This Week in Anime

Idol Anime Spin-Offs and Crossovers

Chris
Steve, we talk about isekai at a distressing amount here, but do you ever wonder what things might be like for us in different worlds? Maybe there's an alternate version of our silly little show where we have some fantasy adventure. Or one where we're all in a band!

At last, the wish-fulfillment aspect of these fantasy travels is at its most understandable. Yoshiko Yohane of Love Live Sunshine may never have gotten to become a real fallen angel. Still, at least she's achieved that comparable dream with her fantasy world spin-off, where she has magical powers and a very good, fluffy girl for a best friend.

A best friend who still dunks on her regularly. So things have mostly stayed the same for her.

When you've been in the musical merchandising game as long as the likes of Love Live! and BanG Dream, finding ways to bring in new fans is just as important as retaining the loyalty of the old fans. Spin-offs thus make an attractive proposition for these kinds of franchises. Heck, Yohane herself is a product of Love Live!'s own venture into the more typical style of these series, staying within the same broad setting and framework but starring a freshly-started new cast of characters.

Yes, we are so deep into talking about spin-offs already that one of the spin-offs we're discussing is a spin-off of a spin-off. The idol anime rabbit hole runs deep.

We also don't talk about Ghost Child Maki from that one bonus episode enough, but I digress. Sunshine in the Mirror (a series so grand it gets two titles, neither of which include "Love Live!") is a bizarre swerve that could have only started as an April Fool's joke. And on paper, it certainly seems like a slam dunk to entice crowds outside Love Live!'s usual audience to engage with Yohane and her music-mates. All the characters are reintroduced to potential new viewers, existing outside the high school musical genre that some people would never allow themselves to be fans of.

This is either Yohane's indulgent AO3 upload or the girls of Aqours enjoying some tabletop role-playing campaign, and either way, I'm here for the raw imaginativeness of it. It's funny how Sunshine in the Mirror, much of the time, actually feels more easygoing and down-to-earth than the madcap comedy its parent series codified in the Love Live! franchise. Except then, three episodes in, Dia drops in as a Kamen Rider with her sister (a fairy now), merging with the mechanical consciousness of her motorcycle.

The resulting musical fight sequence feels straight out of Symphogear, and the fact that they haven't returned to anything like it since only makes it come off even more like a magnificent fever dream.

They're building up backstory and such, leading to the possibility that we might see more stuff like this, probably in the season finale. But it's just the (incredibly satisfying) climax amidst all the slice-of-fantasy-life stuff about Yohane becoming friends with her alternate-world bandmates so she can happily do laundry and taxes with them.

That's the most distinguishing part of this spin-off for me, as an established fan of Love Live! Prime. Those series have always firmly been ensemble pieces, rotating between focal cast members on an episodic basis. On the other hand, Sunshine in the Mirror is very much The Yohane Show, with the others all serving as her supporting cast members, encompassing her personal journey.

The Demon Lord isn't an enemy of humanity; she's just shy. Seeing how the Yohane-centric setup motivates them to take those different approaches is interesting. Thus, you have stuff here like Mari's character arc being couched in her relationship with her subunit members Riko and Yohane, as opposed to how her OG version was more about her interactions with fellow third-years Dia and Kanan. It decidedly sells the "Alternative" part of this whole alternate-universe deal.

It does, however, raise a question that's a little tricky for either of us, as Love Live! lifers, to answer. That question is how well these character rejiggering work as remixes of their original foundations and how they hold up independently for those hypothetical new viewers they're also trying to bring in.

I know I said that Sunshine in the Mirror seemed lighter on the comedy compared to its source show, but that particular gag is at least a perfectly delivered piece of dry humor.

Part of me has to wonder if them regularly bringing up that she and Dia are sisters (despite this objectively making zero sense) comes across as even more hilariously absurd to the new viewers who weren't already aware of them as siblings back in their home universe.

When she couldn't performatively hone in on disallowing school idols, Dia and her crew went all-in on the surveillance state.

Huh, so she's less Kamen Rider and more like Chris Nolan's Batman.

I was pleased they didn't go the route of original-recipe Yohane getting isekai'd; instead, they just had a fresh start in a uniquely realized fantasy setting. Whether that radical take will motivate new viewers to go back and check out the "normal" idol antics of Love Live! is hard to say. However, it does funnily recall an earlier time. Before the likes of Love Live! arrived with the new era of idols we're currently living under, a juggernaut of the genre would go with the genre-switched spin-off option as its inaugural anime adaptation.

I wish we could've talked more specifically about Xenoglossia for this topic since the concept is as buck-wild, if not more so, than Sunshine in the Mirror, and it's fascinating to see how it represents the genre at a time when the dominant platform for playable idols was arcades rather than smartphones. But sadly, the series isn't officially streaming anywhere, which is emblematic of how the idol anime market has shifted to that more standardized spin-off model.

There was a modern Idolm@ster spin-off just last season called Cinderella Girls U149. In the interest of this topic, I decided to sample it as someone who doesn't know much about the franchise beyond thinking that Rika and Mika Jougasaki look pretty cool. Which is to say, I don't know how well I was prepared for Idolm@ster Babies.

It's a weird case because while I can see some potential interest in following the subject of very young junior idols, what I saw of U149 didn't click for me as personally entertaining. And I consider myself to be idol-poisoned on some level! Maybe it turns out even I really have a threshold for too cloyingly cute, or maybe it's just that in an anime era where we get a Selection Project or 22/7 every season, something like this doesn't stand out as especially encouraging me towards Idolm@ster.

Okay, you got me. The other reason I don't think I can find time for Idolm@ster is that I am already in a stranglehold by Bushiroad's BanG Dream franchise and its gaggle of guitaring girls.

If you know me, you are likely already too aware of this fact, which is one of the main reasons I finessed this subject for the column.

That's one of the fascinating points of the It's MyGO anime: While it doesn't do the hard setting shift that Sunshine in the Mirror went with, it's making a point of doing things "differently" from the previous stuff. Earlier BanG Dream had its ups and downs but trended tonally closer to stuff like Love Live!. For this one, Bushi has boldly decided to introduce their newest group of marketable gacha-bait to the franchise using this stupendously soapy serious girls' band drama.

From the perspective of an established fan, it's also very compelling. Previous Bandori stories had dealt with past bands breaking up for personal backstory reasons or wanting to keep the group together for their goals. But MyGO delves into the darker strains of those mindsets, poking at ideas like "Hey, maybe pinning all your hopes and dreams on the success of a high school band is indicative of some much deeper psychological issues."


I need to clarify, for stress's sake, that it's not all that kind of dour doom and gloom getting there, and MyGO's deep dives are spaced out between more conventionally comedic girlfailures, lovable characters who like collecting cool rocks, and guest appearances by our lord and savior, Aoba Moca.

Anon genuinely seems to think she's a Bocchi, but she has neither the actual talent nor enough self-awareness of her potential pitfalls to pull it off. It just results in her being her own uniquely entertaining character.

Also, you know, instead of Bocchi the Rock, she's wound up in a band story that's always about five minutes away from ending like The Commitments.

I can't overstate how "Being in a band with your friends is fun" was effectively the overarching thesis statement for every Bandori installment before this one.

It's great not just because it feels fresh to franchise fans and anyone who's seen so many other "conventional" idol-adjacent music anime but also because it lays out calculated contrasting runways for the odd, uplifting moments of triumph. Sure, poor Tomori is probably the most purely decent member of the group, and that means we want to see her succeed, but we're also torn about how that's possible given who she's wound up grouped with in doing so.

The series started with an hour-and-a-half premiere because they wanted to show off that third episode as early as possible. It's attention-getting, not just in showcasing Tomori, whose coding and characterization could be worth an entire column on her own, but for really hammering home the tonal elements of the series.

Also, hey, you have to appreciate earlier foreshadowing of how some of these girls wouldn't be willing to cut toxic people out of their lives immediately. Always block on sight, kids.

Oh yeah, huge surprise that Steve adores the antics of Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss here; I'm sure the TWIA comments section is agog with stunned reactions as we speak.

The show's careful portrayal of her interactions with others and animations of some of her subtler habits have paid dividends over the past few episodes.

Speaking of Love Live! spinoffs, I remember being disappointed at how defanged the character of Lanzhu wound up feeling in the second season of Nijigasaki High School Idol Club. So it's incredibly engaging to see BanG Dream deliver a real messy would-be mastermind as an antagonistic force at this moment in the story.

It's also fascinating to me, as someone who has gotten a general idea about how BanG Dream "works" over all these years. Soyo is in MyGO, officially! She will presumably be added to the game with them all together to be rolled for and assembled like any other performers, including the one in the freaking pink bear mascot costume. It makes me curious where the anime's story will eventually take her and the others. BanG Dream has done "villainous" characters before, but that amounted to stuff like RAISE A SUILEN, basically playing Dick Dastardly for the second season.

You have to keep these kinds of franchises freshly invigorated somehow. I went into MyGO as a fan of BanG Dream, who's been critical of plenty of its previous entries (ask me sometime about the first season, which nearly killed the whole series). While it took a minute for me to cotton to where this spin-off was going, it's paid off as I've seen how it's kept building, and as you said, the noticeable chatter that's picked up about the series, especially with the past couple of episodes.

It's no full transportation to a fantasy world, but it turns out that taking a series like BanG Dream into the realm of toxic interpersonal drama can be just as dramatic a setting shift.

You say that as if there's any other kind.

Dang, Anon could have learned so much from Bocchi.