko realizes how much Chika cares

There’s a decision for Riko, tho, and it’s one that Chika finds out by overhearing. On the same day as the regional preliminary, there’s a piano competition in Tokyo that she’s been invited to. Riko had decided to stay with the group and not go to the piano competition, but after thinking it over, Chika wants Riko to try the piano competition, because part of Chika’s hope in inviting Riko to be part of the School Idol Club was to give her a break from the piano to allow her to regain her feelings of love for playing the piano.

Old Friends

Love Live Sunshine - Mopey You

Mopey You

So as Riko heads off to play in the piano competition, someone needs to take her place as the co-lead for their song for the preliminary round. And the unanimous choice is You, much to her surprise. But she’s having a tough time getting in sync with Chika, as the other lead. And that’s kind of upsetting to You, because she’s been a bit worried lately about her friendship with Chika. She’s seen Riko arrive and so much of Chika’s attention go to her, and maybe feels a little like her best friend has found a new best friend. And I think everyone can understand that that kinda sucks. And even more than that, You thought being a school idol was something she could do together with Chika, but it ballooned into ‘everyone’, and she’s just one of 9, and not even the one that Chika’s making songs with, or thinking up coreography with.

Love Live Sunshine - Coordination

Finally in step with each other

But there’s a little bit that I think needs to be looked at a little more in-depth. They are having no luck with their coordination, until You tells Chika “Do the steps like you’ve been doing it with Riko.” And after that, they are in sync. But if they weren’t in sync before, was it Chika who wasn’t thinking about You? I don’t think so. It was You trying to be like Riko, trying to be like who she thought her best friend wanted as a friend. And even after Mari takes You aside and tells her to be honest with Chika, let her know how she feels, You just can’t do that, especially when confronted with Riko’s gift of scrunchies to everyone to keep them all together in their thoughts. It takes the one-two punch of Riko and Chika to show You that Chika’s thinking about her, and has been the whole time.

Love Live Sunshine - Riko with them in spirit

And even by herself, she’s still connected with the others

The show ends up with the coordinated performances of Aquors and Riko, with Aquors using a song based on the one that Riko wrote for her piano. This was, hands down, the best Aquors performance that has been in the show. This was the first one that, to me, looked like a coordinated and coreographed musical performance, not just a group of girls singing the same song and milling around. I’d definitely love to see more like this, both music and performance.

header-winter15-highw

I know this is a bit late, since episode 12 is out, but the story was better limited to these two episodes, as Chika’s friends both get to learn something about themselves and something about how Chika cares for them. I liked that these two weren’t about Love Live!, they were about friends and growing up. We’ll get back to Love Live! next week, and see how the season finishes up.

About

Proving that you don't have to be young to love anime, I enjoy all genres and styles of shows. If it's not hurting anyone else, you should never be ashamed of what you like!
Blinklist BlogMarks Delicious Digg Diigo FaceBook Google MySpace Netvibes Newsvine Reddit StumbleUpon Twitter

7 Responses to “Love Live! Sunshine!! 10-11”

  1. skylion says:

    I know it’s kinda corny, but I really loved the “piano playing” part of the performance. It was touching in addition to being just the sort of demonstrative thing a bunch of kids would do. Yeah, I know, I have no taste at all…

    • Highway says:

      I dunno if that is corny. It was one of the things that actually connected the performance to the song for me. Too frequently, the dancing and movements seem like they don’t matter to the song, so you need something like that to connect *this particular dance routine* to *that particular song*. When viewed in a vacuum, pretty much all of this stuff is corny. It needs the connections to other things to overcome that.

  2. Foshizzel says:

    Dat shark sleeping bag is fantastic! 😀 😀 😀

    • skylion says:

      I know, and thanks to this, New Game! and Amaama, I’m seeing shark good all over the place!

    • fragb85 says:

      I’m more impressed on how Yoshiko even got up there. Maybe its the perspective, but that’s at least six feet on the air! I don’t see a step ladder anywhere. And the twine doesn’t look very secure, like its about to snap under the weight of a 15 year old school idol and fall on the others.

      • Highway says:

        Hammock strings always look like that. And Yohane’s not that heavy, probably something like 110 pounds all up.

        But even with that, let me put on my architect hat (and take off my engineer hat): it’s not how you build it, it’s how it looks.

Leave a Reply