Presumably in an effort to save Otonokizaka, the student council decides to make a video featuring all of the school’s clubs. Nozomi opts to film and interview μ’s for the project and this is a good opportunity for her to interact with the club as Love Live! is clearly taking its time making her an official member. The whole promotional video plot does a solid job incorporating the cast’s personalities. I particularly love the brutally honest description Nozomi gives for Honoka. Also hilarious is Nico trying to get interviewed while in school idol mode (and by the way, Nico should honestly keep heir down), only for the others to brush it off and move on to something else.
The real plot of the episode kicks in when Nozomi starts to wonder why Honoka is the de facto leader/center of μ’s. Both Umi and Kotori have specific roles behind the scenes. Honoka freely admits that she doesn’t really do anything. In light of this observation, Nico convinces the club to participate in a series of contests to figure out who is the most qualified to be μ’s leader. Obviously, this is Nico’s ploy to take the position for herself but hilariously, no one considers her for the job and the competition backfires on her as everyone proves to be a force to be reckoned with in some way. Poor Nico is the first comedic punching bag in the franchise.
Since everyone appears to be evenly matched, Honoka convinces the group to have no leader at all and instead take turns with the spotlight. By no means is this a bad resolution but come on. You’re not fooling me, Love Live!. Honoka is the first major character introduced in the show. She’s more or less the main protagonist. Even when I first saw this show, I figured this girl would get more attention than the others. And having seen all the show’s successors, I know that orange hair is retrospectively the equivalent of the Red Ranger in Super Sentai/Power Rangers. Like hell she’s not the leader of the group.
Ironically, Honoka’s pitch is exactly what makes her leader material. She resolves the conflict with everyone and she’s perfectly fine with giving up whatever power she had. By “stepping down”, Honoka proves that she very much deserved the role. Even the other characters acknowledge that Honoka is more or less in charge, following the beat of her own drum and compelling the others to go along with it. I can’t be that frustrated with this episode as it does a solid job developing Honoka’s character but the idea that there is no defined leader in the group feels pretty undercooked to me.
The mixed signals carry over into the MV. There’s plenty to like with it. I particularly dig the vague Alice in Wonderland aesthetic with the costumes and all the decorations in the school hallways. That said, I couldn’t help but pay close attention to the positioning. For a while, the MV does a good job not having anyone as the center as most of the characters perform in pairs. That is until you get to the chorus, where Honoka joins in and is very clearly the center for the rest of the MV. It can’t helped when there’s seven idols and Honoka hasn’t gotten any screen time until this point but I can’t deny that she singlehandedly throws a wrench at her own idea, the one about having no leader in the group.
This episode does make me wonder about how much attention Honoka will get, especially during the MVs. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing if the de facto main protagonist is the most prevalent character in the story or the most frequent center though I have noticed that all of School Idol Project‘s successors struggles in this regard. For example, I really like Chika but looking back, I can’t deny that Sunshine!! almost always makes her the center and she got the lion’s share with the spotlight. I’m very curious to see how this is handled in the original series.
Watch Love Live! School Idol Project on Crunchyroll
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