Love Live! Sunshine!! Episode 3: First Step

What I’ve noticed with Sunshine is that they take similar situations from School Idol Project, but makes them different. Like the characters and the events that happened, like Mari being a boob toucher, the gym being almost empty. They’re familiar but with a little twist so they’re not totally the same. Like at first I was getting irritated and I was like oh boy here we go the gym is empty, but no there were a few students. But then the situation changed for the better later on.

The trio meets with Mari and her helicopter that almost murdered them on the beach, and they find out that Mari is actually the Director of the school. That’s actually not one of her jokes. Because she heard there was going to be school idols in the school, her family put in a lot of money towards the school. And for some reason that puts her as the school’s Director, even though she’s a student. That’s the power of money. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

First seeing Mari in official art, she looked like the Nozomi character to me. With that soft, yet mysterious, expression on her face, she just gave a Nozomi vibe. With the boob grabbing, that’s another thing. But unlike Nozomi, Mari is a lot louder and weirder. She does seem like the person that watches Dia, like Nozomi did with Eli, but I’m not sure. Kanan is part of their trio but we don’t know a thing about her yet so we’ll just wait on that.

Mari proposes a deal to the girls. She challenges them to pack a full house into the gym that she reserved for them for their first concert. If they can get a full house, despite how many members they have, they can create the school idol club. But if they can’t, they have to disband. Of course they take on the challenge, but they realize that even if they get all the students to come to the concert, it still won’t be enough to fill the gym. And it makes me wonder how small their school is? From the outside it looks big and there looks like a good amount of students. Also, why would a school have a gym that big if they don’t have many students? I mean, hello? The town itself seems like a small community, as we saw later on that the intercom from their school connects with the ones in the whole town, so they seem close knit.

Anyway, Chika begs her sister to come along with her business pals. The girls come together and think about what they can do to beat Mari’s challenge, so they go to the more populated town near them to hand out their cute flyers and invite people. I noticed that Aquors had a much easier time getting people to accept their fliers. The people actually seemed interested in going. Also, it helped that You was cute and popular. We ran into Hanamaru and Ruby again, at a bookstore, and I thought it was hilarious that Hanamaru carried a giant sack of books on her back. One, I wonder how much she spent. And two, books are heavy and she carried all that like it was nothing. She must be ripped. She must be shredded.

After being silly and not giving themselves a name, they throw out names to each other and wrote many down in the sand. They stumbled upon “Aquors” and went with that. The day of the concert finally came and of course there was terrible weather. The curtains lift and only a few students are there, but they perform anyway. The song was interrupted in the middle so I couldn’t listen to it well, but it sounded great. I also loved their outfits. They were way cuter than what Honoka and the others wore for their first performance. Of course, this couldn’t be complete without Riko mentioning the skirt length, but she didn’t make too big a deal like Umi did. They performed but came with a shock that the storm brought a power out, and their lights and music were abruptly stopped. I’m so glad that the girls kept singing though, even though Chika ended up crying. Even when you deal with complications like no music, you have to keep singing! But luck was on their side when Hanamaru and Ruby went to go look for the school’s generators, and once the power went back up, Chika sister and other people showed up and the gym was packed, and they finished their performance. Just like Chika’s mother said, the community is pretty warm-hearted, so maybe that’s why so many people came.

And then this part, where I’m not sure that I liked happened where Dia said they only did well because of other school idol groups or something and honestly Dia has been bothering me. People seem to like her but I think she’s coming off as a bitch. Nico sort of had that attitude in the beginning, but she didn’t storm up to them in front of everybody during their performance to say that, not even Eli. I don’t know what her deal is, but I’m almost positive now that she formed an idol group with Mari and Kanan (cue Kanan’s serious face) and something happened. She’s just becoming unlikeable to me.

Next it looks like it’s time to finally recruit Hanamaru and Ruby. Ruby seems the most enthusiastic since she loves idols so much, but I’m not sure about Hanamaru. We saw Yohane in this episode dressed up in a disguise akin to what Nico was wearing, and she seemed to really like the performance so I hope she joins next episode too. Speaking of Yohane, I said she was my fave but lately Riko is gaining speed and she’s probably tied for best girl because she’s just so silly and hilarious and I love her.