aqours finale

still figuring out my thoughts on this one, so this post might be updated in the future

with only 50 days to go from this date until the aqours finale live, i thought this would be the perfect time to put my feelings to words and to showcase my redesigned website with its first blog post.

the beginning, 2016

i started getting into love live in 2016 by playing sif. back then i was big into rhythm games, so naturally i would be attracted to all sorts of things rhythm games. it was pretty sad to see u's disband just as i was getting into the media, so i didn't exactly bother going into the seiyuu side of things back then. that was also the year i moved to japan (not a great time for me) and became much more online than i was before, hanging out more in online communities such as osu (still am very involved in now).

i kept playing sif, watched the sip anime and loved it, but it didnt exactly stick out to me as i was still in my teen emo phase (i was very into oregairu). around the same time i got familiar with the aqours characters through sif and its anime but still wasnt into the seiyuu other than watching clips on youtube. my japanese was still very baby, although living in japan helped a lot for my initial learning.

suwawa comes to australia, 2018

fast forward to 2018, i moved back to australia during the final years of my high school which i thought would be quite rough, but luckily i made friends who were big sif players at the time. this made me snowball quite hard into the fandom and i started writing fanfics and love live song covers with said friend (if anyone was around back then on ll youtube, he made a lot of song mashup videos). although, still not much into the seiyuu side.

september 2018 rolls around and suwawa comes to a convention in my city for world poster girl. i thought hmm, love live, even though i wasnt super familiar with the seiyuu i thought itd be cool to attend the event. and that event changed a lot of things for me as a love liver. i honestly dont have many memories of the event, but the feelings and impression of it still sticks with me today. it was awesome.

i started getting more into the aqours seiyuu after the event, watching clips and streams on youtube. compared to the u's clips i watched, i really liked seeing the aqours' girls personalities shine through more during their streams and that really made me want to get into it more.

sifas, 2019

this year was the peak of my interest in love live. funnily it also coincides with the time aqours peaked in their career.

when sifas was announced and when it came out, my aforementioned friend and i scrambled to try and play the game as soon as possible. even though in the end it sort of didnt meet my hope for a rhythm game the stories and content was still really fun, and the new niji group was a welcome one. i remember this year being the year my friend made the most videos on love live, lots of karaoke streams where i joined in and sang. a great year for love live.

i dont know why it took me this long, but this was the year i found out you could watch streams of lives as well. i remember getting an email for a live stream of guilty kiss' performance in new york, but i never actually got around to watching that live.

llfes, 2020

as with all things during covid, everything died down after this year. i was getting more and more busy with university and covid hampered my energy so much that i couldnt be bothered to keep up with love live post llfes. i stopped playing sif, sifas and fell off watching aqours seiyuu content. i had a touhou resurgence this year (ive been into touhou long before love live) following the wave of people who found touhou after being online during covid and started doing translation work for fan stories. this is also the year i started my writing blog.

the next few years were a blur, as expected of covid. i mostly kept up only with the osu community and touhou community. even going to canada in 2022 to meet up with longtime online friends.

another thing that i got into pretty deep during this time was revue starlight, although i dont talk about it nearly as much as touhou or love live, even though it occupies an equal chunk of my brain.

oh, and i was pretty excited for when liella got announced in 2021. didnt keep up with it at all, though.

numazu, 2023

when japan's borders reopened, i thought i'd visit again since i hadn't been back since 2019. being a grown adult now, i decided to do a roadtrip and tour a lot of locations from touhou, and of course, love live. i loosely updated myself over the past 2-3 years of aqours, and found out how much they suffered through covid. i felt really bad not keeping myself updated but covid basically destroyed my capacity to multifandom at the same time.

it was an awesome roadtrip. we drove from osaka through to nagano, visited all the touhou spots and then to numazu and the aqours spots. around this time i also got into liella and we listened to all their songs and all of aqours' new songs on the roadtrip (jimo ai dash forever in my heart).

during that trip to numazu i had a foreboding feeling of aqours coming to a close soon. it was during the time of the yohane the parhelion live, and the town was filled with gny paraphernalia, but i kept thinking that they haven't been doing an awful lot (livestreams were decreasing in quantity, their seiyuus got busy with their solo careers). i remember telling myself and my friend that if aqours ends up disbanding the following year we will do everything to prepare for it and attend the live.

cue the following year...

finale announcement, 2024

from the japan trip leading up to the announcement, i put touhou on the backburner and returned to love live. i re-familiarised myself with aqours and listened to all of their newer songs, got into liella and listened to all of their songs and watched the anime and started to follow more love live related things on twitter. in the back of my mind there was still the feeling of a graduation / disbandment looming, but i rediscovered how fun love live was and even started writing love live fanfics again.

when bokura no umi de mata aou was teased i thought this was it. it's finally time for aqours to say goodbye, and unfortunately i was correct.

even though i knew in the back of my mind that it was coming, i still couldnt help but feel deep sadness. for that entire week i just felt down.

initial planning

keeping with my word i instantly started planning out the chuusen for the finale. i preorded 20 cds as soon as they were available. i wasnt super familiar with a lot of the chuusen process during this time, so i relentlessly researched eplus and eventing (thanks ramen.events) and gained a lot of knowledge. little did i know the concept of eventing would infect me.

i booked out my hotels as soon as the dates were announced. infamously this was also the announcement of the venue where many were disappointed in, and a few angry. i was of course disappointed.

chuusen hit!!!

i was singing my heart out during love live karaoke when the first advance was announced. i hit day 1!!! i was genuinely so happy.

the next day i booked my flights. i initially planned to go only for a few days to a week but i thought about it for a day and ended up changing my entire itinerary to fit a week-long numazu trip post finale. i almost missed the deadline to change my flights for free because it was so last minute, but i don't regret that last minute change at all.

eventing

fast forward a little bit and i research more and more into events and eventing, joining up the r/lovelive discord. the dudes on there are absolutely crazy about eventing, flying to japan for events too frequent for my bank acccount to handle. but i was inspired. since i'm out of university and have no job yet in my field, i'm currently the freest i've ever been in my life. i decided to take this opportunity to travel more, and now here i am with 6 concerts booked and 3 japan trips for the latter half of 2025.

admittedly this is very stupid of me, but i'm still young which is exactly why i can afford to be stupid. with aqours going away i'd give anything to see them again after the finale, so i got a ticket to anisama in august to see guilty kiss and saint snow, and also to the aiscream event the week after.

afterword

so here we are, 50 days before the live. i think i speak for a lot of people when i say i simultaneously cant wait for june but also dont feel prepared for it emotionally. i just cant imagine what it'll be like in person. ill probably cry a lot, though.