Here it is, the final episode of Love Live. Well, the final episode of Love Live for now, anyway – I have to admit, I was rather expecting this first season to conclude with the immediate announcement of a second season of the show, to materialise once Gargantia relinquishes the timeslot it’s taking over in three months time, but I guess there’s an upcoming Love Live event to save that particular revelation for. Even if the fairly impressive first volume BD sales figures Love Live has been racking up drop off a cliff once we get to the point where it’s neither dirt cheap nor shipping with a live-event-ticketing incentive, I’d have to think that the CD sales alone have made this production worthwhile for those involved. They’ve gone in pretty darn heavy with the merchandising, too.

But, yeah, it’s the final episode. It’s somewhat sad, because now I’m going to have to find something else to write about on a weekly basis, or more likely I’ll just leave the blog lying fallow and unupdated again for weeks on end. It’s also sad because, as much as I kind of rag on the show for silly things, I really enjoyed this show a great deal – enough to import the insert songs CDs, at least. Not as much as I enjoy iDOLM@STER, mind you – not that I think they’re in competition or anything, given that they’ve got very different approaches and aims, but I liked the rather more scattershot approach iM@S took with it’s content. It’s really kind of weird how incredibly different all the idol shows which’ve been airing as of late have managed to be.

There’s a lot of merit to taking a more strictly narrative and consistent approach to matters, devoid of tonal-whiplash, as in Love Live, though. I do think the single cour running time means that there’s a couple of things they tripped over a little – to the very end, Rin is pretty much just there, more-or-less a non-character – but taken in it’s entirety, it’s a pretty cute origin story, produced with the same high production standards that Sunrise 8 have been managing to consistently churn out shows at in recent times, at least when it was avoiding the CG.

It’ll be interesting to see, should they make a continuation, where they go from this point – they’ve probably got about six months of narrative space (the characters having not switched back to Winter uniforms yet) before the third years graduate, but as Eri points out right at the beginning of the episode, they don’t have any particular goal going forward from here. Love Live is over, and the school has been saved (for a year, at least). They’ve resolved pretty much everything in terms of what could be a narrative drive, and I’ve got no specific idea where they could actually take it going forward. Just being an idol is likely to be a little too thin in regards to what they’ve set-up with this show.

Anyway, let’s get to the episodes actual content…
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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.

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This week on Love Live, I get hung-up on really weird things. Although I guess that’s the same every week.

It’s not something which is ever particularly laboured in conversation in the show, but it’s quite easy to over-look precisely how close to Akihabara is to the supposed location of our heroines school, and the advantage that likely gives them over a lot of the other idol units who’re active in the country. If we’re to take the idol ratings as a literal popularity position (whatever metric is used to judge such a thing), then there must be at least, what was it, 999 school idol units registered in the ranking system?

Clearly, not all of those are going to be from Tokyo, or even anywhere that there is going to be a significant population base, even forgetting proximity to the hotbeds of crazy idol otaku. The building which A-RISE’s school is based upon is actually in Akihabara (which is why it is mentioned as being their home turf a few episodes back), and that’s obviously a very deliberate decision – regardless of their actual talent, being seated smack in the center of modern idol culture is an advantage, and the fact the show rates A-RISE as being the number one idol group is clearly indicative of something.

Anyway, I don’t really have a specific point about that, so enough pre-amble…
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Because that’s about how far they were likely off a call from Kakifly’s legal team, regardless of Umi’s present proximity to a left-handed bass guitar.

Before I get onto this weeks episode of Love Live, I’m going to revisit last weeks briefly. Firstly, given the content of last weeks episode, it was a little funny to notice, not to mention difficult not to miss, the new series merchandising that was solicited this week. Whilst I’m pretty sure that Nozomi is the only character truly deserving a Big Can Badge (fnar fnar), there are things like character fans and messenger bags up for order as well.

Onto other matters, I’m really struggling reconcile Kotori’s time.
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In which Sunrise blow through as many of their media partner obligations as possible in one episode?

Well, not really. It’s a slightly odd feeling episode of Love Live this week. I mean, the overwhelming character Love Live exudes is one of almost oppressive earnesty – aside from the Nico stuff the show plays almost purely for comedic effect, it doesn’t have a cynical bone in it’s figurative body. It’s a pretty strange contrast to something like AKB0048 which, despite being sponsored by a genuine idol conglomerate, has a tendency to feel like the production staff are fully acknowledging how dumb this whole idol thing is.

What’s kind of odd is how much of this particular episode ends up coming across as being product placement – even when upon further investigation a lot of it actually isn’t. It’s something that you wouldn’t bat an eyelid at were it not something which comes across as being so cynical in an otherwise so, well, uncynical show.

Not that almost all anime shows aren’t trying to sell at least something, obviously, and the frequent PVs already suggest this show had more of such an agenda than most, but those at least feel organically integrated into the proceedings.

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