Anime: Genjitsu no Yohane: Sunshine in the Mirror

Genjitsu no Yohane is a 2023 spin-off of Love Live Sunshine set in a fantasy setting and less focused on music, thereby departing from the established formula. While it seemed there was a lot of creative freedom available, the main changes were detrimental to both the plot or the characters and the anime is overall mediocre and rather boring unfortunately.

The plot almost exclusively follows Yoshiko this time around as she comes back to her provincial hometown in the summer after a stalled music career. There she meets up with a Direwolf from GoT that is her friend as well as other old and new friends. Meanwhile, Yohane has to put her half-hearted career on hold and adapt to the rhythms of life in her hometown as she reevaluates said career, as a force, known as the calamity, is endangering said town.

The simplistic and vague nature of the description above shows the fatal problem of this show, as it is hardly about anything; none of the events really lead to anything and only Yohane shows substantial character development. To be more specific, the reason for this is that unlike in the main series, this show removes idols, the school, and most of the music aspect save for the end. Drama is also heavily curtailed. This is replaced only by an additional character, Lailaps, and a very uncertain coming-of-age theme, all the while the slice of life aspect is left unchanged. Therefore instead of practicing, studying and interacting with her friends as in the main series, for most part Yohane aimlessly goes around a fantasy provincial town doing odd jobs with a few comedy gags here and there.

Tension is only really created when something fairly mundane happens, such as Yohane misplacing a wand, at which point the entire town and its administration mobilize, use advanced surveillance, and turn into a monolith to find this one thing. The action is saved for the main ‘antagonist’ of the show, the calamity, which is some force that seems to make deer feral, fill the area with fog, and seemingly cut the town off from the outside world. Other than the fact that this event is almost prophesied in the show, it is never clear what it is, with it only really becoming important in literally the last episode, and even then it is somewhat underwhelming. Because it is not clear exactly what is its nature or what danger it poses to people, it's hard to root for Yohane and co. nor be relieved when they succeed in driving it off.

The response to the calamity, in the face of Dia along with Chika and her family, is likewise underwhelming and exudes a similar level of baseless pathos in how they scare away/’disenchant’ the feral deer with swords and weird guns as well as Dia’s laggy Overwatch skin and her NERV-like team supporting her.

In any case, some of the conflicts in the Love Live series are blown out of proportion, but they made some sense in the context of school life or showbusiness. The trivial points of tension in this anime are simply ludicrous, to the point that a commentator on this website said that this anime plays out like MLP episodes and they are not wrong. Worse still, the fantasy setting is in name only; it is really only there to bring in talking animals, the new character, generic scene designs, and effectively decorative magic. A lot could have been done with this setting, but in the end it is simply a convoluted reskin of the old setting with no practical use.

It is a bit puzzling to see such a problem occur. I know of at least one fairly well made Love Live fan manga in a fantasy setting, complete with a link of that setting to the one in the anime. While it was generic, it did a good job of introducing characters from μ’s to an action and fantasy manga and it was fairly sleek plot wise as I recall. This is at least a precedent of such changes being possible for Love Live. In fact, the characters in Sunshine seem ideal for appearing in a more serious fantasy anime, though with certain tone changes. These fan works certainly set expectations for this anime.

The most obvious reasons for failure would be either that the screenwriters simply did not know how to write anything other than a slice of life type of anime or that they were unmotivated. The latter is quite possible knowing examples of the conditions within the industry. It is also possible that the creators did not want to change the genre by adding aspects such as more serious action (not whatever went on against a herd of deer), perhaps in order to keep their audience or because they saw such deviation as too much of a risk. If that is so, then it seems that was a mistake as the current plot seems to hardly please anyone.

It is also not clear how this plot was given the greenlight, seeing as it hardly appeals to any audience that would watch this all the while it seems that a fair amount of effort went into its creation. One possibility was that the characters of Aqours needed a new anime, perhaps to stay relevant and continue operations, but seeing as how only Yohane is ever in the spotlight, that seems unlikely.

All characters, with the exception of Yohane and Lailaps, are shown at length only when Yohane interacts with them and therefore have scant character development. After their first meeting, most of them are very passive in their dialogue, and therefore mostly do the same things throughout the anime and display the same happy emotions throughout if they appear at all. In Sunshine, drama was used to avoid such weak character development by exploring the motivations and the background of a character in relation to their goal of winning at Love Live. Here, drama has been eliminated and there is no long term unifying goal, idea, conflict, or background to bring these characters together and explore them. They are all just living in this provincial town minding their own business. They all live in a vacuum and may as well not exist, unless Yohane stumbles upon them. If this dostoyevskian disunity between characters is some kind of a Matrix allegory, then I take all the criticism back, but otherwise it has been a while since I have seen such a misuse of 8 unique characters that are already established with the audience and were supposed to be almost titular.

All of the things above notwithstanding, in the very least the idea of introducing a coming of age theme is sound, though very underdeveloped, as it was only talked about for effectively one episode. A thought I had was that if the authors remedied the character situation and set the anime in a historic time, then they could have tried to go full Amarcord and show life and culture in that time, which would at least be interesting if not funny due to the premise of being inspired by Fellini.

The character designs are alright, but do not seem very inspired. They are all somewhat generic, clunky, and childish. The designs for Chika’s family are some form of a very weird comedy gag that does not fit the tone even for the weird situations they find themselves in, while Dia can wear a CGI laden outfit, that looks like it is from a Tokyo neo-wave play on Batman, complete with a motorcycle.

While the animation is simplified compared to Sunshine and appears childish, it is fairly well made or at least looks the part more or less. It may be proof that this anime was not just a cheap whim, at least initially. The scene direction is also not bad for the most part. It is also different to Sunshine with its longer scenes, though that in itself may be a cost saving measure and a fair amount of scenes are reused.

In the end, there is not too much that can be said about this anime, as it mostly consists of very mundane slice of life, with the moments of comedy and tension being unable to excite most people. To be able to write more about this and make the anime more memorable, the creators needed to at least add more events and aspects to this anime that actually force the characters to do something, not shoehorn in an adversary force in the last episode. Otherwise, the plot of the anime as it is seems not even bad, but rather incomplete. I would not really recommend watching it as it is rather dull even compared to Love Live at its worst. I hope the creators don’t stop trying to bring Love Live in a different direction, but it needs to have a much better plot that isn’t just about references and fairly trivial problems.