LoveLive!: Why Does an Idol Group That Lives Both in Anime and in Real Life Have Such a Hold on Fans?

A complete cross-dimensional product built by five companies has stirred heartfelt love in countless fans.

For fans of LoveLive!, April 1, 2016 is the day they will never forget.

That evening the nine-member voice-actress group μ's played its last concert, ラブライブ！μ's Final LoveLive! ～μ'sic Forever♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪♪～. Inside the Tokyo Dome, 55,000 fans sat waving glow sticks, waiting for the group to appear. The show was relayed live to 221 venues, 30 of them outside Japan — a production on an extraordinary scale, and the group's farewell.

On the flower-shaped center stage the nine voice actresses, in tiered cake-skirt gowns of orange, white, blue, green, yellow, red, pink, aqua and purple, formed a circle, waved their hands and sang a sweet, light tune called "We Are One Light." It is the theme song of the film LoveLive! The School Idol Movie, and one of the most moving songs in fans' memories.

As bubbles drifted over the hall, the whole crowd waved nine-colored glow sticks in time, singing along through tears and shouting: "いまが最高！(This is the best moment!)"

At that moment the Tokyo Dome felt like a country from another dimension — 55,000 people saying goodbye to μ's, an idol group that lived both in the two-dimensional world of anime and in the three-dimensional world of real life.

A Chinese fan who goes by justvv made the trip, and later wrote on Zhihu about how it felt: "You never know which moment will suddenly hit you and set off tears you can't stop — then you check them in the middle of a song and throw yourself back into the cheering, or you just shout along while crying."

The group called μ's was born in 2010. If you know anime culture and have never heard of LoveLive!, that counts as close to unbelievable.

LoveLive! is a cross-media idol project created jointly by the Japanese animation studio Sunrise, the Kadokawa magazine Dengeki G's Magazine, and the record label Lantis. It follows nine two-dimensional girls with sharply different personalities who form a school idol group, μ's, to save Otonokizaka Academy from being shut down, and work their way toward first place in a competition. Fans of LoveLive! are usually called "LoveLivers"; in China they have an easier name — Lala Ren.

After becoming a Lala Ren, Kaiyuange, a college junior, changed the profile picture on every one of his social accounts to Nishikino Maki, a LoveLive! character: a pretty girl with medium-short red hair, a slightly tsundere streak and real musical talent. She is his "wife" in the two-dimensional world. To get her character card, he spent more than 600,000 yen in the LoveLive! mobile game.

Shuangyueling has been to nearly every LoveLive! show staged in China. Hisaka Nano prefers to put his love for LoveLive! into writing: he once posted tens of thousands of characters of behind-the-scenes lore on Zhihu, and more than 20,000 characters of reflection after the final concert.

Unlike Hatsune Miku, the virtual idol built on fan-made work, LoveLive! is a "reader-participation idol project" — fans take part in shaping the idols and growing them. The group's name, the line-ups of its sub-units, the center position (the spot at the middle of the stage) on every single, even the characters' personalities: readers decided all of it, through magazine votes and the like. Even the name μ's, after the nine Muses of Greek myth who preside over the arts, was picked from readers' suggestions.

μ's is neither a purely virtual idol group nor an ordinary flesh-and-blood one; it breaks the line between the two. From the start, the LoveLive! project ran its two-dimensional and three-dimensional idols side by side. Three months after the animated characters debuted, Dengeki G's Magazine published the names of the nine voice actresses who would make up the real-world μ's. Almost all of them were newcomers, and the magazine introduced them this way: "Just like the heroines who have only just debuted as idols, these are still very new voice actresses — all nine of them! Please cheer for LoveLive! together with the voice actresses as it grows step by step from here!"

Dismissed at first as a copy of The Idolmaster, LoveLive! was no instant hit. Because the voice actresses were nearly all unknowns, the group's first single sold 434 copies — ten of them bought out of pocket by the family of Nitta Emi, one of the nine — and another voice actress, Tokui Sora, once posed for a photo beside a merchandise booth with nobody at it. Through the project's first year, almost nobody paid attention.

Today LoveLive! is a fixture near the top of Japan's Oricon charts. The Blu-ray of the final μ's concert sold 71,000 copies in its first week, the fourth-best opening week ever recorded for a music Blu-ray by a Japanese female act. As of October this year, the mobile game Love Live! School Idol Festival has passed 30 million users worldwide. And research the Japanese advertising firm Hakuhodo released this September puts the market around LoveLive! at 43.9 billion yen, second only to Arashi, the hugely popular Japanese idol group.

At the end of 2015, μ's also became the first voice-actress group to appear on Japan's Kohaku Uta Gassen. Animation of the group played on the big screen while the voice actresses, in the same red-and-white dresses their animated counterparts wore, sang "That Is Our Miracle," the theme song of the anime's second season.

LoveLive! really did become a kind of miracle. Behind the project sits a complete anime industry chain run by five companies.

Dengeki G's Magazine, which started the project, supplies market research, reader feedback, a manga serialization and other print promotion; Lantis, the record label, handles music, Niconico livestreams, radio dramas and other online promotion; Sunrise, the animation studio, makes the anime and the promotional videos. Bushiroad, which joined later, became the anime's sponsor, and KLab develops the mobile game.

Hisaka Nano thinks LoveLive! is "just far too easy to fall into." Because the five companies run music, television and radio, manga, anime and games all at once, people can find μ's and come to love the group through many different doors. They might be idol otaku, game otaku, anime otaku or voice-actress otaku — or people who had never touched this kind of subculture at all. Subculture fans pulling each other in from every direction is what built the LoveLive! audience.

The two-dimensional μ's is out of reach, but the nine voice actresses in the three-dimensional world are real. Even with Hatsune Miku, that other hugely popular virtual idol, the closest you can get is watching a concert projected as a hologram. The nine voice actresses grew up alongside the project, and fans can get near them in person — at concerts, at handshake events.

Kusuda Aina, who voices Tojo Nozomi, wears her hair in the same twin tails as the character; Iida Riho, who voices Hoshizora Rin, keeps the same short cut. All nine voice actresses play their virtual roles offstage as well. But the relationship between a character and the actress who voices her is not as simple as voicing and acting. Uchida Aya's "dark-hearted" streak, and the fact that Tokui Sora is a veteran otaku as well as a voice actress — the actresses' own quirks got written back into the animated characters.

Pile, who voices Nishikino Maki, said in an interview: "As we interpreted the characters, we ourselves gradually came to resemble them more — we even formed a deeper bond, almost merging with them." These nine young women went from slightly green ordinary girls into voice actresses who can carry a show alone, and to many Lala Ren their effort and growth stand for the growth the animated μ's goes through.

On the subject of "the two μ's," Hisaka Nano once wrote in his behind-the-scenes notes: "They are false and real at once, a story and a life at once, out of reach and right in front of us at once, nine completely different people and one group with a single dream. They are not stars known around the world. They are nine ordinary girls you could pass anywhere, and they are the goddesses in our hearts."

"The eighteen of them don't draw any line between each other. The actress keeps thanking the other one — meaning the character — because the two have truly become one. It really is like that." That is how Fuki, a 24-year-old Lala Ren, describes the relationship between "the two μ's."

As a line long repeated among idol fans has it: being an idol is a job that sells dreams. Fuki says LoveLive! gave her something very positive: "They're all just ordinary girls, working step by step toward what they love, toward their own small dream, step by step to success. You get to feel that sense of achievement with them, that satisfaction — that's how I see it, anyway."

In 2013, Fuki watched the first three episodes of season one and fell in completely. "It grabbed me so hard I was in that state before I knew it. Maybe that's the magic of LoveLive! — it can move you right through the screen." Whenever she talks about LoveLive!, this Beijing woman comes back to the same idea, the power to move you: "You watch them dance, you watch them sing, and you're just incredibly, incredibly happy."

Next to real idols in the real world, these beautiful girls in the two-dimensional world never age. They stay young and lovable, forever bouncing with energy, getting up again after every fall and every round of tears. Fuki says: "Idols like AKB48, the three-dimensional kind — that's a profession, that's their work, their livelihood. School idols are different, I think. I think school idols carry a spirit."

Fuki's door into this world was opened by Sailor Moon in the 1990s, and she moved into the two-dimensional world in earnest once she started middle school. A cosplay enthusiast, she has bought more than 20 costumes for Ayase Eli, a LoveLive! character. Each one averages 500 to 600 yuan; add the merchandise, the figures and the in-game spending, and Fuki has put tens of thousands of yuan into LoveLive!. Last year she and some friends started a dance troupe, ShinePlus, devoted to covering LoveLive! choreography, and began performing at comic conventions.

Like Fuki, many young women who love LoveLive! use dance to express their devotion. They put on outfits identical to μ's stage costumes, wear wigs, keep learning each new song's choreography and formations, and perform the whole thing. At comic conventions the sight is now close to everywhere: young women on stage playing their own idols.

Fuki and her friends started the troupe hoping to see a voice actress and her character stand on the same stage. She wears a yellow wig and plays her favorite voice actress, Nanjo Yoshino. ShinePlus now has 18 members: nine cosplay the animated characters, nine cosplay the voice actresses. "Early on, before we even had a name, we won two Beijing qualifying rounds — really won them on merit. Then some Beijing competitions that fed into national finals, and we won those too." ShinePlus took the group prize at the AC Dance Battle held last year by the video site AcFun.

Fuki's first LoveLive! performance, though, was back in 2013, when the project was still a lukewarm thing in China. She and her friends sang "Snow Halation" on a stage at a Beijing comic convention. "Almost nobody knew LoveLive! then. The few who did were a tiny group — nothing like now, when every comic convention is full of LoveLive! cosplayers."

The stage was small, and few people in the audience knew what they were singing. A cheer squad of more than a dozen people lined up in a neat row right in front of it, glow sticks in hand. "We never expected anyone that professional — switching colors exactly on cue, shouting the right chant at the right moment." Looking back, Fuki still says she was "moved to pieces." When the song ended, she and her friends came down off the stage to bow deeply to the cheer squad and thank them for the encouragement.

LoveLive! took a while to become a talking point in China. Only when the second season of the TV anime aired in 2014, and Shanda Games licensed the mobile game Love Live! School Idol Festival for the Chinese market, did the project start reaching a wider and wider audience.

Shuangyueling, a Lala Ren who has worked in games for six years, says: "You can't replicate the way the mobile game got people hooked — though a lot of the underlying pieces are the same." Next to earlier idol franchises like The Idolmaster, LoveLive! did catch a good moment in China: the rise of two-dimensional culture, the arrival of Japanese anime mobile games, video sites buying more and more licensed anime.

In July 2014 a LoveLive!-themed "itasha subway train" appeared on Shanghai Metro Line 2, the outside of its cars covered with pictures and decorations of the nine characters, the inside papered with ads for the mobile game. Ita culture came from Japan: an itasha is a car plastered or painted with a beloved anime character, studio or character name, used as decoration much the way a person gets a tattoo. Lala Ren making pilgrimages to kneel before the ita subway and photograph it briefly became a mainstream news story.

"Maybe in Japan, if kneeling down doesn't block traffic, it ends up as tabloid filler at most. Here people definitely wouldn't accept it." Hisaka Nano counts as a fairly seasoned idol otaku; before LoveLive! he followed The Idolmaster, Wake Up, Girls! and several Japanese girl-idol groups.

"The scene in season two, episode nine, where the second-years march through the snow made me think of the promise in episode 20 of The Idolmaster. That quality of getting through hardship on willpower alone really appealed to me." Hisaka Nano would rather talk about the idols' stories. Once he was fully in, he found that what moved him most was not their sense of growth but the hard road they walked before anything came of it.

In his first year and a half as a Lala Ren, Hisaka Nano flew to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan for LoveLive! concerts and the film. With everything else added in, the more than 50,000 yuan he spent came to about half his annual salary. He sounds like someone who made his peace with it long ago: "Chasing an idol is a hopeless one-sided love to begin with."

Chasing an idol who exists in real life is one thing; his parents could not understand this fervor for a virtual one. They even thought, "how can a grown person be doing something like this," and talked at him again and again out of their own life experience. What puzzled them more: instead of loving all this, why not go find a real partner?

"My mother complained to me once — if you have the money and the energy to love idols, you'd be better off loving your parents more, or loving a real girl in real life. Honestly, that one hit a nerve." They felt his love of anime had already cost him his chance at a relationship.

But Hisaka Nano's hopeless one-sided love ended sooner than he expected. Even two-dimensional idols who never age have a day when they must say goodbye.

Unlike AKB48, where members graduate one at a time, LoveLive! hands over to the next generation by graduating the whole group at once. In the project's sixth year, as the nine high-school girls in the anime reach their dream and face graduation, and the nine voice actresses grow from unknown, green newcomers into stars, the μ's story comes to a provisional close.

Their successors, meanwhile, had already arrived.

Once the business model worked, the project launched a new idol group, Aqours, last October. The new nine girls take μ's as their goal and keep working. The original nine voice actresses were getting older, and LoveLive! was never going to stay attached to one group.

Work kept Fuki from flying to Japan for the final μ's show. Some of her troupe went; the rest waited together in a QQ group chat for the farewell. Fuki remembers the day: "Over here we listened to the livestream and cried our eyes out. Over there they cried until they could barely breathe."

Hisaka Nano flew to Japan alone. On the morning he left he walked out of his housing compound with his suitcase, then broke down at the bus stop and had to call a friend for comfort. "I saw a friend on Weibo mention taking time off for the Final Live and say, 'If my boss gets curious and asks where I'm going, I can tell him straight out that I'm going through a breakup.' I thought that was a pretty good line." That is how he recorded the feeling afterward.

At the end of the show, all nine members of μ's, in tears, said their thanks and descended slowly from the main stage.

Hisaka Nano was thoroughly heartbroken. During the final concert he felt oddly calm, and then all at once his passion for LoveLive! drained away. The graduation of μ's was, for him, not only a breakup with LoveLive! but a breakup in real life: the girl he had a crush on told him he only ever really shone when he was with his friends obsessing over LoveLive!. After he got home he deleted the articles and Weibo posts he had written, knowing he would never again write anything so full of love and happiness.

More than six months have now passed since the final μ's show. Love Live! Sunshine!!, the TV anime built around Aqours, has finished its first season. For the earliest Lala Ren, this is the post-μ's era.

Shuangyueling still cannot work up the enthusiasm for Aqours that she had for μ's. "In the end LoveLive! is the only rabbit hole I ever really fell into. Everything else, I try to get in and I can't." Fuki is watching Aqours but has decided to keep the troupe going: "There are so many dances I haven't done yet, and a lot of the girls in the troupe feel the same. We're not giving up." Kaiyuange, who only began to learn about idol culture through LoveLive!, has moved some of his enthusiasm to The Idolmaster: Cinderella Girls. He never kept up with Aqours, but he has started taking an interest in three-dimensional girl-idol groups like Nogizaka46.

Some leave, some stay. On Zhihu there is a thread titled "After the μ's Final Live, how will you commemorate your years as an LLer?" One person set an alarm for ten years after the μ's Final Live and synced it to an Apple ID, hoping never to forget this stretch of time.

A Lala Ren who goes by Kaikaixia wrote: "How will I commemorate it? Probably like this: whenever μ's comes up, I'll think, that was our miracle, that was the dream we made real together. They have become part of my youth."

(At the interviewees' request, Kaiyuange, Fuki, Shuangyueling and Hisaka Nano are all pseudonyms.)

Cover image from: matome.naver.jp