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For any fan of the Love Live! Franchise seeing Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club was almost a must. Whereas Love Live! Sunshine largely took the formula of the two original seasons around μ and reapplied many of the same themes, Nijigasaki High School goes another way. Both Love Live and Love Live! Sunshine are essentially about unity and about achiving something extraordinary together. Each of the members of μ and Aquors has their own personality, but only together they are the nine muses.
Not so Nijigasaki High School. The very attempt to create something together under the leadership of Setsuna Yuki / Nana Nakagawa was the reason that the first incarnation of the school idol club had failed. The girls don't share a common vision of what a school idol should be or do. Instead, their choice is individualism. Rather than developing a shared identity, they all go their same way as a group of rivals who compete with each other while being friends.
It's almost tempting to ask how our society has changed during those almost eight years between the first airing of the first episode of the original love live on January 6th, 2013, and the first airing of the first episode of Nijigasaki High on October 3rd, 2020. Have we really become more individualistic and less willing to integrate into a larger whole? Or is it more that the fans need their individual heroes to identify with (a phenomenon certainly already present in the original version)?
Personally, I've enjoyed watching the new series together with my youngest daughter. It did not, however, impress me in the way that the original two seasons did, which for all their pathos belong to the anime I watch and rewatch every so often. The individual episodes of Nijagasaki High are a bit too predictable — focus on one character, crisis, help by her rival / friends, resolution — to really hook me.
P. S.: One day I hope to add a comment system to the log. Until then, please feel free to share your comments on Mastodon, where you can reach me under @temperedTea@mk.absturztau.be