Alternative title(s): Genjitsu no Yohane -Sunshine in the Mirror-
Ill-advised spin-off by Sunrise
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

In this fantastical spin-off of Love Live! Sunshine!!, Yoshiko Tsushima’s alter ego Yohane is forced to return to her hometown after failing to make it in the big city. While she struggles to reconnect with her old friends, strange magical phenomena appear to distract you from the fact that you’re watching the same Love Live! we’ve been forced to endure for the last decade or so again.

Aqua’s verdict: I Don’t Know What I Expected

What are we even doing any more? Yohane the Parhelion — Sunshine in the Mirror is an alternate universe spin-off of Love Live! Sunshine!!, a show that was already a spin-off of another show that mostly existed to sell merchandise, tangled up in the tropes of a wholly different genre of anime the tropes of which viewers are expected to be familiar with. Anime like these are clear-cut examples of the ouroborosian nature of the medium, diverting considerable efforts and resources solely to appealing to an ever more insular niche within a niche. Even provided the dedicated fanbase idol shows have, I still can’t imagine why anyone would want to watch a version of Love Live! — not to mention, the worst Love Live! — set in a generic, legally-distinct-from-isekai fantasy world over anything original or daring or devoid of the same metaphorical decomposing horses this franchise continues to beat until nothing but dust remains. Still, this is what we get. Yet another precious late-night time slot that could have housed just about anything else, wasted on these nine cardboard cutouts squealing catchphrases at each other. But this time, there’s magic!

To its credit, Yohane the Parhelion does start in an interesting place: What if Yoshiko’s delusions of being a bombastic fantasy heroine named Yohane were actually real? This spin-off casts her alter ego as the star of her own story, but it’s in this casting that Sunshine in the Mirror already royally screws the pooch. Yohane is not this larger-than-life, Byronic fallen angel vampire princess or whatever the heck Yoshiko imagined her being in the original series. In this, she’s just Yoshiko again, a pompous loser with an inflated ego, still suffering from delusions and being met with nervous laughter and exasperated sighs wherever she goes. It doesn’t help that the world she inhabits is pastoral and vivacious. This show’s version of Numazu is not the grim, gothic dystopia Yoshiko wanted to live in — it’s essentially no different from the town she actually called home, and I fail to imagine a good reason why whoever’s at the helm here thought it was a good idea to not make a spin-off about the token theatre kid’s fantasies the most theatre kid of fantasies they could imagine. It feels oddly mean-spirited towards Yoshiko as a character, too. This was supposed to be her big moment, a juicy serving of wish fulfilment after all the jeers she had to stomach in the original series. Instead, Love Live! can’t help but choose the coward’s way out, and stick to what it has been doing for over a hundred episodes yet again. In a world where even Archie Comics could reinvent itself as gruesome horror, I can’t help but feel that we’re owed something a bit gutsier if this franchise is going to insist on keeping us chained up in its basement any longer.

Indeed, more than the fact that it is a bafflingly craven spin-off, the problem with Yohane the Parhelion is that it arguably isn’t a spin-off at all. There is no fundamental new perspective on the source material to speak of here, this is just Love Live! being its preachy, saccharine self for the umpteenth time. Right out of the gate, the fantasy angle gets shoved aside for — you guessed it — the usual yada-yada-yada about shining on stage and making your dreams come true and being yourself, but not too much, because that would be cringe. I can’t exactly blame the writers for their inability to envision these characters as anything other than idols. The cast of Love Live! Sunshine!! was flatter than a post-it, after all. On the other hand, if thirteen-year-olds on Wattpad can imagine Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson going to Hogwarts or running a coffee shop together, so should these professionals be able to unshackle Yohane and co. from the same (literal!) song and dance they’ve been doing for ages now. Yet again, the Love Live! franchise gets an opportunity it didn’t deserve to begin with, and squanders it. It’s like giving ten thousand bucks to a gambling addict and telling them to use it to get their life back on tracks. What do you think is going to happen?