I keep hearing people say the characters are really different between these versions — Nijiyon, game, anime — where I just see mild changes in viewpoint and circumstances. Maybe I'm just more used to viewing characters from multi-media franchises as a gestalt.

Anyway, much love for Nijiyon.

I mean, they did act the story out on a stage. That's a thing that totally happened.

Bravo.

!

Shizuku's writing fanfic about her senpai, Rina's photoshopping them into dirty memes... What's Kasumi doing?

Mmm, that good "Rina gets special treatment from Mia" content.

It's kind of wild looking back at this discussion from 2022, where:

• The Sunshine! anime was indeed completed with its movie, aside from music videos, but Aqours is still touring, and has an upcoming collaboration MV with Hatsune Miku
• PDP, still considered something of a spin-off and now simply referred to as the Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, launched as the centerpiece of the second Love Live game, School Idol Festival! All Stars in 2019, is now up to 12 members, and is currently airing its second anime season (with a bonus anime-only non-school-idol member taking the place of the game's protagonist)
• The "true" sequel series, Superstar!! , debuted in 2021 with five members in its unit, Liella, has had a successful first season of its anime, and will begin its second season in July with an additional four idols joining
• μ's came out of retirement briefly in 2020 for a new single and MV, "A Song for You! You? You!!"

It's been an interesting four years for the franchise. And of course, the All Stars game still features regular new content featuring the first 2.5 generations (Liella has not yet been added to the game.)

last edited at Jun 4, 2022 2:50AM

As I recall, her copy of the DenDenDen is one of Nico's most prized possessions.

Eh, sometimes you get nerdsniped — I remember once having to pause in reading an Idolmaster doujinshi because one of the girls had a geometric puzzle as homework and I had to refresh my knowledge of trigonometry.

But this has a lot of very sweet little stories in it. As has been mentioned, Mari gets some particularly great moments, but then I could say that about everybody.

I think there's also some influence from the pre-game groupings.

See, back when they were under the Perfect Dream Project codename, the original nine were put in groups of three for a set of 4koma running in different venues. The Famitsu app got Rina, Ai, and Ayumu, and is the memetastic one where Ayumu's a jerkass until Nozomi exorcises her, and then they all go to Mars; the SIF app itself got the three girls who'd previously been N idols in SIF, Shizuku, Kanata, and Emma. So Dengeki Online got the 4koma with Setsuna, Karin, and Kasumi, and for some reason a lot of early shipping featured those three in different combinations. (I think ShizuKana got some of that early boost well, and of course RinaAi went on to be reinforced by the game.)

I'd suspect Ayumu threw a bra on to go next door, rather than expecting to sleep in it.

(Though I do wonder what exactly their parents think of the situation/is going on. Maybe Yu's folks were out, or are very heavy sleepers? In SIFAS, the families are close enough that they vacation together. And now I'm getting ficbunnies for a Marmalade Boy -type plot where their parents admit they've been a foursome for years....)

To get back to the story, I like it a lot. I enjoy Kitaku's stories where the couplings get shuffled about, but the ones that are firmly AnaPomu are also top notch. It's also always kind of funny to see Yu's enthusiasm and tendency to throw herself into something headlong directed towards sex.

That thought process is clearly canon.

And of course ep5 did wind up, in the end, YuuPomu.

From the Goddess's lines, I would think that Lappi didn't have an existence as a human or anything like that prior to having her soul put in the plushie — that the Goddess created her for that purpose. (Otherwise she'd be released back into samsara to be reincarnated rather than just joining with the Goddess.)

I agree that there are a lot of parallels that can be drawn to disability or to asexuality. Not that it's necessarily a direct allegory, but that the analogy is there to be seen. It's really very sweet.

(And that's kinda why I think it'd be a mistake to have a sequel where Lappi turns into a human. Megu says she still has her magic — but she's already said what that magic is: it's love. It's enough, because it has to be enough.)

What's the word for what was done in creating Lappi, by the way? "Incarnated" implies flesh, as its root is "carne", Latin for meat. Was she inlanated? ("Lana" -> "Wool").

Really, if you want grist for the shipping mill out of official μ's material, head for the School Idol Diaries, either the light novels or the manga. (The manga is here, so that's probably easiest to get to.) You get the usual pairings — NicoMaki, NozoEli, UmiEli, KayoRin, the usual combinations of the second years — plus some relative novelties, like NozoRin, MakiUmi, HonoNozo, or EliNico.

Yessssss. This, this, completely this. This is why it's important that before the DiverDiva concert, Rina was the one to hug Ai as she worried.

Insert "you played yourself" meme here.

Aww. Stoic Shioriko has been fun, though.

When I was saying that Misato had served for the very young Ai the same role that Ai served for Rina, I don't think this is quite what I meant.

last edited at Apr 30, 2022 6:54AM

I so purely love the mini-autoemotionconverter Rina-chan Board pin in the extra chapter — winking onstage, yes, but especially giving Kasumi the side-eye when looking at the prize box.

^ Oh, yes! I'm definitely here for post-SIFAS-S2 out-and-proud Setsuna.

Wait a sec — is Yoshiko's "Lili/Riri" little demon name for Riko supposed to be an abbreviation of Lilith?

I mean, I've long thought that "Yohane" is probably a nipponization of the Latin name "Johannes", and a reference to Dutch demonologist Johannes Wier (1515-1588, disciple of Agrippa and author of De Praestigiis Daemonum et Incantationibus ac Venificiis — "Of the Illusions of Demons and on Spells and Poisons" — and the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, a hierarchy of demons), Johannes Faust (purported author of a 1612 German grimoire, Magia Naturalis et Innaturalis), or Johannes Junius (mayor of the German town of Bamburg, who confessed to and was executed for witchcraft in 1628, but who is primarily known for a letter he wrote to his daughter, claiming innocence and describing the tortures that forced a false confession from him). Probably Wier; the Psuedomonarchia is the easiest to find, and it's been translated into many languages, often with cool illustrations.

(Neither Yohane nor Johannes are legitimate angel names, which all come from Hebrew and usually contain part of one of the names of God, ending either in -el or -iel, for "Elohim", or containing "yah" for YHVH. But we are talking about the name choices made by a Japanese girl, probably 14 or so at the time, who was picking up cheap-but-cool-looking grimoires in used book shops and doing internet searches, both probably in half-understood English.)

last edited at Apr 24, 2022 1:21AM

This was cute, between Karin's tough front, trying to look mature for Emma, and immediately afterwards asking Ai for that wakeup call.

(In the game as well, Emma always wakes Karin up. Once Lanzhu and Mia joined, she also wakes them as the other dorm residents, though Karin still gets special treatment.)

last edited at Apr 21, 2022 7:24PM

Yeah, Mia is the youngest school idol in the franchise, and usually quite vehement about not being treated like a kid.

I could see how this book, taken in isolation, could seem to be just extreme for extreme's sake. It's very much the middle installment of a trilogy. But there are still a few moments of calm that I find oddly charming, and I think it's telling that after Reiko's humiliation at the service area, she's doing everything in the car subsequently out of sheer horniness and enthusiasm.

Whew, a half-dozen "first times" joining the One Big Nijigasaki Polycule. Nice.