Love Live! Superstar!! Episode 7

Oh damn it, are we really doing the whole “school is in danger” thing again? So far they haven’t mentioned that the school is not making enough money or was in danger of closing, so it could be that Ren is taking things out of proportion. Which might be the case since the school is really the last thing she has connecting her to her family, her mother specifically, and she wants to protect it no matter what. Then again, Ren asking about how many applicants there are for the next school year doesn’t bode well. It’s just the whole school closure plot thing is so tired, I really don’t want that same plot again.

Most of the episode was your typical dose of Love Live silliness and fluff but for some reason most of the jokes didn’t really land for me. I wouldn’t really call the episode boring, but it just felt like stuff was happening and that’s it. And I know Keke is a pushy girl and I do like her, but for some reason I didn’t like how insanely persistent she was to have Kanon be the student council president when she was very clearly really uncomfortable with the idea. Sumire is funny but poor girl is always the butt of the jokes, I don’t want her to be another Nico (i love her). D:

I don’t know, most of the episode didn’t really do too much for me. The only moments that actually made me laugh was Keke’s imaginary scene of them practicing school idols undercover, and the Nico disguise callback with Sumire wearing the “poop” hat and screeching in front of Ren. Hm, comparing Sumire to Nico isn’t too far off I guess.

The most interesting part of this episode was Ren, of course. There must be a lot of internal conflict she’s fighting with, as we saw with her expression when she was giving her speech. She had made her promise in her campaign to also represent the general curriculum students, which helped her make a landslide win. However, she went against her word immediately and declared that the main event of the cultural festival would be the music program. Of course this causes a huge stir amongst the students, with the general curriculum students creating a position to change this. No one understands this sudden change as most students, not even those in the music program, really knows Ren all that much with how private she is. With the ending of the episode, I guess we have a sort of better idea why she’s doing what she’s doing.

There must be some sort of connection between Ren and school idols. I’m going to guess that her own mother tried to be school idols for the school and failed at it, possibly putting the school in a bad position and harming its reputation, putting it in the situation it’s in right now. With that sour history, Ren wants to avoid that happening all over again in order to save the school from disaster and wants to instead highlight other areas in the music department since the music department is a prestigious program. It could be possible that she wants to do away with the general curriculum and highlight the music program in order to gain more applicants and save the school, which is probably why she made that decision for the cultural festival. She probably doesn’t like that she has to do something like that, with how distraught she looked when giving her speech but went along with it because she thinks it’s right. Her home situation is also really sad, as her father isn’t around anymore and her mother passed away. She basically has no money and other than her dog and her one maid she’s giving her last paycheck to, Ren is all alone. She has a lot of pressure on her shoulders to keep her mom’s school, the last thing from her she still has, alive. And it doesn’t really look like she has any other kind of support system, other than maybe the headmaster of the school who seems to have been friends with Ren’s mother.

I am so torn. For one thing, I do like Ren’s character so far but it’s just so annoying that the school supposedly is in danger again. I already complained that Love Live reuses certain tropes like the school closure plot, the same character types, etc. You would think that the “we have to save the school!” plot would be done and over with after having used it two times, so I cannot believe that they would do it again. I really hope once we get the full context next episode the situation will change, because if not I will definitely be disappointed.