Love Live! Sunshine!!

Episode 24

In an interview earlier this year, Kanako Takatsuki, who voices Hanamaru, likened the time she spent with her fellow Aqours members to a school cultural festival, saying, “We spend a lot of time together getting the event ready for everyone… It's like I'm able to experience being a teenager again, which is a really nice feeling.” And watching the latest episode of Love Live! Sunshine!!, where the students of Uranohoshi Girls' High School come together for a last School Closing Festival, I almost feel the same. This past season, I've referred a lot to the fleeting-ness of youth and the transience of happiness, and as the girls watched their bonfire crumble to its last embers, those themes never felt more true.

Having learned of the third years' plans to move out of Uchiura and pursue their separate dreams, the girls of Aqours are coming to terms with the finality of their last push towards the Love Live. Alongside the other students at Uranohoshi, they agree to put together one last school festival. Mari whips up her (in)famous stew, teeming with bear paws, fish heads, limpets, and who knows what else; Kanan and You set up an aquarium learning center; Hanamaru and Yoshiko put together a fortune-telling booth; Ruby and Dia host a school idol quiz show; Chika and Riko don aprons for a maid café. It's a good chance to see the characters in fun and familiar environments, especially as a contrast to the relatively heavy ending.

Before we get there though, there's a goofy little ghost story that involves two walrus mascots and a surprise visit from Shiitake. I have to say, the show has gotten a ton of mileage out of that walrus suit. It's one of the most consistently cute and delightful character pieces in Love Live! Sunshine!!'s arsenal, and it's always a welcome addition to a scene. This particular gag even has a surprise ending when one of the heads lolls off in a punchline that's just gruesome and weird enough to be hilarious.

Among the individual scenes, my favorites might have been Dia and Ruby's quiz show, and You and Kanan's aquarium. The first is a great callback to Dia's otaku obsession with school idols, but you also get to see how much Ruby has changed over the episodes. She's a little more assertive now, and it's great to see her flourish both as a public persona and a cherished member of Aqours. The aquarium, meanwhile, is just a cute idea. Kanan and You transform one of the classrooms into a mock aquarium, with shifty blue lighting and fish cutouts, and it might be my new birthday party goal. In that moment, while they're teaching a classroom full of rapt kids about the ocean, you get a good sense of what that school has meant to the community and what will be missed out on in the future—something that the show hasn't always communicated consistently. (The show gets minus points for the scene where the students release a massive bouquet of both latex and aluminum balloons into the air, which is terrible for the environment.)

But, as with so many things this season, all good things must come to an end. We know it, and the girls know it too. As the fun frivolity of the school festival winds down, a somberness seeps in. The festival was their last hurrah, and even that's coming to an end. There's nothing else now except the Love Live and the eventual end. It's one thing to write and talk about the moments of joy that flash through our lives and their inevitable dissipation into memory, but it's another to hear the characters you've grown to love talk about it too. It makes for a beautiful but bittersweet end to the episode and leaves you with a burning resolve to appreciate the daily triumphs of everyday life just a little more, even if it's as simple as the 23 minutes a week you spend watching an anime.

Love Live! Sunshine!! has overall been much more sentimental than the original Love Live! ever was. Maybe it's because they went in already knowing it couldn't last forever. But whatever the reason, it's given the series an extra layer of maturity that's really set it apart from the original. As we move closer to the finale, I can't wait to see what the characters have in store for us and what kind of farewell they'll grace us with.

Rating: A

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