Love Live! Superstar!! is one of my favorite entries in the Love Live! franchise, but even I was unsure if the third season was necessary. The previous season ended on a high note, and the girls of Liella! could have ridden off into the sunset for a satisfying conclusion. But despite some misgivings, I decided to stick with it. Fortunately, my faith was rewarded once again, and by the end, I found that this season solidified my ongoing belief that Superstar!! is the absolute best of Love Live! from a storytelling perspective.

Love Live! Superstar!! 3rd Season begins with protagonist Shibuya Kanon and the rest of Liella! coming off the high of finally winning the Love Live! national school idol competition. They start the new school year determined to be first back-to-back champions, but a few hurdles stand in their way. First is the pressure of being the reigning team. Second is the presence of one Wien Margarete, a transfer student from Austria who competed against Liella last time and decides to form her own school idol club at their school instead. Third is the fact that Kanon decides to pull a surprise heel turn (of sorts) and join Margarete’s side along with another girl, Onitsuka Tomari. Now, instead of everyone working as one, the two sides must compete to see who will represent their school.

The idea of rival clubs is an intriguing one, but Love Live! is not really a franchise that can make it particularly intense. Or rather, the last time they tried with the (now-defunct) Love Live! All Stars mobile game, it backfired among the fanbase, and the anime adaptation had to tone things down. And so events proceed fairly predictably, with the two sides eventually coming together and any animosity being just caring and affection in disguise. In that sense, Season 3 is a bit of a disappointment, but I eventually realized that this was the wrong angle to look at the whole thing.

The Love Live! competition itself isn’t actually the main focus in 3rd Season. Even the desire for a repeat victory and the challenge of getting there is merely a backdrop than the driving force. Instead, the real story is about how everyone deals with the inevitability of change that comes with the fact that Kanon and the other founding members will be graduating from high school. All the third-years are thinking about what their adult lives will look like and what careers they want to pursue. The second-years will be the ones to inherit the club, and they must go from being the newcomers to becoming the core. And the first-years, Margarete and Tomari, see their participation in more cynical terms. They’re all at different stages.

Superstar!! is also the first time we’ve followed a core cast from the start of high school all the way to the end. In the first season, Kanon’s main struggle is overcoming her trauma that prevents her from singing. In the second, it’s figuring out how to help others overcome their own fears and doubts. And in the third, it’s about leaving behind a system and legacy that will encourage even more in the future to have courage and chase their passion. This might seem par for the course compared to previous generations of Love Live!, but there is a significant difference. 

In every other case, the story begins with a collection of first-, second-, and third-years all coming together. While characters develop in their own ways, they’re also limited to a degree by this format in one way or another. Often, the specific roster is portrayed as lightning in a bottle—something that cannot (and maybe even should not) be replicated. In contrast, all three seasons of Superstar!! collectively work to show that even as Kanon and her classmates leave, the club will continue to grow and change. Each iteration of Liella! has been important in its own way, and the anime implies that this won’t stop even after the original five are no longer there. This flow of time is what sets this series apart, and ultimately makes this third season satisfying to watch.

So that’s Love Live! Superstar!!…or at least until the series gets a feature-film send-off. While I have great fondness for all generations of Love Live!, I really do think that this one is special because of how strong it is as an overall piece of narrative fiction. Superstar!! relies the least on expecting from its audience an inherent receptiveness to idols (and by extension the “school idol” concept), and I think this versatility helps make it a very rewarding series overall.

In 2021, the first season of Love Live! Superstar!! made a powerful impression on me. With its tightly written story centered around heroine Shibuya Kanon’s lifelong struggle with performance anxiety and stage fright, it stood out in a positively memorable way. One of the aspects that helped the storytelling was its relatively small cast of characters compared to the Love Live! franchise standard, so when it was announced that Season 2 of Superstar!! would nearly double the main group from five girls to nine, I worried that the series might lose what made it work so well.  Fortunately, my fears were unfounded, and Season 2 has turned out to be a solid follow-up that does a good job of playing off its predecessor—and also introduces my favorite member in the process.

Love Live! Superstar!! 2nd Season picks up from where the first left off. The elite Yuigaoka Girls’ High School has accepted the School Idol Club and their group, Liella! Kanon has managed to overcome her issues and can sing loudly and proudly on stage. There’s unfinished business in that Liella! couldn’t make it past the preliminaries of the Love Live! competition. The character arcs are mostly resolved, do the question becomes, what story do they tell given that fact?

The answer is to introduce new girls and place an emphasis on a senpai–kouhai dynamic that isn’t really present in other Love Live! anime. While other series actively celebrate the lack of such hierarchical distinctions, Superstar!! 2nd Season puts it front and center. That’s not to say it’s big on seniority, but the perspectives provided by experience becomes a key factor in the narrative.

The senpai characters do receive episodes of their own (like a hilarious one about gamer addiction), but they seem to get less screen time overall, and even theirs will link back to the new girls in some way. This is likely by design, as it not only does this work to introduce all the first-years, but it provides a clear indicator of progress for the original five as seasoned school idols who must mentor the next generation. After all their hard work, Kanon and the other senpai have gotten so good that they accidentally scare off most of the new student body, who are too worried about not being able to live up to the standards set by Liella! Like the ongoing debates over fighting game design, Superstar!! 2nd Season asks what is the right balance between granting accessibility and rewarding ambition. 

Superstar!! 2nd Season idoes a good job of differentiating the new girls from their upperclassmen, though they can at times feel a little less three-dimensional. The big sticking point is that they seem to adhere more to anime character archetypes, but they’re developed well enough that it becomes less of an issue over time. Also, I have to admit that I myself can be a sucker when the tropes fall in my favor, such as in the case of my Liella! favorite, Wakana Shiki. She’s an aloof scientist with a secret soft side, and her similarities to Nunotaba Shinobu from A Certain Scientific Railgun (including liberal peppering of English phrases into her speech) is both noted and highly welcome.

As Superstar!! 2nd Season progresses, it gradually brings the focus back to the original girls of Liella!, reviving and adding new angles to some of the challenges from Season 1. For example, a rival antagonist shows up who reignites criticisms of school idols as being inherently mediocre artistically, adding a bit of Zhong Lanzhu–esque flair along the way. But the lessons Kanon has learned from her own challenges and the results of that mean her answers to the questions posed to her reflect the positive changes she’s made.

Overall, Love Live! Superstar 2nd Season manages to be a great continuation that builds on a solid foundation. While it risks getting bloated, its broader character dynamics help to mitigate that concern. What results is an anime that shows what Love Live! is capable of.