Having A Database Means You Occasionally Get An Itch To Visualize Some Aspect Of That Database. And Then

Having a database means you occasionally get an itch to visualize some aspect of that database. And then you sit down and write scripts and scripts that call those scripts and then you've got a bunch of brightly colored pixels and you're not sure you actually got anywhere.

(To explain for anyone just catching up, I run the archive and a database for the Daily Theatre episodes from Love Live! School Idol Festival All Stars, only available in the Japanese version of the game, but translated into English by a team of volunteers. These are short dialogues among two or more members of μ's, Aqours, and the Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, and they're often funny, cute, touching, or all of the above. I repost episodes here from time to time, but they're all archived and both browsable and searchable at the site below.)

So! I created a map of all the episodes in the SIFAS Daily Theatre Database, charted out as a calendar. It's separated into blocks of data to get it to display in a halfway-wieldy fashion, though given that there are 66 of those blocks, it really is only halfway. Basically, each block charts the episodes that the idols of a given unit appear in over a month, the columns being days and the rows being idols; the idols are both in alphabetical order and shown by their image colors. So there's a block for μ's in February 2020, and one for Aqours, and one for Nijigasaki, and then the blocks for March, and so on. The units repeat down the left-hand side three times, once for each of the years from 2020-2022 that the Daily Theatre episodes have been running. So that first column has the μ's member whose color is red, Maki, and the one from Nijigasaki that's pink, Ayumu. That's followed by μ's green (Hanayo) and Aqours', er, aqua (Kanan), and the third one is μ's pink (Nico) and Nijigasaki green (Emma). The separation into units is meant to make this sort of identification easier, so you don't have to say, "Now, is that Hanayo's green, or Emma's, or Shioriko's? Is that yellow Rin, or Hanamaru, or Kasumi?"

While messy, a few patterns jump out immediately; you can quickly see the days where everyone in a unit appears, like the two days at the end of December 2020 with all the Nijigasaki girls. And one of the most prominent features is the Kasumi storyline that took up a week in July 2020. If you look closely, you can also spot the points at which Shioriko, and then Lanzhu and Mia, join the Nijigasaki High School Idol Club. Not bad for some scattered pixels!