#the animation is cool and the characters are likeable and i'm not gonna waste my own time nitpicking over the details

[anachronistic-falsehood]

watched what episodes there are of hazbin hotel and honestly i am invested. i didn't think i would be bc i felt like helluva boss lost its pacing and i kept critiquing it and hazbin to stupid degrees but then i saw one (1) post that was like "i kinda like hazbin hotel, it's just a fun show :3" and yk what. yeah it fuckin is. i'm getting back into helluva boss too. i don't wanna be a tv critic i just wanna watch something with cool animation that will do some cocomelon shit to my brain and by god hazbin and helluva are doing that. every single one of these characters look like a twelve year old's deviantart ocs and that's made it weirdly charming to me??? my twelve year old self would fucking love this. i am not here to critique or analyze shit i am just going to absorb both shows as they happen i don't care if there's fanservice or plotlines that don't make sense or if all the guy characters look like tumblr sexymen or if some of the canon ships don't make sense to me i am invested who gives a shit <3

[lyrical-lovely]

Anime Review - Love Live! School Idol Project (S1)

I have a very deep connection to the Love Live franchise, but the original anime was actually kind of disappointing... This is the first anime I've reviewed on this page that had a second season I declined to watch. I might come back to it down the line, but I'm gonna take a break for now.

Watch Love Live! School Idol Project if:

- You enjoy music and anime about music

- You like the premises of sports anime but got tired of baseball/basketball/soccer

- You like women (seriously- there's no voiced men in the entire series)

Do NOT watch Love Live! School Idol Project if:

- You are sensitive to the usual 2010s anime nonsense (minor sexual harassment, sexualization of minors, insensitive discussion of weight and diet)

- You want a cast of likeable characters (don't worry, I'm gonna touch on this below)

- You like anime with tidy endings

SPOILERS below, I have to talk freely about this, sorry.

Nobody here knows this yet, but I've been into Love Live for about 10 years now, just before Aqours debuted. And let me tell you- based on the cards and stories in the game, I was a big fan of u's because I thought their characters were much more complex than they are in the later seasons. This is still true, but after watching the anime, I hate basically all of them. But let's go back to the beginning.

Love Live is an anime about a girl named Honoka who finds out her school, with a history so extensive that her grandmother and mother both attended, is closing due to a lack of applications. After seeing another school's successful idol group, Honoka decides to recruit her friends Umi and Kotori to join her. She runs into opposition at just about every possible point- struggling with getting venues, a difficult student council president, troubles with advertising, arguments within the group, et cetera.

In order to fully understand Love Live, you need to have a grasp of the context- Love Live is actually a sports anime! Many of the issues that Honoka and her friends, which make up the group u's, run into are based on cliches from sports anime, and the characters are also based on sports anime cliches. For example, Nico ran the old idol club before all the other members quit because her demands were too high. Eli is the overzealous student council president who thinks the idol group is giving the school a bad image. Hanayo is shy. Maki is moody and difficult, but a real talent. Do you see it? Replace those names with male names and you've got the ingredients for a perfect baseball club.

Anyway, I had very high hopes for this anime, so it's my own fault I was disappointed. The number of main characters, combined with the sheer volume of hurdles that the group faces on their way to stardom, means that the complex characters I had gotten to know so well through the games were largely left undeveloped. Instead of the cool, calm, and collected traditional woman that Umi's character wants to be, we get a frazzled mess who's being dragged into antics that really don't seem to suit her at all. Instead of deeply struggling with her relationship with her own femininity, Rin just says "nya" a few times every episode and that's literally her entire arc. Seriously, it's a shame because I know she gets development in the second season, but she adds nothing but wasted time to the first season. And as a result of these failed complex characters, most of the Love Live idols to come would ultimately be shallow. I could go on and on about the failed character arcs in this show, but that ultimately brings me to the plot.

Nothing. Goes. Right. Absolutely nothing can be easy or insignificant. Each performance is for the fate of a school, and each hurdle seems nearly impassable. This would be great if the anime was supposed to be a thriller, but its target demographic doesn't want that from it. What young girls wanted to watch was a cute anime about girls wearing dresses and singing, and what we got instead was just a barrage of struggles. There was almost zero downtime, no cute little interactions between the characters that had no significance to the plot. Forgive me, but I think those mundane moments that develop relationships between characters are part of what makes an anime, specifically an idol anime where the emphasis is supposed to be ON the characters, good. In the end, they end up withdrawing from the competition because Honoka collapsed (cliche) and that's where they leave it. Fortunately, I think by this point the anime had been approved for a second season, so I think the dramatic ending was a ploy to draw viewers back for next year.

That's enough complaining, though, because there were some highlights. The music is wonderful (despite the lack of variety between the songs, ALL of which are about doing your best and following your dreams) and the costumes are cute by 2010s standards. They're a little campy now. Furthermore, this series was one of the pioneers of 3D idol performance animation integrated with 2D closeups of the characters. The 3D animation has improved significantly since then due to better software and computing power, but for the time, the animation was good. I also think the color palette was well chosen for this anime, and the voice acting was stellar.

Anyway. This turned into a rant about all my problems with Love Live, but I think any potential viewers should be aware of its shortcomings before investing ~5 hours into it. Overall - 4/10. Amazing for the idol anime genre and I really love Love Live as a franchise, but man, this anime was not for me. Thanks for listening.

[jayteacups]

Hi Jay!!!! I'm Elle I love your blog : ) for the ask game! 1, 2, 5, 6!! :D

Hi Elle! I thought I was following you bc I see you in my notifs quite a bit but apparently not 🙈🙈 thank you sm for sending in the questions!

1. What was your first impression of the show?

Thought the animation was really cool! And I was taken aback because it was my first anime so I sort of had the 'oh it's anime they'll pull their punches with violence and gore' mindset. and then Eren's mum got eaten and i was like OH OKAY

2. What did you think was in the basement?

When I first started watching I thought titans were some form of mutant humans or something so I was happy in S2 when it was officially revealed that titans were humans! So I was convinced that Grisha's basement would have some scientific cure to like suppress the mutations or something?

5. Who was your favourite character originally? Did it change?

Answered here!

6. Who was your least favourite character initially? Did it change?

I didn't have any characters that I straight-up hated in the beginning. They all were pretty likeable. I guess there were characters that I straight up didn't really care for like the cadets that were obviously gonna die quickly or were there to fill up the ranks (Mina, Thomas, etc.). From the main S1 cast though, I found Christa/Historia and Bertholdt uninteresting. Now I really like S3 Historia (and am mad that her character got wasted in S4) and Bertholdt still isn't my favourite but I appreciate that he got some good character moments like the monologue in S3. Also rewatching clips and just seeing him sweat like crazy every time Reiner opens his mouth is absolutely hilarious.

My least favourite character now is probably Floch, I really can't with him. I also don't like Zeke as a person (trying to sterilise and euthanise an entire race???? whole new level of yuck and he killed our faves tho so obviously we don't stan him). Though at least with Zeke I know he did a fair bit to move the story forward and adds extra conflict and tension so he's important on that count and I respect that. Also as a character he is sort of interesting, and I thought he was gonna be the main villain of the story when he first showed up lol

But with Floch I can't even try to be like 'oh he does xyz for the story' or 'oh i don't like him as a person but his character/role is blah blah blah' because I literally cannot STAND HIM he just reminds me of a whiny middle school incel ugh (if by any small chance there are floch stans in the audience i'm sorry lol)

SORRY that was long whoops hehe

AOT 9th Anniversary ask game