Love Live! Sunshine!! – 04

Whew, this post writing stuff can be tiring!

I’m so bad at writing opening lines. I always end up putting what I thought was a clever line in the first paragraph instead. So imagine there’s something more clever here.

I Declare This Club Open

Congrats on your club, now get to work!

And with an enthusiastic flourish from Mari, Uranohoshi has a school idol club! Normal activities begin such as cleaning the (fancy) club room and recruiting members. And of course, the first people on the prospective list are Ruby and Hanamaru. They’re really the only ones of the 6 remaining characters that we know will join Aquors who have shown any overt interest in being in the group. Dia has been totally against the whole idea and Mari has been the group’s advocate, but only so far as canceling out Dia. Kanan has been an enigma throughout, although there’s a hint about her in this episode. And Yohane is still a whackaloon.

There’s your Yohane picture, no complaining!

So you cast your rod where you know there’s fish. Ruby is super excited about them getting club status, because she wants to see more performances, but Chika’s not holding back for any of that. She fairly dragoons Hanamaru and Ruby into service, only to be stopped by Riko and You telling her not to pick on her kouhai. But the reality is that Ruby definitely wants to, and Hanamaru thinks she wants to do Ruby a favor, getting her out from Dia’s influence to be able to do what she wants.

She’s like a cat, thinking that she’s hidden

Domineering Older Sister

Before Dia turned into super crabby emoji-girl

The slightly larger portion of this episode goes to Ruby, as describing her relationship with Dia. Both loved school idols, but for some reason Dia turned 180 and banned Ruby from having anything to do with school idols in her sight, in her grumpy Dia way. But Hanamaru figures out a way to encourage Ruby and also to get Dia to understand that Ruby should be her own person (with the obligatory stand-up-for-yourself scene for Ruby). And feeling like she’s the first stage of a rocket, Hanamaru’s happy that she’s sent Ruby up to the stars and is happy enough to fall back to earth, not being cut out for being an idol herself. But it wasn’t like Hanamaru was struggling too much, and stamina is something that can be gained with work. And so Ruby reaches back to pull Hanamaru up with her.

Hanamaru is happy to send Ruby on her way…

And Ruby follows through with Dia

Mari is a bit flouncy

As far as the Other Member Watch, Mari’s working on Kanan, who has her own reasons for not joining. I don’t know why Mari is such a champion of Chika’s group, but she says that she’s come back solely because of the group. And Dia is probably going through some personal turmoil and we’re going to relive the reasons she became anti-school idol soon. I’m going to guess that it’s something like “she wanted to start a school idol group in high school and had her dream squashed by some grouchy upperclassman.” And Yohane is only on the radar because we know she’s in the group eventually and the show keeps putting her on-screen.

Ruby doesn’t let Hanamaru let go

I know I’ve been saying that comparisons to the other series are something to avoid, but I think Sunrise has decided “Screw that noise, we’re going to make it as alike as we want.” Hanamaru and Ruby track Rin and Hanayo’s story so much that this show throws a lampshade on it and uses Rin as Hanamaru’s attachment to µ’s. Maybe it took a little more pulling to get Hanamaru to join, but it was essentially the same arc. The show also throws in a lot of the same things that µ’s did, such as running up stairs for training, and says “This is what µ’s did, so we should do it too!” This does set up maybe the opportunity later for Aquors to have a significant break from “what µ’s did” but it runs the risk of making the shows be a bit too samey-samey. I think we all expect them to have the same beats, but when they start having the same melody, there are definite risks of overdoing it. Heck, they even put Chika in the same workout outfit as Honoka: An off-the-shoulder shirt with the first character of her name over a tank top. Maybe the show will work as “µ’s-mania” but I think most of us would like to see it diverge a bit.

Granted, the others don’t have exact copies of outfits