Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-24187738-20180225155956/@comment-34824801-20180226040953

Hi! My favorite girl is Kurosawa Dia. My e-mail is [stupid_mop@hotmail.com]

Love Live! Sunshine!! changed my life in the way I understand images and how we relate to them as human beings; that is, how we consume images and, most importantly, how we let ourselves be consumed by them.

I'm very much into art, so this has been a huge deal to me, because instead of finding these new ideas in books or museums, I found them here, through people celebrating these images and stories in some of the most honest ways I've seen (something a bit rare in the art world, I should say). It has truly been a fresh new vision for me.

I entered the world of anime around 5 years ago, I was attracted to its aesthetics, looking for a way to incorporate these fierce images in my work. I was interested in its unbeatable beauty. After getting deeper and deeper in it, eventually (and inevitably) I noticed I no longer could be a outsider, taking just what I considered useful to my work and leaving this realm half-heartedly, so without even noticing, I started embracing it as a whole.

However, something definitely was different after discovering Love Live!

The story caught me almost instantly. While LL! was unescapable because of how everything constructs itself slowly, in LLS! things get even slower, providing a warm set for a more tender story to unfold. I think of it in a very warm and affecting way. I simply surrendered to it.

But I should mention that one of the things that really changed my views is that which is outside of Love Live: its fans.

Fandom has always interested me as one of the few ways to show pure love for something without filtering or disguising it, something you must do in art, almost as a rule.

In art (I mean fine art, the one you find in museums and galleries) you can't really be a fan, you should always take a critical distance with whatever you're looking at, depicting, incorporating, etc. By doing so, interesting ideas can come out, since you're creating a structure that contains its own counter-structure, leaving its flaws and weak pints open for you to understand them… but, on the other hand, there is always something missing: energy and honesty.

It took me no time to notice that Love Live fans were very different, not only because of the usual activities an anime fan takes part of, but because of its intensity, how they had no reservations: they simply gave it all. Here, unlike "fine" art, energy and honesty were the starting point.

I learned about the Arcade with floor pads for fans to kneel in front of their favorite characters in Tokyo, the celebrations that took place in every girl's birthday, about several fans and their way of showing their love for LL to others (from illustrators to a grave maker, no kidding). Most of all, about the shrines, the pilgrimages and the "Love Live Armors". Those things totally blew my mind and still do, it was a completely new art form for me. These guys were giving form to a kind of energy I've never seen in ways I would have never imagined. It is not something you find in art, even in the most avant-garde, I can tell you.

After watching these people submitting themselves to that which they loved, I openly cracked, that's when I really got into it, whole-heartedly, as someone who observes and want to learn as much as he can, but always as a fan.

Getting into art art means understanding how images work, and sadly that implies the notion that images are always the ones to blame. "Images deceit, images lie, images are cunning, etc".

But I knew that was not happening with Love Live fandom.

I learned Love Live Fans were one step ahead in consuming images and stories. They understood them as a celebration, as something positive, but not in a simply festive way (the living proof is every comment posted here!). Some people say fans kneeling and building shrines is a half ironic, half funny way to extend the show's narrative into their own lives. I do not believe that. I think these people are living through these images honestly, they have decided to confront the world from there, living them in the flesh. That's what really affected me and showed me new ways of thinking.

I think a lot about the chinese guy (a Nico fan!) in the Shangai subway who got wet after someone, fed up with these displays of love, poured his water bottle on him. It would be too much to think of him as a martyr, but in a way, he represented the clash between a personal celebration of something you love, a reality that gives a new turn to your life (in several cases, it even gives a new meaning), against another world, a world of boredom and angst. Maybe that's still too far to go, but it certainly makes me think how an image can be consumed nowadays out of pure love and joy. Art is supposed to heal, and I think that's precisely what's happening here. That is the way LLS! has changed me Thank you very much!