Love Live! Superstar!! Season 2

Episode 10

We're in the thick of it now, folks. The eve of the next round of the Love Live is fast approaching, and Liella! have more on their plate than ever before. Not only are they up against a new, dominating opponent in Wien “Better Than You” Margarette, they've now got to deal with the impending hypothermia of their smallest and weakest member. The girls will have to work fast to both finish their new song and thaw Natsumi in time for the big show, but time is not on their side.

Though really, this episode is a lot more chill than you might expect considering it has the big musical faceoff waiting at the end of it. While there's a throughline of the girls putting together all the elements for their new performance, the episode is mostly filled with classic Love Live! Fuckin' Around, including briefly pairing off the second and first years as they work on the various elements of their upcoming show. You'd think with such high stakes riding on this, things would be a lot tenser, but the episode's narrative actually does a great job of arguing why it shouldn't be that way. This is going to be Liella!'s big shot, and that means it needs to channel who they are as a group and what their music means to each of them – and that's not really possible if the girls are all stuck with their nose to the grindstone trying to make The Perfect Song or whatever. So why not let them bond and build memories and just generally enjoy being around one another and let those feelings coalesce naturally?

As somebody who enjoys Love Live! at its goofiest far more than at its most dramatic, I certainly won't argue against that call. And while this episode isn't explosively funny the way some before it were, it's infectiously charming and natural the whole way through. There are a million little perfect, screencap-worthy moments throughout Liella!'s training camp, allowing all the girls to bounce and roll and leapfrog over each other in ways that build chemistry with the other characters and the audience. Stuff like Kinako's befuddlement over Kanon's weird posing habit, or Natsumi balking at Sumire and Keke's belligerent romantic tension, and especially the scenes where our second-years take the newbies under their wing make this episode just a delight to follow. After all these weeks I finally got to see Ren and Mei composing a song together, and I'm glad Ren still hasn't quite escaped her Gamer Phase yet. It's not the peak of Love Live!'s wackiest flavor of humor, but it all builds together excellently, and had me seriously excited to see their performance.

And then Wien stepped onto the stage in her high-heeled boots and fashionably torn tights and brought the house down for the second time this season. Granted, her new song doesn't pack quite the same punch as the first, if only because I knew what to expect now, but it's a showstopper nonetheless. Wien remains the most aesthetically powerful character Love Live! has ever introduced, and I love everything about this gothic middle school ballerina. I love that she glowers into the camera and declares war on the entire Love Live competition like a Gundam villain who's about to drop a colony on some poor Australian populous. I love that she proclaims she'll create her own future with song, like a goddamn Macross character about to shift the tide of intergalactic war through sheer vibrato. I love how she has, entirely through impact, made me actually consider that our central characters might actually lose to her – even if the laws and logic of television drama basically guarantee they won't.

Which brings us to Liella's new song and...it's fine. Like, it's fine. It's fine. But after all that build-up – not to mention following up a much more memorable show by their rival – it just feels like a letdown to hear a perfectly alright little number like “Sing! Shine! Smile!” here. It quite purposefully sounds like the theme song of a sitcom, to the point I could imagine the exact shots of each character doing something innocuous before looking into the camera and smiling. I do at least really dig their outfits, and the choreography once again does an industry-leading job at mixing animation styles for a lively, authentic performance. But after you hear a song that could shake the stars, it's hard to really be impressed by Liella! doing the same kind of tune they've always done. If we're going to have a song that really expresses who these girls are, I'd want something as energetic, vibrant, and filled with personality as the characters – not something that flattens them out to a polished and easily marketable little ditty.

It speaks to the show's writing, then, that I was still on the edge of my seat when it came time to show the results, and yelled out a very guttural “oh FUCK you” when they cut to credits before revealing second place. Any other season of Love Live!, their victory would feel so pre-ordained it wouldn't even be necessary to show the full song. But here, I'm seriously invested to see how this turns out, and to witness the potential aftermath of either side losing. That's just damn good character writing, and I can't wait to see it all go down next time.

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