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.

Anyway, onto some minor points…

1. μ’s is a pretty terrible name for a group
Well, OK, this one isn’t actually all that minor. I realise the name was chosen, not entirely differently to as it was in the TV show, via a Dengeki G’s magazine poll (though I imagine they got more than one entry!), but it’s really not a very sensible name.

I mean, aside from the fact that it’s pronounced “Muse” – the name of a not-unpopular Western rock band – how exactly do you type μ’s? Do you know off the top of your head without looking it up? Would you expect the average pop-music fan to be able to do the same? I’m told it’s straightforward on Windows phones, but messing around with even the Japanese keyboard on iOS, it’s not blatantly obvious to me at least how to type it.

My point there is that, whilst μ’s would probably give you relatively clean Google results (in that every would likely be about the group), you’re going to end up spreading a very mixed message. In these days when social media is seen as being incredibly beneficial to spreading the word about pretty much any media property, you probably want something that’s relatively quick and easy to type out quickly and accurately to maximise the benefit. μ’s is just going to result in people typing all kinds of different permutations of the name.

(P.S. All occurrences of μ’s in this post were copy-pasted from the Wiki entry)

2. Umi is two-thirds of Mio
Just in terms of letters, obviously. Well, maybe not – I’m going back to the “peculiar composite of popular things from popular shows”, though I’m betting you knew which Mio I was talking about without me having to specifically state.

3. A School girl. Also a Fortune Teller. Also a Miko.

Also likes groping girls, it would seem. Not to be all negative in this post or anything, but I can’t help but think they’ve perhaps overloaded Nozomi with a few too many character traits. Others, thus far at least, don’t really suffer the same fate.

4. It’d make a pretty good game
Not specifically to do with the show, I guess, but a thought triggered by the group rating chart which appeared a few times throughout the episode, which seems like a perfect progression system for some form of electronic entertainment. Someone needs to make a cheesy RPG where party members are your bandmates and boss battles are concerts against other schools or something. Actually, they just need to make more idol games in general – iM@S is great and all, but it’d be nice to see some competition in the market place, or something approaching the subject from an alternative tangent.

(I suppose I’ll have to get Yakuza 5 at some point…)