Despite the fact that Love Live! Sunshine!! is set near the beach, it has taken the show ten episodes to do an obligatory beach episode. Go figure. Naturally, this entails some swimsuit themed fanservice though I find it to be pretty tamed compared to some other shows I’ve seen.
Oddly enough, this episode also doubles as the obligatory training camp episode. Dia wants Aqours to use the same training regimen μ’s in preparation for the Love Live preliminaries. Some of the girls are obligated to work in a run-down snack bar at the beach so the whole gang decides to work at the bar and train before and after work hours.
It turns out that Dia is one of the weird ones. I suppose she was a little eccentric in her earlier appearances with how overzealous she secretly was about school idols, especially μ’s, but now that she’s officially part of Aqours, she seems to have set herself loose a lot more. She still takes things very seriously though now it comically extends over to being a school idol, from proposing a training regimen that she herself can’t do to needlessly giving school idol history lessons to her friends. Dia also gives 110% to the snack bar, becoming its de facto manager by assigning positions to her friends and overlooking its PR and sales. The success of this bar is inconsequential and yet, Dia hilariously acts like her career depends on it.
There’s some other good gags in this episode. At the beginning of the episode, Dia and Ruby show some newfound chemistry, with Dia being more doting towards Ruby and Ruby keeping up with her sister’s eccentricities. Evidently, the two being school idols has diminished the tension they had with each other when the show began. As mentioned earlier, there’s the training regiment and barely anyone can follow it through. About the only one who can is Kanan which isn’t surprising, given her athleticism. I imagine this is funnier if you’ve seen School Idol Project but I still chuckled when Dia pondered on how μ’s did so much exercise for their school idol careers. One last bit to mention is You, Mari, and Yoshiko getting assigned cooking duty for the snack bar. I expected the usual punchline where one of the characters can’t cook but it turns out that all of three of them are pretty skilled in the culinary arts. It’s just that You is the only one with any knack for aesthetics.
The plot does thicken when Chika learns that Riko has been invited to perform for a piano recital. However, the recital will take place on the same day as the Love Live preliminaries, meaning that Riko will have to pick one over the other. Riko tells Chika that she’ll opt for Love Live so that she can perform with everyone, which Chika accepts albeit with some doubt. At the end of the episode, Chika asks Riko to play the piano for her. Sensing Riko’s passion, Chika encourages her to go to the piano recital instead of Love Live.
This took me by surprise. Sunshine!! could’ve easily ended with Riko choosing Love Live and citing friendship as the reason and it would’ve been a perfectly acceptable resolution. It certainly would’ve been the traditional way to go. That said, I really like that Chika moves it in the opposite direction as it shows a great deal of empathy on her part. After all this time, she still remembers Riko’s passion for the piano and that her being a school idol was meant to be a temporary reprieve from the instrument. The recital is the best opportunity for Riko to rekindle that spark and Chika doesn’t want to deny that from her.
The very last moment of this episode piques my curiosity. Just a few episodes ago, this show establish that Riko is into girl on girl action so for her to tell Chika at the end of this episode that she loves her, I can’t help but see a ship sailing out off of that beach. Mind you, it’s just as easy to handwave this. Riko is most likely saying that she loves Chika as a friend. Based on a very cursory knowledge of Japanese, I can’t help but think the English subtitles are a bit exaggerated and Riko actually means to say that she really likes Chika. I can’t however handwave the visuals. I mean, you have the two girls holding hands, gazing at each other, and standing before a sunset. Platonic just doesn’t feel like the right adjective to use here.
Watch Love Live! Sunshine!! on Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Tubi
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