This is sort of half a post, and was almost a bsky thread but i realized i had too much to say and that website doesn't deserve it. The way people, Love Live fans even, talk about the two more recent anime outright astounds me. If they even watch them at all, i mean. This isn't at all a dig at screenwriter Hanada Jukki but i just know people see his name attached as permission to enjoy an idol show. He's well earned the prestige attached to his name–K-On and Steins;Gate are indisputably some of the best adaptations of another work into animation ever made, in no small part thanks to his scripts for some of their hardest-hitting episodes. And it shows in his work for Love Live. The man wrote the finale to K-On's anime adaptation and the same penchant for gut-punch goodbyes shines in both his Love Live shows' endings. For all i'll go on to say, Sunshine is still my favorite gen entirely because of how well written the anime is.
But for as good as he is at endings, and as important as that final note is on a viewer's overall impression, Nijigasaki and Superstar both have incredible first seasons. Even better than School Idol Project and Sunshine's, quite frankly. The much-lauded overarching team narrative makes for incredible peaks and also requires a lot of buildup. At the start of a team-building narrative, we're necessarily working with a limited portion of the cast. There's sort of a drip-feed of characterization throughout both the first two gens' first seasons sprinkled within the story of the Love Live competition, and then a few focus episodes. it's no coincidence that characters with the most–well, focused–focus episodes remain the most popular. A decade after Sunshine's airing, Yohane is front and center on the newest Love Live magazine cover featuring the winners of the all-gens popularity poll. Just speaking anecdotally: upon rewatching every Love Live series, the episodes dedicated to one character or pairing stand out the strongest in my memory. It was one such story–the two-part mini-arc focusing on Saint Aqours Snow forming in defiance of Saint Snow's humiliating defeat–that really kind of put to bed the notion that Love Live is about the titular competition. Those episodes are about what makes losing the Love Live so crushing, and how little of it has to do with the actual competition. We do our best surrounded by the people dearest to us. Working hand in hand with them, we can sparkle in ways previously seeming unbelievable. And, it's crushing enough to do your best, yet still fall short. If you fall short along with those dearest to you, it's hard not to feel like you tore down all the dreams closest to your heart. All that remains true. "Believe Again," from that arc, is a heavy rockin' declaration that failure and loss don't have to be the end of all those dreams. As cliche is it is to say "it doesn't matter if you win or lose if you have fun," here, not only does it open the possibility for Aqours to actually lose the Love Live final, it sets a thematic ripple throughout future installments.
So Nijigasaki would have to tell a different story. (It even recontextualizes "love live" to be a statement to "needing to be up there"–loving the live show. As a group of solo idols, their narrative will not fit that same mold no matter how hard they might try. The emotions they seek to convey are all too different. Wrenched apart by a lack of common theme, the initial dissolution of the Nijigasaki High School Idol Club reads to me as a direct mission statement of noncompetition with the past two shows. Yes, this show and club are both missing something that the previous two had. But–contrary to the prevailing fandom opinion of Nijigasaki's hollow plotlessness–there's a lot more depth to this show from the very start. They have to establish all these solo idols so strongly as their own presences, but as their own solo idols, that takes center stage.
As moving and narratively satisfying as Aqours' coexisting victory and graduation are, they're reliant on the entirety of Sunshine behind them to mean as much as they do. In contrast, it seems to defy some physical law of conservation how much episodes like Taking In A Dog or Yohane Descends can mean on their own, giving the characters time to breathe with little space for the season-wide arc. Considering that, Nijigasaki's turn to solo idols feels obvious, if not completely natural as a next step for a series lessening its focus on competition. Instead of being a story about people who need to grow and change to work better together for a common goal, the Nijigasaki girls don't understand each other's tastes and struggle to work together but still enjoy each other's company and friendship having bonded over a desire to make people happy through performance. They share a dream, but their goals are all very different. The time that would have been spent on that shared goal is, sensibly enough, split between each girl's own struggle, and desire, to express herself.
And for what it's worth, in that, there is very clearly an overarching, mature plot. It might not be the focus in the same way as earlier series but there is a reason the first season ends with a collaboration between these girls who practically blew up their debut backstage. They learn what "working together" looks like for them. There's a needle to be thread between the space each girl needs and the desire they have to spend time together sharing their love, and its unique to Nijigasaki. But in being able to be their own people and express themselves while still sticking together, without the pressure to "keep the band together," their bond feels a lot more real. They fail to communicate and clash more than any group prior, and in coming back together again achieve an almost familial bond. It's a hard road both for the characters and the writers but it pays dividends for both in the end.
Superstar's first season very much benefited from paring back the focus to just the five then-first-years instead of having to establish a 9-member unit in 12 episodes. Those first five all being in the same year makes it a lot easier for them to come together as a group, without the expectations of seniority from any one member to the other. That would be the main focus later. Either way, paring down the starting lineup to 5 idols worked wonders. It's a struggle to pick a single favorite among them. Each of those five have their own charm points and i feel them all so intensely. Even more importantly, they work as a unit. As five, they are Liella. The narrative can't be about building a team that can win the Love Live when they're already so competent. So where Nijigasaki was about these people hanging around each other because they liked each other as different people, Superstar is about five dependable, caring senpai being there for their adorable kouhai, some of whom can act downright insufferable. As five, and as nine, and as eleven, they are Liella. Worries like "Can we really call ourselves Aqours without the third-years?" are a thing of the past. Liella's meaning is expansive, whatever the people who make it up want it to mean. Doing justice to the meaning is infinitesimally important compared to the care and consideration they have for other idols trying hard to express something like starlight. Over a three-season run the members of Liella care for each other and allow themselves to be cared for, and that makes them better. Transforms them. Kanon is selectively mute at the start and by the end has not only defeated her rival but taken her under her wing. That kind of growth, like Nijigasaki's nigh-familial bond, couldn't come to be within the structures of SIP or Sunshine. Growth like Kanon experiences–from adorable failgirl protagonist to the kind of reliable, caring senpai who'd make Nozomi blush–requires three years of space to grow, stretch and breathe.
i'm trying not to show how upset it makes me when people write these shows off, because at the end of the day as long as people are watching Love Live how they like to i'm happy. But it really breaks my heart seeing these shows try something different, succeed, and not get their flowers for what i see as unique, interesting developments to Love Live as a whole. In the past i've sort of discounted Hasunosora and Ikizu Live in the same way, but i think i really need to either check them out or shut up about them being "the gens that are allegedly also there". Especially because i only feel that way because i literally haven't been able to get into them; not that i tried and bounced off but i haven't even started. That incuriosity inside myself doesn't sit right with me. Either way, thank you for reading !!