English Dub Season Review: Love Live Sunshine Season One

Super-positive idol competitions

For the most part, Love Live is a show that tries to be as positive as possible. It juggles comedic slice of life with a more sport-type idol competition and highlights the girls’ struggles as they try to find themselves and win.

First things first, by nature the show is extremely more, and that is always a hit or miss. While personally, I find that a miss– there are too many unnecessary close-ups of the girls’ lips or repeated quirks for added cuteness, that is a drawing factor for a good chunk of the audience. There’s no doubting that Love Live is extremely popular, but if you’re not into that kind of thing, it’s rather annoying.

That aside, the content is largely about Aqours growing after their great loss, and how they move on from dropping out early from the last Love Live. Another issue out of their control is that their school is closing down, and they want to do everything they can to prevent it. While the backdrop is the idol competition, what tends to drive most of the plot is the girls finding what personally drives them, and what being an idol means to them individually.

The character arcs are fairly well done, focusing on the girls one at a time, and how their steps in growing up despite large changes soon to come. Dia realizes that she wants to be closer to her juniors, and Ruby comes to find joy in being an idol without using her sister as a primary motivator. Yoshiko tries to drive her bad luck into something that buffs up her self-image and becomes closer to Riko after helping her get rid of her fear of dogs. All of these revelations help the girls grow in one way or another and strengthen their bonds as a team. This specific character growth is probably the best thing about the show.

However, the overarching themes are very clunky. The show aims for positivity, and in a regard, they have succeeded– but for the character arcs, not overall. The general formula of Love Live is that the girls put in some hard work aiming for one thing regarding the competition, and then random chance does the rest. There’s no doubt that everyone in Aqours works hard, but when success is largely boosted by happenstance, it’s a lot less positive. There are a few exceptions, Chika’s new routine being one example and Ruby’s persistence with Leah being another, but most of the time it’s just luck. All competition absolutely thrives on luck in one way or another, but when the winning percentage happens to be that, it isn’t as positive. The largest example comes towards the end, where the seniors are desperate to go wish on a shooting star, but it ends up raining. Mari decides to drive all the girls far enough away to find clear skies, but they stop short. Instead, they decide to wish that the clouds clear and sure enough, voila, the clouds dissipate so that they can make their wishes. This sequence would have been far more impactful had Mari driven even further, fueled by her determination so that they would escape the rain clouds. Instead, we get a deus ex machina. The season is rife with this. The girls’ talent, hard work, and enthusiasm should be the cornerstones, but when everything relies on chance in the end, well, that’s not really that positive, is it?

Love Live aims for a lot of things, and is overall a feel-good show. There’s hardly any angst, and it definitely doesn’t follow the grimdark trend of most popular anime. Unfortunately, the writers didn’t really have a handle on how to properly convey that positivity. It’s not by any means an awful show, but it’s definitely not great either. Fans of the game will probably enjoy it more than someone who is only watching the anime. I’d take an entire season of a slice of life with the girls as opposed to the rushed idol competition.