“Love Live! Sunshine!!” returned with its second season on Oct. 7. The series continues to follow the adventures of the idol group Aqours.
Experiencing failure and creating new (and recovering old) bonds have led the group further than ever and they now have their sights set on becoming the champions of the famous school idol competition known as “Love Live!”.
“Love Live!” is a multimedia project started back in 2010 in a collaboration between ASCII Media Works’ Dengeki G’s Magazine, the music label Lantis, and the anime studio Sunrise. In the span of seven years, the project has gained a large following across the board of all work related to the series including the anime, live concerts, the mobile game, CDs, and books. Recently, the mobile app “Love Live! School Idol Festival” hit 40 million players worldwide.
The series began on Jan. 30, 2010 when the prologue story and character introductions for nine girls were officially released. Following that was a single called “Bokura no LIVE Kimi to no LIFE” that was released on Aug. 25, 2010 with a promotional video posted to YouTube on Sept. 9, 2010. Several more singles followed, some varying in who the main girl or “center” of the song would be.
Many parts of the series were determined through fan voting, such as who some of these centers would be, the group name for these girls, and what sub-units they would be in when it came to trio songs.
Following the rise of the singles and Dengeki G’s articles about them, many of the other media presentations of the project fell into place. The original anime had 26 episodes total, split into two seasons along with a movie.
The anime’s plot revolves around nine girls (later known as μ’s (Muse)) attending a school called Otonokizaka Academy, a private school on the verge of shutting down due to an insufficient amount of people taking their entrance exam. Honoka Kousaka, a second year student shocked by this announcement, came to a conclusion after arriving at the famous UTX Academy that hosted the popular school idol group A-RISE. Determined to save her beloved school from shutting down, she asked her two childhood friends Kotori Minami and Umi Sonoda to join her on a journey to become school idols. Along the way, the trio gained six more members, three first years and three third years, forming their group of nine.
In 2016, however, a new group was introduced once μ’s retired. Aqours, led by Chika Takami (a second year), ended up finding herself in a similar situation. Living in a coastal town with not as many citizens as Akihabara had landed her own school Uchiura Academy in danger of shutting down. Inspired by μ’s, who had disbanded five years prior, she convinced her best friend You Watanabe and newly gained acquaintance Riko Sakurauchi to form a trio of school idols.
This was her idea to turn a zero into a one for school applications. This led Aquors and her group of nine down the road to becoming school idols.
Erika Brandenburg
Reporter