Love Live! Sunshine!!

Episode 13

It's been a long journey for Aqours, but in the end, they were able to find that "shine" they were looking for. At the very least, they accomplished the things they set out to do—they formed a school idol club, they made it to the Love Live! prelims, and they were able to get at least one new person interested in attending their high school's open house. It's a great ending for Chika and her friends, I suppose, but after everything that's happened and after everything the girls have gone through, the finale feels empty. It has a lot of happy feelings packed into a tidy little box, but with so many great episodes leading up to the end, it was just kind of underwhelming.

It doesn't help that I kept being yanked out of the series. First when the random classmates (including one who looked like she was permanently about to sneeze) trotted up to the girls and declared they wanted to be school idols too, and Chika just said "Sure!" without consulting anyone. ("Sorry, but you can't sit here!" is what I expected Riko to say.) Then when the concert started, I wondered why dogs were allowed in the venue. Then again when the girls launched into a dramatic reenactment of their history, which forced me to wonder why anyone in the stadium was okay with watching this excruciatingly long recap. (Did all the groups get to do a five-minute intro?) Then again every time Chika ran toward a light and everyone in Aqours kept shooting each other worried glances. Was this part of the act, I wondered? Was she going to crowd-surf? Was she actually running toward a light, or was it just a metaphor? And if it was the latter, why did all the girls look concerned? Was she going off-script?

In a series where I've largely gobbled up the shlock, goofy character humor, and dramatic monologues, I found that I just couldn't stay in my fictional fantasy zone long enough to embrace this too-much finale. I'm glad the girls wanted to share their origin story with the audience, but their real-world audience just sat through 13 episodes of it; we didn't need a recap. If I'm being brutally honest, while I enjoyed experiencing their origin story along with them, it wasn't anything drastically original. So who is the recap benefiting? The fictional stadium audience? Or we, the viewers, who literally just watched the events unfold?

Were I to re-watch this first season of Love Live! Sunshine!!, I'm not sure I would bother re-watching the season finale. Aside from the performance at the end, I don't think it holds as much entertainment value as the previous episodes. Sure, it's nice that the other Uranohoshi girls have been inspired to help save their schools, but that was always the least interesting part of Sunshine!. What drove the emotion in the series was not whether the girls would be able to save their school, but whether they could come together, overcome failure together, inspire each other, and succeed together. Not as school savers, but as school idols, each with their own dreams of being part of something bigger than themselves.

Overall, I think this season was a success. It shouldered the heavy burden of expectation coming in, sometimes leaning too heavily on the goodwill and rosy nostalgia of μ's fans, but if its goal was to make viewers care about a new generation of school idols, I think it accomplished that. There were moments along the way that could be a little clunky and fan-pandering, but it managed to work off its own strengths and create a handful of truly delightful and often emotional episodes. It embraced themes like overcoming the stress of internal and external expectations, finding the courage and inspiration to surpass normalcy, and realizing that while everyone may have idols and role models, everyone still has their own path and timeline for success.

Some of the themes smack of cliché, to be sure, but the series didn't really feel cliché most of the time. The characters' struggles were shockingly relatable, which did a lot to give them more complexity than their predecessors. In the follow-up season that is surely on the way, it will be interesting to see where the writers take the girls. Victory is nice, but it's not always as interesting as the tears shed along the way.

In the end, it was a good run. But I could've done without the finale.

Rating: B

Love Live! Sunshine!! is currently streaming on Funimation.

Follow Bamboo on Twitter.