This week in Love Live… don’t tell me you didn’t see this cut of Tsubasa and didn’t think she looked like she should have been in a detective drama.

Which, forget all this moooo’s nonsense, is the real gist of this episode – how the heck in A-RISE even lose in the first place? Clearly, Tsubasa’s little grey cells are working on it overtime, and it’s elementary that she isn’t going to let things rest without asking just one more thing.

*ahem*

It does leave me pondering the validity of a detective spin-off from Love Live starring the members of A-RISE, just to contemplate something other than the Xenoglossia-esque robot show many folks joke about. They’ve probably got the cast down at least – Tsubasa is obviously the private dick, which I guess makes Anju the plucky secretary who gets involved deep enough to be well out of her depth, and Erena the femme-fatale with a pistol hidden in her fishnets. Well, something like that, anyway.

But I digress, this weeks episode was very much a transitional thing, in so much as not a whole lot of consequence happened beyond an extended decompression of the tension of last weeks episode.

In other digressional news, however, aside from the end of the LLSIF event this week (yeah, I got Sheep Kotori, not that the last couple of hours of watching those tables fluctuate wildly whilst I paid half-attention to the E3 press conferences weren’t stressful), a bunch of stuff turned up in the mail this week. Mainly my English Love Live Weiss Schwarz cards.

I grabbed a box of boosters as well as a trial deck, so I got a set of PR cards – I got the third years (so chibi-Nico, chibi-Eli and chibi-Nozomi), though I gather that is boxes PR cards are random between first, second and third years sets. Third years works for me, unsurprisingly – I guess a lot of people probably want the cihib-Maki card, but that does mean you’d be saddled with Hanayo and Rin. Is the trade-off worth it?

Otherwise… I’ve still not actually managed to actually play a game of WS, so I have no idea how good or bad a deck I’ve actually ended up with. I’ll probably go through it and arrange a workable deck (at least as far as I can ascertain from the rules) based largely around Nico cards, usefulness be damned. If you’re mostly after a deck with goofy faces in it, it’s a pretty good set, though.

My copies of the first couple of insert song CDs turned up today as well (alongside some Puchimas stuff and that last volume of Gundam Unicorn, reminding me that I’ve still not actually watched the first episode). I hadn’t noticed previously how hilariously serious-business Honoka was looking on the front cover of the Yume no Tobira CD cover. If anyone is curious, I got the Rin card from Yume, and Nico from Love Wing Bell/Dancing Stars on Me.

But let’s back to the cartoon…
1) PINK!?

This week in telling my readers how to suck eggs, when Honoka asks who won between “Red and White”, she is referring to the annual Kohaku Uta Gassen, the new years NHK spectacular song contest in which the red team (female vocalists) compete against the white team (male vocalists) in a musical popularity contest.

Yukiho’s response of “pink” is a bit odd, in so much as I’m really not sure if I’m missing a really dumb joke, or if it’s just as blatantly obvious as her combining the two colours – presumably Yukiho also fell asleep and actually has absolutely no idea who won herself.

(Of course, once again, we now know exactly what date the show is on this episode!)

2) STUDENT COUNCIL PRESIDENT

Who is completely unprepared as New Year rolls around.

Also, she totally looks plumper in this scene than in the episode where was supposed to be looking fat.

3) PiyoPiyo

Kotori roughly translates to Small Bird, hence her telephones wallpaper. It’s a little on the mark in a fashion that someone probably wouldn’t utilise in real life, but whatever, it’s cute. I’m mostly just pointing this out because someone recently asked me why AmiMami sometimes call Kotori Piyo in iM@S (not to mention that the Kotori puchidoll is call PiyoPiyo), and it’s essentially the same thing – PiyoPiyo is an onomatapedia for bird song.

4) Like an Old Man

Is it just me, or does Rin have her skirt pulled up real, real high here? Like, it’s hitched all the way up to her oh-so-flat chest. As a result, when she is lifting the hem of her skirt, as she is here, she’s showing off way-thigh (and probably pants, in some sense at least).

5) Magnanimous in Defeat

This is kind of an interesting way to reveal the results of the events of the previous episode – the Love Live qualifier back in episode 9 was cut away from the second that Snow Halation ended, and this episode opens without, beyond the now semi-usual Zenkai no Love Live moment, really making much acknowledgement of what was going on there.

The revelation is that it’s our heroines, rather than A-RISE, that are progressing to the finals of the Love Live. A-RISE are, of course, perfectly pleasant about the fact, at least at this juncture – everyone in this show is a really nice person after all.

That said, it does kind of leave the question as to where the show goes from here. There’ll be, what, two or three episodes of the show left to go, and, if were are really stretching the term, we’ve barely “seen” maybe two or three other named idol groups. Our heroines have already jumped over what has been portrayed as being the biggest hurdle, and nothing has been suggested as a replacement, even if we do see a couple of units in passing this week.

It rather makes me wonder how they’ll actually cover the Love Live. I mean, I’m pretty sure that there’s another insert song CD out in a few weeks, at the beginning of July, so there needs to be the opportunity for them to jam another song into the show, otherwise I’d suggest that they may even skip the event as being unimportant to the general tone of things going forward – that, at this stage, the building melancholia surrounding the graduation of the third year students is more important.

Probably not, though, which does cause me to ponder how they’ll actually choose to cover the Love Live given that they may only have a single episode to devote to it. Unless we just end up getting a Love Live – The Nationals series next year.

6) I can’t help but notice that…

…the trophy for the Love Live qualifier just happens to have nine stars on it. Nine stars… does that remind you of anything? You know, the number nine? As in a collection of nine things?

It sounds like a case for Kira Tsubasa, Private IdolVestigator, to me – an epic and sordid tale of corruption and bribery within the organisation responsible for organising the Love Live, as someone with a vendetta against the old-guard of A-RISE plot to humiliate them by ousting them from the Love Live at such an early stage. Little do they know…A-RISE are throughly nice people, and their opponents were at least moderately talented, so it wasn’t that shameful a loss. Whoops.

Although this does have me wondering who, exactly, it is who is organising the Love Live event in the first place. Probably a bunch of pervy old men.

(Also amused that Honoka has her manga volumes completely out of order, unless it’s just Rin or Yukiho having disrupted their order whilst reading them…)

7) Miko-Miko-Mi!

Not that there’s anything particularly interesting about it, other than, as pointed out, Nico looks cute as a Miko. Which also kind of rhymes, I guess.

8) Most Passionate Algebra

Rin suggests, upon matching Nico in her miko costume with Maki in her Kimono, that they form a Japanese-styled unit, which then crash-cuts to the scene above. I can’t help but notice, though, that if it wasn’t for the background, the costumes are way more like spanish Flamenco costumes than anything you’d necessarily associate with Japan.

With Maki dressed in Red here, that probably makes her the Red Comet of this cartoon. So, as suggested by the Build Fights OST, does that mean her Flamenco is three times the passion of an ordinary flamenco, or is it six times the passion?

9) Before anyone get’s excited about a sequel…

Bear in mind that there’s versions of the Love Live franchise in which Alisa doesn’t even exist, as weird as that sounds.

As much as the property boomed in popularity once the TV anime started, in a certain sense, it’s still a periphery product, or at least a promotional part of a media-mix production. It’s purpose is to promote and sell merchandise and events centring around the nine members – both as characters and personalities – of m’s. Aside from the fact that the name of the group doesn’t make sense if they only have eight members (though I guess, aside from Yukiho, they could rope in some other random rookie first year were they to continue the show), I kind of just don’t see it as a thing that would actually happen.

But, hey, I’ve been super-wrong about this kind of thing before, and honestly, I’d like to be wrong, and I’d love to see a third series of Love Live, although I would worry about it feeling K-On sequel manga levels of unnecessary, and given we live in a world where they’ve not only failed to merchandise A-RISE, but they’ve stuck their songs on the OSTs almost as an afterthought, I’m not really confident in them doing anything interesting with the secondary cast of the show.

10) It’s because she’s a short-arse

The whole conversation whilst they’re doing their stretches in kind of weird, in an almost pornographic fashion. I’m sure it’s probably a fetish of someone, somewhere on the shows production staff. That being said, it does show at least some sense of progression – remember all that talk from back in the first season about how difficult it was to so much as smile whilst exercising, or how inflexible and pained they were when Eli pointed out how bad they were at this kind of thing? Not so much of an issue at this point, given they can now hold casual discussion simultaneously.

Also, no, it didn’t escape my notice that Nico was the only one warming up on her own. That’s what happens when your unit has an odd number of members, I guess. I’m sure it’s absolutely nothing to do with a lack of popularity, and everything to do with the fact that she’s half a foot shorter than the rest of the girls, right? RIGHT?

11) Another thing Hanayo sucks at, apparently…

You know, ever since Hanayo took over the exposition duties, as well as the use of the computer in the Idol Research Club room, that second monitor looks to have been disabled. Clearly, there are limits to Hanayo’s computer literacy, in that she probably can’t fathom the fashion in which a mouse pointer can and will move from one screen to another.

12) Totally robbed, right?

So, Tsubasa collars Honoka to try and pin down what, exactly, lead to A-RISE’s defeat in the Love Live preliminaries. I’m pretty sure it’s that entirely down to our heroines choice of song resonating with the poor saps who trudged through the snow in order to attend the event (which, as I was reminded earlier in the week, was not unlike the journey many in Japan made to get to the Love Live SSA show back in February).

Well, either that, or mooooo’s had the advantage of having members which appeal specifically to far more fetishes than A-RISE do, given that they have three times the number of members. The only things which A-RISE have covered that our heroines don’t is that forehead moe, and I guess Erina’s mole.

Also, I guess that they can’t somehow manage to summon a completely produced song out of the hat they have just dropped at a moments notice.

13) STUDENT COUNCIL PRESIDENT

I’m less sure that Yukiho is talking about how she sees moooooo’s, more that she’s talking about how specifically she sees her sister, though I guess that, being the units leader, it’s one in the same to an extent.

Also, hey, it looks like Yukiho has found Hanayo’s discarded glasses lying around somewhere.

14) Hungry, Hungry Hippo

I’m kind of wondering if Hanayo has brought her own plate and chopsticks with her here, given that none of the other girls seem to be sporting eating utensils at this moment in time.

I’m sure that all you guys who watched Tamako Market will be well aware of the existence of Mochi and it’s relevance at New Years already.

(I feel like I should make a comment about the varying translations of Nico’s really lame pun here, but aside from it feeling like the Crunchy translation wasn’t particularly trying, I don’t really have anything amusing to say about it)

15) DYNAMIC ACTION!

I do kind of wonder where Alisa suddenly appeared from here, whether or not she is stalking Umi, and why she only (literally) leapt into action when Rin took hold of the mochi-pounding mallet. I mean, what, exactly, does she think Rin is going to do with the thing? Does she know something about Rin having a vendetta against Umi that us, as the audience, are unaware of? Or did she just happen to be randomly passing by, perhaps on her way to see Yukiho, as this series of events was transpiring? Would she have even bothered leaping to the rescue if it was, let’s say, Hanayo taking up the rice-turning duties?

16) Two Girls, One Cut (of wood)

Awww, they’re sharing a board, isn’t that cute?

Also, I can’t help but notice that this one on the left makes it look like our heroines are about to be on the receiving end of Cure Honey’s super attack. Whelp.

The shrine in Love Live is, I gather, based on Kanda-Myoujin, a real-life shrine near Akihabara. Of course, Love Live themed Ema aren’t an uncommon sight there, apparently, as tends to be the case with any anime featuring a shrine based on a real-life location (infact, I’m pretty sure we’ve seen a couple of shows announced through such things in the past). Whilst the Kanda shrine being close to Akiba means Love Live mingles with other shows on the rack, I do wonder if any of these Ema that we see in the show are based off those that fans, or even the shows staff, have hung in the location previously.

17) Look at what Mr Chips is doing, and Say what you See

Up until this point, I’ve completely forgotten to mention the fact that this episode was about Honoka’s struggling to come up with a catchphrase to describe the unit. I kind of feel like I should have some kind of witty comment regarding it, but I’m mostly concerned as to whether or not george made it into the seven finalist spots we didn’t see. I also wonder if our heroines are starting to get a complex about the fact that they always seem to be listed last whenever a list of Love Live entrants is on display, but I guess that’s what happens when you have a name which starts with a character outside of the usual alphabetic range.

Also, Lemon Milk’s Sweet and Sour Chemical Reaction catchphrase was amusingly and cutely blunt.