Dream with You - Why I love Ayumu Uehara

In the summer of 2019, I held my breath and took the plunge into Love Live. I loved School Idol Project so much that I cried, and I loved Sunshine so much that I cried. They opened my world to something new and I quickly fell in love, but in this story I've told so many times, there was a third as well. Around the corner, just out of view, was a group of solo idols I'd grow to love, and one especially who I could find in myself to call my favourite.

This is my story with Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, but more specifically, this is my story with one girl: Ayumu Uehara.

Being a Love Live fan in 2019, it was hard to avoid hearing mentions of what was known at the time as Love Live Perfect Dream Project. This strange side project no one really seemed to know much about wasn't something like School Idol Project or Sunshine; PDP wasn't a new anime series, it was a new group of characters often being featured in magazines or promotional material. We got weird silly 4koma manga panels and their first album, Tokimeki Runners, but that was all we really had at the time along with the promise that they'd be in some new mobile game. The months passed us by and even though I hadn't paid much attention to this mobile game when it came out in Japan, I was told by a friend that the game would be released in English, and I got really excited to play a Love Live game on its launch date. 

I remember being so excited to play School Idol Festival All Stars (or "SIFAS") when it came out. I downloaded the app as soon as it was available and kept opening it over and over before the server was even online just because I wanted to play it so bad. In late February 2020, the English server for SIFAS opened, and I'm proud of how I've owned my account ever since its release day. The first few days of SIFAS gave us non-Japanese players our first opportunities to understand the game's mechanics and how everything worked. For a lot of people however, the main focus happened to be these new characters promised for the game.

These Perfect Dream Project girls, now known as the Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, weren't really well known and for a lot of people, SIFAS was our first introduction to them. Everyone was eager to get to know these girls and pick their favourites, and so was I. So when I was asked who mine was, I had one girl in mind to answer with:

Kanata Konoe.

Wait, what?

          

While I found myself attached to Ayumu from the very start, this feeling deep inside told me it wasn't right to say it. Nijigasaki was so new, and wasn't she just another Honoka character like how people seemed to think about Chika? Ayumu and Chika were both the 2nd year leaders for their respective groups, right? I kept my love for Ayumu a secret inside my heart and I told people Kanata was my favourite, because I thought it was cute how she was sleepy all the time.

The week passed and March 1st marked Ayumu's birthday. I had a habit of writing birthday posts for characters I liked on Instagram so I made one for her, tagging my friends as their favourite characters and tagging myself as Ayumu. It was the most vocal I'd ever been about my love for her at the time, and even as I played SIFAS less in the following months, I always looked back fondly on that post, and on my love for Ayumu. Eventually I only opened SIFAS to show support for the characters on their birthdays which, over time, slowed down to never playing at all, and that's where this story would've ended.

Until October, when the first episode of the Nijigasaki anime would premiere. As a big Love Live fan, I stood with everyone else, eager and excited for a new season of new idols. The Nijigasaki anime was something new, something exciting we'd never seen before, and it was my first time watching Love Live as it was airing. In just the very first episode, I was hooked and knew I wanted to keep watching because something special happened: seeing Ayumu again. After Episode 1, all the love I had for her months prior came flowing back into my mind. I remembered all the things I liked about her from SIFAS, but that list was only being added to. The anime brought so many new reasons for me to love her. In Episode 1, she wishes to be more expressive about what she wants and be more honest with herself.

I still love pink and cute clothes, and I still want to wear them!

I love Ayumu's selfless kindness and her love and appreciation for both Yuu and all her fans. A major theme of her SIFAS bond stories is wanting to connect with her fans and show her appreciation for her fan club. It's wonderful and satisfying seeing her grow from an unconfident girl unable to fully express how she feels to a wonderful idol showing appreciation to her fans and symbolizing their shared growth literally by growing flowers together. Her conflict and struggles in the later episodes of the anime not only felt reasonable to me, but relatable as well. Love Live is often a story of love and connecting your feelings with each other, and I don't think I could say anyone represents those themes stronger than Ayumu.

          

In December, as we neared the later episodes of the anime, I had a period where I spoke more about Ayumu, though it was just through my close friends story on Instagram. It was like having a secret space where I shared my love for her. I loved hearing people say that I'm similar to Ayumu or say I'm a big fan of hers, and I'm glad that it's now what some friends know me for. Having a friend tell me "this is something you'd do" during one of Ayumu's cute moments really made me smile, and make me not only feel like Ayumu was more relatable to me, but that it felt okay to love her. After a few weeks and support from people, I made a post detailing my love for Ayumu and those feelings for her inspired me. The next few days, I spent hours writing about my passion for Love Live, and started a blog. At a loss for a name, I thought hard about it, and settled on one perfect: Dream With You.

♪ I just couldn't find my confidence and kept my head down, but you were the one who gave me a gentle push forwards... ♬

This blog is named Dream With You not only to represent my love for Ayumu, and my favourite Nijigasaki solo song, but also to represent the lyrics about the song itself. It represents being unable to be honest with your feelings before being pushed along by others to reach something you couldn't accomplish before, and expressing those feelings through song. It perfectly represents the journey I'd gone through to write even just the first article for this blog, being encouraged and pushed by those around me to share my feelings about something I love. This love for Love Live in general is what's kept me going. Pouring my passion into this driving force that's kept me happy in these past months has felt amazing. At this point, I've been playing SIFAS daily for months. I've been incredibly excited about Love Live, way more than I was when I first started playing SIFAS. And my love for Ayumu has only grown. The amount of time and effort I've put into SIFAS to earn stars to obtain Fes Ayumu, while not on the level of more serious players, is still something I'm incredibly proud of.

Ayumu either is the reason or has impacted the reasons for so many things: why I'm a Love Live fan, why I write these blog articles, why I play SIFAS, why I enjoy talking with my friends about Love Live, why I'm happy now... It just goes to show that the reason I can pour my passion into something like this, this thing that brings me happiness and makes me want to keep going... it's Ayumu.

Writing like this, sharing my passion, talking about Love Live, all of this was just a dream I had. But in part thanks to Ayumu, it's a Dream with You.
And that is why Ayumu Uehara is my favourite character in all of Love Live.

Happy Birthday, Ayumu.

          

Thanks so much for reading!

If you enjoyed reading about how much I love Ayumu, I do a lot of that on Instagram and Twitter as @akari_uehara, along with a lot of LL rambles and progress updates on future blog articles!

After I spent enough effort and stars into the recent Fes banner in SIFAS I realized I was gonna be out of stars to pull for Ayumu's birthday gacha, so I wanted another way to celebrate! I've sort of had this idea ever since writing my first blog article and when I thought about what I wanted to write about next, I prioritized this over another idea I had because I knew my girl's birthday was coming up. I hope I could do this queen some justice and get more people to love her. It's been so so amazing to see all these kind words and support for her on her birthday, and I've been sharing so much amazing art from such talented people. I'm really glad we can all just come together today and share our appreciation for something, someone, who makes us happy.

This was a bit of a different style to how I normally write, and it wasn't beta read either like I usually have them. I felt it ultimately ended up being more formal or emotional with less humour than usual and considered it. Some support from people and my thoughts led me to one conclusion: I've been speaking from the heart this whole time. I think if I edited or changed the way I said something it would feel less genuine, and on Ayumu's birthday, I want to share nothing less than my genuine feelings for her. Trying a different style could help me grow or experiment, and while I'm more comfortable with the style of my previous articles, I hope this was just as nice to read for everyone.

I want to give a big thanks again to everyone who helped push me back in December to start writing or to be more vocal about what I love. Thanks so much to Kyo, Mizu, Lastuli, Jack, and Stella for giving me that push I needed.

Since then I've received support that's made me really happy. Thank you to Slike, Theo, Melon, and Cosmos for a lot of your kind words or motivation to continue writing! The conversations I've been having recently with all 9 of you have really helped motivate me.

I want to give another thank you to ItionoBen for your video on Hanamaru and your advice in December. Both of these inspired me and showed me that if you just wanna talk about your best girl for a while, it's lots of fun and people will come to show support.