{"id":3456,"date":"2013-01-15T21:43:02","date_gmt":"2013-01-15T20:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/?p=3456"},"modified":"2020-10-11T21:05:47","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T20:05:47","slug":"four-quick-thoughts-about-love-live-episode-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/?p=3456","title":{"rendered":"Four Quick Thoughts about Love Live, Episode 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"piccytures\/lovelive\/love_live_2_1.jpg\" \/><\/center><br \/>\nBecause I can&#8217;t think of six things to comment on this week.<\/p>\n<p>To get the preface out of the way, I&#8217;m still strangely luke-warm about the show, and I&#8217;m still not entirely sure why &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/omonomono.com\/2013\/01\/14\/bookcover-scratchpad-1-winter-2013\/\">Omo seemed to report similar feelings<\/a> coming out of the opening episodes, so I&#8217;m not the only one in that position, but I&#8217;m not really sharing the same love for the show a lot of people on the Twitters seem to have.<\/p>\n<p>Again, though, I&#8217;m not really sure why. To a certain degree, it might just be that I&#8217;m over-thinking it, and a lot of the criticism I think to lay at the show strikes me as maybe coming from a weird hypocritical place of defending my iM@S fandom in the light of supposed competition. I mean, the main thing what strikes me about Love Live is that it&#8217;s all perhaps a little <em>too<\/em> calculated in it&#8217;s execution &#8211; in parts, it comes across as a peculiar composite of popular things from popular shows, and outside of that dance sequence at the end of the first episode it hasn&#8217;t really displayed enough of it&#8217;s own character yet. That&#8217;s hardly a complaint that can be pointed at Love Live exclusively, though, being that it&#8217;s true to a significant degree of a lot of anime these days, but Love Live is all just a little too smooth &#8211; it&#8217;s been lacking a bit of the rough edge or conceptual weirdness or just something that gives these shows some actual flavour.<\/p>\n<p>Not that I don&#8217;t <em>like<\/em> the show or anything &#8211; it&#8217;s fun, and there&#8217;s a lot that&#8217;s legitimately great about it, but I just don&#8217;t love it as much as I was expecting. It&#8217;s still early days yet, though.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nAnyway, onto some minor points&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><b>1. \u00ce\u00bc&#8217;s is a pretty terrible name for a group<\/b><br \/>\nWell, OK, this one isn&#8217;t actually all that minor. I realise the name was chosen, not entirely differently to as it was in the TV show, via a Dengeki G&#8217;s magazine poll (though I imagine they got more than one entry!), but it&#8217;s really not a very sensible name.<\/p>\n<p>I mean, aside from the fact that it&#8217;s pronounced &#8220;Muse&#8221; &#8211; the name of a not-unpopular Western rock band &#8211; how exactly do you type \u00ce\u00bc&#8217;s? Do you know off the top of your head without looking it up? Would you expect the average pop-music fan to be able to do the same? I&#8217;m told it&#8217;s straightforward on Windows phones, but messing around with even the Japanese keyboard on iOS, it&#8217;s not blatantly obvious to me at least how to type it.<\/p>\n<p>My point there is that, whilst \u00ce\u00bc&#8217;s would probably give you relatively clean Google results (in that every would likely be about the group), you&#8217;re going to end up spreading a very mixed message. In these days when social media is seen as being incredibly beneficial to spreading the word about pretty much any media property, you probably want something that&#8217;s relatively quick and easy to type out quickly and accurately to maximise the benefit. \u00ce\u00bc&#8217;s is just going to result in people typing all kinds of different permutations of the name.<\/p>\n<p>(P.S. All occurrences of \u00ce\u00bc&#8217;s in this post were copy-pasted from the Wiki entry)<\/p>\n<p><b>2. Umi is two-thirds of Mio<\/b><br \/>\nJust in terms of letters, obviously. Well, maybe not &#8211; I&#8217;m going back to the &#8220;peculiar composite of popular things from popular shows&#8221;, though I&#8217;m betting you knew which Mio I was talking about without me having to specifically state.<\/p>\n<p><b>3. A School girl. Also a Fortune Teller. Also a Miko.<\/b><br \/>\n<center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"piccytures\/lovelive\/love_live_2_2.jpg\" \/><\/center><br \/>\nAlso likes groping girls, it would seem. Not to be all negative in this post or anything, but I can&#8217;t help but think they&#8217;ve perhaps overloaded Nozomi with a few too many character traits. Others, thus far at least, don&#8217;t really suffer the same fate.<\/p>\n<p><b>4. It&#8217;d make a pretty good game<\/b><br \/>\nNot specifically to do with the show, I guess, but a thought triggered by the group rating chart which appeared a few times throughout the episode, which seems like a perfect progression system for some form of electronic entertainment. Someone needs to make a cheesy RPG where party members are your bandmates and boss battles are concerts against other schools or something. Actually, they just need to make more idol games in general &#8211; iM@S is great and all, but it&#8217;d be nice to see some competition in the market place, or something approaching the subject from an alternative tangent.<\/p>\n<p>(I suppose I&#8217;ll have to get Yakuza 5 at some point&#8230;)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because I can&#8217;t think of six things to comment on this week. To get the preface out of the way, I&#8217;m still strangely luke-warm about the show, and I&#8217;m still not entirely sure why &#8211; Omo seemed to report similar feelings coming out of the opening episodes, so I&#8217;m not the only one in that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-love-live"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3456"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6292,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3456\/revisions\/6292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}