The show starts out promising enough. Kanon is our now apparently archetypal spunky orange-headed protagonist. Unlike Honoka or Chika though, she gets to have real character flaws. She's grumpy, she sulks, she talks back to her family. She loves to sing, but she has struggled for years freezing up in front of an audience. When we meet her, she's convinced she'll never make it as a performer. There's potential for a focused, if rather well-worn, character arc here that Love Live has never really done before.
Unfortunately, this lasts about two episodes in total. Within days of meeting Kanon, Keke sweeps her up into doing the school idol thing with her, with only token resistance from Kanon. One pre-concert jitters scene later, Kanon's stage fright is cured forever (or at least until we pretend it's still an ongoing issue nine episodes later to try to have some kind of conclusion for the end of the season), and we never see her acting moody again. Apparently, solving a lifetime's worth of anxiety issues is sometimes just that easy. A few episodes later, Kanon's childhood friend Chisato mentions that she specifically went into dance so that she could help Kanon out by doing the things Kanon can't do, but the implications of this put the opening arc of the show in a weird spot. I guess despite the two being close friends for nearly ten years or so, Chisato just never tried hard enough to help Kanon conquer her stage fright.
Aside from all that, Kanon herself is very popular at school, even though it is barely mentioned outright. Kanon handily wins a class vote for their idol group's center where most people voting would have no reason to care, and she's implied to have had a very good chance at the student council president seat if she hadn't refused to run. She's struggled with stage fright in front of her classmates for years, but the only bullying that ever happens is over Chisato drawing some stick figures in the dirt at a public park when she was a little girl. It's like a committee took someone's script and proceeded to shave off anything with the remotest chance of offending someone, all for the purpose of circling back to the safest route possible.
As we build up the school idol club, we're informed that—surprise, surprise—the student council girl, Ren, is against it. Why? Well, her mom was a school idol too, but she never kept any records of her club activities, and she apparently only mentioned her feelings about it once to Ren. But Ren forgot—yes, really—what her mom said to her, and thus concluded that her mom must have regretted being a school idol, it's the only explanation. She is thus very vocal on her anti-school idol position as she runs for student council president. Ren manages to get the votes of the general curriculum students by promising that everyone will get to participate in the upcoming school festival.
Once she's elected however, she insists that only the music course students will be performing, because she believes it's the only way to get more students to enroll in the school. Yes, apparently, the school is in danger of shutting down. Yes, again. Not only is the plot point derivative to the point of self-parody, but logistically, it makes little sense. Yuigaoka is literally in the very first year of its operation since it was formally refounded. How could it fall into such dire financial straits in the span of a few months? Are we to assume there's some embezzlement happening behind the scenes?
Ren's abrupt about-face in policy naturally upset the general curriculum students who start a petition in protest, and we see heated arguments break out between the general and music course students. Oh, but don't worry. All of this is resolved within the episode when Kanon and the gang showed Ren that no, her mom really did love being a school idol. So Ren relents and immediately reverses her position, allowing the general curriculum students to participate in the school festival. In response, the students all clap. Literally, everyone claps. Apparently, there's sometimes no one more understanding than a room full of irate teenagers. The school shutting down doesn't even get brought up again until it's suddenly solved off-screen in the final episode, so I guess it wasn't that important either?
Before Superstar aired, I had hoped that the smaller than usual main cast was a sign that we would see more nuanced, fleshed out characterization, but the characters are just as shallow here as when we had nine main characters in previous Love Live anime entries. Nothing the characters do have any real consequences, and every conflict is resolved almost immediately. There's never any stakes because the characters are never allowed to meaningfully fail. Early on, the fledgling school idol club is given an ultimatum: they have to win first place in an upcoming idol festival or they'll have to disband. They end up losing to the contest favorite school idol duo Sunny Passion, but the school just shrugs and lets them have their club anyway with no pushback.
Sunny Passion functions as our main rivals, but they might as well not exist for how severely underutilized they are. Their whole characters can be summed up in three traits: they're nice, they never sing on-screen, and they look like they got picked off the cutting room floor of Aikatsu character designs. They get a full episode where they invite the girls out to perform at their island resort, and even then they have barely any presence. I'd be surprised if anyone remembers their names because they matter so little.
Meanwhile, our main cast of girls get to have cute antics with good production values, but that's all there is to it. The only character flaws they have that aren't tossed aside are ones that can be spun as cute, as if they're disguised strengths in the weaknesses category of a job interview. The one exception to this is when the focus shifts to Sumire, whose hangups get treated some actual weight. She's insecure and afraid of failure, and that doesn't magically all go away after receiving one kind gesture from her friends. Two episodes cannot carry a series however, and the show otherwise never tries to be anything more, quickly quashing any hints to the contrary.
Love Live is a mega popular franchise with more than enough dedicated super fans to weather a few unexceptional anime entries, but a franchise that keeps playing safe is one that will eventually hit a wall in market saturation. As of now, Love Live is juggling three different active groups to run the live concert circuit: Sunshine's Aqours, Nijigasaki, and Superstar's Liella! Each one has the same basic premise of starting a brand new idol club in the face of student council disapproval. Sunshine, at least in its first season, distinguishes itself by having a consistent through line reinforcing its central theme. Nijigasaki flips the focus in favor of individual character episodes instead of any overall plot, and at least its school isn't in danger of dying for no good reason. In contrast, Superstar has little giving it its own identity.
On its own, Superstar is serviceable if light on substance, and it has enough great scenes to demonstrate that someone on the staff really cared about the show, but they're always fighting against the show's refusal to take a step outside the boundaries of past successes. Taken in the context of the franchise, it has little innovation to offer. Newcomers to Love Live will have no issues enjoying the series, and super fans don't need a second opinion. For everyone else though, it's more or less skippable.
