Headscratchers / Love Live!

• If Rin thinks her short hair is so ungirly, why doesn't she just grow it out?
  • Hair was just one of the things she didn't think was cute about herself, so she probably thought growing it out wouldn't magically solve anything and kept it short for a matter of convenience: she plays a lot of sports.
• Who, exactly, is doing the protagonists' camera work? Or for any of the idol groups, for that matter. There are some cases where we get an answer to this - Hideko, Mika and Fumika were helping for the first performance, for example, and one can presume that the people running the fashion show and Halloween event did it there, but there's no logical explanation elsewhere. We can't even presume that Hideko, Mika and Fumika kept doing it, since they're in the audience the rest of the time. They also clearly don't have an unmanned camera or anything of that sort, since we see people watching their performances, sometimes live feeds of them, that have the same closeups and camera angles that we, the viewers, see.
  • The official Love Live! performances probably had professional camera men. A-RISE probably helped with the filming for "Yume no Tobira", since it was filmed at their school. So that leaves the PV's that are filmed on school grounds. I am going to assume that Hideko, Mika & Fumika filmed "Itsuka no Someday", since the PV for that song was filmed on school grounds. Maybe they got permission from the principal to borrow an unmanned camera for filming if it's on school grounds? If they DID get that permission, then you can also assume that they used that camera to film "Bokura no LIVE, Kimi to no LIFE" & "No Brand Girls". Though I kind of forgot where Hideko, Mika & Fumika were at those moments... Honestly, if Honoka can get permission to borrow the costumes from other clubs, then why can't she get permission to borrow an unmanned camera if she promises to only use it on school grounds?
• On a related note: who is making the backing tracks the girls use for their performances? It's one thing to get the music composed, but having it arranged, orchestrated and recorded takes another skill entirely. The tracks are quite elaborate as well, with professionally played parts on guitar, keyboards, bass and drums, and would take some time and effort to put together. Still, none of the girls is shown to even own a studio (even just a bedroom sized one), and they don't seem to involve another studio or musicians to get the tracks made.
  • The so-called 'composer' in the anime is having the prototype of the song to be performed shown to us while the actual composer (here in real world) is actually making it. Most music-heavy anime are exactly working this way: someone else in this world is making the music while in-universe composer is shown to be working on the prototype with whatever instruments that person is portrayed to be proficient in.
    • ....what?
  • With the advent of D4DJ, there's a more plausible theory now: DJ units like Happy Around! and Peaky P-Key could be collaborating with these idol units, they just don't get as much in-universe prominence or credit aside from some liner notes on the groups' CDs (similar to how idol franchise music in general is Kayfabe Music, with the actual producers/composers being given fine-print credits in liner notes and in the idols' respective games when starting a song). There are many real-world electronic music composers who got their starts in their college or even primary school years, and for many of them, some inexpensive or free music production software and a PC is all they need to get started (getting the equipment to produce more professional-sounding tracks can come later).
• Why is Umi so embarassed of wearing a short skirt with her idol costume? She does it all the time with her school uniform!
  • Well, yeah, but everyone in the school also does, so no one’s paying special attention to her legs or something. Her idol outfit would be used in a stage, for everyone to see (and IIRC, I think her stage skirt is at least a little shorter than the school uniform’s, but I might be wrong about that).
  • Even assuming the uniform skirt is the same length or shorter, keep in mind that for the idol performance she'd be moving around as well as standing on a stage. Some of her issues with it might have also been the way Honoka and Kotori went about doing the designs: Umi asked them to give the costume a longer skirt, Kotori said she would, proceeded to not do anything about the length, and then waited until literally five minutes before their performance to spring this on Umi.
  • I agree with the tropers above me. It's hard to explain, but I know many people (including myself) who never showed their legs at school and when I read this, I realized that I never had any problem with wearing my school/gym uniform. When it's something everyone wears, you pay less to no attention to how embarrassing it might be.
• So how exactly do members work in School Idol Festival? First of all, you can have multiple versions of the same character in your roster and even in the same team; you can have a team of nine Nicos if you really want to. It may make sense in a Mons game, but this is a game with an ordinary high school setting that treats your roster as a club and your individual "cards" as members of said club; it's extremely unlikely that cloning technology exists in-universe. Second, how does Practice work? You pick a member to improve, you pick up to 10 partners for them, and...those partners just disappear, never to be seen again. Granted, this is what other mobage refer to as "power-up fusion" and KLab needed a more-fitting term, but it seems odd that your members will do practice with someone to improve that member's abilities and then just leave.
  • ...You're thinking a little too hard about this. I think they just put a school setting in the game mostly because the characters are school idols, and are obviously schoolgirls and have been so since before the game. Would've been weird, especially for those who haven't watched the anime, to play a game where there isn't ANY story or setting AT ALL, just cards of some nine girls, congrats-if-you-know-the-music-videos-they're-from. There isn't actually a "producer-style" system in School Idol Festival that explains everything you choose to do in-game (like putting nine Nicos on a team or "feeding" a normal girl to a rare). In-game you aren't a character (such as a producer) and you're not actually doing anything in the story of the game. Excluding the characters' sidestories, of course, probably because it would've been weird for the characters to be talking to themselves. Even then is almost a Breaking the Fourth Wall, since the main girls address you as obviously a player, not as a character ("No LP? Use a Love Gem!", "I think we can do a Special Practice!", etc).
• Where does Kotori get the funding to make the costumes from? Making a sole costume is expensive so making 9 is even more, and I don't think working at a maid cafe would be well-payed enough to cost them.
  • One chapter in the game implies all the girls use their allowances' money in order to make costumes and all. Kotori's mom is a school principal who could send her to another country to attend a fashion school, so while they might not be filthy rich, they're probably well-off. Maki must also have a really good allowance, since her family is wealthy in canon. All their money together along with the school idol club's budget, they certainly can afford the costumes, especially if Kotori is the kind of designer that can make good-looking stuff even with cheap material.