Love Live! Sunshine!!

Episode 8

A moment of reckoning has come for Aqours. After a disappointing performance at a Tokyo school idol invitational where the girls placed last, they need to figure out how to deal with the very thing that Dia warned of in the last episode—failure. Not just failure, but everything that comes with it, like despondency and frustration. When your very best doesn't even come close to being good enough, how do you move on? And is it even worth moving on?

Chika, ever the team leader, tries her damnedest to put on a brave face and a smile. "We did our best!" she keeps saying, reminding the others through a forced smile that they made the fewest mistakes yet this time. But confronted with her true emotions later, she can't help but crumple into sobs. After all, the girls did do their very best. They wrote the best song they could, they practiced as hard as they could, they made the best costumes they could, and they sang and danced as best as they could. But not only was it not good enough, it didn't even register for anyone at the school idol event, since they didn't get a single favorite vote from the audience. A few episodes ago, I called Aqours "folksy," and I suspect that was the exact intention. From their floppy costumes to their sweet, homegrown enthusiasm, Aqours may have a lot of heart, but it's just not enough.

For Dia, it's a bit of an "I told you so" moment, though her kindness and empathy shine through exactly when the girls need it the most. She may have been harsh with them before, but now's the time to provide comfort. She knows that being a school idol is brutally difficult. Not only does everyone want to be a school idol these days, thanks to the popularity of μ's, but everyone thinks they can do it. And with a larger talent pool, it's harder now than ever before to claw your way to the top. As one of the Saint Snow girls tearfully lectures them, "It's not a game." And indeed it's not, because even in the fictional world of Love Live! and school idols, we see that for some, the ups and downs of the school idol world can have life-altering consequences. For some, it may be just about saving their school, but for others, like A-RISE, it can be their only chance to go pro.

Nothing quite sums up Aqours like what the other half of Saint Snow says to them, a somewhat condescending "I thought you guys had a lovely song, and performed really well." It may as well be a patronizing head-pat for the seaside girls and a participation ribbon for showing up. While it may have been mean for her to tell Aqours to give up, we can't really fault her. Everything that Sunshine!! has shown us up until this point backs up this endgame. At the end of the day, Chika and her friends are just μ's fans playing at idol, filled with the sunny fantasies of big town fame.

Maybe that's where Love Live! Sunshine!! shows its brilliance. Truthfully, in thinking back to the first Love Live!, μ's was never really put through their paces. They worked hard, to be sure, but their struggles basically amounted to your usual sports anime montage struggles. With just enough elbow grease and gumption, they made it to the top, because that's how anime series work. But if Love Live! was Rookie of the Year, then Love Live! Sunshine!! is Friday Night Lights, where things don't always work out, and the reality of competition is that there are more losers than winners, and sometimes dreams are shattered along the way. For every tale of sacrifice that leads to victory, there are so many more where the same sacrifice simply leads to nothing.

Of course, that's the more pessimistic take, but perhaps one that's stuck harder with Dia and Kanan, whose Tokyo debut crashed and burned and took their dreams with it. It might be Mari that raises them up again, but also maybe Chika, whose resilience is the very ingredient that Dia didn't possess. By the end of the episode, Chika is back in the saddle again, though maybe a little bit wiser and more wary of the realities of the world. Surely, when things are the bleakest, she'll find a way to harness the experience of the third-year girls and rebuild the group stronger than ever.

Aqours is taking a longer path to the Love Live than μ's ever did, and that's the perfect decision for a show like Love Live! Sunshine!!. The series has always strived to look deeper at its characters and poke at their deepest vulnerabilities. In the same way that Aqours has to work harder than all the school idol groups that came after μ's, so too does Love Live! Sunshine!! in the wake of its predecessor. I can't help but see the parallels between the two every week, and I'm happy for the journey both are taking now.

Rating: A

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

Bamboo is a long time fan of idol anime, and still remembers the existence of Chance Pop Session. Follow her on Twitter.