The Scoreboard: Kirio Fan Club

As everybody else on this planet, I have an opinion. As many people do too, I like to write about it. Share it generously. And I am excellent at keeping score (mentally), so I will try tallying up my fondness of things according to balance.

Kirio Fan Club

Behind every crush may just be the fondness of the idea. That’s certainly what it seems like to the two main characters in this show, Aimi Miyoshi and Nami Sometani. Two best friends crushing on the same guy seems like it’s a recipe for disaster, drama and heartbreak, and to be fair all those three things happen but not under the circumstances you may expect.

What this series does extremely well is uncovering the feelings for a crush and how they relate to the people surrounding you. For Aimi and Nami, their crush on Ken Kirio is a way to strengthen their bond and explore mutual interests. Early on, you get the idea that crushing is moreso a way of trying to express certain feelings than actually wanting to pursue a romantic relationship. Although her role is somewhat smaller than expected, their younger classmate Satsuki Muraoka plays a pivotal role in cheering for the main two girls, while being a crucial bridge to their love interest as their baseball team coach. For the main male characters, Ken Kirio turns out to have surprising depth beyond being a ‘quiet but nice guy’, and his friend Hayato Momose gets his own troubles to deal with. Awkward Mitsuru Manda rounds out the main cast and though he can be a bit grating in the beginning, it’s shown he has real heart towards the end.

The series basically follows Aimi and Nami as they crush on Kirio and try to get closer in more and less successful ways. However, as the series progresses we see that even though these girls really cherish and care for each other, they have their own secrets which they keep from each other. Their ideas of crushing on Kirio are absurd in a really well-meaning way, and above everything, they pursue with genuine sincerity, even though they seem quite unsure of how things will actually develop or if they want that to happen.

As the series progresses, it manages to build tension effectively, testing Aimi and Nami’s friendship, as well as revealing more behind Ken’s mask and what he’s actually feeling. However, it’s not all high-stakes drama. There are plenty of gags and inside jokes that keep returning, from Aimi and Nami constantly drooling at the idea of everything Kirio, to Manda’s voodoo spells going off the rails. Along the way, these characters stumble but also build real relationships and community. I rate it a very effective in reminding you of how great it can be to make new friends.

The Scoreboard: You and I Are Polar Opposites

You and I Are Polar Opposites

First love is a special thing. It’s not for nothing an endless source of entertainment, emotions and stories. This anime does something special with the standard cliché of opposites attract though. It makes it work without feeling too performative.

Miyu Suzuki and Yusuke Tani are quite the opposites. A bumbly and sociable girl with a quiet and serious guy. However, getting to the romance between these two suprisingly doesn’t take too long and they make for a very sweet but still relatable couple once it happens. The other two couples in the cast take a bit longer to get to a certain level though. Kentaro Yamada and Natsumi Nishi are the opposites of our main characters, but different enough in their own ways, and get some much-needed help from Natsumi’s good friend Rikako Honda and Suzuki. Shino Azuma and Shuji Taiga on the other hand keep circling around, seemingly moving the needle very little. However, looking at where the second season ends with the two of them, it’s clear they’ve also taken some steps of their own.

Over the course of the two seasons, the main couples’ stories are given enough room to breathe. Every couple gets to be in the spotlight from time to time, highlighting their different personalities and how it influences their relationships. Our main couple seems to have it somewhat the easiest, although they do get believable drama in the second season related to university choices and balancing a relationship with your own desires. Yamada and Nishi also manage to become official fast enough, although Honda wouldn’t have minded it happening even faster, and also manage to create a different type of ‘opposites attract’ dynamic that forces them to grow in their own ways. Azuma and Taiga have the least romantic development, which can be somewhat frustrating, but seeing their individual growth from their more self-destructive tendencies is almost equally satisfying.

What’s especially refreshing, is to see some drama happening because characters are nervous, insecure or inexperienced, but it generally gets resolved fairly quickly in a way that seems believable. The awkardness and eagerness of all the teenagers is front and center which can make the viewer laugh in one scene and melancholic in the next. Additionally, all main couples are part of a bumbling friend group and often interact with different classmates in a way that shows their world is bigger beyond their romantic pursuits.

I don’t have particular fondness for my high school memories, but this series made it feel like I could be part of this lovable group of teenagers as they stumble through first love and beyond. I rate it first loves done well.

The Scoreboard: Tamon’s B Side

Tamon’s B Side

This is such a cute series. It takes a pretty boilerplate story in an over the top direction but also manages to make it genuinely touching. The fangirl and idol love story is of course a romantic classic, but by playing into alter egos, something especially prevalent in the idol industry, and by taking the fangirl seriously instead of infantilizing her, the series works wonders.

Utage Kinoshita is a normal high school girl who is a superfan of the idol group F/ACE. To make it somewhat believable she can spend many resources making merch and going to concerts, she has a side job as a cleaning lady. One day she is asked to substitute a colleague in cleaning a certain appartment. This turns out to be THE Tamon Fukuhara, her most beloved idolboy, but instead of his confident and slightly mischievous personality, he turns out to be totally lacking in self-esteem and confidence.

Throughout the series we meet more two-faced people and it’s honestly a joy to see them interact and learn more about their backgrounds. Throughout it all Utage never gives up and firmly believes in Tamon no matter what happens. And even though you can see actual feelings developing from miles away, the series manages to take things slow without it feeling to frustrating.

In the end, this is one of those series where you’d just like to see and know more. Because the characters are well-developed, you just start wondering more about those that are not. Also, the singing is also surprisingly limited for an idol-themed show, so a bit more of that in a next season wouldn’t be bad either. I rate it while watching I can’t wait for the full album and a new season to come out.

The Scoreboard: A Sign of Affection

A Sign of Affection

Love is one of the most universal topics and I am a sucker for a sweet romance. This anime has heaps of sugar, many pastel-colored backgrounds, twinkling eyes, but it somehow manages to not go totally overboard with its elements.

The main character is Yuki, a sweet, timid deaf girl who’s just entered college. By the way, I am also a sucker for college romance. My very first anime series and one of my all time favorites is Honey and Clover, set in an art college. This college is more nondescript, but it is always nice to have more mature characters at the heart of a story.

Yuki takes the train one day and is asked something out of the blue by an enthusiastic stranger. She signs that she cannot hear, but he does not seem to notice. Before things get too awkward though, a young man gently intervenes and helps the stranger out.

It is a typical meet cute, heroine gets rescued by her hero. And for a series so romance-focused, things happen surprisingly drama-free. For the main romance, that is a good thing since it shows Yuki building trust with Itsuomi, him being fortright about putting effort into learning sign language for her sake, and both clearing up misunderstandings swiftly and enjoying to spend time together.

There is a bit more drama involved with the secondary characters, especially Yuki’s overbearing and overprotective childhood friend Oushi and Itsuomi’s high school friends/love triangle Shin and Emma. Although this provides some meat to the plot, and in Oushi’s case some actual growth, Shin and Emma’s case ties up a bit too quickly for all the setup that was done.

The other romance between Yuki’s friend Rin and Itsuomi’s cousin Kyoya also does not really get enough time to fully flesh out the development from friendship to romance. Both are nice characters, feeling are involved, but there is no episode reserved for their plotline.it honestly feels like a missed opportunity because Rin as a popular girl and Kyoya as a weary date-avoidant guy seem to have some interesting backstories.

Although I really enjoyed the series as is, I do think it would have benefitted from some extra episodes. Not only because the main couple is hella cute and it would surely be enjoyable to spend more time with them, possibly allowing for Yuki to be less tense with Itsuomi as well (yes I love me some smut), not only to flesh out the secondary characters more, but to also highlight Yuki’s experience as a deaf person in Japanese society more. We do not see her taking any classes, she does not reminisce a lot about the past, we do not know a lot about her fanily or why they did not learn sign language and although she gets a part-time job, we never see how it goes for her. These would all have been very relevant topics that could also naturally develop the bond between Yuki and Itsuomi.

Although it may seem the series came up short, I would say that is only the case since it was so enjoyable. I wanted to explore, learn and see more. Alas, maybe I will pick up the manga or a second season could be made.

I rate it very sweet and nice, good to watch if you want to reminisce about your first, current or future lover.

The Scoreboard: Cherry Magic!

Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?!

When I started watching this one, I simply wanted a nice, sweet and short series to bingewatch. Lately, I have been getting back into watching anime again. But it feels like I need to watch a show with adult characters as the main focus, to not get too swept up in some of the immaturity that younger characters display.

Although the heyday of my ‘rotten girl’ period has passed, I do love me some boys love content. I do not know exactly which scratch it itches, but somehow an unfolding romance between two male characters has something special. I think because it is more unexpected for the characters, and that is a fun element to play with.

Another fun element that this anime plays with, is the idea that you get a magic power if you are 30 and still a virgin. You will be able to read the thoughts of anybody touching you. Our main character, Kiyoshi Adachi is of course quite taken aback by this. The anime delves right into his first moments with his new power, how it makes some things more difficult or unpleasant for him, but most importantly it quickly gets to the gist of things: he finds out his colleague Yuichi Kurosawa secretly likes him. And that is a big deal, because this guy is the star of the office. He is perfect in all regards, smart and beautiful, the one everybody wants to be with.

I really liked the pace of this series. It quickly provides exposition for the main characters and the situation they find themselves in. And also afterwards it continues in this breezy manner. We see Adachi grappling with the disconnect between Kurosawa’s behavior and his inner thoughts he can grasp. Even with this much inner dialogue being revealed, reactions remain believable and the matureness of characters in this dramatic setup is refreshing.

The B plot, though entertaining, does not hit as hard. It feels like the premise between the two characters is not as sweet, and both behave a bit more like the standard anime archetypes: mature shy guy and a tsundere in this case. At the same time, the plot does tie in nicely with the main one while adding some valuable context and depth.

I also enjoyed the side characters, especially the other ‘rotten girl’ colleague. I am a bit sad that the misunderstanding was not revealed, Adachi assuming she liked him whereas instead she likes imagining him together with Kurosawa, but it is a fun addition. The other colleague almost verges on the border of being annoying, but him bringing out Kurosawa’s pettiness when vying for Adachi’s attention is fun to watch.

All in all, this is a fun little series to watch in a weekend. It has a nice pace, a clear story to tell, and characters who know what they want fairly quickly. It looks decent, although characters do seem a bit off most of the time and animation can look a bit stilted. It is a shame since some key moments are animated very beautifully, which highlights the difference with its usual look. I also had to get used a bit to the style in the beginning, it seemed like the characters were perpetually tired with the lines under their eyes. Something not unimaginable from salarymen in their early thirties.

I rate it a very good time if you like romance, especially if you are already or on the path to become a rotten girl.

Film rewriting: Maboroshi

Mari Okada can pull some heartstrings. The last film I watched of hers (Maquia: When the Promised Flower blooms) is a feast for the eyes and had me bawling them out half of the time. I think its sadness is up there with Grave of the Fireflies and that episode of Violet Evergarden. Regardless, she tends to have an interesting and quite unique way of viewing things and putting it together so I was quite excited to watch this one of hers.

The synopsis of the film on imdb is:

“Following an explosion at a factory that mysteriously freezes a town in time, two students encounter a mysterious feral child, spurring an impulse of love fueled by the frustration of their daily lives that begins to upend their world.”

I also read another review that was quite positive about it, and although I like the concept and ideas, parts of the execution fell flat for me. I think the despair and dread of being frozen in a particular moment and how different people react to it is depicted well. I also think she shows interesting choices some characters make to change the present based on how they think there will or will not be an ‘actual’ future to look forward to. And upping the stakes by creating a way for characters to disappear is always a surefire way to create some intense moments. But there are some other things I think could have been left out or executed differently.

I feel the orignal mystery about the factory causing the town to freeze in time could be explored further. As it stands now, this is just a fact and everyone accepts it, although clearly some characters have more whacky ideas about why it happened than others. Besides discovering the ‘feral child’ at the factory, the characters do not spend a lot of time uncovering anything about the explosion, where the smoke comes from, why it happened to them. Even if this was just a fully random thing happening to them, that would be interesting to explore and see if it throws some characters further into despair. As it is, the visuals are very striking but I am left wanting more information.
The romance seems to not get enough room to be fully fleshed out. It is a very interesting concept to know that somewhere else you are leading your own future life but you will never get to experience it in your own reality. However, I felt the connection between the two main characters was disturbed in an unfulfilling manner because they get shoehorned in a weird love triangle. One that also has a bit too much of an incestual tone for my taste.
We do not see a lot of the side characters except for short bursts that show pivotal moments but because they are not shown in many other situations, it is not as meaningful as it could have been. If we would see more glimpses of these characters’ past, hopes and dreams then it would hit a lot harder to see some of the arbitrary decisions being made or sympathize more with their feelings

All in all, the film did hit quite some spots but it was not as gut-wrenching as I expected it to be. The concepts and perspectives that were shown are still quite powerful, but the execution left a bit to be desired.

Film rewriting: Little Women

Things are opening up again, including movie theaters. And one thing I did miss in China, were the smaller places we have here where you can find the non-blockbusters. It is a bit ironic then that the first movie I watched here, was one of the more mainstream ones.

Hearing the title Little Women, it kind of reminded me of A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahara. I have not read both books, but they must be quite different after watching the first one’s adaptation. Little Women is a romantic setting, à la Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights. A Little Life is more of a biopic including many different characters and their struggles, a focus on the realistic instead of the romantic.

So Little Women, then, has the following synopsis on imdb:

“Jo March reflects back and forth on her life, telling the beloved story of the March sisters – four young women, each determined to live life on her own terms.”

It feels similar to Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility in the setup with multiple sisters who all have quite different personalities. Although I pretty much bawled my eyes out during the second half and liked the movie in general, there were a few things I would have done differently.

I expected to see a bit more evenly divided screen time. Of course it became clear early on that we would just be in Jo March’s head, and Amy March as a good second, but I hoped to learn a bit more about the other 2 sisters’ perspectives as well. Especially Meg March, who is shown having some grudges about the life she chose, but there is no real catharsis from the one argument she has with her husband, to her frolicking in the garden with her kids at the end. Let alone talking about the sickly sister Beth March, who mostly serves just to be taken care of instead of being a fully formed character.
How did they manage to make this main love interest guy look so much like he does not belong in this era? He is cute, but his body language reminded me of a cool guy who just put on these clothes because someone told him too. Also, he is not even fleshed out that much. We see him bantering with his teacher, who marries Meg March, and hear through other characters that he does not have a very good relationship with his father, but none of it is really shown. This makes it even more difficult to look beyond his modern demeanor and see him as an actual Victorian gentleman.
Jo March is played very well by Saoirse Ronan, but her arc is kind of… anti-climactic. Especially since during the movie’s title sequence, a statement is shown saying something like “my life has been tough enough, so I only wrote about frivolous things.” And I am not one to say that it is ‘not tough enough’ if you have to scrape by or lose a family member, but the problem is that you do not see a lot of moments of real despair, besides the main ‘climax’. Even though everyone is not thriving at the beginning, neither of them really have failed. Add to that the fact that you mainly see flashbacks of happy family moments, and all the tension created for the final romance, sort of feels undeserved.

This is not to say that I do not like the movie, I just think it is a bit too sweet for my taste. I really love Pride and Prejudice and liked Sense and Sensibility as well, so I certainly have a soft spot this genre. It just nagged me a bit while watching the movie that I was waiting for a punch, but only got soft pats.

N.B. I did not take into account the original novel (which I have not read) for these critique points.