Dream with You

Love Live, as an idol anime, lives off the music tied to the series and the idols who sing them. Watching Love Live for the first time, I'd never have expected to cry so much watching a show about cute girls dancing and singing songs. Now, as someone who's rewatched the series as a whole so many times I’d still never have expected to cry so much watching a show about cute girls dancing and singing songs. While the music is wonderful and there's an absolute boatload of slapping songs to fight god to, the plots of these series and how the music directly ties into them are what keeps me coming back again and again. The music in Love Live is something I’d consider a huge part of its “multimedia” aspects and appeal; there’s so much to get into as a fan of the series. Keeping up to date with the seiyuu on social media, watching the lives, or even those adorable Nijigasaki dramas I literally cannot get enough of. The easiest way to get yourself into Love Live, however, is by dippi...

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 sil...

There's a lot I could say about "cringe culture", how often the term is used and what it means, but I'm really not a fan of that kind of thing. What I am a fan of, however, is Love Live. If you're a Love Live fan in any capacity, or really just an onlooker curious about the series, it's not uncommon for people to share their opinions about the series, and because of that it's not uncommon to hear stereotypes about the people who are interested in Love Live or even anime in general. There are a multitude of great videos on YouTube that express this (a favourite of mine being someone celebrating You Watanabe's birthday at their school) but it seems to come up pretty commonly in conversation when expressing your interest in the series. While usually caused by differing opinions with people outside the fandom, I don't think the Love Live fandom itself is without these differences. Between fans of Love Live themselves, there's a common topic people ...