To MakAndChiz's bit, including

I hope I don't sound rude in any of this ;-;

-- absolutely no offense taken at all. Heck, part of my point was that it's very hard to pigeonhole any of the Nijigaku girls as copies of previous Love Live generations.

To slightly explain my -- rather forced -- mappings, the Rina ~ Nico bits are the way that they're both sort of "gimmick" or "persona" idols, and the Kanata ~ Honoka is purely the napping (I think Honoka mostly does hers in class, rather than afterwards). Even the Kasumi ~ Nico comparison is a little forced, because Kasumi really is that cutesy gremlin -- there's no personality she's covering by being "Kasumin~" -- and Nico's very much a put-on persona of the Greatest Idol in the Universe.

(A lot of my thought process comes about from somebody snarking on a Kasumi/Setsuna piece that it was both halves of Nico making out with each other, so the thoughtworm got planted and it came out here.)

To get back to this series, I so wish we had more! Hibari and Hina are teriffic, I can absolutely see 3yo Kotori being very indignant about the proper name of chun-chuns, it's great seeing Umi overwhelmed by the little sister attack, and it's wonderful to get the family-side resolution of the first-season ending.

"Is it possible all of μ's is at this level?" "Let's rework our curriculum!" Never change, hentai doujinshi setup logic.

Ankira is always welcome. Though with this looking like a doujin cover, it gives more wants.

... turns out this is canon (at least to SIFAS) — https://twitter.com/SIFAStheatre/status/1282384896623697920?s=19

!

!!

oh my heart

Ayumu and Yuu are too cute and sweet.

(I'm honestly loving how, thus far in the anime (ep 6), Ayumu is still twitching every time Yuu calls one of the other girls cute, or is otherwise all enthusiastic at them — and then gets terribly embarrassed when Yuu calls her cute. Girl definitely wants to monopolize her childhood friend some, but is way too nice.)

Kanata, the strategist. Beautiful.

For some reason, I find these gentle comedy manga that double as cooking instruction wonderfully engrossing. Thank goodness for their proliferation.

I'll admit, the recent chapters in SIFAS:World ed. have kinda made me like Ayumu/Shioriko, which I did not expect — though the fact that they both want Yuu is maybe a distraction.

This is your occasional reminder that bisexual people do, in fact, exist.

I like the little cameos of Ruby and Dia, and also Yoshiko.
Am sure I missed others

One I spotted was Nijigasaki's Yuu — she also recurs a few pages later.

This did seem maybe longer than it needed to be, but it's a great character study in what brought these two to the beginning of the series.

Uh... was there like a contest for "Love Live Alt Reality Eri x Kotori Doujin With them as a Police Inspector and Master Thief and a Balloon-Aided Getaway," or was this outright plagiarism, or just the weirdest case of synchronized inspiration ever?

The Cutie Panther as phantom thief bit I am pretty sure comes from cards in SIF, as do all the costumes. The tropes, including the balloon-aided getaway, come straight from the broader Phantom Thief genre — I personally first saw most of these in Kaitou Saint Tail, but they go back farther; both CLAMP's Man of 20 Masks and the Detective Conan-adjacent Kaitou Kid reference similar masked superthieves that go back to (I think) the 1940s.

Yes, the middle of the three, the little goth/horror girl (probably the little skull sticker on the envelope would have been enough to tip off fans if Ryo hadn't said "Koume").

Mio's not really a tomboy, but — hmm. So, to my reading, New Generations are kind of three versions of the girl-next-door archetype. Uzuki is the ordinarily cute sort — frills and long hair, works hard but doesn't really get anywhere by it. Rin is the cooler-than-you type, sleeker and more stylish. Mio is the girl who grew up with brothers — played with the boys as a kid, but she'd never be mistaken for one, and still super-friendly with everybody.

More accurately, stupid puns in general are Kaede's fetish.

They kind of spoiled the fact Shioriko Would join the club with that bond episode, so they kinda shot themselves in the foot by not having the Main story caught up for before releasing that episode

I don't think they completely spoiled that; at the current state of the World storyline (late October 2020), Shioriko has already become way less antagonistic, but she's still not a member — and I think that's the state in the bond episode as well, since she's saying she'll watch Fishpuff when the club has shows (implying that she's not in them).

Yeah, this is what old-school hackers call a "priority interrupt".

At this point in my life, if I try to read like that, I doze off and drop the book on my face, and I wake up terrified and with a sore nose. So really, Riko is saving You here.

So many great bits, but I think savage Kotori is my favorite.

So cute! And so many background gags — Erena very seriously fighting to get a Chunchun plushie in the arcade was my favorite.

I expected the sisters to be You and whoever was considered Nijigasaki's Kotori lol

You know, I'm not sure Nijigasaki has as close of mappings onto μ's as Aqours does — and even You is as much an Umi (protagonist's best friend from birth, brilliant athlete) or a Rin (energetic, athletic, mildly tomboyish) as she is a Kotori. In the SIFAS main story, when Nico proposes a series of one-on-one competitions between μ's and Nijigasaki, the fashion/costuming portion was Kotori versus Rina, and Rina's costumes were just Rina-chan-board sketches.

(Kasumi and Setsuna are both sort of Nicos, though Setsuna's got some Maki and Eli in there; Ayumu is a cross between a Honoka and. Hanayo; Ai is closest to a Rin, maybe; Karin is an Eli/Nozomi mix; Emma is a Hanayo with some Eli and Nozomi also; Kanata is maybe also a Honoka with some Nozomi; Shizuku is maybe closest to an Umi/Eli; and Rina is maybe a Nico with Nozomi's backstory. These are all kinda forced. It's possible that Yuu is doing the costumes as well as the songwriting and choreography?)

That aside, this is adorable.

I mean, Kasumi might top, but I kinda get the feeling like she'd completely self-destruct like usual halfway through?

This is very cute, though.

I love the connection between Setsuna's clumsy overzealousness at cooking and lovemaking.

(I don't think Setsuna's cooking (dis)ability has been touched on outside the SIFAS event "Come Enjoy These Special Sweets", but even without that, the way her over-enthusiasm switch gets hit when she's talking about her favorite anime or light novel or anything, really, makes it very understandable.)

I think the "magic drink" bit wasn't boosting confidence, per se, but just getting them both to relax a little — you'll notice they both drank some. Once Setsuna wasn't stressing over having a checklist to get through, and once Kasumi wasn't worried about that, they could handle things much better.

(Now that I think about it, I do sort of wonder that we all seem to take for granted that Setsuna's lover would keep using her stage name. It makes a certain amount of sense — she's much more herself as Setsuna than as Nana — but it's still a little odd.)

Just the Nijigasaki girls? Nah, in SIFAS, Yuu's got the entire cast wanting her. It's honestly making me feel guilty, since she's also contractually bound not to notice no matter how obvious anybody is, and to airheadedly make leading remarks.

One thing I thought from the show is Maki seemed to love song writing & not to want to go into her parents hospital - I'm not sure she would do it - or if she had any pressure to. Also her parents own it/run it right? If they wanted her to take over, wouldn't she be in management? A doctor isn't gonna know the first thing about running the place.

Remember that Maki's dad is a doctor himself. The way that doctoring works in Japan — or at least the way it works in fiction! — is that a wealthy doctor is wealthy by owning and running a hospital. There's therefore double pressure on their heirs: they must take over the family business, and to do that, they must be a doctor themselves. You get the impression that Japanese people wouldn't trust a hospital owned by, say, an MBA — and given how medicine (particularly the cost) has gone in the US in the few decades since hospitals became profit centers run by businesspeople, I can't blame them.

I assume that, because of this trend, either there are (possibly optional) classes in administration in Japanese med schools, or that the owner of a hospital or clinic is not the day-to-day manager. It's certainly true that any sizable hospital is going to have a good deal of administrative staff, and that that staff would not disappear when Maki takes over, so it's not like she'd go from, say, surgeon to the one who has to personally order bandage restocking and make sure the sheets are washed.