Sep 18, 2023
Disclaimer: I am writing from the perspective of someone who hasn't seen the original series, Love Live Sunshine, and at the time of writing only started the original SIP a few days ago. This is a review of YOHANE as a standalone entity and not a part of the Love Live franchise.
YOHANE is a show with an identity crisis. On one side is a iyashikei-style slice-of-life series about a girl returning to her charming village hometown and reconnecting with its fantastical inhabitants in an increasingly rare instance of a fantasy world in anime that actually feels unique among a sea of carbon-copy generic isekai JRPG-inspired
...
worlds. On the other is the series' agonizing insistence on trying to be something Bigger than that despite not needing to be anything else.
This show is an audiovisual treat, not just in the musical segments one would expect from the franchise, but in its entirety. The original soundtrack is beautiful and something I see myself listening to in the future when it is released, and I found the art style here much more enjoyable than the standard Love Live style. This is definitely the kind of show whose idyllic setting endears itself to the viewer and leaves them wishing it were real.
The cast of characters are mostly charming -- when the show actually gives them focus. Overall, I think the cast is slightly too large which leaves several characters feeling rather pointless and undeveloped. This problem is exacerbated by the show's core issue: its desire to give its story bigger stakes than it needs leads to time that could be spent further exploring the girls' lives being interrupted repeatedly by a nebulous apocalyptic Bad Magic Thing that is seemingly trying to destroy the town. The first time it happens, it sets up an interesting plot hook, but it quickly grows tiresome as it becomes evident that the series is not particularly interested in fleshing out the exact nature of this so-called Calamity, where it came from, or even what exactly it represents as a metaphor. It seems as if it was intended to represent Yohane distancing herself from the people of Numazu, as it strikes most intensely when she decides to leave town again and is only solved by her coming together with her friends to stand together in song and settle down in Numazu, but it wasn't particularly troublesome when she left for the city before the start of the story so it's hard to understand why Yohane in particular is so essential to the happiness of Numazu.
As if its main character arc's weren't muddled enough, YOHANE makes it even worse with its clumsy handling of the character of Lailaps. Lailaps is a giant talking dog who starts the series acting as something of a sister-figure for Yohane who encourages her to open up to the people of Numazu and start to reintegrate herself as part of the local community. It is later revealed that Lailaps was once a normal dog, but was granted her personality and the ability to speak by Yohane's magic. Lailaps is thus a fragment of Yohane's own psyche created as a companion that harbors bitter feelings toward her creator's desire to leave Numazu and pursue a career in music, leaving her behind. This is expressed through a desire to make Yohane reliant on her to keep her from leaving. The climax of Yohane's character arc is a confrontation between the two in which they realize they are two parts of a whole and that the parts of Lailaps that Yohane have been inside her the whole time and that what Lailaps truly wants is for her to become the best possible version of herself.
This... somehow leads to Yohane deciding to stay in Numazu instead of following her dream of becoming a famous singer because she has an inexplicable sudden realization that what she really wanted was to inspire people through song and she's been doing that already in Numazu? Yohane's character arc is abruptly brought to a conclusion without a strong reason. This being where she ends up makes sense and is the conclusion the show had been obviously telegraphing for a while, but it seems like the writers forgot that simply creating a character arc with a logical conclusion doesn't mean they don't need to explain how it reaches that point. This clumsy storytelling takes what should've been an extremely straightforward story and derails it with dull melodrama.
I really did like this show at the start, despite its flaws, but by the end it becomes too messy to ignore and lost me.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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