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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…Isn’t the hardburned subtitles or the permanent ident which are present on the Crunchyroll presentation of the show, though on the off-chance that someone from Aniplex is reading – if you’re going to insist on slapping your company logo (way larger than most TV channel idents, might I add) on foreign streams of your shows, than can I mention how terrible in terms of placement the bottom-right of the screen is? All what happens is that audiences attention is drawn to it by the frequent appearance of pert schoolgirl buttocks subtitles along the bottom of the screen.

Anyway, the thing which really kind of bugs me about the show is Rei’s scarf. I mean, not the fact that she wears a scarf or anything – scarves are cool, even when they aren’t amazingly heroic-looking red ones billowing awesomely in the wind – but the fact that it’s drawn in a fashion that doesn’t make any sense. I look at the thing and see something akin to a really stupid Professor Layton puzzle, where the aim is to mentally trace a line connecting the two ends of the scarf together, but I simply can’t do it. I can’t mentally parse it. It makes no sense to me. It’s something I find way more distracting than any absurd degree of male gaze on display in the show.

Clearly, I am just stupid, or am at least missing something really obvious. If anyone has an answer for this on, please let me know.
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I have to admit, had I not been informed about this beforehand, this really isn’t the kind of reference I would have expected to see in the new Girls und Panzer OAV…
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At this point in the proceedings, I’m increasingly convinced that the whole Love Live tournament we have looming on the horizon is merely a red herring designed to distract the audience from what is actually going on in this show. You see, Nozomi is clearly a master of The Long Con, and everything which is going on in the show is part of that. I’m pretty sure that Idol Groups are the new Circus Troupes, and Nozomi is, in fact, putting together a team of super-specialists who’ll tour the country performing extreme acts of thievery whilst disguised as semi-popular aspiring pop divas.

This is all, of course, part of the larger Nico Esper Theory, established due to the fact that the shows fifth episode makes literally no sense unless Nico is the holder of super-powers. It, of course, follows that if Nico has psychic powers, other characters may also have similar mutant powers, and even if they don’t, they may be possessing other skills (although I’ll refrain from going as far as suggesting the show is actually set in Academy City).
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For one episode only, I’m bringing back an old blog-post format that was way more effort than the show I used it for deserved, where I attempted to summarize an entire episode in but five crudely drawn images (because, frankly, the better scanning, post title-wise, nine was way, way more than that other show required). I kind of picked a bad episode for it, though, because whilst it felt like there was very little plot progression, a surprising number of things happened.

Anyway, on with the usual…
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