Well, being the penultimate episode, I suppose they needed to generate some drama from somewhere – the problem is that, when they choose to do a melodramatic episode like this one, the end result tends to be that there’s very little for me to write about.

1. Important Matters First…

Our friends over at the idol group george (who apparently hail from the not-so-remote Nagoya) are up to 19th place, so even without Mooo’s having pulled out, they’d be back up into the qualification ratings. Go Go george!

Of course, the result of Honoka collapsing last episode is that they’ve chosen to revoke their Love Live application, removing them from the rankings entirely. It’s a weird situation – if this was a show full of nasty conspiracy theorists, they’d probably have been accusing Kotori’s mother of being manipulative by making it easier for Kotori to make a guilt-free exit, but people in this show are far too nice. Instead, it’s either just giving them a convenient plot development for the shows last episode in the form of a last-minute reapplication, or it’s saving them an awful lot of headache-inducing character design issues when it comes to the shows likely follow-up series.

2. Oh, it’s A-RISE again

It’s curious that the Mooooo’s girls haven’t really had much actual interaction with other idol units, but, again, I suspect that’s as much to do with character design and voice casting as anything else. It’s nice, however, that in their few appearances, A-RISE aren’t depicted as being anything other than being another group of nice people. Sure, there’s time for that to change if there’s a sequel series, but it’d have been easy, and incredibly lazy, for them to have simply created drama in these final episodes by having A-RISE, or another idol unit, apply external influences upon our heroines.

By the way, for those who weren’t paying attention to background elements in the previous episodes, the A-RISE members are Tsubasa Kira (the cute one with the short hair, who seems to be the units center), Erina Todo (the one with the dark hair) and Anju Yuki (the red-head).

3. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Hanayo, I think that word is, in fact, the exact opposite of what you mean in this case. I feel like this is maybe the second time this has happened, where Hanayo states that something drastic is happening, only for it to turn out that it’s something good. This time it isn’t even used as a cliffhanger – even a mid-episode one before the advertisement break – which means that it doesn’t even make much narrative sense (structurally). It’s just weird.

The news she is reporting is, of course, that the student applications are way up, and as a result it’s likely that the school won’t be closing. The metric for applications being way up isn’t entirely clear – I mean, one could speculate that the application numbers doubling simply means that Yukiho is considering applying in addition to Arisa. Or maybe it’s Yukiho, Arisa and their other friend.

4. How much advance notice do you need before it becomes “Foreshadowing”?

The biggest news this week is that Kotori is leaving to study costume design aboard. I’m pretty sure at some point it’s going to be revealed that Love Live is secretly the prequel to Aikatsu, and Future Kotori is secretly the one behind Aikatsu card series Raburi Meido or something.

Well, I’d be pretty sure if it wasn’t eminently likely that Kotori will back out of moving abroad at the last minute, but the show could still surprise us in that regard.

The alternate idea for this post – the one I’d be doing if I was spending considerably more time on it – would be New Ninth Member Try-Out Comics. Except I kind of did that in meme comics before, and I had only thought of one joke (something to do with Nozomi reject Kuroko (Railgun) for character overlap). It’d probably have been hilarious. Or terrible.

5. Errr, how often is the Love Live again?

Poor Nico, she’s clearly been talked down to so much that she’s forgotten that she’s a third year. I’m pretty sure that the Love Live is for school idols, and surely she’ll have graduated by the time the next contest rolls around.

Unless this is actually just a subtle way of her informing the rest of the group that her grades have gotten so bad that she’ll be repeating the year over again.

6. Out Of Context Screengrab

I’ll allow that one to speak for itself.

7. The One-Eyed Man Is King

In the world of Love Live, showing even the slightest character flaw that isn’t played for comic effect makes you The Worst Human Being Alive, it would seem, and as a result, Honoka has now been relegated into that position.

I have to admit, I don’t even think that Honoka is entirely in the wrong over this one. Sure, she’s over-reacting, but so is everyone else in this situation. It doesn’t really help that they’re kind of throwing a lot on Honoka so suddenly – I mean, they withdrew themselves from Love Live without even discussing the matter with Honoka first, then she lost her sense of purpose due to the delay in school closure, and then Kotori dropped the overseas-study card. It’s probably not the time to be dropping specific obligations on her, even if she is moping around. Given that these people have just been pointing out Honoka’s lack of perception when it comes to others, it all feels somewhat like a glasshouse/stone-throwing situation.

Also, Umi’s slap was total weak-sauce. They didn’t even have it onscreen!

Oh, and we still don’t know a thing about Rin.