#a show that’s been called basic and cookie cutter starter anime actually ends up being one of the first to have a gay main character

[happyjackmhafanboy]

Personally, with a dash of optimism and realism, I think 2 is what I’m expecting. They’re too far gone at this point in the manga to suddenly say they’re not gay, but there’s also going to be a large backlash if they do end up confirmed queer and probably a backlash if they aren’t. I think Uraraka’s story was about moving on from Midoriya as she was more than just her admiration for him, so suddenly having her turn around and go back would feel forced to me (personal opinion). Thinking both about Horikoshi’s safety from harassment and what he’s been writing, I think 2.

On that note if 4 did happen I would be absolutely over the moon. I truly hope it is what happens.

I was going to do a voting poll, but I also want to hear opinions via comments/reblogs if anyone is able to:

for the bkdkbk fandom, how do you think hori is going to end bkdk/dkbk?

do you think he will end the manga open-ended and leave everything to the reader?

do you think that hori is planning to, at the very least, imply the bkdk's relationship is romantic (ex: crepe date, forehead touch, romantic hand hold, etc)

do you think that hori is going to keep the relationship platonic and have midoriya end up with ochako?

do you think certain accounts are going to be right and hori is going to make bkdk explicitly canon (love confession and/or kiss scene)

or do you have another theory of how it will end?

[lechevaliermalfet]

“His and Her Circumstances” and the truth about relationships

I’ve occasionally been described as liking grimdark stuff when it comes to anime (fun fact: I initially wanted to type “been accused of liking”, then thought better of it).  As much as I protest this label... it fits.  I enjoy series like Berserk, Rurouni Kenshin: Remembrance, Neon Genesis Evangelion, X, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Soul Taker, and Revolutionary Girl Utena. Yes, Utena is dark.  It only looks pink and wonderful on the outside.  But I like lighter and softer shows, too!  I loved watching Azumanga Daioh! and found I’m Gonna Be an Angel! weirdly compelling, and still go back to them occasionally.  Well, I go back to Azumanga Daioh!; it’s hard to go back to I’m Gonna Be an Angel! considering the thing was never fully released in the U.S.  And I watch BECK Mongolian Chop Squad about once a year or so.

But one that I don’t wind up talking about a lot is His and Her Circumstances. Which is a crying shame, because it’s probably my favorite romantic comedy out of all the ones I’ve ever seen.

I saw this show for the first time my first year of college, which dates me; this would have been January or early, early February of 2000.  I remember driving home from my friend’s house, where we’d watched the first four or five episodes, in such a deep, marrow-freezing cold that the Discman I used to play CDs in my car didn’t want to spin a disc.

I couldn’t put my finger on quite what it was I liked about it at the time.  I mean, yeah, there was the madcap pacing of it.  And I liked the art (but I’m a weird dude who likes shoujo art exactly because of the way it looks). And it was the rare anime comedy that actually got me laughing without needing liner notes to explain why something was funny.

A certain part of me getting the humor was because a lot of it was visual.  The way characters’ reactions are expressed, both internally and externally, involves a fair bit of abstraction and unconventional depiction.  It makes them instantly understandable and relatable, and the comedic timing is well done.  I also think that a lot of the comedy centers around pretty universal ideas that make sense no matter where in the world you are.

The series also has its serious moments, too, of course.  It would have to, after all.  It’s still a romance.

I think my first reaction upon being told that this show was directed by Hideaki Anno (better known as the director of the epic mindscrew that is Neon Genesis Evangelion) was “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING M–wait, no, I see it.  Holy shit, yeah, this makes total sense.”

Anno has this weird duality where he occupies the polar opposites of a spectrum.  On one end, he’s deeply cynical about the way people are, while on the other end intensely hopeful about what they could be.  I didn’t really think about it in those terms for a long time until I saw it articulated somewhere else, and then it made perfect sense, instantly. It also explained why I ultimately liked Neon Genesis Evangelion, despite all its manifold issues: I’m basically the same way.  Anno’s outlook is in at least this respect much the same as mine.  Evangelion spoke to me in a way that I wasn’t used to, and in a way that’s sometimes still difficult to articulate.  Writing this, I start to feel like I should go watch it again.

And so despite perhaps not being the most obvious choice to direct a romance comedy based on a shoujo manga, I honestly feel like Anno was just about the perfect choice, nonetheless.

You see, most romance comedies get it all wrong.

In anime, the typical story goes something like this: You have an aggressively generic, milquetoast Everydude who has few to no discernible personality traits of his own, a smooth lozenge of a person whose inoffensiveness paradoxically makes him more offensive. The sort of character who, when he has any stated personality traits at all, has things like “he’s very loyal to his friends” or “he really cares about his family” or in other words the sorts of things which are true of literally every even-halfway-decent human being on the planet.  In looks, he’s also average.  Maybe kind of generically cute, because the way so much anime is drawn makes even Everydude look sort of attractive, but not really eye-catching.  Dark hair (often in a subdued style), dark eyes, average height – again, no distinctive features.  And he has a crush on this girl...

The girl — let’s call her Goldilocks, for reasons that are probably obvious, but which I’ll get to in a moment anyway, just in case — is going to be a certain Type.  Usually, that’s the girl-next-door type.  Sweet, with maybe some baggage, but ultimately kind and caring and the sort of girl all the guys go for.  She’ll have some sex appeal, but it will be very chastely expressed; she won’t be challenging anyone’s social norms or morals.  She also occupies a kind of middle ground.  This sounds a lot like our Everydude.  But there’s the difference.

Everydude is middle-of-the-road in a way that’s utterly lacking in distinctive features.  It makes him relatable to the male audience, an avatar upon which the average viewer can project themselves with ease and live vicariously.

Goldilocks, on the other hand, is middle-of-the-road in a way that’s meant to be appealing to the male audience.  She typically expresses a kind of ideal of desirability.  Not slutty, but not too chaste; not very tomboyish, but not excessively girly.  Like her namesake, she is just right.

There are other girls who may be interested in Everydude. There’s usually a tomboy, possibly one who is more… accessible, a childhood friend (sometimes Goldilocks is the childhood friend as well, but sometimes not).  One will have a kind of innocent, childlike charm (or will simply be innocent, and childish—or worse, an actual child), one may be older like a cool big sister, one may be shy and standoffish.  But they all, for the most part, have two main characteristics in common:

They make the audience wonder why the hell they find Everydude to be such a catch, and

They all serve to further illustrate that Goldilocks is the sort of Golden Mean among them.

The entire show is based around the struggles of Everydude and Goldilocks getting together.  The whole runtime will be spent with Everydude desperately seeking the courage to confess his feelings to Goldilocks. She’s usually the first girl who’s introduced (so as to spend the most possible time on the show with Everydude agonizing over her). Sometimes she’s oblivious, sometimes she knows, but needs him to make the first move for whatever reason, sometimes there’s interference from a rival love interest, but it always ends the same way, with Everydude making his confession in the end, and the two of them implied to be living happily ever after.

Sometimes this works.  With enough sincerity, and authenticity, and care, and with enough character, these cookie-cutter stories can be pulled off.  A lot of times, though, they feel focus-tested or plotted by committee.  The characters and story don’t go where they naturally would, but instead where the producer(s) think they should.

In shoujo romantic comedies, as near as I can tell, this all plays out in pretty much the same way, only you have Everygirl and Prince Charming instead.  And in my (admittedly limited) experience, the heroines usually have a bit more depth and personality.  Yet in the end, the story structure remains pretty much the same. 

His and Her Circumstances knows better than this.  His and Her Circumstances calls bullshit on the whole premise.

For starters, it throws Everydude and Goldilocks out the window where they belong, and actually has some damn characters.  Our heroine is Yukino Miyazawa, and her love interest is a young boy in her class named Soichiro Arima.  Rather than rely on tried-and-true tropes of the genre, these two are actual individuals.  Miyazawa is a seemingly perfect student: intelligent, good-looking, friendly, and athletic.  

Arima is likewise.  

But all of this is a facade.  In reality, Miyazawa is a praise-obsessed attention-seeker.  All of her positive qualities are a colossal put-on.  At home, she’s content to lounge around in sweats (they’re more comfortable to study in, after all), has no concern for her appearance, and spends all of her free time honing every aspect of her appearance and personality for the best possible presentation.  She doesn’t really have friends, despite being friendly with people in her day-to-day life.  They’d only get in the way of her pursuit of more praise.

Then Arima accidentally uncovers the truth about her.  At first, she dares to hope that he’ll be such a nice guy that he won’t mention it.  But it turns out that, much like Miyazawa herself, his perfect Prince Charming appearance covers up something altogether different.  Less ideal, and more human.

When I was younger, and had no real experience with relationships, the characters in themselves were the main draw for me.  They’re entertaining to watch, and you find yourself rooting for them pretty quickly, and it only gets more fun as the cast grows.  

The thing that occurred to me watching it later in life was that it explores territory most other romantic comedies don’t dare to look at too closely, because it’s uncomfortable and awkward (potentially), but also (again, potentially) fucking hysterical.  Said territory is what happens after the main couple admit that they really are in love with each other.

It turns out that it’s relatively easy to enter into a relationship. Maintaining one is a task that’s infinitely greater, and one that has far more opportunities for trouble—and comedy.

Relationships are work.  And, look, we’re talking about work that is absolutely worth doing.  But that doesn’t change the fact that it is work, a labor of time, communication, and (of course) love.  The opportunity for misunderstandings becomes a source of vastly more comedy than the tired cliché of will-they-won’t-they.  And His and Her Circumstances sets its sights on this territory and dives straight into it.  That, to me, is what makes it so much better than most of the other romantic comedies out there.  Rather than a  romantic comedy about getting into a relationship, His and Hers is a romantic comedy about being in one.  It makes all the difference in the world.

Really, about the only complaint I have with His and Her Circumstances is the way it ends.  Which is really not quite putting it right, because it doesn’t end so much as it just sort of coasts to a gentle stop.  Given the length of the manga, and the fact that it was ongoing at the time, getting all of the story into anime form was probably unlikely at best from the very beginning.  Unfortunately, the manga author apparently had serious problems with the way Hideaki Anno interpreted her material when making the anime, and made enough of a fuss about his presentation of it (he remained faithful to the substance, just showed it in a very different way than the original manga) that he left the project.  I’ve never been entirely clear on whether he stepped down willingly to avoid a scene, or whether he was asked to do so.  

In my own opinion, it was a mistake, however it happened.  Anno’s direction lent the series a distinct identity and “voice” that set it apart.  The series can swerve from madcap insanity to complete seriousness on a dime.  But you can feel the change in direction in the later episodes, which become a bit more… I don’t know if listless is the right word, but I can’t think of a better one.  It just sort of coasts to its end and then that’s it.

Still, it’s the journey far more than the (lack of) destination that really makes His and Her Circumstances. Just talking about it and picking apart what I like about it has made me want to go watch it again.

And maybe Evangelion, too. But that’s a post for another day, if I can ever manage it.