Yazawa Nico and the mundane

This is an edited version of a segment in my prior Re: Love Live Sunshine > School Idol Project  that was reworked into a video script, with the script version now also hosted here for posterity.

Adore her or abhor her, with Nico there is no middle ground, and I am very much in the camp that favours her. On the surface level she’s just super entertaining to watch in the way that she so shamelessly tries to push this obnoxiously cute idol image despite the fact she’s usually more akin to a grumpy old man on the inside. For me Nico is incredible based on that contradictory character performance alone, and yet there is still much more to her. Because despite all the glitter, all the hard-fought glamour, Nico is just a normal girl. Using the sparkling super idol Nico-ni as a veil, she attempts to distract from her reality. Yet beneath all that, Nico is just normal. Weary of her grey life, and terrified by the thought that she will never be able to escape the mundane that so plagues her. In a series of such inordinate optimism, Nico sticks out as the melancholic gem, hiding an unexpected emotional labyrinth beneath her carefully rehearsed smile. As much as she tries to present herself as a simple character to the others, there’s a lot of complex factors feeding into said simplicity. There’s an earnest, and depressingly grounded reason for why she acts the way she does. Nico’s self-absorbed idol persona and apparent penchant for vanity are deliberately manufactured constructs. So as to not slight the lavish image she tried so hard to build up in her web of lies, she goes to extreme lengths to keep it under wraps, but Nico’s life is anything but.

Though we first glimpse it in episode 12 with her outburst at Honoka, it’s only all the way in episode 16 where we properly get to see past her facade, when the girls end up stumbling upon her home and her family arrangement reveals itself. Despite the frequent claims about how extravagant her home life is, it turns out to be a totally average apartment, and stepping in reveals an equally unremarkable daily life. Forget any wild claims she once made about living in a mansion and being so rich that they hired butlers, she herself is actually the one acting as head of the household in the absence of her busy mother. We get a general sense of her circumstances, but ultimately the μ’s anime is laser-focused on the Love Live, and doesn’t often spare time for any significant character exploration beyond that. This episode is an adaptation of a chapter from her volume of the School Idol Diary, but returning to the Diary in full provides a more substantial look into the sad origin of the starstruck Nico. The girl we know is someone desperately trying to grasp radiance as a means of decorating her vapid heart. She acknowledges that she’s not quite in poverty, but they had to make every single dollar count. And when surrounded by people whose birthright had long set them to inherit schools and hospitals, she can’t help but wish her life was just a little bit nicer so she could stop feeling embarrassed to stand by their side. But of course, it wasn’t always like this. As a bright and energetic young child she loved nothing more than going out for fun with her parents. Her stay at home mother was always entertaining her, but she secretly loved the weekends where she could play at the park with dad the most. You never had to look far to find her grinning from ear to ear as she gleefully recites the “nico nico nii” song that he’d made for her. But unfortunately, this happiness doesn’t last. Around the time she enters elementary school her father abruptly succumbs to an unspecified illness, and the colour quickly drains from her world.

With a widow and her four children suddenly left behind, things begin to distort around her. The status quo they’d become so comfortable in couldn’t be maintained like this. Beyond the grief, the most immediate problem was that the loss of income meant her mother began having to work extreme hours in order to make ends meet, which is obviously going to be problematic in a household with that many kids. So it naturally falls on eldest sister Nico to look after her siblings. She wouldn’t go so far as to call it a burden since she obviously loves them, and their cluelessness often provides a nice breather, but it’s easy to see how taxing this is. She’s essentially raising three young kids on her own while still merely a child herself, alongside taking care of the house and stocking groceries. Nico runs herself ragged at school, staying late enough to hit the time-limited discounts on her way home, and then usually doesn’t even have the time to change out of her uniform before the little ones pounce on her and start pestering her to cook dinner. That’s already exhausting enough for a working adult, let alone someone her age. And it can’t have been any easier on the mind either. Her siblings were too young to sympathise, and her mother had her hands full concentrating on work, so Nico was always the one carrying the mental stress alone. She was the one forced to worry about her family’s vulnerable finances while prowling the grocery store for sales, and so too was she the one feeling the worst when feeding her siblings the cheapest food available. She might try to pretend it isn’t a big deal by joking to herself about how much of a housewife she is, but it is true that young Nico was bearing the brunt of responsibilities she ordinarily shouldn’t have had. While reluctantly becoming accustomed to that languorous lifestyle in the wake of her father’s death, one day it happens. Nico stumbles upon idols. Wearing gaudy clothes and living lives of such excess, being a foreign creature deified under the spotlight and yet somehow inspiring a familiar joy in all who gazed upon them. Sirens of the stage so powerful that a mere melody could trick even those at their lowest into briefly feeling like the world around them was glowing. It shakes her to her very core. Somewhere deep inside of her, a light that had previously burnt out begins to flicker back on. This was it. This was what she needed to become. She could feel it surging within, that this was everything she was ever meant to be. And so it becomes her intimate little wish to shine. More than anything else, she wanted to be that kind of dazzling super star – to work hard and transform into someone capable of escaping her bleak lifestyle, to be a glimmer of hope for herself and her tired family, to set foot on the stage and soar so high that maybe, just maybe, her father would see her from the skies beyond.

So she saves up her meager allowance for a while, and is eventually able to join the odd audition. The judges were impressed with her abilities, to the extent that she was considered somewhat of a prodigy for her age. The drive she held was a clear level above anyone else present. But even still she ends up being rejected in the final phase, and adding insult to injury she overhears the judges gossiping that it was because she lacked fake teeth to replace the one she was missing, a luxury her household certainly wouldn’t be able to provide. She has the skill in spades, but it just can’t be that easy for someone like her, can it. Surely she must be cursed. While this was all going on Nico had been biding her time with the belief that come high school she was going to attend UTX for their performing arts department, where she would finally get her big break. To be an idol, she obviously had to go there. There was no doubt in her mind. But these dreams were violently shattered when she took a flyer and saw course fees costing tens of thousands per year – a scale she’d never even considered was possible. The guilt overwhelms her, and she meekly mourns ever letting herself get carried away. She believed that somewhere along the line she must have acted too greedy and forgotten her place, so this frustration choking her had to have been retribution. Dejected she turned to Otonokizaka for no reason other than it being affordable and relatively close to home. Though she still tried to make a school idol club, nobody could keep up with her passion and she was eventually left isolated with her lifelong aspirations dead in the water. Always wanting to shine, and always being punished for it. Becoming deeply cynical somewhere along the way as she routinely applied for cheap auditions below her skill level, receiving a deprecating satisfaction as she reveled in the fact that the only reason others got chosen instead was because of her financial turmoil. They didn’t beat her, it was their money. It was always the money. She couldn’t continue to the next stage because she lacked the funds, but if she did have enough then the world would not be ready for how decisively she’d rise to the top. This is the twisted way in which she comforted herself. She wanted to fly away from there, but it seemed fate was intent on keeping her chained. Though she continued to lie to her family about it, there was no one left who was willing to support her dream. At some point a trio of second years did show up to her clubroom asking if she’d be willing to hand over her inactive idol club, but that was a nuisance more than anything. Nico had been suffering from her inability to succeed for the majority of her life, and now some carefree girl was trying to become their school’s idol group on the most random of whims? Screw that. She had been met with despair too many times in the past, to the point she tried to keep out of harm’s way by rejecting their efforts entirely. The eyes of adoration she’d once had in her early days were all but gone, and even the desperation she felt in middle school had begun to fade, leaving an empty melancholy hanging over her mundane life. Nico’s longing to become something more than this was repeatedly and brutally beaten down.

That’s why µ’s was her miracle. When she was finally just about ready to give up after years of fruitlessly trying, µ’s appeared and promised to take her to the stage she so yearned for. When she was losing faith in herself and beginning to begrudgingly accept that she would never be able to escape her bad lot in life, Honoka took her by the hand to help her along the way. They were angels to Nico. Looking back at the torturous path she’d walked to reach this point, Nico is able to reach her hand to the sky and warmly think to herself that maybe this is finally it, maybe she’d been wandering all her life just so she could one day end up together with these girls.

Having at long last taken hold of what she’d always been reaching at, she cherishes every moment. Practicing and performing in a genuine group was every bit as rewarding as she’d believed it would be, and after so many years of lying it felt endlessly vindicating that she could finally begin to brighten the lives of her siblings in earnest. That’s not to say there weren’t times of difficulty though. Keeping all this history in mind gives deeper insight into why Nico gets filled with such unbridled vitriol when Honoka suggests ending µ’s after successfully saving the school. The other girls were all unhappy at what they were hearing of course, but Nico looked damn near ready to sock her in the face if she hadn’t been restrained. After being hurt so many times Nico, despite her initial wariness, had decided to let herself be pulled into Honoka’s promises, and to be betrayed after taking that courageous step cut deep. As she slowly began to lose it, there was an entire lifetime of emotional outrage rushing out. All this time she’d been stifling her hatred. Refusing to cry and rejecting sympathy, instead donning a smiling mask as she grits her teeth and inwardly condemns the world around her. But this pushes her over the edge. When Nico snarls at her, screaming “I decided to put all my hopes into this!”, it’s not because she was some spoiled kid who had just had her favourite toy taken away. Nothing so harmless. It was because µ’s had rescued her from the stagnation suffocating her. µ’s had finally cut a path in what was previously the most oppressive dead end of her life, and yet Honoka was now trying to close it off once again on a selfish, short-sighted impulse. This was the most important thing to her, something that she’d been frantically clawing at all her life, fumbling every step of the way and enduring the constant pain, and now their panicked leader was wanting to end it all because she messed up once. There’s no way Nico would accept that – you have to understand that µ’s was just about the only thing that had ever truly gone right in her life. But after taking a week to cool their heads they inevitably join hands once more and overcome this challenge together, growing closer through the conflict, and before long becoming exalted to such a degree that their final concert ends up changing the face of the school idol world forever, transformed into a life-giving light eternally calling out to the many talents yet undiscovered who would one day inherit their will. Though given all that µ’s meant to her, it was a little difficult to accept this finale at first. She cedes to their resolve after Maki conveys the feelings informing their decision, but initially Nico is the one who pushed most strongly for the group to continue even after her graduation. µ’s was what she had been dreaming of all her life, and she did not want that dream to end.

But the reality of being a school idol is that it has to end eventually. Their flame can burn for merely a moment in time, and Nico vanishes from the stage almost as suddenly as she first appeared. However unlike before, she steps out into the world with a sturdy optimism in her heart. Forming in her final grade, it wasn’t even a full year that she had been active as an idol. But in that brief flash, my word were they brilliant. µ’s had stormed the world of school idols like a raging bolt of lightning; lasting for truly only a second, but bursting with a light of such power, such ferocity, that it scorches the ground below and roars throughout the world. She was a failure no more. Wherever she goes from here, the wounded mundane will never again bear its fangs at her. It was a painful road to reach this point, but Nico had at long last managed to shine. Even if only for the shortest of times, she had defeated the forces of fate which seemed so hell-bent on punishing her for daring to dream. Nico once again returns to her everyday life, but the dismal colour of dead leaves that once clouded her vision was nowhere to be found. Her dream had come true, and that memory, that ephemeral image of angel wings beating softly as eight hands gently push her from behind, will carry her forever.