Love Live! Fans Angry Over New Billie Eilish Merch Allegedly Stealing Art

As anime fans know all too well, unfortunately, the nature of fan art on the Internet is tenuous [...]

By Nick Valdez

As anime fans know all too well, unfortunately, the nature of fan art on the Internet is tenuous at best. With various social media channels, it's easier than ever for someone to pass of another's original creation of their own. This has been especially prominent with merchandise sales, which sees all kinds of art across multiple mediums being adapted into apparel and the like for sales.

One particularly prominent case arose when a new release in a collaboration between pop artist Billie Eilish and Los Angeles fashion brand Siberia Hills appeared to have allegedly featured art similar to a famous fan artist on Twitter.

With the above tweet announcing the collaboration, fans of the Love Live! franchise were quick to not only point out that the character featured in the art was the popular Nozomi Tojo, but also seemed to closely resemble fan art from the popular artist Makoto Kurokawa. You can see the portrait in question below:

Seeing the resemblance between the two works, fans were quick to angrily point out the similarities between the two. There were allegations that the art was stolen with fans shedding light on other controversies from the Siberia Hills brand in the past:

Neither Eilish nor Siberia Hills have issued an official comment as of this writing, but the merchandise in question has been removed from Eilish's storefront.

Love Live! School Idol Project is a joint project between ASCII Media Works' Dengeki G's magazine, music label Lantis, and animation Studio Sunrise. The story follows Honoka Kosaka, a girl who is attending a school that is about to be closed down due to a lack of new applicants. Discovering that school idol groups are very popular, Honoka decides to start a group with friends from school. Soon they enter in the cross-country idol competition, Love Live.

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