What is it with anime and Alapacas anyway? It seems like the kind of thing someone should set up a wiki for. Either that, or that My Girlfriend is an Alapaca that came out recently is making me think that it’s more common than it actually is.

Anyway, this week on Love Live:
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Because clearly they’d have to be to enjoy thi… nah, just kidding.

In lieu of anything of particular substance to post about recently, I suppose I may as well stick to posting about the show for now, though there’s increasingly few things to talk about on a weekly basis without repeating myself to an excessive extent.
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Because I can’t think of six things to comment on this week.

To get the preface out of the way, I’m still strangely luke-warm about the show, and I’m still not entirely sure why – Omo seemed to report similar feelings coming out of the opening episodes, so I’m not the only one in that position, but I’m not really sharing the same love for the show a lot of people on the Twitters seem to have.

Again, though, I’m not really sure why. To a certain degree, it might just be that I’m over-thinking it, and a lot of the criticism I think to lay at the show strikes me as maybe coming from a weird hypocritical place of defending my iM@S fandom in the light of supposed competition. I mean, the main thing what strikes me about Love Live is that it’s all perhaps a little too calculated in it’s execution – in parts, it comes across as a peculiar composite of popular things from popular shows, and outside of that dance sequence at the end of the first episode it hasn’t really displayed enough of it’s own character yet. That’s hardly a complaint that can be pointed at Love Live exclusively, though, being that it’s true to a significant degree of a lot of anime these days, but Love Live is all just a little too smooth – it’s been lacking a bit of the rough edge or conceptual weirdness or just something that gives these shows some actual flavour.

Not that I don’t like the show or anything – it’s fun, and there’s a lot that’s legitimately great about it, but I just don’t love it as much as I was expecting. It’s still early days yet, though.
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Love Live! (School Idol Project) is the new idol show from Sunrise, specifically Sunrise Studio 8. I gather that these two facts put it entirely within the wheelhouse of things I’m supposed to post about here.

Which is pretty much the main reason why I’m posting about it – honestly, I’m kind of luke-warm on the show as of the first episode. There’s a lot of things I appreciate about it – I think the music is pretty catchy, and whilst I don’t think the writing is particularly sharp, I do think there’s at least a degree of intelligent direction going on. There’s some degree cleverness to the way some sequences cut together at the very least. I’ll probably end up watching the whole show anyway, though, mostly because there’s precious little else that’s caught my attention thus far this season. Infact, there’s been a few shows I’ve not even managed to survive half an episode of.

Anyway, just a few quick thoughts about the shows first episode…

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