Love Live! Sunshine!! Episode 2: Catch the Transfer Student!

The 2nd years trio isn’t complete so the goal is to get Riko to join the school idol club and to become more friendly with her. Surprises this episode! We get an interesting look into Dia’s character that I half-expected and it now confirms some theories I saw people guess at with just the first episode. We also get a look into Riko’s backstory and we can make some guesses as to what happened with her.

I see that Riko is probably one of the more unpopular Aquors girls, just beating out Ruby. People don’t seem to be drawn to her, but I for one am and after this episode, she’s rising up in my ranks of Best Girl (Yohane still takes that spot despite not being in this episode). I compared her to Maki because of her red hair and her playing piano, but she’s honestly a lot more like Umi. She’s elegant, she’s polite, and she has a scary side and gets annoyed when things aren’t serious, like how she wanted to work on song lyrics at Chika’s house. But, no offense, I find her more likeable than Umi. So now with her, she completes the trio and they look more and more like the original 2nd year trio. I suppose You is supposed to be the Kotori I suppose, since she can apparently make the idol outfits. But she’s also a mixture of Rin with her sporty side and silly side. I find her so cute. And Riko! So cute.

Chika is still adamant on enlisting Riko into the club, no matter how many times she gets shut down. The “I’m sorry” started off sweet to then annoyed, and Riko is honestly getting a little irritated. Riko enjoys playing piano, but we see at a competition or something of that sort, she got cold feet and did not play. She admits later on that she has been getting worse at the piano and that she wanted a change of scenery, which is why she moved. She wants to listen to the sound of the ocean, which she still hasn’t done yet. Chika and You take her out diving with Kanan, and with them and swimming underwater in a beautifully-drawn scene, Riko hears the sound of the ocean. With that, she hopes she can become inspired. I don’t really know what happened with her, whether she lost her passion for the music or she just became discouraged for some reason, we still don’t know anything yet but I’m sure we’ll touch this subject later on.

Riko doesn’t sign up to be a school idol at first, but she agrees to help Chika and You with composing songs. Riko is amazed at seeing Chika being so passionate about Muse. We can see that Riko doesn’t have much confidence, but hearing how Chika says she feels sparkly when listening to Muse songs, made her think about herself as a child saying how she felt sparkly when she plays piano. But it seems that she lost her spark somewhere. She watches Muse’s performance of Yume no Tobira on her phone, then sits herself down on the piano and actually plays, singing a couple lines of Yume no Tobira. And that was pretty. ;_; Hearing a noise outside, surprise surprise, Chika is her neighbor and she popped out on the balcony when she heard the song. Riko doesn’t know what to do with herself and again Chika offers her to join as a school idol, just to see if she finds it fun. If not, she’s free to go back to the piano. This seems to touch Riko and it looks like she accepts. And then there was that whole hand reaching thing, which I thought was really cheesy lmao. I fully expected for Chika to fall off the damn balcony and that would have been hilarious, but fine whatever…hand reaching across balconies. Too cheesy for me, not shipping it.

The episode mainly focused on Riko, but we did get appearances from the other characters. We saw Hanamaru again, with Ruby hiding behind her. Chika lured her out with candy…like a dog. Which was weird. But they seem to be on friendly terms? When did that happen? We only saw them talk to each other just a bit last episode, but now they’re acting like they’ve hung out together a lot. I found that a little jarring. Another friendship that hasn’t been explained is Riko and You with Kanan. We don’t know anything about her except for the fact that she looks like the mom friend and she goes diving.

But the most interesting thing we learned is that Dia doesn’t really seem to hate school idols at all. She was practically insulted when Chika pronounced Muse wrong. I didn’t mention it in my review for last week, because I forgot, but Dia knew too much about school idols and Love Live and the fact that the group needed a composer. This episode she finally revealed that she’s a huge Muse fan. She questioned Riko about them like where they performed in their second Love Live, what song did they sing first with all 9 of them, what encore song they sang, and who skipped in the beginning of the song. She denied her fangirl with saying it was general knowledge. Um, no it’s not. She talked about it with such passion, that now I have my own guesses about Dia and Kanan’s weird reaction to school idols in episode one. I’m guessing, and another piece of evidence is the shot of the third years in the opening looking all solemn, is that Dia, Kanan, and even Mari made their own school idol group but something went wrong and they had to disband and it’s been NINEN BURI DESU KA since. And Dia doesn’t want Chika to make a group because she can see that Chika isn’t serious enough because she just wants to impersonate and she’d just be giving school idols a bad name. That’s what I’m guessing, and it sounds similar to how Nico felt at first. Aidorus are serious.

Speaking of Muse, Riko went to Otonokizaka. She lived in Tokyo, where A-RISE was a huge deal too. So how did she not know about the group of girls that saved her school from closing? I know she said she only plays piano, but Muse should be general knowledge at her school. Literally everyone talked about them, even about A-RISE, and she knew nothing about them? That doesn’t make sense to me.

I think we’ll be seeing Mari next episode, so that she be fun. I liked this episode better than the first one. I think…I’m really starting to warm up to Sunshine. I was worried that the characters would be too similar to Muse, but they’ve been proving me wrong to some extent. Riko is the Umi, but with more substance. You is a Kotori/Rin mix, and Dia is like a weird mix of Eli/Nico. And maybe even a little bit of Hanayo with how passionate she is about idols. They’re differentiating themselves, which is good. Of course things could change later on, but so far so good.