I just watched “Love Live”.
It’s a cheesy and rather stupid anime, with lots of plot holes. It telegraphs plot lines from even the beginning, and so far from what I can see, the different incarnations of “Love Live” are essentially the same plot with different characters and location. It’s cheesy and it’s stupid and I loved it.
But why did I love it?
Well, one reason is, it had heart. It was cheesy and stupid and it really tried to treat the girls as real, emotional people, and not moe-blobs. I liked that.
But the real reason I love it is, the same reason I am attracted to Japanese idols, the same reason I like other “Cute Girls doing Cute Things” anime like K-On, to some degree “Sound! Euphonium”, and a few others.
It’s because their world is happy.
I know it’s fake, I know it’s manufactured, I know the world behind the scenes of all these things can be really dark (see “Oshi No Ko”) but sometimes you just want to get lost in the cute and the sparkly and the incessant cheerfulness. The main character of Love Live, Honoka, is the most optimistic, cheerful, happy girl ever. Nothing ever seems to get in her way, sometimes things get to her but she always perseveres, and at the end of the day, her world really is bright and cheery and sparkly. Exactly the opposite of my world, which is dull, dreary, boring, and depressing.
I think that’s exactly why these things exist.
This is why idols exist, and the fact that they are a manufactured product of faux happiness doesn’t change the fact that, well, they still exist.
And that’s why I love “Love Live”.
Because, at the end of the day, their very existence means that somehow, somewhere, the world does not have to be entirely depressing.