The Spring 2017 Anime Preview Guide

Starmyu season 2

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The five students who banded together to form an unlikely idol group have attained their goal of entering the Ayanagi Academy's music department, which permits only the most talented singers and dancers to enroll. Now Team Otori has set their sights on an even higher goal: to become the five students who earn singing roles in the lofty Kao Council's prestigious graduation performance. However, they'll need one heck of a musical training montage to triumph over their immensely skilled new rivals and get the part! STARMYU season 2 is an original anime work and can be found streaming on Crunchyroll, Mondays at 12:00 PM EST.

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Lauren Orsini

Rating: 2

STARMYU appeals to a very specific audience combination that fortunately has a lot of overlap: people who like male idols and people who like musicals. Season two brings back both of these things doubly, to the point that I'm having a little trouble keeping everything straight.

First of all, in addition to the first season's already sizable cast of multiple school idol groups, there are graduated idols, professional idols, and a brand new group of five new antagonists. Whew! Furthermore, there was not only one expected new song this episode, but two—complete with adequately animated dance sequences and bizarrely memorable environmental settings like a field of stone and headless mannequins for the edgy new antagonist idol center. Don't ask me to remember his name; I barely remember all the names from season one and instead resort to remembering their barely-there personality traits that read more like dating profiles than real people: the cool guy who rides a motorcycle, the one who's thoughtful enough to make everyone bentos, and so on.

The first season got the bulk of its drama from interpersonal relationships—who's unexpectedly related to who, who is rivals or best friends or both with who, etc. This season is shaping out to be no different, but I'm going to need an increasingly complex relationship chart with pictures and string and thumbtacks if I want to remember it all. The saner option would be to simply enjoy all these cute boys with the exact same face and slightly different hair and eye colors, all wiped clean of those pesky human characteristics that might make them either unappealing or interesting. This is a pretty show about pretty boys doing pretty things with absolutely no substance, and outside of its devoted core audience, it's doubtful that an increasingly complex second season is going to attract any newcomers.