may 16th:
WOW i didn't go a full month between entries lmao
felt like writing since i've been really nostalgic abt love live lately and need someplace to talk about it for a little bit
i got into love live as a freshman in high school through the original app game in like late 2014-ish... at first it was just bc all my friends were getting onto it, but i enjoyed the gameplay and music enough to check out the anime and from what i remember it was actually pretty good! very goofy, i didn't really vibe w the drama w kotori and thought it had a melodramatic feel but i liked it enough to watch the whole thing over a weekend, both seasons. i even went and saw the original movie in theaters with my best friend :3 tbh i was kind of hooked.
shortly after i got into it, aqours debuted and i was really hyped, i ended up keeping up with them from their debut up until i think just before or after their movie debuted in 2019, but i'm getting ahead of myself a bit. i need to give a little bit of context as to like. WHY i latched onto it as hard as i did when i did. i was living through kind of shitty life circumstances at the time. on top of the terror of being a teenager, i had a pretty fucking lousy online friend group and in retrospect i'm not really sure why we were all friends in the first place... it feels like all they did was fight and drag me into their shit. i was also pretty isolated from the world; i had just started independent study which would continue until i graduated high school, so i didn't have any school friends and all my irl friends were going to a different school than i would have gone to anyway. i also had a very rocky relationship with both my parents at that point. my mom had been an alcoholic since prior to me being born, and it was at it's worst when i was in high school. my dad was mostly absentee out of necessity, but whenever he was around he refused to address anything w my mom and was and still is the most emotionally stunted man i have ever met. i also started dating my ex, who i had met on tumblr through a common interest. pro tip: DON'T FUCKING DATE PEOPLE ON TUMBLR LOLLLLLL. he ended up being extremely manipulative and controlling and unfortunately for me, we did end up meeting irl and that went very fucking poorly for me. TL;DR my life sucked SHIT and following something positive like love live was kind of my lifeline.
a LOT of good came from me getting into love live, beyond just being an emotional lifeline for me at the time i got into it. sometime after aqours debuted, there started being a lot of IRL events in my area related to love live, and despite having debilitating agoraphobia (which was the reason i went on independent study in the first place), i pushed myself to attend as many as i could and meet people there, even if i didn't maintain contact w anyone after any given event. had to do baby steps lmao. i'd still have to tap out early at cons (i saw aqours live at ax 2016 BUT had to leave kind of immediately after bc the crowds triggered my agoraphobia really badly. my ex and my now wife were with me and my wife says that with the knowledge she has now of what my ex put me through, she wishes she laid him out and just took me to the event on her own lol. i love her very much and part of me wishes we had dated back then instead BUT we needed to grow a lot first. THIS IS A FULL BLOWN TANGENT SORRY), but gradually as i attended more and more cons and concert screenings and started pushing myself forward in other ways, my agoraphobia pretty much melted away and by the time i entered my senior year of college i was pretty much a mostly-well-adjusted extrovert.
at the same time, it did kind of keep me in fem hell tho. part of the stupid shit my ex did to me was pretty much forbid me from transitioning or being masc in any way. in his eyes, he had bought into a butch/femme relationship and he was gonna keep it that way by any means necessary. even violence. it fucking sucked. being with him was the worst i ever felt. we broke up mid-way through my junior year of high school. even though the relationship was over, the emotional damage he did to me, in combination w the shit i had to deal with from my parents and the sheer social isolation i had been dealing with, kind of kept me BIG fucked up until i was able to move out of my parent's place during college. during that time i was very hung up on some level of internalized transphobia/gender essentialism. 'oh but i like this cute idol franchise and i really like girls, i couldn't possibly be a guy!' tough shit numnuts u r a guy! that does not bar you from liking stuff that is cute or girls! it didn't help that love live's brand of femininity was very... well, it's not exactly pushing boundaries? aside from some of the yuri teasing stuff but even then i know at least some of that is for marketing rather than telling queer stories. it's very everyone is generally very fem and while there are different ways that they are fem, there's absolutely 0 gendernonconformity. and it kind of blows. tho it is an idol franchise and the whole idea of jp idols is to be the picture of perfect femininity or whatever. liking love live, in part, kept me in the tiny little box of 'sad young woman' and i ultimately had to drop it for a long while cold turkey just to let myself live a little. it was that living a little and leting myself explore who i was and who i wanted to be beyond what i had been up until that point that helped me figure out that i wasn't quite a woman and i definitely wasn't as fem as i had been forced to be in the past.
now though... i can acknowledge that it wasn't really love live's fault, in the end. it was just the life raft i needed at the time, i just held onto it too tightly for longer than i needed to. now that i've recovered from all the bs that happened to me, it feels like less of a life raft and more like a pool floatie if that makes sense? not necessarily something i need, but it can be fun from time to time. it's grown a lot since i last kept up with it and... yeah, i think i might just stick with muse and aqours. i'm not really interested in catching up with everything niji, and LLL seems WAY too daunting to try to catch up with, esp considering the whole premise of characters graduating in real-time means there's content i literally can't catch up on. it kinda sucks. yousoro to the ppl who can keep up tho.
